Honor among sorcerors: Merlin 3x09 and 3x11
(Better late than never, right?)
I’m linking these two episodes together because (other than their sad lack of Gwen) they share some interesting commonalities. Most obviously, both are attempts to correct some of the mistakes of season 1, which relied heavily on a formula of magical people with a grudge coming to Camelot to kill Uther and Merlin stopping them.
These two episodes revisit that formula and emphasize the painful compromises Merlin makes in order to fulfill his destiny. Chief among their distinctions from season 1 is the idea that lower-class sorcerers who are not Merlin and who hail from outside the city have their own honor, a sense of right and wrong, and internal struggles that loom as large as the political ones in Camelot.
This is interesting, because previously ideas of honor have been attached primarily to non-magical characters, like Arthur, Gwen, and Lancelot. But here we have two magic-workers who struggle with their own demons, literally and figuratively.
At this point there’s no suspense in any plot to assassinate Uther; we viewers know he won’t die yet and he won’t die at the hands of a one-off guest character. But what does create suspense in both cases is the fate of Alice and Gilli-and not only whether they will survive to the closing credits, but the state of their souls.
In both cases our visiting sorcerers live, and live more free lives. Alice is freed from the control of a malevolent force that she explicitly calls slavery; Gilli from his painful misapprehension of his father’s life. Even better, in both cases their survival leaves hope for their continuing relationships with our main cast.
The compromised morality of both the show and our main character is still very much in place, and not entirely dealt with in the too-abrupt coda to 3x11. But both episodes emphasize how easy Uther is to hate-3x09 underlines his hypocrisy toward magic and Merlin’s particular animus against him, and 3x11 displays both his foolish arrogance as a ruler and lousy parenting skills. Only the last-minute reveal that he has taken measure of Arthur’s worth in the latter offers him a glimmer of redemption.
Both episodes also chip away at the equivalence between protecting the kingdom and protecting Uther. In 3x09 Merlin incriminates Alice and saves Uther out of loyalty to others rather than the king himself; he explicitly acts to prevent Gaius from suffering the death penalty at Arthur’s hands. Saving Uther’s life is ultimately an indirect effort to protect both Gaius and Alice.
This foreshadows 3x11, where Merlin again has to prevent Uther’s death via magic, explicitly because it will turn Arthur against magic forever and compromise their joint destiny-the future for which Merlin is gambling everything. But even in that plot, it’s notable that Gilli didn’t actually come to Camelot to kill Uther, or even oppose him.
He came seeking respect, and initially opposed killing any opponent. His argument isn’t so much that someone should kill Uther, but that Uther’s death is minor collateral damage in the quest for his own glory. Gilli’s vendetta is personal, and the show no longer contrasts Merlin, playing a game of political compromise, with a more radical position.
(A more Doylist interpretation would be that the showrunners are aware of just how problematic Merlin’s repeated saving of Uther is, and are trying to lessen the damage without undercutting the basic formula.)
3x9
Virtually everything I had to say about this episode has been covered by heather here (http://heather.livejournal.com/192869.html#cutid2) and selenak here (http://selenak.livejournal.com/632879.html#cutid1). But (predictably!) I still have a few more thoughts.
• Alice is clearly powerful, explicitly more powerful than Gaius, and she can work with crystals, which so far only Merlin and Morgause (and someday Mordred) have been strong enough to do. She’s also ambitious, teasing, and flirtatious. I hope we get her back.
• Although the scriptwriters seem apparently to think that the best way for older people to flirt is to talk about what they did when they were young, the final conversation between Gaius and Alice, the first time both of them can be entirely honest with the other, is marvelous. Her steadfast courage in the face of her encroaching death, her understanding and forgiveness of the compromises Gaius has made, and her outright respect for what he has done in Camelot, and her own sense of shame give us a far deeper and richer portrait of Alice than we’ve seen so far.
• It’s now canon that Merlin ships his friends; his reaction to Gaius/Alice is essentially the same as it is to Arthur/Gwen. He teases and helps and colludes and quickly gives up his room and generally displays his inner yenta. I’m surprised no one has yet written the “Five Times Merlin Tried to Set Gaius Up, and One Time it Worked” fic.
