Merlin
Episode Five: “Lancelot”
BBC One, Saturday 18 October 2008, 5.55PM
Written by Jake Michie
Directed by Ed Fraiman
Warning: this review contains some spoilers. If you’d rather not know what the story is going to include, bookmark this page and read it after viewing.
There’s no hanging around with this episode. It opens with Merlin in the woods, innocently picking large mushrooms. Out of the blue, he’s suddenly attacked by a giant griffin—part lion, part eagle—and his fate seems sealed until the arrival of a handsome young swordsman who manages to fend off the creature, although he breaks his sword and is injured in the process. Before he faints he tells Merlin his name: Lancelot. Cue titles.
We’ll ignore, for the time, the question of how skinny little Merlin managed to get the comparatively hunky Lancelot back to Camelot on his own, as that sort of detail is merely distracting—there’s plenty of character-buillding plot to get on with. For, once patched up by Gaius, Lancelot expresses his lifelong desire to become a Knight of Camelot. Feeling he owes him one, Merlin decides to help out… with regular viewers of the show already guessing where this is going.
There is, of course, one slight problem; in Camelot, knights must be of noble blood, and though even Arthur admits Lancelot “fights like a Knight”, the newcomer is a commoner by birth. He’s a handsome, well-spoken commoner, but a commoner nonetheless. As is to be expected, our modern-minded, meritocratic Merlin feels that this is extremely unfair and so uses some photocopier magic to whistle up “proof” of the wannabe knight’s noble heritage, which subsequently leaves a disgraced Lancelot in the dungeons once the deception is uncovered.
Meantime, the griffin—with a sadly off-screen taste for human flesh—is chomping its way through the villages and sending refugees into Camelot. Again, we’ll ignore the minor detail of how far Merlin was from Camelot on his mushroom expedition. Just distracting details. The problem is that Gaius is convinced that, since a griffin is a creature of myth, it must be created by magic; if that’s the case then it can only be destroyed by magic. Hard-nosed Uther Pendragon rejects that proposition utterly, sending out Arthur and his knights to kill the beast using sinew and steel alone. Let’s just say that they end up a bloodied and beaten mess after a disappointingly off-screen final battle with the monster. With Arthur’s life in danger, it’s up to Lancelot—and the most powerful spell Merlin has so far ever made—to save the day.
There’s absolutely no doubt now that this new version of Merlin has a distinctly British fixation on class, hierarchy, and the straitjacket of tradition. Unfortunately, Merlin himself doesn’t yet seem to be learning much from his previous experiences; once again, his well-meaning interference with the natural order of the castle puts someone else in the dungeon—will the boy never learn? That said, Merlin’s beliefs do seem to be somehow rubbing off on Prince Arthur, who is developing a pragmatic side sufficiently willing to bend with the wind when it comes to courtly tradition. His father, in contrast, remains as rigid as stone, leading to some extremely strong scenes between father and son that rather neatly contrast with Gaius’s own pleading for Merlin to use magic to kill the griffin.
Santiago Cabrera (best known now for playing Isaac Mendez in NBC’s Heroes) would be an appealing addition to the show in any role, but the fact that he plays Lancelot is actually rather distracting—particularly for anyone who has even the faintest knowledge of the traditional Camelot myths. Lancelot’s interest in Gwen and his determination to become a knight of Camelot are understandable in that context, but jar for someone introduced as simply a one-off character. When he will return, however, is as yet unknown to the viewer.
Thankfully, the John Hurt-voiced dragon beneath Camelot fails to appear again, presumably because the episode’s entire CGI budget was taken up by the griffin—an impressively designed creature, although again it seldom directly interacts with the live-action footage. In any case, Gaius is more than capable of giving Merlin the plot pointers he needs.
There is a lot to enjoy about this episode; the cast are now clearly comfortable in their roles; the excitement is well paced and the fight sequences—particularly between Arthur and Lancelot—continue the high standard of previouus episodes. If there’s one fundamental problem with the series as a whole, though, it’s the continued failure of the writers to nail down the small details of this fantastical world; not least, for instance, the major problem of where the griffin actually came from.