Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season Two/@comment-5102537-20130713192800/@comment-5102537-20130714110440

Hello Areanna123, everyone is very welcome to join the discussions :-) It's only a few people doing it because this wiki is not as crowded as it used to be ever since the end of the show. The new episodes made much more people curious and pushed all the discussions, of course but now it's over and a lot of fans have stopped talking about the show.

I agree with both of you, ReganX and Areanna. However, I didn't mind the true love's kiss so much. Even though it was indeed cheesy and predictable, I've always preferred that kind of stories over the later total misery,  suffering and emotional (and physical) brutality of all characters.

But yes, it was cheesy and I too think that Vivian didn't deserve to keep being unlucky in love for the rest of her life. They should have mentioned somewhere along the way that the spell will be broken after the kiss or after a certain amount of time in order to release Vivian from the spell. I've never liked the concept of eternally punishing those who behaved wrong, which was a constant principle of the show.

What I was most interested in was the unification of the Five Kingdoms. I think that such predictable and sometimes cheesy (though nice) storylines around Merlin and Arthur were the reason why both became more and more supporting characters to me, because the really interesting and grown up-stories were actually around Uther and sometimes Morgana. To me, uniting the Five Kingdoms was the main plot of this episode whereas Arthur's and Gwen's true love was only a subplot.

However, both plots were connected to each other since Arthur almost jeopardized the peace treaties by his false love for Vivian due to the spell. But it still pushes the Five Kingdoms into the foreground because in the end, it comes down to whether or not Camelot can be saved from a potential war.

I'm still baffled that Arthur tried to unite the Five Kingdoms in season five when Uther had already done this here in "Sweet Dreams". Moreover, the kingdoms that Arthur had peace treaties with were obviously totally different ones, which was one of the biggest plotholes on the entire show. I will never understand why they completely ignored this episode in the last season and pretended as if it had never happened at all.

I think that among others, this episode proved very well that Uther wasn't a war mongerer but that his first priority in regard to Camelot was peace. Not only that he had been keeping peace for at least 22 years (aside from banning magic, of course) but also that he was eager to keep it up by uniting the Five Kingdoms instead of only having a truce with them. This is also one of the reasons why I disliked the sudden change in Uther's description in season four when he suddenly was aking of war and Arthur had to make peace and set right what Uther allegedly did wrong. This was so ridiculous. Uther told Arthur here in "Sweet Dreams" how important peace was and Arthur had learnt from him. So t was even more ridiculous that in "The Death Song of Uther Pendragon", Uther cast a stone at Arthur for gaining peace - with kingdoms that Uther had already had peace with... What the heck...?

All in all, this was a good episode that actually progressed the story forward (if it hadn't been for season four and five, oddly...) with some funny scenes. I especially liked Uther asking Merlin what's wrong with Arthur. He surprisingly didn't force Arthur into any direction but left irritated. This was quite an amusing and unsual situation.