Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season Five/@comment-5102537-20140308144416/@comment-203.166.226.254-20140312032935

''I think it was disappointing that the focus was on the bromance only. There was indeed great potential in some stories and most episodes had some or at least one great scene that made me curious. Sadly, all the interesting storylines and scenes were only approached and then ignored again.''

The irony is, for me (and I know I'm probably in the minority here) I didn't want the focus to be on the bromance. Bromance's are a dime a dozen on TV and Films, but I wanted character development and growth, and to witness the journey. I wanted to know why Merlin thought after all this time, that he still thought Arthur was going to bring about change, and why he was such a great guy, even though he was mean, and hit him and threw things at him, and generally a bully. Its almost as if any interesting story line was deliberately quashed by the show-runners in an attempt to keep the status quo for some reason. There could have been an interesting story here,  that unfolded in a natural way, if only they'd have let it happen.

Merlin could have told Uther what he had done to him, his father and his fellow sorcerers in order to show him his own point of view and to make Uther see the other side

That would have seemed the logical step to take, and what the promised "Merlin and Uther have a conversation" they crowed about would be. But I don't know if they were teasing the audience with this, or it never entered their minds that this could be a road to take. But its one of the many mindbogging decisions the show-runners made.

It's almost as if the viewers were meant to accept without question that Arthur was a better king than his father, when in fact there's little evidence to indicate that that was true.

Exactly, and the only way to do this was to make Uther a tyrannical monster, even though it didn't fit in with what proceeded it in earlier seasons. No matter, that we didn't see the town rejoicing at the death of cruel dictator, nor Arthur doing the "Dad's dead, I'm King" dance ala King George in Horrible Histories. All of a sudden Uther was bad for the Kingdom. And Arthur was better.

They did this with magic users too. They could never have Arthur interact with a magic user who didn't want him dead. They all had to be evil (no reason given) in order to make Arthur the hero without him actually doing anything. Look at Kara, she calmly told him because of his continued stance on magic, they considered themselves at war, which was obviously news to Arthur (you thought he might of guessed, since he was still oppressing these people somehow) Everything she said made sense. Instead of having Arthur try to negotiate some sort of truce (making a promise to dead kids mustn't count, nor making one to other Kings when they try and kill you), they have to make her attempt to kill him. Of course, now he has a reason to kill her, and he tells her, I'm not at war with you, even though you think you're at war with me, its not because of the magic I'm killing you, but because you tried to kill me, because of the whole not at war thing. So then we get Merlin going NOOOOO, because he knows Mordred will run to Morgana and kill Arthur, and he has to stop it, so they can go on and do everything that they were supposed to do. No matter that when he tells the Dragon he has failed, the Dragon says, Wha?? No of course you didn't, weren't you paying attention, all that already happened, but don't worry, sit here and wait long enough, and he'll come back, and you've got plenty of time for that.

You can do anything you like in a fictional universe, but you MUST have consistency, and if you set the story up to be a journey (of becoming the legends) then you follow that journey. Don't chop and change at the whim of what you as creators perceive the audience to want. (As somebody once said, Don't give them what they want, give them what they didn't realise they wanted)