Regarding Pellinore.
Massive spoilers and whingeing about reboot-Arthuriana, so it's cut --
Those of you who know me well are aware that I played Camelot's Sir Pellinore in a summer musical about a decade ago, and that I've been interested in and writing about the character ever since. Like many of the characters in the Arthurian legends, he's been rewritten a couple times -- king of the Isles, helps Arthur quell rebellions, descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, kills King Lot of Orkney and thus earns Gawain's anger, forever hunting the Questing Beast in a gorgeously symbiotic relationship, crucial in the search for the Grail, sometimes played for laughs and sometimes for pathos. He is a ridiculously interesting character that is pretty crucial to Arthur's life and rule in Camelot no matter which way you write him.
Nowhere does Pellinore die in combat with an immortal black knight before he has the chance to hunt the Questing Beast, as in the BBC's Merlin. Doing this takes away the essence of what makes Pellinore so cool.
Take this and heap it above the whole Mordred business, and you have a show that has taken the chance at a really great reboot and shoved it into the mouth of a Monster Of The Week format. One of the most beautiful things about the Arthurian legend is that it has been retold over and over and over again, with different roles and different themes -- but when writers squander such characters like Bedivere and Pellinore on redshirt plots, it just doesn't make sense.
On the other hand, Uther is totally awesome and I got a short story idea from this.
Those of you who know me well are aware that I played Camelot's Sir Pellinore in a summer musical about a decade ago, and that I've been interested in and writing about the character ever since. Like many of the characters in the Arthurian legends, he's been rewritten a couple times -- king of the Isles, helps Arthur quell rebellions, descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, kills King Lot of Orkney and thus earns Gawain's anger, forever hunting the Questing Beast in a gorgeously symbiotic relationship, crucial in the search for the Grail, sometimes played for laughs and sometimes for pathos. He is a ridiculously interesting character that is pretty crucial to Arthur's life and rule in Camelot no matter which way you write him.
Nowhere does Pellinore die in combat with an immortal black knight before he has the chance to hunt the Questing Beast, as in the BBC's Merlin. Doing this takes away the essence of what makes Pellinore so cool.
Take this and heap it above the whole Mordred business, and you have a show that has taken the chance at a really great reboot and shoved it into the mouth of a Monster Of The Week format. One of the most beautiful things about the Arthurian legend is that it has been retold over and over and over again, with different roles and different themes -- but when writers squander such characters like Bedivere and Pellinore on redshirt plots, it just doesn't make sense.
On the other hand, Uther is totally awesome and I got a short story idea from this.