If you've been following my blog lately you know my views on the individual episodes in the fifth and final series of Merlin. However, I thought it would be good to bring it all together and talk about the fifth series as a whole.
World-Building: Annoying
Characterization: 2D, lacks not only depth but consistency.
Plot: Shoddy.
It's difficult to decide which of the three aspects of the story: world-building, characterization, and plot, were the most badly handled in this series. The one thing I can say with complete confidence is that Merlin failed to live up to its standards this season. This is sad, because it was the last season and it really should have ended on a much better note.
The writers seemed to have forgotten all the progress that had been made, both in terms of characterization and plot, up until this point so there were many episodes which felt like re-treads of territory we'd already covered in previous series/seasons. Overall, I was very disappointed with it as a viewer. I would still reccommend that you watch it, just because it's the last season and if you've held on up to now then you should see it to the end, but you will most probably be dissappointed.
The most frustrating thing for me this season was the characterization. The characters, especially Merlin, were doing extremely stupid things, making mistakes that, in previous seasons, they had already made and supposedly learned from. The most frustrating was Merlin. Finally, arthur gained power and was in a position to make changes, and finally, Merlin was starting to have some influence with the King. So how does Merlin handle this newfound power? He consistently advises Arthur in the wrong course of action, the course of action he KNOWS to be wrong. It's as if, with Uther gone, the writers couldn't handle the concept of actual progress, of things actually changing for the better for magic users, for Merlin, for anyone.
Another area where this season failed completely was in world-building. Instead of taking the opportunities presented by the fact that this season is the fifth one, that the audience is already familiar with the characters and main settings and widening the scope of the series they actually narrowed it. They did this both in terms of the characters and the kingdom and also in terms of the magical world and magical powers.
In season one we used to see Arthur interacting with, and caring about peasants, we used to see him solving problems related to the lives of the ordinary/average people in his kingdom. Now, it's as if the only characters that exist are Arthur, Morgana and Merlin and sometimes Gwen, Gaius and a couple of knights. Instead of this show being about how Merlin's actions influence the entire kingdom it's become about the neverending battle between Morgana and Arthur. A battle that, by the end of the series, I don't think either of them remembered their motivations for starting.
We also used to see much more variation in the magic and magical powers on the show. Merlin used to learn complex spells and do something different each episode. There was a sense of magic being this big world that Merlin was discovering bit by bit. Now, as many other fans and reviewers have pointed out, we just get Merlin, or Morgana, throwing people around.
Finally, this series was veyr badly plotted. Almost no progress was made for 12 episodes and then finally, in the last episode they tried to cram in feeble nods to all the things they should have been developing across the five seasons.
I didn't really talk much about the "legend" before, because I wouldn't consider myself an expert on Arthurian legend. I will say, now, that I didn't like the fact that they tried to align the ending so much with Arthurian legend. It would have worked if they'd done their job of characterization and plotting and world-building properly, but as it stands this sticking to the legends robbed the series of the unique quality it started out with.
Overall, you can see I'm not a fan of this fifth series/season of Merlin. There were many missed opportunities and many fumbled aspects of the show. It was a show with great potential, but in the end it didn't live up to it. I still like it overall, I enjoyed past seasons much more than this one, especially the first and second, so I'm thinking of making a list of the better episodes in the series, the ones that can't be missed - the episodes that provided enough awesomeness and promise to keep frustrated fans hoping until the last moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment