User blog comment:Fimber/The Grinch?/@comment-4190137-20121215003419/@comment-5102537-20121215123303

You might be right about this and personally, I always avoid to speculate about real people and their motives, but even if they were told to make it all darker, there would have been multiple ways to add even more darkness without all those illogical happenings, the plotholes and the incomprehensible character-changes.

I recently rewatched episodes of Buffy and Angel with some friends. I started to watch it two years ago. As a matter of fact, I've always been a big fan of Supernatural and The Walking Dead - which is a huge contrast to a show like Merlin. So I have nothing against shows for adults that are very, very dark and show the misery of people (admittedly, I prefer happy endings but with shows like The Walking Dead, you know from the beginning to what you've signed up for, so to speak), and I can't imagine anything darker than The Walking Dead... But in those shows, things are getting dark and even very cruel and brutal without changing the core of the characters and plotlines.

Angel, which was a lot darker than Buffy and done for adults, developed an even darker tone while the show progressed, and in the end, some characters died. It wasn't very surprising, and as sad as it was, it happened at the end of the show in the very last epsiode. The characters that died before the finale were brought back again without changing them into the opposite and with continuing the plot in a believable way. With the overall plot, nobody really expected a huge happy ending for them all, so the viewers were prepared and it didn't feel as if you've suddenly landed on another planet where everything is twisted upside down, and it didn't feel as if someone had taken something dear from you. I suppose the viewers would have scratched their head if the characters suddenly had thrown flowers and danced into the sunrise, happily forgetting about everything and not knowing about demons and evil forces anymore. Because this would have turned the plot into the opposite, simply because the show didn't start as a show full of hope, warmth and light.

Other than Merlin.

I don't get why they didn't turn it darker without disappointing so many people and without changing and turning everyone and everything. The other shows like Buffy, Angel and Supernatural have brilliantly managed to demonstrate all the shades of grey of the characters and there were only very few clear good vs evil-situations. The two main vampires, Angel and Spike, who did extremely cruel things in their past became the heroes of the shows when they redeemed, and other villains had their moments too, except those very supernatural creatures from hell who came into existence for the sake of being evil.

Merlin could have been the same because it started as a show that presented the questionable characters and situations as something to think about and to figure out the right way. And then it changed into a flat story about good vs. evil with belittling and destroying conflicted characters and forgetting about questionable "grey" situations. "Merlin" was even more brilliant in the beginning because it only had thirteen epsiodes and a much lower budget than the US shows, still it managed to provide a similar quality in storytelling and character development. It's a shame that it all changed so much.