Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season Five/@comment-5102537-20140308144416/@comment-203.206.105.250-20140311004039

Good points. Yes, it was weird that Giaus never approached Uther. It would have only taken a sentence from Gaius to explain why Uther was acting the way he was. Again, nobody in this show every communicated and as you pointed out everybody was lied to, manipulated and kept in the dark. There was so much going wrong in this episode, and they just expected the audience to hand-wave it yet again, but in the past this was possible, here, it was too much to disregard.

From this point forward I got the feeling the writers had given up trying to tell some sort of story - arc or otherwise and were simply giving the fans what they thought they wanted - banter and erm, "those moments", because who needs story when you can have 40 odd minutes per week of  banter? I'm not saying fan-service is a bad thing, shows do it all the time, but when you offer fan service in liu of everything else? not such a good thing (and yes, some fans were happy with this, because that's what they watched for, and didn't expect much else)

By the end, I don't understand why Merlin and others thought Arthur was a much better King than Uther, because exactly as you said - he carried on Uther's legacy in the same way. Nor why Arthur would change things,  nor unite the lands, Given that he had 3 years in which there was relative peace, what with Morgana being chained up, tipping her over the edge to outright craziness, and he made no attempt to do a thing. Oh, and it was generally when an opponent or critic (such as Tristan) met him, were they won over, not by his reputation, but - it must be his boyish charm, or something.