Board Thread:What If?/@comment-5674726-20140630220202/@comment-5674726-20140806210058

Fimber wrote: That's the million dollar question. Gaius and Merlin clearly said that Nimueh chose Igraine, and if the viewers were supposed to question this, Nimueh would have objected or we would have seen something else that demonstrated that Gaius and Merlin were wrong. Instead, Nimueh accepted both allegations. Why?

In Excalibur, we are presented with a Nimueh who sounds sincere when she tells Uther that she didn't know that Ygraine would die, and her point that she would never have helped him if she knew how it would play out is completely logical. Only a complete idiot would use magic to help a King have a son by his barren wife, allowing him to have an heir without having to set his beloved wife aside, deliberately sacrifice the wife's life and expect it to end well. As viewers, we are given no hint that she is misleading Uther when she tells him that she didn't choose Ygraine.

If we have a case of Nimueh using magic to bring Arthur into the world without knowing that Ygraine would be killed and/or without having any control over who was sacrificed, it makes Uther's blanket persecution of magic users more understandable, as it would show him that even when used for good, magic does a lot of harm and users can't control it. If it's not a case of Nimueh deliberately sacrificing Ygraine, as opposed to a criminal already slated for execution, then from Uther's perspective, magic is simply too dangerous for anybody to be messing about with, regardless of their intent, because it can backfire. Nimueh had no intention of causing harm but that didn't keep her from causing it, therefore good intentions are no excuse for courting the risk that using magic will cause harm.

I'd say that Nimueh was retconned as having deliberately sacrificed Ygraine in order to shield Merlin from the consequences of his decision to mess with the power of life and death while leaving his "hero" status intact.

Picture this scenario:

Merlin goes to the Isle of the Blessed in search of the Cup of Life and meets Nimueh. She gives him the Cup but warns that it is unpredictable and that he cannot control whose life will be sacrificed to save Arthur's. Merlin goes through with it anyway, only to discover that his mother is dying as a result of his use of magic to save Arthur. He then returns to the Isle of the Blessed and uses his magic to murder Nimueh, who is not making a move to harm him and who is offering to help him make Arthur King, so he doesn't have to pay the price magic has ordained he pay.

The writers weren't willing to let Merlin murder a woman who was not making an aggressive move against him in order to evade the consequences of his arrogance so they went against previously established canon, not to mention plausibility, to make her the cause of the Great Purge so their Designated Hero could knowingly sacrifice an unwilling victim and still come out smelling like a rose.

Frankly, I find it a little insulting that the writers could expect me to find it in any way plausible that Nimueh would deliberately sacrifice Ygraine.

If they wanted Merlin to kill her so he didn't have to pay the price for his choice to mess with a power that he had no business messing with, they should have had the guts to let him take the step of murdering her rather than trying to claim that she controlled who would die to balance the scales of life and death, even when she wasn't the one to use the power of life and death.