Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season One/@comment-5102537-20130406100756/@comment-5674726-20130414003526

''As for Merlin telling Morgana, despite the problems that came up with Merlin bringing her to the druid camp, at least Gaius could have tried to guide her. Uther knew very well that Gaius once practiced magic, so no secret here. Had Gaius tried to guide Morgana the way he guided Merlin, he wouldn't have risked Merlin's life. Unless he believed the prophecy that said that Morgana will turn to evil, which is unlikely since Gaius always dismissed Merlin's visions of the future and said that the future is yet to be written and not set in stone (and wrong he was).''

In some ways, Gaius was better able to give Morgana the kind of help she needed and, as you say, he could have done it without endangering Merlin. He believed that Morgana's life was in danger if Uther ever learned about her magic but leaving her to struggle without any guidance on how to control her powers made her a danger to herself and others, since her accidental magic could do a lot of damage and expose her. Had he confirmed to her that she had magic and tried to help her learn to control it, I can't imagine that he'd have needed to draw a diagram to make her understand that telling her magic-hating guardian that she had magic might not be the best idea.

More importantly, Gaius, having lived through the Great Purge and seen the damage that could be done with magic, could have helped her understand that not everybody with magic is a good guy, and that they're not all her friends. I think that Morgana trusted Alvarr and Morgause far too readily because she needed to believe that they were good; she identified with people with magic and needed to believe that Uther was wrong about magic corrupting one's soul, and ended up going to the opposite extreme and being too trusting of some of the people with magic who approached her. Uther said that the Great Purge was before Morgana's time so it's probable that most of the major threats were wiped out either before she was born or when she was a baby. By the time she came to Camelot, a lot of the people executed were probably minnows rather than sharks, so she saw seemingly harmless people killed for having magic. Gaius could have helped her see that, not only was magic once a great threat to the kingdom, there was a lot of anger over the Purge and angry people can be very dangerous.