• The interesting thing about the Freya parallels is that Merlin himself acknowledges them (“I understand why you’re protecting her-really, I do”), and himself brings up the fact that Gaius didn’t go with Alice years before.
• I am an absolute sucker for character who screw up but then admit it and apologize, and while I am often of mixed feelings on Gaius I loved the way he appears here as a full and complex human being-one who makes mistakes, wrestles with doubts and regrets, and comes to self-knowledge. The moment in the penultimate scene in which he describes his service of Uther as slavery is very stark, and suggests just how much of himself he has given up to survive under the king’s policies.
• Gaius’s accusation that Merlin cannot bear for him to be happy is devastating in part because Merlin’s early support for Alice so clearly demonstrated the opposite; but because it makes no sense situationally, it tells us reams about Gaius’s pysche. It’s a strikingly manipulative thing to say, yet Gaius seems to believe it-suggesting that his own inner conflict about having what he wants is so large that he projects it onto loved ones, expecting them to oppose his happiness. And that in turn suggests more about his decision not to follow Alice when she fled the city years before. In other words, Gaius has a lot of material to share on the couch of the Camelot therapist.
• The fact that Gaius lies to protect Alice even after he knows she’s guilty is completely in character. He has spent his entire adult life protecting magic-workers, and (as is increasingly clear) hiding parts of himself.
• Notice that for most of this episode Alice, Gaius, and Merlin all wear blue, the color most often associated with magic-users on the show. It’s particularly striking when they all meet in Gaius’s workshop, the place where most magic takes place.
• The omission of Gwen from both these episodes, and Morgana from one, shows that despite how far we’ve come from season 1, the fundamental problems of the male characters being more important than the female characters and the white characters more central than the black character persist. At the same time, the outcry in parts of fandom that there were “no women” in 3x09 is a shocking instance of how ageist and misogynistic this fandom can be. While it’s well worth protesting that female characters in the main cast can be entirely excluded from an episode (or more than one, if you’re Gwen), I could do without the misogynistic idea that a female character is worth nothing-and in fact loses her femininity-once she ages. The sheer inability to recognize Pauline Collins’s Alice as a smoking hot woman boggles my mind.
• As always, plots that cut Merlin off from Gaius’s help provide more screen time for another character who takes his supportive role. But while previously (in 2x07 “The Witchfinder” and 3x03 “Goblin’s Gold”) that person has been Gwen, here it’s Geoffrey of Monmouth. And rather than being part of Merlin’s team, he’s generally antagonistic (and clueless).
• Incidentally, the spell Merlin casts on Geoffrey, involving mental manipulation as well as levitation, is an order of sophistication above what we’ve seen him do before, and another example of how far his powers have grown. (Also quite creepy, as he’s essentially playing with Geoffrey’s mind.)
• Arthur’s well-intentioned advice is useless dealing with both Gaius and Uther, but an interesting insight into how he survives Camelot. Of course, Arthur ignores his own advice (to disastrous effect) in the next episode when he fights with his father over Guinevere, but it’s an interesting character insight. It’s also no more effective dealing with Uther in the larger scheme of things than Merlin’s lie-low position.
• Unfortunately, the fact that Merlin is now doing exactly what Arthur’s first manservant in the first episode did underlines the fact that Arthur’s character hasn’t progressed at all, and that Merlin has in some respects actually gone backward. This sadly undercuts what is otherwise a nice bonding moment between the two boys.
• Gaius has to use magic, picking up on an intriuging plot thread from 1x04 and 1x05, which makes more sense once you know it’s leading up to 3x13.
3x11
• Rarely for Merlin, this episode has been sharply trimmed of unnecessary exposition. There’s no padding spelling out exactly what Morgana intends (which we don’t need), or who Uther is fighting at any moment, and Gilli’s motivations are largely shown, not told. The result is a much tighter episode with more room to delve into character.
