User blog comment:Morgana High Priestess/Could have Morgause brainwashed Morgana?/@comment-5102537-20130311075520/@comment-5674726-20130316235959

So she either was really brainwashed, like Gwen was when she tried to kill Arthur, regardless his true feelings for her, or she was mentally disturbed and had no interest in love, family and harmony anymore but considered sympathy and love to be the very things that would help her to destroy her "enemies" by using it against them.

I'd say that the other possibility is that she died in The Fires of Idirsholas and that, when Morgause brought her back to life, she didn't come back the way she was when she left.

If you look at Uther in The Death Song of Uther Pendragon, there is a very marked contrast between his behaviour when Arthur meets him in the Spirit world and his behaviour after Arthur accidentally dragged him back into the world of the living.

In the Spirit World, Uther expresses his concerns about the way Arthur was ruling. I'd say that, under the circumstances, his concerns were reasonable.

He criticised Arthur's decision to knight commoners. We know from Lancelot that the First Code of Camelot is something that Uther instituted to restrict knighthoods to the noble families that had supported him when he claimed the throne. It's not a huge stretch to imagine that this was a sweetener to help secure their support, if not part of a bargain that he was upholding, since the nobles are unlikely to have committed resources to putting him on the throne out of the kindness of their hearts. If that's the case, then Uther would have cause to be concerned that Arthur's decision to spit on the First Code could alienate the support of the nobility.

He also criticised his decision to marry a servant girl and pointed out that Arthur's marriage should have made an alliance to strengthen Camelot. Arthur jilted a princess after bringing her to Camelot as his intended bride, an insult that could have resulted in consequences ranging from a drastic cooling of diplomatic relations between the kingdoms to war, had Princess Mithian and King Rodor not been incredibly tolerant, especially whenPrincess Mithian was jilted in favour of a servant girl. He lost the opportunity to unite Camelot and Nemeth and, if that wasn't enough, he had to surrender the disputed territory to Nemeth when he reneged on his promise to marry Princess Mithian. I can’t imagine that any ruler would be happy to see his son reject a princess, particularly one who seems to have been heir to the throne, in order to marry a servant girl, and they would be even unhappier about it if their kingdom lost territory as a direct result of this decision.

It’s no surprise that Uther would be concerned about the choices Arthur was making as a ruler. He wanted to warn him because dark times were coming and Arthur and Camelot needed to be strong. His criticisms were born of concern for his son and his kingdom and he clearly cared for Arthur, ensuring that he didn’t linger in the Spirit world so long that he would end up trapped there. He also made it clear that he loved Arthur.

Once Uther was dragged back to the world of the living, his misgivings about Arthur’s choices as a ruler and his concern for Camelot escalated to murderous rage against the perceived threats to the kingdom he had built. The negative emotions were amplified at the expense of the positive ones.

I’d say that the same could be true of Morgana after she came back. There was still some love and compassion there, Aithusa is proof of that, but the negative emotions dominated her life at the expense of the positive ones. When she learns that Uther is her father, it looks as though the good in her might win out but her negative response to Uther not acknowledging her overshadows the positive response that you’d expect to learning that he was her father and that he loved her enough to be willing to use magic to save her life. If she died, the trauma of being forced to return to the world of the living could have affected her. Morgause didn’t know her so she wouldn’t have picked up on any changes in Morgana’s personality, and her influence wouldn’t have helped since she would have encouraged Morgana to hate Uther and Camelot.

It’s also worth noting that Morgana’s ability to make intelligent plans seems to have suffered too. In Season One, she orchestrated an attempt on Uther’s life that not only would have been successful, had she not changed her mind about going through with it, but would also have not been traced back to her unless Merlin accused her, which is highly unlikely. In Season Two, she succeeded in getting Alvarr out of the dungeon. In later seasons, there were times when I thought that she was subconsciously self-sabotaging, given how daft some of her plans were, not to mention her inability to learn that shooting was not too good for her enemies.

I don’t know which would be worse; that she was enchanted all along but that nobody could recognise this and give her the help she needed, or that she was suffering from the effects of being forced back into the world of the living after she had passed on, in which case there was nothing that could have been done for her.