Merlin 5.03 The One With The Spoilery Title
This episode has so much potential, concept/premise wise, and does some things really well, so that all the other ways it falls short of fulfilling what it could do, and instead falls back on the mediocre, are all the more frustrating to me. You could hear my teeth grind during watching. I like most Howard Overman episodes, I truly do. At his best, he's great. Alas this was far from his best, and thus Overman's flaws are all the more apparant, though I blame the Julians as well because some of the problems are tied to overall developments, or lacks of same.
Let's start with something very basic. There are two season 4 episodes the premise of this one demands an immediate comparison with: The Wicked Day (most memorable for Uther's death and Arthur becoming king, but also for Arthur following in his father's footsteps by trying to use magic and in the end being even more against it) and Herald of a New Age (a fantastic ghost story, also Arthur confronts his own guilt re: magic users). Both episodes are among the best the show did, though I am beginning to suspect the later has dropped from everyone's memory in the writing staff. More to the point, this episode could have been an ideal follow-up to both. But it wasn't.
The start with the witch burning Arthur stops: has no follow up for the rest of the episode. Being merciful to the individual while continuing to have the anti-magic law is THE crucial problem, and the show continues to refuse to address it this season. In the episode as it is, the only purpose the teaser serves is to provide Arthur with means to contact Uther's ghost. As opposed to, you know, bringing him to the realisation that the law itself, which the village leader was only obeying, needs change, which would have been a key issue to include in the Uther confrontation scenes, but no.
Gwen getting taken out of commission early on: okay, it demonstrates in a quick and efficient way to Arthur this really is Uther's work and needs to be stopped right away, but it also means no Gwen in an episode which could have benefited hugely from her presence, as the representative of the new Camelot. Instead, it's only the Merlin and Arthur Go Ghostbusting show, when even the other knights have next to no lines. (Again, compare to Herald of a New Age, which uses the entire ensemble while still focusing on Arthur being haunted in more than one way.) Which brings me to something every episode so far makes me surer of: yes, the show's writers know that the Merlin and Arthur dynamic is the key selling point to the majority of the fandom. But unfortunately, this is to the disadvantage of said dynamic. It feels really really stale now, with virtually every other relationship both of them have offering more interesting scenes than yet another rerun of the same tired old jokes (and Overman gets the lame physical stapstick act out again, and again we hear the confidence bolster speech from Merlin, and I'm just no longer moved or invested, just tired of it and wanting change, any change, but that won't happen, I fear, as long as the producers believe it's popular.
Speaking of tired old sticks: the poltergeist doings of Uther here don't hold a candle to the genuinenly scary ghost scenes from Herald, did I mention that? The show can do scary so well (in addition to Herald, there are Uther's visions from the season 3 opener, for example) that sudden noises and suddenly appearing people really don't do the job.
Continuity fail: you know, given that Overman to my knowledge also wrote Sins of the Father in s2, it would have been really obvious for someone - Merlin, Arthur himself, even Gaius - to bring up the fact Arthur already had a ghost of a parent conjured up once, and that didn't go so well. Oh, and Arthur definitely could have reminded Ghost!Uther that Gwen helped caring for him for a year. Continuity, people. It's not that hard.
So what did I like: well, because of the manner of Uther's death and his preceding mental retreat after Morgana confronted him,two things never happened back in the day: Arthur never had a confrontation with Uther in which he rejected Uther's core teachings (Sins of the Father doesn't count because of the emotional state he was in, and also because Uther won him back with Merlin's help), and Merlin never had a confrontation (as himself, not in Old Emrys disguise) with Uther telling him the truth, either. So I can certainly understand the show wanting to give them the chance. And I do think the development to it is psychologically plausible: Arthur was formed by Uther and loved him, and lost him partially through his own fault, so last season a theme was Arthur being torn between being the king he thought Uther wanted and being the king his people needed. In the later part of s4 we had him say out loud more than once that Uther had been wrong in some matters, but that's still not the necessary exorcism, and Uther-as-idol (and the person who in large parts made Arthur who he was when Merlin the show started) was still in the back of his mind. So I could buy Arthur wanting to talk to Uther's ghosts, and I also could buy that instead of this resulting in some heartfelt Pendragon love it would in Uther being just plain horrified by the new Camelot and telling Arthur so in no uncertain terms. Arthur literallly having to rid himself of his inner and outer Uther before that Uther can destroy Gwen and the new Camelot in order to bring back the old: I'm on board with that, and some of the visuals - Uther on the throne, because of course he's sitting there (where he and Arthur had their key confrontations when Uther was still alive) until Arthur exorcises him - worked (though again I would have traded most of the Arthur-and-Merlin-wander-through-the-castle scenes for Gwen's active participation and for giving her scenes to react to Uther's presence). Merlin confronting Uther was also something of some satisfaction, and you could tell Merlin relished the chance to finally come out to Uther. "Magic was at the heart of your kingdom", indeed. However the problem there was that the storyline demanded that Arthur, not Merlin, be the one to defeat and banish Uther, which indeed happened, so other than giving Merlin brief emotional satisfaction, this didn't go anywhere. It could have done while still letting Arthur be the one to defeat his father (which he really had to be). You know how? By not giving us yet another case of Arthur being knocked out at a crucial moment, and then Uther being exorcised in the second before he can say "magic". I'm not a reveal before everything person, I've always said "change of policy before reveal", but these lame red herrings are just stupid, and in this case they prevent the show's titular hero's storyline actually going somewhere. Again. If Arthur had banished his father after realising about Merlin's magic and we'd have been left with a tag scene of him brooding about this instead of the stupid stupid STUPID slapstick tag, it could have been a game changer. But no.
Last season's The Wicked Day showed the producers had the courage to actually do something radical. I had hoped this third episode would prove likewise. I was wrong.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/831446.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.