Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season Three/@comment-5102537-20131012122916/@comment-5102537-20131013134843

Reaper47 wrote:

What are YOUR thoughts on the ring, Fimber? Do you think it was quite useful or too much of  a risk having to be blinded by a white light when you need to heal yourself with it and therefore attracting attention?

Obviously Merlin didn't need it but it might have been a good collection for maybe GAIUS to use, who knows...

I've never thought about the ring, to be honest. But yes, I think invisible and silent magic would have been much more convenient for the magic users :-D Merlin whispering spells and risking to get caught using magic was often very dangerous. By the way, sometimes he needed spells and at other times just a look of his was enough. The white light of the ring most certainly was the energy that was needed to start the healing process.

Merlinarthur, I can't remember those deleted scenes you mentioned, I think I've missed them. However, Morgana was plotting on the show when she convinced Uther to join the tournament. She only wanted him to fight to either die on the field, to get humiliated if he lost or to restrain his relationship with Arthur. Since she knew Uther and that he couldn't withstand a challenge, especially when the challenge was mentioned by his daughter and he had the chance to prove himself and to please her (as he might have thought), she again manipulated him.

Arthur and Uther:

But I think that there was more to it. Uther wasn't only trying to prove himself but was also testing his son. When he told Arthur and Morgana in the end that he knew that Arthur had thrown the fight in order to let his father win, all his arrogant and challenging remarks towards Arthur during the tournament made sense. He must have known that Arthur was meanwhile better than him due to his youth, plus he told Arthur in the end that he had been watching his progress since he was a boy. And then he said that now Arthur is ready to be king.

So he obviously wanted to see if Arthur can retreat and put his own pride aside or if his honour and sense for his father's honour, plus considering the opinion and morale of the citizens prevail. At first I thought that Uther was just downplaying his own insecurity by boasting and by outfacing Arthur, but what he was really doing was challenging Arthur's common sense and sense for honour and social reputation. A king has to know when to give in and to lose in order to save the greater good, and Arthur had learnt that lesson when he gave his father the victory that Arthur had actually deserved. So Arthur made sure that the people keep seeing their king as the strongest one which made them feel safe.

If Uther only wanted to make Arthur feel inferior he wouldn't have told him and Morgana in the end that he had lost if Arthur hadn't thrown the fight. He had no problem admitting that he lost against his son but even reckoned that he would. I think this was a very unusual situation of true greatness of Uther on this show. He gave Arthur a soft  lecture by risking his own humiliation and by that tried to keep stability among the citizens, which worked in the end. It was politically clever and at the same time wise.

The fight:

However, I think that Arthur had a much too easy job of defeating Uther so quickly. When considering that Uther used to be the best sword fighter until Arthur and that they were wearing chainmail and wielding very heavy swords, plus that Uther was taller than Arthur and brought in more weight when striking, it was totally unbelievable that Arthur didn't even seem to be a little out of breath. Him winning because he was younger is totally fine and believable but winning as if he was only parrying a tiny fly was quite ridiculous. Especially since Uther had defeated every other opponent before, so he was still a great sword fighter and all the others were much younger than Uther. So why would he have to gasp for air when fighting Arthur while Arthur himself barely had to breathe at all like he was only standing somewhere and watching a sports event on TV? That didn't work for me at all.

Another thing I found very weird was the fact that this tournament had no rules. Fighting Camelot's best knights, the Prince and the King without any rules was the stupidest thing ever. What if anyone had really killed Arthur or Uther in a bloody stupid and unimportant tournament? And all that only for gold. And if there were no rules, did it mean that even magic was allowed?

Which leads me to another question: was it just me or did Uther see that Gilli used magic during the fight? His magic was so obvious that actually almost everybody should have seen it, especially Uther who was directly affected by it. Why else would his sword sudenly fly out of his hands and land metres away on the ground? Gilli's eyes glued yellow when Uther directly looked at him. So was it just plot convenience and he didn't see it or did he simply ignore it because there were no rules?

What's more, as much as Uther and Arthur were in danger of being killed by those who didn't serve Camelot, it was clear from the very beginning that no knight of Camelot would have ever really hurt either the Prince or the King. I would even say that most knights, if not all of them wouldn't have dared to really fight like they were fighting a true enemy in order to not injure or accidentally kill Arthur or Uther.

Gilli:

I liked him very much and I would have loved to see him returning. He wanted to kill Uther, yes, but he wasn't a bad person, only misguided. I felt sorry for him when he killed for the very first time. The look on his face showed how much it affected him because he wasn't a killer at heart. On the other hand, he had already defeated his opponent and it wasn't necessary to kill him. So once again, magic corrupted and made a murderer of an innocent boy once he had the power to finally stop being pushed around. I think that the power overwhelmed him which is why he killed his opponent in the end. Again we were shown that only a few people were able to handle such a power and that most of them corrupted.

Fortunately, Merlin was able to interfere and prevent Gilli from doing even more harm. I bet if this had happened in season four, he just would have stood by and watched and then shrugged in the end when Uther had died in the battle. He probaly would have told Arthur to simply accept it, like he did in "The Wicked Day". Good thing this was still season three when everyone except Morgana was still in their right senses.

What would have happened to Gilli if he had succeeded and killed the king? There surely would have been people who had wanted to avenge Uther. There wouldn't have been any glory for Gilli but he would have only be known as the one who killed the king for gold. Arthur would have lost his father, Camelot would have lost its king, Morgana would have won. Merlin did the absolute right thing in preventing Gilli from killing Uther, for the sake of (almost) everyone.

Nevertheless, I would have liked to see more of Gilli since he was yet another friend of Merlin's, or at least another one who knew of Merlin's secret, who just disappeared out of Merlin's life. Shame.

Arthur:

I was a little surprised that Arthur seemed to have such a hard time in the end when he had to decide whether to win or to lose against his father. While he was only concerned in the beginning (which was also unbelievable since Arthur knew that Uther was a great sword fighter and not so easy to defeat - and he wasn't Methusalem actually....) he later had to fight with his inner self to finally give up and let Uther win. Why? Arthur didn't need the victory in "The Once and Future Queen" when he hid at Gwens place but let "Sir William of Deira" take all the glory. So why was it so hard for him now when his father, the king was the "winner"? It's not a shame to lose against the king who had conquered Camelot and built the kingdom as the strongest one in the land.

Arthur had already learnt his lecture in humility in "The Labyrinth of Gedref" when he had to put his pride aside. I doubt that his father's arrogance really had made him so immature to be eager to prove to him that he was wrong. The Arthur that we have been introduced to, ever since he had changed from being a bully to the kind prince, wouldn't have had a problem "losing" against his father or anyone else in an honourable fight.

Anyway, I liked this episode. Good entertainment, some wise lessons and an interesting new character (Gilli).