Merlin's Apprentice
Remember that 90s Merlin miniseries that I (re)watched a while back/ The other that was fun and had possibly the most bearable version of Merlin, but also had some really iffy gender stuff?
I RETRACT ALL MY CRITICISMS (ok they're still there but so much less...ragey) COMPARED TO THE SEQUEL, IT IS A MASTERPIECE! (Uhm...both in terms of good entertainment and Fail.)
So, to start with, they ditch the ending of the miniseries, retcon Nimue out of existence, and make The Lady of the Lake (aka, the only good female representative of magic) evil.
The series is set 50 years after the first, Arthur and the knights are gone Camelot is falling apart, yadda yadda. Our Hero is a thief with magic powers who becomes Merlin's apprentice. Towards the end, Merlin realizes that...HERO IS HIS SON! And then he remembers that he was asleep for 50 years because the Lady of the Lake enchanted him. And, naturally, The Lady of the Lake is Hero's mother.
I...am not clear if they rewrote it so that they acually had a consentual relationship before that or not (in the first miniseries, Merlin was faithful to Nimue throughout and his relationship with The Lady of the Lake was purely platonic) but it's emphasized that she put him to sleep because he knew she was evil and wanted to stop her, so she used enchantments to have him get her pregnant. As we know, that's Arthuriana code for rape.
Anyway, Hero spends the entire first half of the series bonding with his father while hearing about how awful his mother is. Ok, no one knows it's his mother at that point, but still. Then Merlin learns the truth and makes another speech about how awful The Lady of the Lake is, and goes "oh, and she's yor mother," and then he makes a speech about how it's ok because he and Hero will save Camelot, and goes "oh, and I'm your father."
I was amused that hero's response to that was "If she's my mother and you're my father...WHAT WERE YOU, DRUNK?" simply because I love when kids with mysterious parentage react with ABJECT HORROR DO NOT WANT to learning about their biological parents instead of "OMG my father's the king/knight/sorcerer/etc cool!" but that lasted about 3 seconds when I realized that he was never going to even consider that his mother might have a POV. Then she kills Merlin, which made me happy because I hated him at that point. (You know, the Merlin in the first miniseries wasn't exactly going around making speeches about feminism, but he seemed to think way more of woment han of men and was very judgey about how people treated/mistreated women. Here he's one of those who jumps to the "WOMEN ARE THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL!" assumption every chance he gets.)
Anyway, Hero spends the first half of the series bonding with his father and gets a touching reunion with him in the underworld, and interacts with his mother for about 1 minute, and only to tell her off. She also had about 10-15 minutes screentime total-maybe, and it was purely about her being Evil and having her Evil be about environmentalism.
For a while, I thought it would redeem itself by having the Guenevere figure, who was believed to be Gawain's granddaughter, be the destined heir/ruler of Camelot and the Lancelot/greatest knight figure be a crossdressing girl who wanted to be a knight, but alas. In the end, both girls were peasants whose dreams in the end were to support their men or whatever.
I shall now bleach this from my mind so that I can still mostly like the first miniseries.