User blog comment:Fimber/Things that went wrong in "The Death Song of Uther Pendragon"/@comment-7285162-20130415005522/@comment-5674726-20130427001518

''As for Nimueh, in "Le Morte d'Arthur" Gaius made clear that Igraine was chosen by Nimueh and Merlin confirmed that later by saying that not the Old Religion chose Hunith and Gaius but that she did. ''

That's what I find baffling.

In Excalibur, Nimueh sounds sincere when she says that she didn't know that Ygraine would die, though she knew that somebody would, and that had she known, she would never have agreed to help Uther. That made a lot more sense to me than that she would be stupid enough to deliberately sacrifice Ygraine and not have a reasonably good idea of the likely reaction of the man who loves his wife enough to resort to magic to have a child by her rather than the more conventional solution of setting her aside finding himself a new wife who can bear children.

I think that, not only would it have been more interesting if Nimueh hadn't known in advance, and she ends up mirroring Uther in a sense, by targeting Camelot in reprisal for the deaths of her friends in the Great Purge, it would have made Uther's stance on the dangers of magic more reasonable; Nimueh may have had good intentions but magic demanded a price, and even something that seemed positive on the surface masked danger.

I also think that it would have been more interesting if, instead of Merlin being handed a convenient excuse to sacrfice an unwilling victim to get his way, Nimueh wasn't actually able to facilitate his wish to sacrifice his life for Arthur's. Had it been a case that, in addition to the balance of Life and Death needing to be maintained, magic also had to be kept in balance, sacrificing the most powerful warlock ever to save non-magical Arthur would have been a no-no, so the magic of the Cup of Life worked by taking the life of the non-magical person Merlin was closest to: Hunith, with no take-backs.

It would have been an effective lesson about the dangers of messing with forces that he doesn't understand.