Rex quondam, etc., etc.
I did, as I usually do, what the internet told me, and I watched Merlin, and it was pretty damn delightful.
My initial impressions: relentlessly charming. Incredibly cheesy special effects and some ridiculous dialogue that is sold most of the time by the winsomeness of the cast, who are very winsome indeed. The premise seems to be that everyone is basically good, unless they are an evil sorcerer or Anthony Head--who is absolutely delightful, and elevates the acting of everyone with whom he does a scene. He neither takes the character too seriously nor looks embarrassed to be there, and I mean that as the highest compliment; it's the only way the tone of the show works. Uther is a masterstroke of a villain: he's the logic that makes the plots work 95% of the time, but you can't quite hate him. If the show ever lost him, it'd be in serious trouble. He's the only character with mixed motives.
I think the show will, or could, get exponentially better when they realize what they're trying to say, especially given its emphasis on the persecution of sorcerers and, you know, genocide. I don't necessarily mean that the show ought to be allegorical, but it ought to try to mean something, even a little bit. They've been sowing seeds for future discontent right and left--Mordred and Lancelot have all shown up, and Morgana is already a problem for the king, and Excalibur has been forged--and then leaving them where they lie. They should develop some real arcs. The monster-of-the-week pattern wastes the characters and the mythology.
Race and gender: there's been a lot of talk about this in the fandom, and talk that occasionally devolves into wank, and I'm not going to do any of that justice in the next, like, three sentences. miriam_heddy responds to one post here, if this sort of thing interests you; Miriam writes incredibly well about race in fandom. I think the show is sincerely trying to get it "right" on both accounts. They deal with race and gender in the same way: by pretending (for the most part) that it isn't a problem. Both of these strategies are incredibly problematic, of course. Colorblind casting as a strategy--implying that race isn't an issue in the world you're building--only "works" (kind of) if you don't cast people of color in a token, representative fashion. On the other hand, they're using people of color in significant roles (Guinevere and Lancelot--which brings its own problems, i.e., have they done this to avoid miscegenation in the relationship between the mythology's infamous adulterous lovers? How can we call that "colorblind casting"? And how are we supposed to read Arthur and Gwen's eventual marriage then--do we know that Gwen and Lancelot "belong" together--the Lancelot episode implies sexual tension between them, for the record--because they're both people of color and that Arthur and Gwen don't because they're not? Furthermore, Gwen and Lancelot are not the same race, and if we're supposed to read them as a "set" because they're both people of color, the secondary implication of this is that all people of color are "alike," no? Frankly, I'm not sure how to untangle this--and there's also the fact that they're playing fast and loose with the mythology and we can't quite assume its trajectory, even if it's always implied), and writing them better, frankly, than a lot of other shows. Cough cough Stargates. I'm not sure that it's a great day when we can give a show credit for not doing quite as bad a job as it could be, but I think there's evidence that they care about portraying people of color in a positive way.
Gender: well. Another example of solving a problem by pretending it doesn't exist. I saw a review or something somewhere that says the show has a 21st-century sensibility, and I think this is nowhere as evident as it is in its gender politics. I think the most explicitly this has been addressed is in one episode when Gwen and Morgana have left the castle, unchaperoned, to go with Merlin to help defend his village, and Arthur (more on that below) half-heartedly attempts to keep the women from fighting and then apologetically relents twenty minutes later. The problem is that while it's clear that Morgana and Gwen have room to maneuver, the show doesn't really dismantle the patriarchy of either the source material or the "21st-century sensibility" that informs it (like it doesn't really dismantle racism--not that i want to draw a line between the two, just in the show's strategies for dealing with them). There aren't actually women knights in Camelot, but the show's trying pretty hard not to have to think about it (yet, I hope). I've read some complaints about Nimueh as the big bad--yet another association of powerful magic with an evil woman who must be brought down--and that's true, but I think it--as "it" usually is--is more complicated than that, although I agree that that's there and that it's troubling. I think the text tells us that Nimueh is a villain because Uther made her one because he couldn't make the choice between losing control over his wife's body and not having an heir (the wife dies giving birth to Arthur after Uther has had Nimueh do something magical to make her pregnant; Uther then burns Nimueh's family). I haven't watched 12 and 13 yet, where the Nimueh plot gets taken up again.
That was a lot more than three sentences, and yet still woefully incomplete. Well, I'll probably come back to it at some point.
The fun stuff: the reason why this show is so popular in fandom is because it's the most perfect fandom show I have ever seen. With the four leads you could make any kind of coupling you want. The homoerotic subtext of the show is absolutely unbelievable--around episode 9 or 10 it starts to get really ridiculous (the C-plot of above mentioned village-saving episode is about how Arthur's showing up to help is evidence of how much he cares for Merlin--every single character mentions this. The B-plot? Merlin's best village friend is jealous of how much Merlin trusts Arthur). I think the show thinks it's about male friendship? i.e., the question of whether or not the show's actually writing this in or not is entirely up in the air. The next season will be telling, I think, because if they didn't know how it would play out on screen before, and how fans would react, they can't be ignorant of it now. The show clearly operates within the same boundaries that most TV shows do: that same-sex erotics are always subtext (think about what we'd expect to happen with the characters if one or the other were a girl). I hope the show doesn't become uncomfortable with all the talk of entwined destinies (maybe some jokes about how "we're not girls ha ha ha"?).
Anyway, it's all, as I said, pretty delightful, and I think the internet is justifiably excited about it--I just hope that it lives up to its promise, I guess?
