Destiny Rigged from the Start?

I mentioned that I've been watching Merlin lately. I'm up to The Moment of Truth, and the previous two episodes The Beginning of the End and Excalibur seem rather stark and bleak in retrospect. I haven't ever finished S4, I think, and I know I didn't finish S5. However, I know that there was an outcry about the end of the series. I came across a blog post that I didn't read but which I'd like to about how the final episode made someone feel so betrayed that they subsequently avoided anything with the same creative team despite liking the show overall. That blog post was fairly recent, in fact, as it seems that numerous people have revisited it which is interesting. It is cheesy and more like a highly-produced play than a tv show at times, but now that I am nearing the end of S1 it is obvious that the continually put more effort into it.

I realize that it had a disappointing ending, but upon revisiting S1 I kind of wonder if it wasn't easy to see coming. I think that this show was kind of meant to end in tragedy with a silver lining from the beginning, and often people aren't willing to accept that. By the time I get to the end of it, presuming I do, I may be mad, too, but I feel like it will be more for characterization failures and missed opportunities than the tragic end in and of itself. I think that people may be offended b the tragic end because of some kind of mixed signaling that wasn't a simple teeter-totter between whether or not they could subvert terrible events of change their fates. Just like with Morgana, I think that the show was very unwilling to commit to a stance that allowed for the audience to read ambiguity and nuance for themselves. It's such a simple show that I feel like they wanted to continually present certain things as true: in the end, most of them will be okay, even though occasionally people aren't. And I think that people may have felt a sense of whiplash because of a lack of integrity in the way it was presented rather than the writing, exactly?

I'm not sure, but I think that if one looks at the two episodes I mentioned that it sort of seems that way. First, we have the Dragon saying that if Mordred lives that Merlin will be unable to fulfill his destiny of protecting Arthur. Merlin waffles on whether or not to let the forces already at work around him take their course and allow Mordred to be executed. However, the expectations of Arthur and Morgana and Mordred's own telepathic pleas for his life finally make Merlin cave. I really enjoyed that episode because of how they worked with the key cast of players being younger. Even in that era, Morgana and Arthur are too young for Mordred to be their child, but he sort of becomes something that was conceived of their shared affection and sense of responsibility and so on anyway. It also is a great way to establish a sort of unspoken bond between Merlin and Morgana, and even moreso between Morgana and Mordred. It is one of the first episodes when the show stops feeling quite so silly and more like something with some teeth now and then. But Mordred escapes death, and we are left with the knowledge that this probably shouldn't have happened no matter how cute a child he seems to be.

Then, in the following episode, Excalibur is formed. I love the way they handled Excalibur being formed in this series - the fact that it came from Gwen and her father. In this series, they are common people, and it seems thematically to go with both future Arthur/Gwen as it stands and what Arthur is supposed to become as a ruler that Uther is not. The same goes with the way Merlin takes it to be influenced by otherworldly power through having the Dragon burnish it. However, when the Dragon burnishes the sword, he absolutely insists that it must only ever be used by Arthur and Arthur alone or something bad will happen. He's not really clear about the specifics of it, but it seems that the outcome is pretty clear.

Because Uther is a complex person in spite of being someone I overall hate as he is in the series' present-day, he begins to feel that he must sacrifice himself for Arthur. Nimueh all but agrees to the notion that if Uther dies that she will stop being such a problem for the rest of Camelot. She views it as justice, given how he cast her out and killed so many of her loved ones. I think that basically it is as if Uther was "supposed" to die in that episode immediately after Arthur having become Crown Prince. Because Merlin could not find a way to prevent Uther from seeing and subsequently using Excalibur, however, he didn't. Then, as the series progresses, Merlin becomes more and more blinded by his affection for Arthur and his concern about whether or not he is "ready" to be King. He protects Uther even when Uther does not deserve his protection and is a tyrant with genocidal intent because he happens to be a tyrant who loves his son and whose son loves him back. If Uther had died in S1, then they would have stood a much better chance of things not going quite so terribly in the end, even though Uther is eventually dispatched.

Just some thoughts.