Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season One/@comment-5102537-20130323143713/@comment-5674726-20130330000019

One thing I like about this episode is that they didn't have Edwin's parents as innocent victims of the Purge. In the eyes of their son, who was only a child at the time, they were murdered but, by the sounds of things, they were hurting others.

It was a good way of highlighting the grey areas, that Uther's crusade against magic wasn't purely the result of Ygraine's death. As Gaius pointed out before, magic once caused chaos in Camelot. People like Edwin's parents would have been executed for committing crimes with magic even if Ygraine lived to be a hundred and bore a dozen healthy children. Uther has to have been very wary of magic before Ygraine's death, since he turned on magic as a whole instead of thinking that Nimueh was a bad egg who had tricked him into agreeing to use magic to have a son by Ygraine, knowing that it would cost him his beloved wife. I can't imagine that somebody who believed that magic was a force for good except in the rare cases where it's misused would be led to stamp out magic, to the point of having little children killed, because of the actions of one magic user.