Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season Five/@comment-5102537-20140308144416/@comment-24456706-20140311194933

The scene where Arthur rescued the sorceress was a complete throw-away, and made absolutely no sense within the greater arc of his character. Watching his views on sorcery and magic-users from episode to episode was like watching a game of pinball, and it became annoying and exhausting. You cannot put in a scene like this and expect it to speak to some greater sense of justice or fairness in Arthur--"Yeah, of course he's not like his father!"--and then two episodes later reference the fact that magic-users still aren't allowed proper burials.

It's almost as if the viewers were meant to accept without question that Arthur was a better king than his father, when in fact there's little evidence to indicate that that was true.

Uther always stood out to me as one of the better-written characters on this show. He was occasionally dragged into some pretty convoluted plotlines--season one, anybody?--but for the most part his behaviour from series to series was fairly consistent. When he made decisions contrary to his own views and decrees--like when Morgana was dying in "The Crystal Cave"--they didn't seem forced or even out of place. They still made sense somehow, speaking to a greater complexity that almost every other character on this show lacked. Even though "The Wicked Day" was a lacklustre episode in general, Uther's final conversation with Arthur spoke to his growth over the course of the show, and seemed a fitting goodbye. The character assassination that he was dealt in "Death Song" was unacceptable. I agree that the writers could have explained his psychopathic behaviour, some story about his tortured soul, but I doubt such a story ever occurred to them. It always felt like the writers were pushing the "Uther is gratuitously evil" angle, even when he was alive and well, and this episode was just an extension of that--another means of highlighting Arthur's supposed greatness.

In fiction, the writer is allowed to set the terms of his or her own universe. It was never my impression that the viewers were meant to look at Uther and consider him an accurate, historical model of a Middle Ages king, or even Camelot a Middle Ages kingdom. In this Merlin universe, cheating serving girls could become Queen without question, servants could talk to the King however they wanted without punishment... so much of what wouldn't fly in the real world was given a pass here, because it's fiction. But even in fiction, even in your own universe, characters do not just BECOME evil for no reason.