Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season One/@comment-5102537-20130512091538/@comment-5674726-20130517000024

To me he was not making a mistake because he has magic, and believes in it to solve his problems.

Uther once believed that magic could solve his problem by enabling his barren wife to give him a son. He ended up wishing that he hadn't sought a magical solution to his problem.

Merlin was using magic that he did not truly understand so, storywise and in terms of character development, I think that he should have had to suffer the consequences of tampering with the Balance of Life and Death. If nothing else, it would have been a much-needed lesson about the need for extreme care when it came to messing with powerful forces. It was a major cop-out on the writer's part to not only let him get away without having to lose somebody dear to him thanks to his choice to use magic to save Arthur, but to let him sacrifice an unwilling victim and act like it was okay by rolling back on what had been established in Excalibur and presenting Nimueh as having deliberately sacrificed Ygraine and Hunith, for no other reason than that she could.