Board Thread:Series 5 Discussion/@comment-209.196.232.2-20121230195253/@comment-5102537-20130206134932

I could not disagree more with you, MerlinUSA. I know that we've already had this discussion, and if you want to know why exactly so many people think that the show was ruined and what went wrong, you're welcome to read my blog so that I don't have to repeat everything here (would be too long ;-) ):

http://merlin.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Fimber/Did_Uther_win_at_last%3F_R%C3%A9sum%C3%A9_of_Merlin_and_the_finale_-_The_Diamond_of_the_Day_Part_2

I'll try to give a clue of why the show started differently and ended on a very disappointing and destructive note. The show had promised a happy ending from the beginning with really every single detail we were shown. It originally was about the younger years of Merlin and Arthur before they got famous and it was planned to end the show with Arthur becoming king, which would have been the time when the legends begin. What was supposed to happen off-screen, whether Arthur dies in the end (off-screen) or not was irrelevant since the show itself promised a happy ending with Arthur's coronation (and marriage with Gwen etc...). When this was changed and Arthur became king much sooner, the show still promised the golden age and a happy time in Camelot with magic being restored/allowed again. To prevent magic from being allowed, Uther had been  brought into the story in order to give it all a good reason for Merin to hide his powers.

The reason why so many characters died in season four already was the fact that for some weird reason more people are attracted to darker and more brutal shows since they seem to think that cruelty and "darkness" is a sign of maturity. So the direction and tone of the show changed and we got more deaths, more cruelty, more brutality and more character changes in order to make us suddenly believe that everyone "grew up". The show had to fight with the general opinion of being a children's show due to its more lighthearted stories and promised happy ending. Instead of continuing the broached dramatical and more mature storylines, they simply turned characters like Morgana and later even Uther into psychopathic monsters, let characters being tortured and even killed them off.

From the beginning the whole plot and essence of the show was Merlin's magic, his attempt to bring it back to Camelot and to help Arthur uniting the lands of Albion, whether on-screen or off-screen, as was evident by Kilgharrah's statement in season one already, by the Fisher King's statement and by the Vilia. This was what everyone had waited for when watching the seasons, and this was what the show gave us to wait for. The bond between Merlin and Arthur may have been the main plot in regard to the character's interaction but it never came across as the main plot of the story itself. Stories consist of a various aspects. You can either tell a story that is only focused on a few characters and at the same time forget about subplots, concentrating on a relationship only. Then you can tell a story that develops from the characters and provides drama/action/humour/whatever as a consistent story. And then you can tell an overall story of which the characters only a play a part of and are put in to force a story development. "Merlin" was a mixture of the last two examples up until season five. There was an overall story (Merlins magic, restoring it, uniting Albion) and then there was also drama/plot developed from the characters (interaction, conflict, the past of some characters, the foreseen future etc).

However, the finale ignored the overall plot and reduced it to a story between two protagonists only which was never what the rest of the show was about. It was done subsequently because obviously, there was no time to conclude the story that had been told from the beginning with some grave changes later in the seasons. This finale ignored not only the essential plot but also other characters that have always been extremely important since most stories developed from their characters. Instead those characters were reduced to side-effects and in the end some of of them were killed within seconds.

If it had only been about the love between Merlin and Arthur without the overall story and the promised ending, this show would have never survived a second season. To state out the deep bond between Merlin and Arthur, it wasn't necessary to ignore what everyone had waited for (Albion, happy ending, magic being restored and so on). It had always been clear from the beginning that there was much more at stake than only the bond between two protagonists. This bond was supposed to be the reason as to why they will succeed in the end, not fail.

Make a love story between two characters, fine. But make it clear and show the audience that everything else is unimportant. Make a show about a particular story and give the characters the power to push the story forward, fine. But make it clear and conclude the story. Ignoring it and/or changing everything in the middle of it and/or in the end is simply bad storytelling.