• This is a marvelous Morgana episode, whose manipulations are as fun to watch as her regal beauty and pleasure in the tournament scenes. (She really does act like Uther’s consort throughout.) There’s a bit of calculated chaos in the way she sets Arthur and Uther against each other, hoping for loss of face or life. And Morgana taunting Arthur has a real edge to it that their sibling banter in earlier seasons did not.
• Naturally Gilli, like Morgana, represents what Merlin could be if he made different choices and took a different path. But he’s a lot closer, because he lacks Morgana’s place of privilege at the court; the phrase “Without magic, I’m a nobody” is never true of Morgana. But Gilli, like Merlin, is lower-class and from outside Camelot (like Edwin, Lancelot, and Freya, the three characters to whom Merlin has revealed himself before), and the story takes time to develop their relationship. In fact, you can see how all these previous, hasty reveals-and the almost-reveal to Morgana, which haunts this episode-have affected Merlin’s means of proceding. He’s slow and cautious to tell Gilli about himself, and it’s ultimately the memory of Balinor-and the obvious parallel between his death and that of Gilli’s father-that pushes Merlin past his own reticence. You can see his face changes as soon as Gilli starts to talk about his dad.
• Of course, Balinor’s memory cuts two ways. Merlin is actively trying to follow his father’s footsteps (serving a king with his magic) while avoid Balinor’s fate (being turned on by the king he serves). The logic that governs Merlin’s decision here-Arthur must be prevented from turning into Uther by preventing the equivalent of Ygrain’s death-also turns on generational echoes. (In my opinion this is one of the better justifications we’ve seen for Merlin to uphold the status quo.)
• But of course in preventing Arthur from losing a relative, Merlin must be willing to effectively make the same sacrifice himself. The Dragon’s line, “To see one of your kin die is never an easy thing,” speaks not only to Merlin watching Gilli, but to the fact that both young men saw their fathers die, and of course to Kilgarrah himself.
• Although the ring implies Gilli is not as magically talented as Merlin (and Gaius says as much outright), his healing shows he can do something Merlin can’t.
• The A plot and B plot are exceedingly well-intertwined. Both Merlin and Arthur have to lose on ground that they care about-Arthur sacrificing his pride in his skill, Merlin sacrificing a friend-a second self, in fact, whom he explicitly sees as kin. And of course Gilli’s decision to throw the match parallels Arthur’s; both decisions show us a character conquering their personal pride, a far greater opponent than Uther, whose arrogance highlights the greater nobility of his opponents.
• The B plot also gives us a very nice development of Merlin’s advisor relationship with Arthur; for once the latter simply asks Merlin outright for advice, and Merlin both tells him honestly and expresses sympathy-even verbally acknowledging what Arthur has given up after his defeat.
• Of course Merlin’s “You have to let him win” applies not only to Arthur-it’s a great commentary on where Merlin stands overall, and his delivery makes it clear that Merlin feels he is letting Uther win daily battles in hopes of winning the war. (This also explains why Merlin seemed to accept that Arthur had to wed Elena until he saw how very torn up over it Arthur was.)
• “I didn’t inherit this kingdom; I won it” is a telling bit of backstory about Uther, and some serious foreshadowing for the finale.
• The ultimate reveal is beautiful shot and acted; I particularly like the fact that Merlin closes his eyes when he casts the spell so the golden glow won’t give him away, which may speak to how very hard it is to show himself at this point. It’s striking how much this scene recalls the moment in 2x03 when Merlin starts to tell Morgana about his magic and is interrupted by Arthur’s attack on the druid camp. In both cases, Merlin is willing to reveal himself to someone for whom he has already felt a degree of kinship and tried to help, but his immediate motivation is to get the other person to act for the greater good. Also in both cases he’s wrong about the other person’s priorities.
• There’s a great moment when Arthur sees his father’s vulnerability and decides to throw the match. Besides being very well-acted, it’s well-scripted, in that Arthur forgoes an opening, but his decision isn’t obvious to the stands and we see that Uther is not without skill.
• What does it say that Uther decides that his son is kingly when he acts to save face for his father? Admittedly Arthur has a pride problem, and this act of humility is more of a sacrifice coming from him than it might from someone else; but I don’t think it’s even close to Arthur’s best demonstration of his suitability to rule.
