Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season One/@comment-5102537-20130316141226/@comment-5674726-20130329000435

''Yes, but working with the sorcerer was also Tom's fault. Even though I don't support it, Uther had more reason to sentence Tom than Arthur had to even threaten the life of his one and only true love. I can't imagine myself to reunite with a man who threatened to kill me only because he freaked out over something. But if Gwen accepted it because it was normal in that period of time she also should have realised that sentencing a "conspirator" (which Tom was believed to be) was the common treatment and logical consequence. So it shouldn't have made Uther a bad king in her eyes but only the one she despised because she lost her father. She can be indifferent or even in rage with someone without thinking that that someone was a bad king or evil man, given that his son even wanted to kill her because he was hurt.''

At the very least, Tom has to have known that something was amiss, given that a stranger was paying him a substantial amount of money to perform secret experiments in the dead of night. Even if he had lived to see his trial, I could see him having a difficult time convincing Uther and the court that he didn't know what Tauren had planned, given the secrecy of their experiment and the fact that he was caught with a big lump of gold in his hand. He'd certainly have a more difficult time than an innkeeper who rented a room to Tauren for the night, for example, since the innkeeper couldn't reasonably be expected to recognise a sorcerer on sight or to be suspicious of somebody who wants a room for the night.