Yeah, I do hear them out on that. I respect that it's hard when you set something into motion all the way back in Season 1 and feel like you have to pay it off years later.
My question is: Why did they feel they had to adapt the Arthurian legends to the very end in the first place? Why did they feel like they had to show Arthur's death?
The only promise of the series was to get Arthur on the throne and start the Golden Age of Camelot, an age where magic could be free. You can still have the promised seeds of its destruction in the background, implied to occur in the future, without having to actually show that onscreen.
As Orson Wells once said, "If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."
Like, Merlin from the offset is meant to be a prequel to the Arthurian legends, as it was inspired by CW's Smallville, which is a prequel to the whole Superman mythos. Smallville ends just as Clark officially becomes Superman, and it's a great ending that pays off the initial promise of showing how Clark became Superman and Lex became his enemy.
So, why didn't Merlin end with a post-magic reveal Arthur becoming king and making Merlin Court Sorcerer? THAT was set up, too! That would have been accurate to the legends, too!
They say they were locked into that ending because of audience expectations, but they were already picking and choosing what to adapt and what to leave out! They set up Lancelot and Guinevere's affair multiple times, which in the legends destroyed Camelot, only to blame it on magic and have Gwen and Arthur come out the other side united.
So, you could have still had those child Mordred appearances, the promise that he will one day end Arthur, without having to actually show it happening on screen. You could have even shown Mordred as a knight, without showing his betrayal on screen. Because if you were banking on the audience knowing the legends anyway, then showing what happened onscreen should not have mattered. (Though, of course, the writers were clearly wrong to assume the audience: 1. Knew the legends well enough, or 2. Expected the show should end the same way, for the reasons above)
They had a great hook at the end of Season 3 for how Arthur could start really growing into the king he was meant to be without officially taking the throne until the series finale, since Uther had become mentally infirm after Morgana. Give him space to figure out how to be a ruler without his father always hovering over him, start seeing the magic conflict more up close, have his status as regent in constant jeopardy to give Merlin something to do, etc, leading up to the magic reveal, some episodes of fallout and reconciliation, and the final crowning.
But by killing Uther off in 4x03, they made Arthur the official king way too soon. It caused them to put the entire Golden Age of Camelot offscreen, between seasons, in a way that half the audience didn't even realize it had happened, instead of having it as something to send the audience off on in the finale. More importantly, it caused them to divorce the Golden Age from magic's return. So in my mind, they had already cheated audience expectations a whole season before that finale and didn't realize it.
gracieabrams
origamiaround
kianamaiart
