Merlin Review: Episodes 1 - 3
Now that the final reviews are in and the Christmas flu is winding down, I finally have time to watch Merlin. I've seen the first three episodes so far, and I haven't been disappointed.
As a diehard Classics geek, I was looking forward to it more than you might expect. There's a blank area in Arthurian legend that I always wanted to see explored: what were Uther and Merlin like as young men? They had to be a major league pair of badasses riding the land in order to accomplish all they did, but that's never shown. That's what I've always wanted to see. I think Andre Norton came the closest, but it was in one of those dreadful juvenile psuedo-fantasy books of the 1950-1960s which had far too much psuedo-science and not enough swords and sorcery. So I figured I could always mentally recast their "Arthur" as "Uther Pendragon' if my brain started to hurt.
Besides, the Great Stories are living things. They need to be rewritten every now and again as long as the big themes stay intact. (Disney, I'm looking at you.) And Merlin sounds tame in comparison to some treatments I've read. (Camelot 3000, I'm looking at you.)
After being told they'd made a complete dog's breakfast of Arthurian legend, I was pleasantly surprised at how much they got right. The "Arthur and Merlin as the same age" is the only significant addition. (Gwen and Merlin as servants is not that big a deal at this point in history, this is only the start of the class system.) The others are either variations of old myths or things that could be logically extrapolated from those variations. For instance, if you go with the version of Guenivere's origin that has her being the daughter of a Roman, it's not much of a stretch for her to be the daughter of a Black Roman.
Seconds in and I wonder why no one has commented on the Muppets connection. It's not just John Hurt as narrator, that title sequence is lifted straight off The Storyteller.
Three minutes into the first episode and we've had our first killing. I suppose that's like Torchwood saying the f-word in the first five minutes of the first episode: fair warning that this is the sort of thing you can expect. I wonder if that's one of the things Davies advised them to do when they consulted with him? It also ups the tension from the start.
Five minutes in and it's clear that Merlin belongs to the Danny Kaye School of Historical Reenactment. This is cool. While I prefer authenticity, there's a time and place for it and a time and place to lower Glynis Johns in a swing from the ceiling wearing a designer dress. Besides, the arguements over which version, or even which time period, is most authentic are too great a burden for a children's show. Let it wait until the kids pester their parents into pulling out the classics. For now, bring on the designer dresses.
The basic premise is interesting, and it seems as if there's a lot more worked out behind the scenes than is now apparant. The actual writing is a bit rough. There's too many plot holes that a good script editor should have caught and smoothed over. Somebody was asleep at the switch. The set is sumptuous, the swordplay is very good, and the FX tolerable. Special Mention goes to the editing, which is superb.
But the best part of the show is the characters. They are exactly as I pictured them at this age, allowing for Arthur's changed origin.
Uther is a warlord through and through, a man who carved a kingdom out of chaos with nothing more than his sword,his fists, and his loyal warriors. Not too bright, but that's not in the job description. Genial as long as he gets what he wants, but drops any pretense of fairness or justice when they become inconvenient. Not a drunkard as he's sometimes written, for a drunkard could not have accomplished what he did. A soldier more comfortable with warriors and horses than he is with children, he doesn't really know what to do with a teenager he can't draft into the army. An absolute military dictator used to the adulation of the older generation who remember the Bad Times before his rule and can't understand why the young people want something more. Don't they realize how lucky they are? I was reminded of Communist Germany, the old people so grateful they no longer had to deal with the terrors of World War II, the young people yearning for so much more. Completely anti-magic, but what are his reasons? The presence of a dragon chained up in his basement suggests one old legend that might explain it.
Morgana is a firebrand, a warrior's daughter who inherited her father's fighting spirit but who lacks a mentor to guide her. If she were born a man she would be at home with a sword, but she sees no room for a warrior woman in her world. Some people claim she fancies one or another character, I don't see her having any passion at this moment other than being right and proving her adopted father wrong. Tweaking her adopted brother is a bonus. The scene is the third episode where she says anything to goad her brother into action was so exact a replay of exchanges between my then-teenaged sister and I that I burst out laughing. I have no problem with going back to the older myth that makes her Arthur's adopted sister and ally instead of his half-sister and enemy.
Gwen is sweet, self-effacing, virtuous, modest, uncomplicated, unable to control her mouth, and by her own admission completely unsuited to be Queen -- exactly the traditional Guenivere with all her virtues and flaws intact. It actually works better making her a commoner, because I always thought a noblewoman should be less politically naive than Guenivere is portrayed as being. Kudos to Angel Coulby, it's not easy to play a genuinely sweet character. She loves her father, Arthur, Morgana, and possibly Merlin. In that order.
Arthur is a jock, but he has to be a jock. You don't get a knight's physique on a medieval diet without training practically every day of your childhood. That's the first problem with T.H. White's model of the neglected child homeschooled by Merlin. The other is that the mature Arthur did nothing to promote that kind of intellectual education. Camelot was full of brawlers, not problem solvers. That was originally it's asset and eventually it's downfall.
