Merlin
Episode Four: “The Poisoned Chalice”
BBC One, Saturday 11 October 2008, 7.05PM
Written by Ben Vanstone
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.
Since its return to television, the BBC’s Doctor Who has, by necessity, been forced to “double-bank” certain episodes—that is, record two episodes at more or less the same time. Having a relatively small cast—just the Doctor and his companion—this has unavoidoidably led to a sequence of “Doctor-lite” episodes which have either focused on newly introduced one-episode characters (as in Russell T. Davies’s “Love & Monsters” or Steven Moffat’s “Blink”) or a pair of episodes that focus on the Doctor and companion individually (as in this year’s “Midnight” and “Turn Left”, both by Davies). I mention this only because “The Poisoned Chalice” would seem to be the show’s first “Merlin-lite” episode, where the title character spends most of the time sweating and mumbling on his death bed while a genuinely heroic Prince Arthur gets all the screen time.
Following last episode’s somewhat passive introduction, Michelle Ryan’s sorceress Nimueh gets more to do this week, sneaking into Camelot in the guise of a servant girl with a diplomatic party from a previously hostile northern kingdom. Relying on his desire to protect Arthur, she effectively forces Merlin to drink from a poisoned goblet in order to prove his accusation of poison. Prince Arthur, feeling more than just duty-bound to save Merlin’s life, volunteers to collect the rare antidote from a distant, monster-filled forest—against the wishes of his father, Uther Pendragon, who firmly believes that the life of any servant is less important than that of the future king of Camelot.
Having set the wheels of her plot in motion, Nimueh then departs a Camelot which starts to slip onto a war footing—the northern kingdom understandably taking it badly when they hear that the honour of their king has been called into question and that he’s currently stuck in Camelot’s dungeon. However, on hearing that Arthur has gone in search of the exceptionally uncommon flower needed by Gaius for the antidote, Nimueh is forced to meet Arthur in the forest, although her “damsel in distress” act is so unconvincing that it rather lowers our opinion of Arthur that he could fall for it and be led into a potentially fatal situation with hundreds of very large, presumably meat-eating CGI spiders. Annoyingly, like any melodramatic villain, Nimueh then makes the serious mistake of choosing not to stay to watch, giving Arthur an opportunity to escape thanks to a guiding ball of light engineered by an unconscious Merlin back at Camelot. Nimueh’s insistence that Arthur is not destined to die at her hands seemed rather lame as an excuse, to be honest.
This episode has its fair share of fantastical monsters and magic (though, thankfully, no useless dragon mentor); the former are realized well enough, although the lack of direct onscreen interaction between monsters and actors is all too obvious—for example, wwhen Arthur throws his sword at a giant lizard, we don’t even see sword hitting the creature, just it dying on the ground. The heart of the episode, though, and the major obstacle that the characters have to overcome in the end, isn’t Nimueh’s plots, but the relationship between Arthur and his father. It’s genuinely shocking when a triumphant Arthur returns to Camelot, only to be thrown into the dungeons for disobeying his monarch’s command. Anthony Head is excellent in the scene where he crushes the flower Arthur had nearly died retrieving, as a way of underlining the “big picture” a future king has to consider.
While a genuinely entertaining episode, “The Poisoned Chalice” still had some problems; the military threat from the northern kingdom is dismissed almost without dialogue, Nimueh still lacks the looming presence that such a sorceress should possess, and the recovering Merlin’s comments that an embracing Gwen and Gaius was disgusting—”You’re old enough to be her grandfather!”—was a rare contemporary intrusion into the story.