Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season One/@comment-5102537-20130316141226/@comment-5674726-20130329000435

''Yes, but working with the sorcerer was also Tom's fault. Even though I don't support it, Uther had more reason to sentence Tom than Arthur had to even threaten the life of his one and only true love. I can't imagine myself to reunite with a man who threatened to kill me only because he freaked out over something. But if Gwen accepted it because it was normal in that period of time she also should have realised that sentencing a "conspirator" (which Tom was believed to be) was the common treatment and logical consequence. So it shouldn't have made Uther a bad king in her eyes but only the one she despised because she lost her father. She can be indifferent or even in rage with someone without thinking that that someone was a bad king or evil man, given that his son even wanted to kill her because he was hurt.''

At the very least, Tom has to have known that something was amiss, given that a stranger was paying him a substantial amount of money to perform secret experiments in the dead of night. Even if he had lived to see his trial, I could see him having a difficult time convincing Uther and the court that he didn't know what Tauren had planned, given the secrecy of their experiment and the fact that he was caught with a big lump of gold in his hand. He'd certainly have a more difficult time than an innkeeper who rented a room to Tauren for the night, for example, since the innkeeper couldn't reasonably be expected to recognise a sorcerer on sight or to be suspicious of somebody who wants a room for the night.

As for Guinevere's banishment, I'd say that quite a few of the nobles would have agreed with Agravaine's stance about her actions meriting the death penalty. It was the day before she was due to marry Arthur and she was caught with another man. I could see some thinking that things would have gone a lot further, had they not been interrupted, that she would have married an unsuspecting Arthur the next day, and that he could have ended up with a firstborn who bore a striking resemblance to Lancelot.

Frankly, I find it implausible that people were so accepting of Arthur marrying Guinevere at the end of Season Four given that, at the time, the only person who knew that she hadn't betrayed Arthur of her own free will was Morgana, and I can't imagine that she felt the need to issue a statement exonerating Guinevere. Logically, you'd expect that people would be incredibly dubious about the prospect of the King marrying a woman who had already cheated on him before, that the most charitable assessment of Arthur would have been that he was a besotted fool, and that, at best, Guinevere's coronation should have met with a largely subdued response, with only Merlin, Gaius and the Round Table knights showing any real enthusiasm. I'd say that it would be more probable that they wouldn't have been able to marry; bad enough that the King wants to marry a commoner but a commoner who has already cheated on him once and is therefore unlikely to be given the benefit of the doubt where future fidelity is concerned should have been out of the question.

The plot device fairies (and/or Merlin) were apparently hard at work making everybody forget about the whole Guinevere being caught with another man the night before her wedding thing.