Keeping Uther alive is closer to the original legend and solves some problems that show up in the later versions over his exact relationship with Morgana and smooths over the hectic months of battles immediately after the Sword in the Stone incident wich later legends gloss over. The important thing is that Arthur was reared by a hard-nosed warrior, that can be Uther just as easily as Kay.
Arthur is a noble jerk, but all teenagers are jerks at least some of the time. He shows signs of growing out of it. He's a great fighter, able to win against grown men far older and more experienced than himself. He's obviously worked very hard to please his Dad and has suceeded, but now he seems to be starting to wonder if there may be more to this growing up business than pleasing Dad. There also seems to be a subtle loneliness about him, as if there's no one around him that he can be a teenage boy with.
His relationship with Merlin becomes interesting the moment Merlin is placed in his service. Not that it wasn't interesting before that, but the disdain, curiousity, and growing respect at Merlin standing up to him and the immediate horror at finding that he would be working with Merlin are all predictable. What couldn't be predicted was that his immediate reaction to having Merlin placed in his service was to become protective of him. We go from the last scene of Episode 1 where Merlin is ordered to take care of Arthur to the first scene of Episode 2 where Arthur is sparring with Merlin. Yes, Arthur is preparing for the tournament. (Although if that's the excuse he knows he'd be better off with an experienced opponent.) Yes, Arthur is playing with Merlin in the only way he knows how to play with another boy his age. But at the same time, he's also teaching Merlin self-defense. That's Arthur taking care of Merlin. So do we see other scenes of him being protective of Merlin?
Later in Episode 2 Merlin returns to Arthur with a long list of completed chores. Arthur is surprised that Merlin's done them all by himself so fast, but Arthur doesn't react much. Now the thing that new-boy-in-town Merlin doesn't know but that any interested schoolchild knows is that part of the traditional training for a Knight is to work as another Knight's servant. Arthur knows exactly how long it takes to do those chores, especially if you've never done them before, because he's done them himself. He knows exactly what marks they leave on the worker's hands -- marks that Merlin doesn't show on his own hands. What does he do? He gets very quiet and looks thoughtful. Ah, but does that mean he's actually thinking or just comtemplating what's for lunch? Skip forward to Episode 3 and watch his reaction to the accusation that Gwen is a sorceress. He gets very quiet and looks thoughtful, especially when Morgana mentions the calluses on Gwen's hands ("Why would she kneel on a cold stone floor every day if she could use magic?") before announcing his belief in Gwen's innocence. And what's the first thing he tells his father after he stands up for Gwen? "Once you hear the word 'magic' you stop listening."
Now compare these incidents with what happens later in Episode 3 when Merlin outs himself to save Gwen. Notice what Arthur doesn't do in this scene. He doesn't get quiet and look thoughtful, his first reaction to taking in new data. This isn't new data to him. Instead he immediately leaps into a loud (for Arthur) and polished defense of Merlin based on Merlin's alleged newly-discovered crush on Gwen, It's a defense that his father, more used to dealing with teenage boy soldiers than with any other kind of children, buys. Bradley James pulls off some complex acting in this scene, playing the part of a young man who is making himself look like a guy who's making fun of Merlin but the underlying body language is very protective of Merlin.
And did anyone buy for a moment that a trained invesigator missed that book? Especially when his first words to Merlin amounted to, "Put up your stuff"?
That Arthur is protective of Merlin is undeniable. Call it destiny, call it lust, call it the nascent stirrings of chivalry, but it's there. I don't believe Arthur himself could put a name to it at this point, teenage emotions are often a bubbling stewpot of mixed-together feelings.
I like the fact that the audience has to figure out for itself that Arthur knows Merlin's secret. That's the sort of puzzle that appeals to my husband and I.
As far as Arthur's passions, I think he's trying to figure that out for himself. He wants to please his father, but he isn't obsessed with it. He can't make up his mind if he wants Morgana for a girlfriend or a sister. Guenivere doesn't appear to be on his radar at all. He's attracted to, puzzled by, and very protective of Merlin, but he doesn't know yet what to name that feeling. It's not an uncommon situation for a teenager. And he tells Morgana he's still waiting for the right "person" to love, not the right girl.
Now let's talk about The Great Dragon. There's no dragon myth in the most common version of the Arthurian Legend, but there are still traces of them in the older legends. Interestingly I've read a critique comparing The Lord of the Rings with it's older Germanic predeccessors which notes that there are dragons in both The Hobbit and the early Siegfried legends but no dragons in the Lord of the Rings and the later Siegfriend legends. The differences were said to be because the first story in each series was a straight-up action adventure story for the whole family, while the latter two focused on complex geo-political events that would put the younger kids to sleep. If that holds true, the presence of a Dragon in Merlin is one of the traditional ways of marking this story as family-friendly.
