Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season Five/@comment-5102537-20140308144416/@comment-203.166.241.247-20140316031542

Uther always stood out to me as one of the better-written characters on this show.

He certainly was, and was given more complexity and subtlety than the other characters were allowed. They could have gone the same way with Morgana, but for reasons that she had to be solely just out and out crazy-evil didn't. Merlin is always a ambiguous, mysterious character didn't get anything. Both he and Arthur's growth were always stunted. Agravaine could have as well, but was just plonked without much of a backstory or any sort of motivation. The knights, always so prominent in any story get reduced to (very pretty  and mostly shirtless) wallpaper. We get Arthur not being able to dress himself or Merlin being a clumsy oaf because its  so funny,  even if you have to shove those sorts of scenes in when it doesn't make much sense to.

Its a dubious kind of achievement to have  a show run for five years, and either not give the main characters any sort of development at all, or strip away any characterisation that they did have, as they did with Uther. What we got was a two dimensional villain, that we're told "No, but he's always been that way, (or rather Arthur is told his father has always been that way, he just never realised) and just expect the audience to accept it.  (as they expected us to just accept that the Golden Age of Camelot (as well as everything else that went hand-in-hand with that) had been and gone.  Or rather, it hadn't, but was going to happen with Gwen at the helm.  (sorry, that whole 160 degree turn they did with that still rankles)

And that's why whole direction they took is extremely odd, because those characters are not new characters, they've been around in one way or another for over a thousand years. They could have taken their pick from  dozens of different sources and even then twist them into a new take on an old story. You don't have to tell the story of Merlin falling victim to feminine wiles and becoming trapped in a cave or under a bush, because its been done differently. Morgana is Arthur's opponent yes, but she had reasons - good ones too. And both of this characters have been portrayed as having fairy blood in them, so even that gives them motivations They stripped away these elements and characteristics, but didn't replace them with anything else.