I’m linking these two episodes together because (other than their sad lack of Gwen) they share some interesting commonalities. Most obviously, both are attempts to correct some of the mistakes of season 1, which relied heavily on a formula of magical people with a grudge coming to Camelot to kill Uther and Merlin stopping them.
These two episodes revisit that formula and emphasize the painful compromises Merlin makes in order to fulfill his destiny. Chief among their distinctions from season 1 is the idea that lower-class sorcerers who are not Merlin and who hail from outside the city have their own honor, a sense of right and wrong, and internal struggles that loom as large as the political ones in Camelot.
This is interesting, because previously ideas of honor have been attached primarily to non-magical characters, like Arthur, Gwen, and Lancelot. But here we have two magic-workers who struggle with their own demons, literally and figuratively.
At this point there’s no suspense in any plot to assassinate Uther; we viewers know he won’t die yet and he won’t die at the hands of a one-off guest character. But what does create suspense in both cases is the fate of Alice and Gilli-and not only whether they will survive to the closing credits, but the state of their souls.
In both cases our visiting sorcerers live, and live more free lives. Alice is freed from the control of a malevolent force that she explicitly calls slavery; Gilli from his painful misapprehension of his father’s life. Even better, in both cases their survival leaves hope for their continuing relationships with our main cast.
The compromised morality of both the show and our main character is still very much in place, and not entirely dealt with in the too-abrupt coda to 3x11. But both episodes emphasize how easy Uther is to hate-3x09 underlines his hypocrisy toward magic and Merlin’s particular animus against him, and 3x11 displays both his foolish arrogance as a ruler and lousy parenting skills. Only the last-minute reveal that he has taken measure of Arthur’s worth in the latter offers him a glimmer of redemption.
Both episodes also chip away at the equivalence between protecting the kingdom and protecting Uther. In 3x09 Merlin incriminates Alice and saves Uther out of loyalty to others rather than the king himself; he explicitly acts to prevent Gaius from suffering the death penalty at Arthur’s hands. Saving Uther’s life is ultimately an indirect effort to protect both Gaius and Alice.
This foreshadows 3x11, where Merlin again has to prevent Uther’s death via magic, explicitly because it will turn Arthur against magic forever and compromise their joint destiny-the future for which Merlin is gambling everything. But even in that plot, it’s notable that Gilli didn’t actually come to Camelot to kill Uther, or even oppose him.
He came seeking respect, and initially opposed killing any opponent. His argument isn’t so much that someone should kill Uther, but that Uther’s death is minor collateral damage in the quest for his own glory. Gilli’s vendetta is personal, and the show no longer contrasts Merlin, playing a game of political compromise, with a more radical position.
(A more Doylist interpretation would be that the showrunners are aware of just how problematic Merlin’s repeated saving of Uther is, and are trying to lessen the damage without undercutting the basic formula.)
3x9
Virtually everything I had to say about this episode has been covered by heather here (http://heather.livejournal.com/192869.html#cutid2) and selenak here (http://selenak.livejournal.com/632879.html#cutid1). But (predictably!) I still have a few more thoughts.
• Alice is clearly powerful, explicitly more powerful than Gaius, and she can work with crystals, which so far only Merlin and Morgause (and someday Mordred) have been strong enough to do. She’s also ambitious, teasing, and flirtatious. I hope we get her back.
• Although the scriptwriters seem apparently to think that the best way for older people to flirt is to talk about what they did when they were young, the final conversation between Gaius and Alice, the first time both of them can be entirely honest with the other, is marvelous. Her steadfast courage in the face of her encroaching death, her understanding and forgiveness of the compromises Gaius has made, and her outright respect for what he has done in Camelot, and her own sense of shame give us a far deeper and richer portrait of Alice than we’ve seen so far.
• It’s now canon that Merlin ships his friends; his reaction to Gaius/Alice is essentially the same as it is to Arthur/Gwen. He teases and helps and colludes and quickly gives up his room and generally displays his inner yenta. I’m surprised no one has yet written the “Five Times Merlin Tried to Set Gaius Up, and One Time it Worked” fic.