In Welsh legend Uther tries to build Camelot over a spot besieged by daily earthquakes thanks to magic. (That could explain our Uther's equation magic=chaos.) He finds the child wizard Merlin and threatens to kill him unless Merlin puts a stop to it. Merlin tells him that two dragons battle constantly in a cave under the ground: the White (or Yellow or Gold) Saxon Dragon and the Red Celtic Dragon. Uther kills the Saxon Dragon and chains up the Celtic Dragon under the ground, bringing peace and order to the land, and building Camelot right on top of the cave. That's the Red Dragon on the Welsh flag. There are certainly elements of this story in Merlin.
(One variation has the Red Dragon spending the next century underground patiently clawing out the foundations of Camelot and bringing the castle crashing down. My husband likes this version.)
But in this story it's a Gold Dragon, not a Red Dragon, that's chained up in the cave. That may mean something, it may not. The Dragon talks, as Dragons do, in elleptical ways that make no sense to boys but perfect sense to Dragons, and gets inpatient with their obtuseness. So far the Dragon has been used fairly well, except for the scene is Episode 2 which added nothing to the story. Some people have complained about why does the show have two mentor figures, an old man and a Dragon? Surely Merlin only needs one. I should think that was obvious. At some point in the future Gaius and the Dragon are going to give Merlin diametrically opposed advice, and he's going to have to figure out what to do then for himself.
Now let's get to Merlin. One constant in all the Merlin legends is that he's never afraid to speak Truth to Power, so it makes sense that he'd be a mouthy kid as a teenager. There's plenty of Merlin origin stories. Let's look at them.
1) The Welsh national myth listed above. Already there's evidence for this one, and since the producer is BBC Wales I think we can look forward to seeing more along this line.
2) He's a Druid. Nothing so far.
3) There are those who think (I'm one of them) that the tales of people turning into birds and back again points to evidence of a pre-Christian priesthood that used feathered cloaks similar to the Native Carribbeans, Native South Americans, and Native Polynesians. In that case "Merlin" might refer to a hawk-priest. Nothing so far in this story.
4) He's the son of Taleisin, the greaest of the Celtic shaman-bards, a shapechanger who used song magic. In this story Merln was stillborn and Taleisin sang the life back into the body of his newborn son. We saw a shapechanger use song magic in Episode 1.
5) He's half-Demon. Possible, but we've seen no mention of Christianity so far. Even the church bell was referred to as "the Great Bell".
6) He's half-Dragon and coud take Dragon form under extreme duress in his younger days. We may be seeing this one. He clearly appears to be not fully human in the ease that he uses magic and has used magic since before he was a year old ("before I could talk"). And then there's his eyes, which flash with a golden glow when he uses his magic that we've only seen used for The Great Dragon's hide. It's even possible to combine #1, #4, and #6, as some stories say the bards learned magic from the Dragons.
Young Merlin is clever, good-natured, and painfully naive Seriously, at this point in time if he spends a significant portion of the day around any halfway intelligent person, they're going to figure out his secret. He's impulsve, strongly moral, and lazy -- the scene where one teenaged boy is "rewarded" by being assigned to clean another teenage boy's room had me cackling with laughter. He also bears the burden of being the audience identification figure and having to ask the really dumb questions. Some of these could be explained away as the hayseed fresh from the sticks, but others are not so forgivable.
These three plots suffered from a regrettable sameness of structure, but hopefully that will come to an end now that the setup is done. I laughed at the complaints that Merlin was only using his magic to do small things. In the words of Jeff Smith's Red Dragon, "That's right kid. Never play an ace when a two will do."
AfterElton has called Merlin an allegory for the gay experience in high school. That's certainly true, but the power of allegory is that it can be a metaphor for more than one experience. Anyone who has ever felt ostracized in high school can identify with Merlin -- and by extension identify with the gay experience in high school.
It's funny to see criticism of the show that amounts to, "They act like teenagers!" Gee, isn't that the point? The best example so far is the scene where Merlin outs himself to Uther's court. "Why didn't he show his magic?" people complain. Because he's a kid! He's a teenage boy who impulsively does something major league stupid, realizes halfway through that he's in big trouble and shuts up, lets someone else talk him out of trouble, and as soon as the danger is over and his stress levels go down he gets angry and insults his rescuer. That is textbook teenage behavior.
And you wonder why Arthur calls him an idiot? Merlin is dangerously out of touch with the political realities of Camelot.
My other favorite complaint is that its "too Lord of the Rings". People, people, people! As soon as I get off the floor from laughing, I'd like you to meet one of the definitive scholars of the Arthurian legend Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, JRR Tolkien. As the saying goes, "That's not a flaw, that's a feature."
My own criticism is that the burden of being the audience identification figure for the ensemble threatens to make Merlin the least interesting character in the show. Hopefully that will change -- soon.
All in all, a good start.
I apologize if this isn't up to my usual level, but I'm recovering from a long illness.
Episode 4: Innocence at Camelot
Episode 5: (The Once and Future) Lancelot
Episode 6: (Death Is) A Remedy to Cure All Ills.
Episode 7: Deception for Dummies
Episode 8: Deception for Non-Dummies
Episode 9: What Color is Your Fairy Tale?
Episode 10: The Practical Exam
Episode 11: Today is a Good Day to Die