Four Torches (Out of Five)

Warning: The following review contains spoilers for the first season of the TV series Merlin.

And so it ends.

The first season of Merlin came to an end last night with the airing of two episodes:  “To Kill the King,” in which Morgana goes postal on Uther, and “Le Morte de Arthur,” in which Arthur is critically injured by a mystical beast and Merlin learns that he can only be saved by making a deal with a practitioner of “old” magic, which requires the exchange of a life for a life.

There was a great twist in the latter episode when Merlin travels to the Island of the Blessed to seek out one of these ancient magicians, only to learn that the person he is dealing with is none other than … the witch Nimueh, his season-long nemesis.

Merlin gladly trades his life for Arthur’s — but as is usually the case when dealing with the devil, the deal doesn’t work out quite the way Merlin planned. It’s not his life the magic wants to take, but his mother’s.

The things I liked about the finale were all the things I liked about the 13-episode season:

• The magical and emotional bond between Merlin and Arthur was fresh and interesting. They are “two sides of the same coin,” the dragon said, and they often influenced each other in interesting and unexpected ways.

• The series and its other characters had what seemed to be well-planned-out plot arcs. For example, unlike in many TV shows, the characters responded to events that had come before. In addition to the deepening relationship between Merlin and Arthur, Morgana eventually became fed up with Uther (and vice-versa), and we learned interesting things about the pasts of Uther, Gaius, and Nimueh.

• I loved the moral ambiguity of the dragon. He clearly knew the future, but was he an ally or an enemy? For him, the end always seemed to justify the means — which is, of course, perfectly in keeping with a being who does know the future and always sees the big picture. After all, what’s one life when the whole world is at stake? And the series left the dragon the perfect note, with Merlin finally coming to understand that he is not to be trusted — but by spurning the dragon, Merlin also created a powerful enemy for season 2.

• Gaius was a terrific character played by a fantastic actor, Richard Wilson.

What didn’t I like about the season?

• The female characters were almost embarrassingly thin.

• The character of Uther was one-note and often over-the-top. His hatred of magic was eventually “explained,” but it was almost always boring.

• Merlin’s magical ability was infuriatingly ill-defined, expanding or contracting based on the needs of the particular episode (and sometimes the particular scene!). In the finale, Nimueh was at first able to brush aside Merlin’s magic with a shrug … and then, after getting a little angry, he proceeded to destroy her with the same magic. WTF?

• Several of the episode scripts were ridiculously bad, especially “Valiant” and “A Remedy to Cure all Ills,” and some of the plot resolutions, such as Merlin’s sudden ability to kill Nimueh with his “magic”, were contrived and disappointing.

Given the show’s low ratings on NBC, it seems very unlikely that the show will return for a second season on that network (despite the fact that they’re co-producing the show with the BBC). But a second season is currently being filmed in the U.K., so I hope that the episodes end up on the SyFy Channel (which is owned by NBC Universal).

It may not be a show for the ages, but even so, I’m looking forward to seeing more.

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• MERLIN Episode Review: “A Remedy to Cure All Ills” Kinda Made Me Sick
• MERLIN Episode Review: Unicorns, Labyrinths, and Gay Subtext!

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