Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season One/@comment-5102537-20130309111322/@comment-5102537-20130408213547

"I think that he summed up his attitude towards the situation very well; it wasn't a case of him viewing Merlin's life as worthless, he viewed his life as worth less than Arthur's. I can't imagine anybody else in his position disputing the second part, and I'd say that there would be some monarchs who would believe the first part."

There were definitely monarchs who believed that servants/peasants/commoner's lives were worthless. We even find such attitudes in our modern societies where people in higher positions and some of those who are rich consider the ordinary people as being more or less worthless. We just have to take a look at those countries that are ruled by dictators in our today's world. Syria, North Korea, China and many others. Poor and/or ordinary people are  are being killed, abused, tortured, exploited, enslaved.

In comparison to those rulers, Uther was a teddy bear - too bad they made him murdering so many people during the Great Purge, not to mention killing children.

Anyway, I suppose every other parent, king or not, would always put the life of their children over the lives of others. I don't quite understand the fuss about Uther's descision to forbid Arthur to risk his life for Merlin. He was a father first of all. Why would he think that the possible death of his son was alright?

The only thing I really disapprove of was Uther crushing the flower that would heal Merlin. Even though I understand that he wanted to demonstrate to Arthur that his disobedience was out of line and also very dangerous (and actually plain wrong), I think that once the flower was found, Merlin deserved to be healed. On the other hand, Uther wanted to make clear that Arthur's actions have consequences. Season one was full of life lessons and interesting dilemmas.

Once again, when rewatching all those epsiodes, it's a shame that they sacrificed all the fascinating and intelligent character descriptions and plotlines for the boring and manipulating "darkness" and action of season four and five, showing us dreadfully naive epsiodes in order to "surprise" the audience. Uther was ready for redemption, yet they threw it all away.