Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season Five/@comment-5102537-20140308144416/@comment-58.6.186.43-20140311112409

This show had a bad habit of taking a complex situation, or a person of complexity like Uther (who probably was the only character who was given complexity and some ambiguity, Morgana might have had some but they decided she was an out an out villain, with no redeeming features) and then completely disregarding it and acting as though there was none. There were situations like this, where Arthur used magic for his own gain, or rescued an accused sorceress from a pyre, yet the writers didn't take advantage of this, and nobody called Arthur out on being a hypocrite. They set up these scenes, but there was never pay-off. Arthur could have found that horn under his bed one day for all that scene meant. Every time a plot came up that could have gone in an interesting direction, they resorted to cheap banter, and simplification between good and evil. Arthur walks away feeling heroic, but really didn't do much, as Merlin did all for him from the shadows. This episode managed to ignore what had gone on before it, and tried to present Uther as an evil tyrant and Arthur as the hero who was making everything better. But this actually wasn't so, because we know Uther had told Arthur that he loved him, and Morgana, and we knew Arthur hadn't changed anything. I don't know about anybody else, but watching this made me feel that the show-runners were insulting my intelligence by assuming that I wouldn't remember. Or as Murphy said in his commentary later "to shut up and just go with the flow", which is just as insulting.