merlin 4x05
starting on a shallow note, holy crap, mr. james. not only are you are rocking the new-king angst but looking mighty fine through and through. i mean, boy is classically gorgeous but i don't think i have ever been this glued to staring at his face. no idea if it was the lighting or the acting or what but this was something else.
otherwise, i have to say, show is really keeping up the epic scale. like incredibly, unbelievably well that i have to pinch myself every once in a while.
i love the entire theme of becoming your own person through trial and error. it is one of my favourite themes in general and i think it was done beautifully through the course of this episode. i know the popular opinion (and also what the writers generally misled us to believe) was that arthur would only be king when he had learned ~everything and then he would do no wrong but, quite honestly, from a narrative perspective, i love the decision to have him be faily at the start (which we got from s1) and even be a little bit faily at the start of his kingship. basically? this is the show i wanted. i wanted a king arthur who is finally at the top of the foodchain but still screwing up, still learning, and merlin being there and solid and present and powerful but far from the deus ex machina. i wanted them both realizing their limits and knowing when to back off and knowing when to step in. i wanted them butting heads but in a way that's productive and not just done for the sake of "lol look comedy" (which is occasionally fun too) and then at the end of the day realizing that they really do need to rely on each other because, by themselves, they are in so many ways powerless even if, in other ways, they are too much concentrated power that will go haywire otherwise. and we're getting nods to this now and i love it.
in sum, i am glad that, as dumb as it was, arthur went and did that killing the caerleon king thing. only by acting like his father did he realize just how unlike his father he really was. i appreciated that he told merlin to back off when he did because while merlin is obviously a lot more than he lets on and has had to make difficult decisions, the consequences for him are mostly personal rather than public, and if things to wrong (like they did something like 2 weeks ago) no one will know any better and no one will call him out on it except for maybe his conscience. i'm also glad that he didn't blindly listen to merlin because there is no learning in that. instead, he listened to doucheface agravaine and regretted it later but managed to realize in a roundabout way that wow that was a stupid idea. sure, boy's still not very bright so it will probably take him ages to figure out agravaine but, as gwen said, it's a start. a good start.
so many great moments though. i think so much of arthur gets overshadowed by everything around him (not to mention all the fail his writing has been in the past) but since sins of the father and maybe a little bit in the one where he'd had to fight uther in the tournament and dudley dursley came to town, this was the most character-centric bit we got of him. it showed him at its core, the bit i love best, stumbling and imperfect but so, so good at heart.
(as an aside, dashboard's vindicated is one of my big arthur songs what with the whole flawed but cleaning up so well theme. is there a fanvid? of course there is.)
the arthur rant aside:
+ can we keep knight!merlin please and thanks?
+ i thought arthur and gwen were kind of adorable this week though i wanted her to give him way, way more hell. i am also an awful person because i was all, CAN LANCELOT SWEEP IN NOW AND CRADLE HER BROKEN HEART ALREADY when they were breaking up.
+ headcanon says merlin kept the ring.
+ how ridiculous is merlin's job tho. he couldn've have picked another dude to protect, one who didn't try to get himself killed every five seconds. i feel myself rolling my eyes on his behalf every time arthur comes up with a half-baked plan to off himself.
+ and okay, what was this? WHAT WAS THIS?
nbd, just stealing glances at merlin in the firelight before i wander off to my death.
+ queen annis was a class act. i want her to come back and chill with arthur and give him ruling lessons and kick agravaine in the face :)