User blog comment:MerlinUSA/Merlin -- The Big Picture/@comment-5102537-20130120143649/@comment-5995315-20130121143132

Now I see a thread emerging in what you're saying, and I'll like to make two clarifications.

The "power of love" speech is in Sweet Dreams,  S2E10. When I saw it I had now doubt a new theme was being introduced, although I didn't yet know how the theme would play out.

I explained the previous post that as I see it, Merlin and Arthur started out as a bromance which deepened to a friendship and the into love. Now, the dragon told Merlin it was his job to help Arthur become the greatest king, and he said they were two sides of the same coin and so on. He didn't say how Merlin would go about this. But to have a as close a relationship as this, they have to be or become attracted to each other. So yes, there had to be what we call homosexual attraction for Arthur and Merlin to keep getting steadily closer to each other. That's not to say they ever had sex (although certain scenes imply the did). But completely heterosexual males don't fall in love the way Merlin, for one, had done by season five.

The story is open as to the extent to which same-sex attraction accelerated the bond, and I personally have no settled opinion about it. But this evolving attraction is one of the striking f aeatures of Merlin that sets it apart from any other show and accounts for its popularity in the men-over-forty market segment. By season five, then, it's simply offensive to denigrate the bond as a "bromance." It would be pointless to go scene by scene to point it out, but I'm assuming in any case that the depiction of a same-sex relationship on television doesn't bother you --  unless you tell me otherwise. There is nevertheless a wave of homophobia directed at the show, some of it pretty open.

But the concerns you stated involve other things pertaining to the story arc, and I think our disagreement over its coherence is the main point. I do not accept hearsay upon hearsay as evidence of the intentions of anyone connected with the show. I'm also concerned about proper reasoning because it can help get through this thicket. In particular, I think as a matter of logic that people should be taken at their word until we have evidence that they're lying. Otherwise, we could not live a single day in society, and our heads would be filled with conspiracy theories and nonsense. So it makes sense to start with the simplest explanation for the story arc first, which is what we were told by everyone -- it was always a five-year arc. Because I cannot accept hearsay I believe the writers when they say they knewow the story would end before they ever got started. This is how most writers write, so it makes sense.

So now the question is really whether and to what extent the individual episodes went off track. I see the issue with particular plot points, the episodes often gave me the impression of being great one-off shows, but with no necessary connection to the next episode. It was the finale that convinced me that the overall arc followed a consistent pattern. That is the point of my blog. Katie McGrath said "all" our questions would be answered in the finale,  and to me she was more or less right. For example, Merlin's Second Reveal ("I was born to serve you, Arthur") about himself explains so much about his strange behavior in the earlier episode -- and no doubt Merlin is a strange, strange man even without magic. If you didn't catch his drift in the finale then you would forever be baffled and frustrated by his earlier behavior.