#but recognizing merlin as an unfinished story has kept me from feeling that too deeply

[panharmonium]

some meandering bbc merlin thoughts that got too long for tags on this gifset.

normal disclaimers apply, which, given that i’m evaluating media, means that these are just my own thoughts and nobody else need agree with them; i don’t expect all of us to have the exact same impressions of tv shows. :) 

now, without further ado:

i started to type a novel in the tags of that gifset, but it got too long, so i’m moving it over to an actual post.  and what i wanted to say there is this: my thing about arthur isn’t that his story was badly written.  it’s that it was incomplete.

it’s probably more common for folks to assign responsibility to the writing, and that’s totally fine; i definitely get it - there are places in this show where i think things could have been handled better as well.  (i did write sixteen pages about how poorly executed the finale was, after all.)  but for my own part, i personally don’t think most of the story was badly written.  i think it was unfinished.

and what i mean by that is that i sincerely think that almost everything bbc merlin did could have been pulled together in a meaningful way after 5.11, and that if this had happened, then we would be evaluating the previous seasons differently, because things that seemed to not fit or be nonsensical or not be given enough attention would have been pursued all the way through to their natural conclusions.  

i’m not sure if it’s because i watched the show so late, or because i watched it in a spoiler-phobic bubble isolated from fandom input, but my own assessment of this show seems to exist in kind of a weird limbo-place on the spectrum of fandom opinions, because i don’t like how it ended, but i also don’t dislike the writing, up to the point of the finale.  are there things that could have been improved, or quibbles i have?  definitely.  i can list them for you.  but overall?  i still believed in the story at the 5.11 mark.  there were things i sometimes thought ‘oh, i’m not sure about this,’ but i always gave the show the benefit of the doubt, because i truly did feel that things were going somewhere.  anything the show did that gave me pause wasn’t something that couldn’t eventually have been made meaningful, if the show had actually...been finished.* 

(*elyan’s death excepted.  that’s one of the things on my list, and i think it might be the only thing besides the finale that doesn’t fall under the criteria i’ll discuss below.  it was a bad decision, flat-out, and could not have been improved by finishing the story.)

so for example, morgana.  if i were going to critique her development, yeah, i’d say that we don’t get enough of her internal conflict; she goes from the voice of moral authority to (apparently) delighting in wickedness very quickly, offscreen, and the constant smirking doesn’t show us what we know must be true - that she hasn’t become like this because she enjoys it; that she is wounded and her rage at arthur, gwen, merlin et al comes from a very real place of pain.  

but, as i said above - even though her development was something i recognized as questionable while i was watching, it didn’t make me too nervous, because i really trusted that the story was eventually and slowly taking us to the place it needed to go.  you could see her conflict, sometimes, in her confrontations with arthur, and that conflict finally took center stage in 5.09, when mordred confronted her and appealed to her humanity.  they were getting there.

and evaluating her development solely from what we ended up getting, i agree: now the writing just looks Bad.  but it wouldn’t have been bad, if it had been finished.  i would have completely believed morgana closing herself off from regret/sadness/compassion/any feelings at all for her former friends; it would have been okay for her to be so smirky, cold, etc; because it wouldn’t have been the endpoint for her arc, but rather a front to protect herself from the true conflict she felt.  we would have gotten more than that.  the story would have taken her farther than that.  but the story was incomplete, and so everything that came before it just looks like a mess that ran off a cliff.

this is how i feel about almost all of the “questionable” writing things on this show.  it’s not that they were ‘bad’ decisions in and of themselves, but they look that way in the rearview mirror because they never had the chance to develop into what they were supposed to be. 

take arthur, for another example.  i honestly don’t have a problem with his arc in S4 and S5.  i completely believe what a horrible and unadmirable mess he is for most of S4.  i believe that he would absolutely revert to thinking about “what would my father do” as soon as the realities of kingship are thrust upon him.  and i love how in S5 he’s moved past that and IS admirable in so many other ways, but then we start once again addressing the central conflict, which is that he’s still oppressing part of his population, and he starts to hit roadblocks again.  5.05 and 5.11 are the crisis points there, and honestly, i didn’t have a problem with how they unfolded (i mean, i did, but not in the sense of ‘this is bad writing and i hate it.’  rather in the sense of ‘this is fucking painful but i believe it’).  

