Merlin
Episode 13: “Le Morte d’Arthur”
BBC One, Saturday 13 December 2008, 7.10PM
Written by Julian Jones
Directed by David Moore
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.
It is only relatively recently that the makers of long-running drama series in the UK have began to copy the US habit of building up to a “series finale”, a final episode which acts as both a climax of what’s gone before and a teaser for what’s to come. Indeed, it was only with the 2007 series of Doctor Who that the term was publicly used by the BBC for the first time, and thus broke into the mainstream of broadcasting vocabulary.
With this final episode of the first series of Merlin—according to the end titles, the show will return at some point, even if the BBC haven’t said much about that so far—the series returns to some not-uncommon themes aand situations, but shadows them with the seeds of potential future storylines.
Once again, Arthur’s life is put into mortal danger (on this occasion, he’s bitten by a half-snake, half-lion creature with a deathly bite) and Merlin has to make a bargain with old foe Nimueh (Michelle Ryan) in order to save the young prince’s life. That this involves travelling to a distant ruin, across mountains and valleys, is to be expected. Sadly, we’re given no real sense of either the distance Merlin travels or the effort he has to put into crossing the mountains. As a result, the viewer is left with the feeling that Merlin doesn’t actually have to sacrifice as much as expected to save his prince.
Uther and Gaius are also again given opportunities to express their love for their respective “sons”, while Morgana and Gwen suddenly seem not so far removed from their “traditional” roles in previous tellings of the Arthurian myth—respectively, Morgana as frantic seer and Gwen as the caring woman whose growing love for Arthur perhaps surprises even herself. Perhaps the crowning moment of the episode, though, is when the penny drops about the dragon—Merlin finally realizes that this oh-so-wise creature will do almost anything to engineer Uther’s death and so anticipate the crowning of Arthur as king, in the belief that the young monarch and Merlin will create a new kingdom where magic is accepted once more and the dragon will at last gain its freedom.
Typically, things don’t go quite as Merlin (or indeed the dragon) expects; with Arthur restored to health—typically without either he or his father knowing of the sorcery involved—Merlin naturally expects his life to be taken in exchange. The “life for a life” price for Arthur’s life, however, turns out to be Merlin’s mother, who comes to Camelot on the verge of death. Knowing that Merlin has an important destiny to fulfill, Gaius travels to Nimueh and offers his own life in exchange for that of Merlin’s mother—a deal the sorceress seems williing to take, given her sense of his betrayal of sorcerers.
Almost too late, Merlin arrives—although how he manages to cross a fairly large lake without a boat isn’t made clear—and after a rather disappointing and short-lived magical battle (involving a couple of fire balls and some forked lightning) triumphs over Nimueh and pulls back Gaius in frankly a rather poor fake death scene. Quite where Merlin acquired the magical power to kill another sorcerer is never explained, but at least there’s a certain relief in knowing that—should Merlin get a second series—it shouldn’t lack the reliable performances of Richard Wilson.
Enjoyable though this final episode was, however, there’s always that feeling that it could’ve been a lot better, and with some more attention to the details, much more convincing.