• The interesting thing about the Freya parallels is that Merlin himself acknowledges them (“I understand why you’re protecting her-really, I do”), and himself brings up the fact that Gaius didn’t go with Alice years before.
• I am an absolute sucker for character who screw up but then admit it and apologize, and while I am often of mixed feelings on Gaius I loved the way he appears here as a full and complex human being-one who makes mistakes, wrestles with doubts and regrets, and comes to self-knowledge. The moment in the penultimate scene in which he describes his service of Uther as slavery is very stark, and suggests just how much of himself he has given up to survive under the king’s policies.
• Gaius’s accusation that Merlin cannot bear for him to be happy is devastating in part because Merlin’s early support for Alice so clearly demonstrated the opposite; but because it makes no sense situationally, it tells us reams about Gaius’s pysche. It’s a strikingly manipulative thing to say, yet Gaius seems to believe it-suggesting that his own inner conflict about having what he wants is so large that he projects it onto loved ones, expecting them to oppose his happiness. And that in turn suggests more about his decision not to follow Alice when she fled the city years before. In other words, Gaius has a lot of material to share on the couch of the Camelot therapist.
• The fact that Gaius lies to protect Alice even after he knows she’s guilty is completely in character. He has spent his entire adult life protecting magic-workers, and (as is increasingly clear) hiding parts of himself.
• Notice that for most of this episode Alice, Gaius, and Merlin all wear blue, the color most often associated with magic-users on the show. It’s particularly striking when they all meet in Gaius’s workshop, the place where most magic takes place.
• The omission of Gwen from both these episodes, and Morgana from one, shows that despite how far we’ve come from season 1, the fundamental problems of the male characters being more important than the female characters and the white characters more central than the black character persist. At the same time, the outcry in parts of fandom that there were “no women” in 3x09 is a shocking instance of how ageist and misogynistic this fandom can be. While it’s well worth protesting that female characters in the main cast can be entirely excluded from an episode (or more than one, if you’re Gwen), I could do without the misogynistic idea that a female character is worth nothing-and in fact loses her femininity-once she ages. The sheer inability to recognize Pauline Collins’s Alice as a smoking hot woman boggles my mind.
• As always, plots that cut Merlin off from Gaius’s help provide more screen time for another character who takes his supportive role. But while previously (in 2x07 “The Witchfinder” and 3x03 “Goblin’s Gold”) that person has been Gwen, here it’s Geoffrey of Monmouth. And rather than being part of Merlin’s team, he’s generally antagonistic (and clueless).
• Incidentally, the spell Merlin casts on Geoffrey, involving mental manipulation as well as levitation, is an order of sophistication above what we’ve seen him do before, and another example of how far his powers have grown. (Also quite creepy, as he’s essentially playing with Geoffrey’s mind.)
• Arthur’s well-intentioned advice is useless dealing with both Gaius and Uther, but an interesting insight into how he survives Camelot. Of course, Arthur ignores his own advice (to disastrous effect) in the next episode when he fights with his father over Guinevere, but it’s an interesting character insight. It’s also no more effective dealing with Uther in the larger scheme of things than Merlin’s lie-low position.
• Unfortunately, the fact that Merlin is now doing exactly what Arthur’s first manservant in the first episode did underlines the fact that Arthur’s character hasn’t progressed at all, and that Merlin has in some respects actually gone backward. This sadly undercuts what is otherwise a nice bonding moment between the two boys.
• Gaius has to use magic, picking up on an intriuging plot thread from 1x04 and 1x05, which makes more sense once you know it’s leading up to 3x13.
3x11
• Rarely for Merlin, this episode has been sharply trimmed of unnecessary exposition. There’s no padding spelling out exactly what Morgana intends (which we don’t need), or who Uther is fighting at any moment, and Gilli’s motivations are largely shown, not told. The result is a much tighter episode with more room to delve into character.
• This is a marvelous Morgana episode, whose manipulations are as fun to watch as her regal beauty and pleasure in the tournament scenes. (She really does act like Uther’s consort throughout.) There’s a bit of calculated chaos in the way she sets Arthur and Uther against each other, hoping for loss of face or life. And Morgana taunting Arthur has a real edge to it that their sibling banter in earlier seasons did not.