the problem for me was never that it took arthur too long to accept magic or that he backslid or anything like that, because quite frankly i found all of that to be believable, given the circumstances.  the problem was that the show ended before he was ever allowed to progress past that.  he never atoned for anything he did.  he, like morgana, was never allowed to go where he was meant to go, because the show stopped before it was over.  if he had, all of his previous missteps wouldn’t have felt so much like ‘bad writing,’ they would have just been natural steps on his long journey.

same thing goes for gwen.  do i have a problem with her being sidelined towards the end of the show?  abso-fucking-LUTELY.  that’s on my list.  did her relationship with morgana deserve a resolution?  YES.  but it still could have happened!  if there had been more time, the show could have dealt with that.  gwen’s enchantment by morgana could have meant something, could have prompted something bigger; gwen could have taken the reins and started pushing arthur, who has entrenched himself into old ways, to start thinking from a place of compassion, even though it’s risky and it scares her.  or she could have broken with arthur’s decisions completely and made a move of her own.  if they had been given the time, nothing that happened to gwen prior to 5.11 precluded her character from going somewhere important.

and merlin - merlin could have gotten what he deserved, which is a resolution to the question he’s been struggling with since literally day one: how do i justify serving a regime that oppresses me?  how do i reconcile my responsibility to my people (and MYSELF) with an externally-imposed responsibility to protect arthur?  

merlin never settles on an answer to that question.  or rather, the answer he’s given is that he doesn’t need to be conflicted in the first place; protecting arthur was the right thing to do (even though it ultimately achieves nothing).

merlin deserved to have a chance to work out the answer to that question for himself, rather than having his core dilemma wiped aside.  and, much like my opinion on everyone else’s arcs, i don’t think the writing on this show ever took merlin to a place where this problem couldn’t be addressed.  i don’t find merlin’s arc questionable; i am fully convinced by the hole he’s dug for himself by 5.11.  merlin’s descent into single-minded preservation of arthur’s life at the expense of his own welfare/moral compass is absolutely tragic, yet also absolutely believable, to me - merlin’s been told all along that saving arthur is the only way to save his people, and now he’s been presented with so much evidence to the contrary - and yet he doesn’t want to admit that it’s all been for nothing - it’s honestly…i honestly actually think it’s spectacularly crafted.  that scene with finna in 5.10 is absolutely the most devastating thing i think i’ve ever witnessed on this show - when merlin’s on the verge of passing out and he murmurs, ‘it won’t always be like this.  things will be better.’  and you can see he’s just telling himself a lie, over and over again, trying to believe.  and then when he says ‘running…from arthur?’ because he knows, he knows it’s true that arthur is the real threat, arthur is the one with the sword at all their throats, but merlin has come to care about him so much - 

truly, they hit a point there that was just - fucking amazing.  that was the moment.  that, leading into 5.11, was the axis point for merlin’s unavoidable moral crisis, and there was so much potential there and so many places for it to go, but then the show just ended.  conflicts wiped away.  no wrongs ever righted.  merlin never comes into his own.  he never finds his feet.

but he could have.

so again.  what i’m saying here is that for me, for my particular experience with this show, i actually don’t dislike the writing, up until the very finale.  i think the writing actually brought us to a place that was fairly exploding with possibility.  but then the show just stopped, and that’s why it’s so easy to find places to critique the previous seasons, because of course it all looks poorly constructed now.  it isn’t finished.

#the once and future slowburn #meta #long post #even if merlin wasn't cancelled (which i have my doubts about tbh; who announces that their show is ending four weeks before the finale?) #the ultimate effect is still that of a cancelled show #if you took away the last two episodes i would never have guessed we were that close to the 'end' #there was still so much to deal with! #but anyway #on the whole merlin is a show that for some reason went over extremely positively with me for almost its entire run #i see spots where i would tweak things too #but recognizing merlin as an unfinished story has kept me from feeling that too deeply #most of the things i would tweak are things i KNOW would have been okay #if only they had been given the space to develop fully #and come to a natural conclusion #so for me #i never felt like this show tanked #not until the finale #i was as deeply engaged in 5.11 as i was in 1.01 #and then they just - pulled the plug when the story wasn't anywhere near finished #THAT was the problem for me #not that what came before wasn't good; but that what was supposed to come after was never allowed to happen #(everybody's different and i know not everybody had the same experience as me; which is totally understandable) #(but that's where i'm at) #¯\_(ツ)_/¯