User blog comment:MerlinUSA/Merlin -- The Big Picture/@comment-5102537-20130120143649/@comment-5995315-20130121143132

Now I see a thread emerging in what you're saying, and I'd like to make two clarifications.

The "power of love" speech is in Sweet Dreams,  S2E10. When I saw it I had no doubt a new theme was coming into play, although I didn't yet know how the theme would work.

I explained in the previous post that as I see it, Merlin and Arthur started out as a bromance which deepened to a friendship and finally  into love. Now, the dragon told Merlin it was his job to help Arthur become the greatest king and so on, and he said they were two sides of the same coin. He didn't say how Merlin would go about helping Arthur.

But to have as close a relationship as this, they would have to be or become attracted to each other. So yes, there had to be what we falsely call homosexual attraction for Arthur and Merlin to keep getting steadily closer. That's not to say they ever had sex (although certain scenes imply they did). But completely heterosexual males don't fall in love the way Merlin, for one, had done by season five.

The story is open as to the extent to which same-sex attraction accelerated the bond, and I personally have no settled opinion about it. But this evolving attraction is one of the striking features of Merlin that sets it apart from any other show and accounts for its immense popularity in the men-over-forty market segment.

By season five, then, it's simply offensive to denigrate the bond as a "bromance." It would be pointless to go scene by scene to point it out, but I'm assuming in any case that the depiction of a same-sex relationship on television doesn't bother you --  unless you tell me otherwise. There is nevertheless a wave of homophobia directed at the show, some of it pretty ugly.

But the concerns you stated involve other things pertaining to the story arc, and I think our disagreement over its coherence is the main point. I do not accept hearsay upon hearsay as evidence of the intentions of anyone connected with the show. I'm also concerned about proper reasoning because it can help get through this thicket. In particular, I think as a matter of logic that people should be taken at their word until we have evidence that they're lying. Otherwise, we could not live a single day in society, and our heads would be filled with conspiracy theories and other nonsense.

So it makes sense to start with the simplest explanation for the story arc first, which is what we were told by everyone -- it was always a five-year arc. Because I cannot accept hearsay I believe the writers when they say they knew how the story would end before they even got started. This is how most writers write anyway, so there's nothing odd about it.

Now the question is really whether and to what extent the individual episodes went off track. I see the fixation with particular plot points. In fact, the episodes often gave me the impression of being great one-off shows, but with no necessary connection to one another.

It was the finale that convinced me that the overall arc followed a consistent pattern. That is the point of my blog. Katie McGrath said "all" our questions would be answered in the finale,  and to me she was more or less right.

To give one example, Merlin's Second Reveal ("I was born to serve you, Arthur") about his self-identity explains so much about his strange behavior in all the earlier episodes -- and no doubt Merlin is a strange, strange man,  even without magic. If you didn't catch his drift in the finale then you would forever be baffled and frustrated by this earlier behavior.

I think the overall questions about the series were adequately answered in this way in the finale. Of course there remain questions about particular plot holes, but I think viewers who didn't listen carefully to the dialog in the finale will confuse essential and inessential questions.

Everyone keeps complaining, as an example, about what happened to Sefa, but who gives a flip about that now? The plot holes are easily filled in with  imagination. The show  should not have to account for every single inconsistency -- viewers are expected to have enough imagination to bridge the gaps in their own minds without having a specific resolution spelled out in blue ink for them. In modern storytelling, listeners are expected to engage with the story this way because it's what people actually like to do. The plot holes, by and large,  are a gift to creative minds.