Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season Five/@comment-5102537-20140412104407/@comment-24785400-20140412230042

I can barely remember this one! Probably not a great sign. As a stand-alone episode it was OK, but this is the beginning of the Gwen is evil arc and it was a slow and pretty pointless arc really. Again we have the writing happening around plot points, and scenes the writers wanted to see. Gwen has been somehow manipulated into killing Arthur. Did anyone else find the scenes between them a bit icky? They barely showed them in the same room (one scene Arthur was sitting around reading reports of something in his chainmail, and in Death Song of Uther Gwen wasn't even in the room while he was eating!) and now all of a sudden they are lovey dovey - it was....odd. Lets see - Merlin voices his concern to Gaius, who dismisses him as over-reacting. Come ON, she was kidnapped by Morgana, last time she stuck a snake in Merlin's neck so he would be the one killing Arthur!! Gwen was able to talk Arthur out of questioning Tyr and nobody thought it out of character for her? They just kept Merlin in his servant role, who nobody listened to and was continued to be treated shabbily, unless they  needed him for something. There was just no character progression at all, the leadership and self-confidence he'd briefly shown in the previous episode had disappeared again.

Poor Tyr. I liked how Merlin turned detective here, and was proactive in trying to solve the mystery, but at the end, when he and Gwen were giving each other the evil eye - they were friends! he should be concerned that something had happened to her, and not glaring at her with I'm gonna kill you look. I was really disliking Merlin by now, he was just so blinkered by Arthur that he didn't care about Gwen. The writing and direction of the two girls was so inconsistent too, in one episode they were greeting each other hugging and Gwen was concerned about Morgana, the next, Morgana was acting all cold towards Gwen again.