• Naturally Gilli, like Morgana, represents what Merlin could be if he made different choices and took a different path. But he’s a lot closer, because he lacks Morgana’s place of privilege at the court; the phrase “Without magic, I’m a nobody” is never true of Morgana. But Gilli, like Merlin, is lower-class and from outside Camelot (like Edwin, Lancelot, and Freya, the three characters to whom Merlin has revealed himself before), and the story takes time to develop their relationship. In fact, you can see how all these previous, hasty reveals-and the almost-reveal to Morgana, which haunts this episode-have affected Merlin’s means of proceding. He’s slow and cautious to tell Gilli about himself, and it’s ultimately the memory of Balinor-and the obvious parallel between his death and that of Gilli’s father-that pushes Merlin past his own reticence. You can see his face changes as soon as Gilli starts to talk about his dad.
• Of course, Balinor’s memory cuts two ways. Merlin is actively trying to follow his father’s footsteps (serving a king with his magic) while avoid Balinor’s fate (being turned on by the king he serves). The logic that governs Merlin’s decision here-Arthur must be prevented from turning into Uther by preventing the equivalent of Ygrain’s death-also turns on generational echoes. (In my opinion this is one of the better justifications we’ve seen for Merlin to uphold the status quo.)
• But of course in preventing Arthur from losing a relative, Merlin must be willing to effectively make the same sacrifice himself. The Dragon’s line, “To see one of your kin die is never an easy thing,” speaks not only to Merlin watching Gilli, but to the fact that both young men saw their fathers die, and of course to Kilgarrah himself.
• Although the ring implies Gilli is not as magically talented as Merlin (and Gaius says as much outright), his healing shows he can do something Merlin can’t.
• The A plot and B plot are exceedingly well-intertwined. Both Merlin and Arthur have to lose on ground that they care about-Arthur sacrificing his pride in his skill, Merlin sacrificing a friend-a second self, in fact, whom he explicitly sees as kin. And of course Gilli’s decision to throw the match parallels Arthur’s; both decisions show us a character conquering their personal pride, a far greater opponent than Uther, whose arrogance highlights the greater nobility of his opponents.
• The B plot also gives us a very nice development of Merlin’s advisor relationship with Arthur; for once the latter simply asks Merlin outright for advice, and Merlin both tells him honestly and expresses sympathy-even verbally acknowledging what Arthur has given up after his defeat.
• Of course Merlin’s “You have to let him win” applies not only to Arthur-it’s a great commentary on where Merlin stands overall, and his delivery makes it clear that Merlin feels he is letting Uther win daily battles in hopes of winning the war. (This also explains why Merlin seemed to accept that Arthur had to wed Elena until he saw how very torn up over it Arthur was.)
• “I didn’t inherit this kingdom; I won it” is a telling bit of backstory about Uther, and some serious foreshadowing for the finale.
• The ultimate reveal is beautiful shot and acted; I particularly like the fact that Merlin closes his eyes when he casts the spell so the golden glow won’t give him away, which may speak to how very hard it is to show himself at this point. It’s striking how much this scene recalls the moment in 2x03 when Merlin starts to tell Morgana about his magic and is interrupted by Arthur’s attack on the druid camp. In both cases, Merlin is willing to reveal himself to someone for whom he has already felt a degree of kinship and tried to help, but his immediate motivation is to get the other person to act for the greater good. Also in both cases he’s wrong about the other person’s priorities.
• There’s a great moment when Arthur sees his father’s vulnerability and decides to throw the match. Besides being very well-acted, it’s well-scripted, in that Arthur forgoes an opening, but his decision isn’t obvious to the stands and we see that Uther is not without skill.
• What does it say that Uther decides that his son is kingly when he acts to save face for his father? Admittedly Arthur has a pride problem, and this act of humility is more of a sacrifice coming from him than it might from someone else; but I don’t think it’s even close to Arthur’s best demonstration of his suitability to rule.