My initial impressions: relentlessly charming. Incredibly cheesy special effects and some ridiculous dialogue that is sold most of the time by the winsomeness of the cast, who are very winsome indeed. The premise seems to be that everyone is basically good, unless they are an evil sorcerer or Anthony Head--who is absolutely delightful, and elevates the acting of everyone with whom he does a scene. He neither takes the character too seriously nor looks embarrassed to be there, and I mean that as the highest compliment; it's the only way the tone of the show works. Uther is a masterstroke of a villain: he's the logic that makes the plots work 95% of the time, but you can't quite hate him. If the show ever lost him, it'd be in serious trouble. He's the only character with mixed motives.
I think the show will, or could, get exponentially better when they realize what they're trying to say, especially given its emphasis on the persecution of sorcerers and, you know, genocide. I don't necessarily mean that the show ought to be allegorical, but it ought to try to mean something, even a little bit. They've been sowing seeds for future discontent right and left--Mordred and Lancelot have all shown up, and Morgana is already a problem for the king, and Excalibur has been forged--and then leaving them where they lie. They should develop some real arcs. The monster-of-the-week pattern wastes the characters and the mythology.
Race and gender: there's been a lot of talk about this in the fandom, and talk that occasionally devolves into wank, and I'm not going to do any of that justice in the next, like, three sentences. miriam_heddy responds to one post here, if this sort of thing interests you; Miriam writes incredibly well about race in fandom. I think the show is sincerely trying to get it "right" on both accounts. They deal with race and gender in the same way: by pretending (for the most part) that it isn't a problem. Both of these strategies are incredibly problematic, of course. Colorblind casting as a strategy--implying that race isn't an issue in the world you're building--only "works" (kind of) if you don't cast people of color in a token, representative fashion. On the other hand, they're using people of color in significant roles (Guinevere and Lancelot--which brings its own problems, i.e., have they done this to avoid miscegenation in the relationship between the mythology's infamous adulterous lovers? How can we call that "colorblind casting"? And how are we supposed to read Arthur and Gwen's eventual marriage then--do we know that Gwen and Lancelot "belong" together--the Lancelot episode implies sexual tension between them, for the record--because they're both people of color and that Arthur and Gwen don't because they're not? Furthermore, Gwen and Lancelot are not the same race, and if we're supposed to read them as a "set" because they're both people of color, the secondary implication of this is that all people of color are "alike," no? Frankly, I'm not sure how to untangle this--and there's also the fact that they're playing fast and loose with the mythology and we can't quite assume its trajectory, even if it's always implied), and writing them better, frankly, than a lot of other shows. Cough cough Stargates. I'm not sure that it's a great day when we can give a show credit for not doing quite as bad a job as it could be, but I think there's evidence that they care about portraying people of color in a positive way.
Gender: well. Another example of solving a problem by pretending it doesn't exist. I saw a review or something somewhere that says the show has a 21st-century sensibility, and I think this is nowhere as evident as it is in its gender politics. I think the most explicitly this has been addressed is in one episode when Gwen and Morgana have left the castle, unchaperoned, to go with Merlin to help defend his village, and Arthur (more on that below) half-heartedly attempts to keep the women from fighting and then apologetically relents twenty minutes later. The problem is that while it's clear that Morgana and Gwen have room to maneuver, the show doesn't really dismantle the patriarchy of either the source material or the "21st-century sensibility" that informs it (like it doesn't really dismantle racism--not that i want to draw a line between the two, just in the show's strategies for dealing with them). There aren't actually women knights in Camelot, but the show's trying pretty hard not to have to think about it (yet, I hope). I've read some complaints about Nimueh as the big bad--yet another association of powerful magic with an evil woman who must be brought down--and that's true, but I think it--as "it" usually is--is more complicated than that, although I agree that that's there and that it's troubling. I think the text tells us that Nimueh is a villain because Uther made her one because he couldn't make the choice between losing control over his wife's body and not having an heir (the wife dies giving birth to Arthur after Uther has had Nimueh do something magical to make her pregnant; Uther then burns Nimueh's family). I haven't watched 12 and 13 yet, where the Nimueh plot gets taken up again.
That was a lot more than three sentences, and yet still woefully incomplete. Well, I'll probably come back to it at some point.
The fun stuff: the reason why this show is so popular in fandom is because it's the most perfect fandom show I have ever seen. With the four leads you could make any kind of coupling you want. The homoerotic subtext of the show is absolutely unbelievable--around episode 9 or 10 it starts to get really ridiculous (the C-plot of above mentioned village-saving episode is about how Arthur's showing up to help is evidence of how much he cares for Merlin--every single character mentions this. The B-plot? Merlin's best village friend is jealous of how much Merlin trusts Arthur). I think the show thinks it's about male friendship? i.e., the question of whether or not the show's actually writing this in or not is entirely up in the air. The next season will be telling, I think, because if they didn't know how it would play out on screen before, and how fans would react, they can't be ignorant of it now. The show clearly operates within the same boundaries that most TV shows do: that same-sex erotics are always subtext (think about what we'd expect to happen with the characters if one or the other were a girl). I hope the show doesn't become uncomfortable with all the talk of entwined destinies (maybe some jokes about how "we're not girls ha ha ha"?).
Anyway, it's all, as I said, pretty delightful, and I think the internet is justifiably excited about it--I just hope that it lives up to its promise, I guess?