Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-93.72.133.51-20140307194703/@comment-58.6.236.54-20140308213441

Well that theory fits in with the shows insistence that women with magic = evil (and every other woman coming into Camelot was bad news)

Back to the motivation issue however. Merlina as a result of the great Purge was born to do two things - Keep Arthur alive so he would become King, and unite the Lands of Albion, and to bring magic back to the lands (thats 3 really) All on the say so of a prophesy and a lizard. To use Harry Potter parlance, he's the chosen one, but instead of it being his journey, at some point it becomes Arthur's journey. Because of this show's insistence on continually pressing the reset button, and rehashing the same stories over and over again, we didn't get the character growth we should have. We didn't see Merlin learning to become the great sage he was destined to,  and teaching Arthur to be a great King the way he should have. Learning what he was to do and why, when different people kept telling him different things. And then by the end, we have a character who is so devoured, and blinkered by the very thought of Arthur, that he forgoes everything else, and lets his own people by the way-side, at the same time as telling them that everything would be better one day, but never doing anything about it. In doing this, he definitely became a parody of his mythical counter-part.