User blog comment:Knightofthecart/Writers and producers, what did you want ?/@comment-5102537-20121229205305

In my opinion, they simply wanted to attract a larger audience, and what could be better than showing action, drama and humour in a very shallow way? People didn't have to think much about it, they didn't have to get invested in the characters and having deeper thoughts about them and the stories. Just relaxing, laughing a bit about the silly banter, being impressed by slow-motion fights and some minor cheesy romance, and that's it.

For some reason, most show runners or maby the media at all think that the audience doesn't want depth and only wants to be entertained on a simple level, which might be the reason why so-called reality TV shows are supposed to be so successful. The dumber, the better. A lot of people were also curious about the common Arthurian legends, so the average viewer didn't care about consistency and logic but were satisfied with seeing the parts of the legends.

Additionally, I think the show runners constantly wanted to "surprise" the fans. It didn't matter whether those surprises were positive or negative ones, all that mattered was that people kept talking about it. The more controversal, the better. As we have seen, the fans desperately tried to find solutions and explanations for all those plotholes and inconsistencies because they thought that there had to be something about and behind it when stories suddenly contradicted themselves or when characters were suddenly completely changed and didn't match their former descriptions anymore. They knew exactly that most fans would disapprove of this kind of finale with Arthur dying and all that stuff, yet they did it because, as we are proving here, the fans will talk about it. They couldn't ask for more. Others get curious and more people want to know what was going on and soon this show will be cult. It didn't need awards for great writing or whatever, it only needed viewers.

In my opinion, it all became pure manipulation and business.

Another problem, in my opinion, was that they wanted to put too much in this show that only had thirteen epsiodes per season. It suddenly had a turning point when it went "darker" and the plot about Merlin keeping his secret collided with the fact that Arthur was supposed to be the great and fair king. There was no solution to it. They should have either shown Arthur being the king he was supposed to be or sticking to Merlin who has to keep his secret because Arthur is getting crueler. Both things at a time, Arthur being the great king (which he wasn't) but Merlin STILL hiding his powers didn't work the way they showed it. Of course, there could have been multiple ways to make Merlin hiding his secret even after Uther's death, for example, if Arthur had continued it in a similar tough way (meaning, for us to SEE and to believe it ) and Merlin loosing faith in him, maybe becoming his (moderate) enemy or opponent for a while and in the end, a serious event brings them together and they have to fight side by side again... or whatever. However, from the moment that there wasn't an explanation for Morgana's evilness, for Arthur persecuting sorcerers but Merlin still believing that he was so great, bantering around and whatnot, the story went downhill. It wasn't believable anymore. The so-called golden age that allegedly happened in the time skip can only be a joke because it didn't differ from the time before Arthur became king, except for the Round Table. So it was all a little bit of everything but nothing straight and not a serious, believable story with a direction but only chaos.

In the end, it didn't matter. Everyone had hoped for a conclusion and for explanations, so they kept watching even more so. Job done.