Board Thread:Series 5 Discussion/@comment-209.196.232.2-20121230195253/@comment-5995315-20130206192748

Hi Fimber --

I'm not sure I'll be able to take up every point you've made, but if I don't we'll get around to them on other threads sooner or later. This is a broad discussion. We don't agree about what the show was about in the first place. I would point out that, if the ending diverges radically from what one expects, it may be a good idea to rethink how justified one's expectations were to begin with. And too, the finale did in fact fit with what some segment of the audience was expecting.

 It originally was about the younger years of Merlin and Arthur before they got famous and it was planned to end the show with Arthur becoming king  

How would anyone know this but the creators? I never heard anything like that. Although I knew from two years ago that the writers said they had the ending planned before they even started, I never read anything more detailed than that.

The premise of the show is Merlin and his service to Arthur, stated by the dragon in the first episode. All along the way the dragon and Merlin himself assume he'll bring back magic, but this is not the point of the show because two of the themes holding the show together come into direct conflict over this, as in S1E13, and that conflict is never resolved.

 From the beginning the whole plot and essence of the show was Merlin's magic, his attempt to bring it back to Camelot and to help Arthur uniting the lands of Albion,  

It was neither. It was Merlin himself and his coming of age, without any baggage. I agree people are lead to believe in many scenes that Merlin is under some obligation to bring back magic, but the scenes about this are contradicted by other scenes as part of the ongoing dramatic tension.

'' they seem to think that cruelty and "darkness" is a sign of maturity. So the direction and tone of the show changed ''

Nothing really changed. The cruelty and darkness were there at the beginning. The last scene of  The Beginning of the End in season one is a clear, dark foreshadowing of Arthur's death. The only thing that that's different is that nobody then actually thought it would happen. If the show had been cancelled, it might not have.

The difference is between a static and a dynamic reading of the story arc. Too many people expected what was true about a character in season one to remain true in season five, but the characters grow, for better or worse. That's part of the enjoyment of the show.

the finale ignored the overall plot and reduced it to a story between two protagonists only which was never what the rest of the show was about.

The ending is giving us a direct answer: It was always about Merlin. The very first episode has only one point, and that was to bring Merlin and Arthur together for the reason the dragon gave. The majority of the episodes stressed the relationship, although it is true that viewers could be of different minds over what was most important in a particular episode. The point is, the bond in the finale did not come out of thin air. It was building all along and examples of it in early episodes are almost to the point of being blunt.

Nobody knows that Arthur didn't in some way unite Albion, but the King's Speech in S5e12 implies that's exactly what Camlann did, given that there is now in fact a "united kingdoms" of which Arthur spoke. No one knows that magic wasn't brought back to Camelot, either. In fact, Arthur's peace with the Druids shows that at least among them, magic was accepted by Arthur.

You refer to a plot, but I don't think there was any exact plot holding the episodes together as a unity. Or maybe we're using different words for the same idea. What we have are four or five central themes running through the series.

'' Make a love story between two characters, fine. But make it clear and show the audience that everything else is unimportant. ''

But if they made it clear, there wouldn't be a story. Or, as you point out, it wouldn't have lasted two seasons. But my question is, does the love story at the end really render the rest unimportant?

In the finale, the producers presented one theme as decisive. That upsets viewers who favored the others. Yes, why couldn't they have done justice to all of them? To me, the problem was that there was only one Merlin and, right or wrong (this can be debated endlessly), he settled on one of them instead of accommodating them all.

The love story angle may have been intended for the finale all along. But if that's not the case, why the creators laid stress on it is, it seems, simply that the chemistry Bradley James and Colin Morgan brought to the screen was too unusual to waste. Even more relevant  is that Colin Morgan simply ran away with the show.

Whatever balance may have been intended at the start eventually had to give way to these two phenomena once they became the drivers of the show. The producers could not have predicted it, but once they saw they had a gold mine on their hands they'd have been crazy not to take advantage of it.