Merlin 3x06 and 3x07

[zahrawithaz]

3x06 and 3x07

Since I seem unlikely to catch up with the show at the current rate, I’m going to post some quick thoughts about these two episodes, which pair well together. They both make the Gwen/Arthur relationship central, boast almost equally hammy villains, and build on the new moral alignments of Merlin and Morgana from the opening episodes (

Comments

[utterlunacy]

Great stuff, as always. As for the unrealpolitik, and the question of whether Arthur should expect to be married off or no - I think I can handwave that now. Uther's boast that he won Camelot rather than inherited it, and glimpses of rulers like Cenred (more bandit king than courtly liege lord), and the constant mention of mercenaries, these all make me think of Albion as a land of newly carved-out kingdoms, freshly settled by warlords and successful mercenaries who then put on a veneer of nobility in an attempt to justify their right to rule.

We've never seen Uther at the traditional contests, not even the melee, and the one time he fought it was solely to protect Arthur from the Black Knight. How then should he be so comfortable in the free-for-all contest open to all regardless of rank? Why is he so desperate to maintain things like the Code of Camelot and the distance between commoner and noble?

He's acting like someone who clawed his way up from the lower class to ruler status and is so anxious to close the door to any other comers that he will dig up old traditions and rules and follow them slavishly. I don't know if you've ever seen the British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances about a working class woman desperate to appear upper middle class, but I'm getting the same vibes now from Uther. Or, to use a perhaps more widely-known example, it's like Camelot is Animal Farm and he's a pig that learned to walk on its legs.

It would explain Arthur's confusion. He's grown up with cognitive dissonance, a number of mixed messages on how nobles are meant to behave and how nobles actually behave. Mostly he's been trained to obey his father, and he's beginning to learn that's not exactly an objective and reliable source of information, neither by telling nor example.