Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season Five/@comment-5102537-20140308144416/@comment-5102537-20140312103409

Anglophile wrote:

Uther always stood out to me as one of the better-written characters on this show. He was occasionally dragged into some pretty convoluted plotlines--season one, anybody?--but for the most part his behaviour from series to series was fairly consistent. When he made decisions contrary to his own views and decrees--like when Morgana was dying in "The Crystal Cave"--they didn't seem forced or even out of place. They still made sense somehow, speaking to a greater complexity that almost every other character on this show lacked.

And that, I believe, was the reason why Uther was reduced to a mere tyrant and even a brutal psycho - and maybe it's even why he was killed off instead being put in the background for a longer time in order to give Arthur the time to grow into his job as king.

Uther upstaged the other characters due to his character complexity and the stories connected to him. The plot about the conflict between Morgana and Uther alone was big and great enough to give it an own show, which is why Arthur and Merlin often almost appeared to be some bystanders or supporting characters, even when their story was in the focus.

It would have been easy to give Arthur a better plot and character development. Some conflict between him and Merlin, for example, a slow realisation of what was and is happening around him in regard to magic, some encounters with sorcerers who are not the bad guys but questionable characters,  him trying to make peace with Morgana and/or learning that she was the one who killed their father, some real improvements in regard to magic, making him a strong personality instead of a fickle teenager-like simpleton, making him trying to figure out what was going on with his uncle, forcing him to deal with the Old Religion and making believable decisions instead of ignoring the plot after "The Disir" again, giving him some passion instead of lethargy ...

If they made Uther an evil psycho in the end - cosidering their statement that he was always a selfish and ruthless tyrant - because they didn't want the audience to forget that he actually killed countless sorcerers and that especially the Great Purge is more than just a questionable thing, they shouldn't have given him redeeming features in the first place and by that made him likable or sympathetic to the audience. In case that they saw later that it was wrong to make him a likable character they simply could have added something to the plot which could have explained why Uther was actually not a cold mass murderer. Although there is no excuse for the Great Purge, there was always a good reason for it that didn't have to do with evilness. He didn't do it out of fun or because he was a sadist or something. In order to explain why even someone who started the Great Purge can be a normal human being who doesn't have to be regarded as a monster, some redemption would have done the job. Like Uther seeing what he had done (not necessarily becoming a fan of the Old Religion) and realising that there are indeed those who don't abuse their powers. He could have sacrificed himself for some good sorcerers, for example.

When he was broken and almost catatonic for a year, it was obvious that he couldn't deal with it all anymore and that something had changed inside of him. This was where they could have continued; making him see what he did wrong (though he wasn't always wrong) and trying to make at least a bit of it right, showing the viewers that especially the Great Purge was unforgivable even though it stabilised the land after the chaos. If Uther had been able to see that such radical measures weren't the right way, the audience would be convinced even more so.

And even if it wasn't about all this, considering that the show regularly demonstrated that the majority of sorcerers/magic users were the bad guys, including the Triple Goddess, a story about Uther as a spirit who still fights magic instead of the knights, Gwen and his own son would have been a much, much better idea and much more believable.