Looking forward to Season 5
Warning: Spoilers for Season 5!
It feels like it wasn’t very long ago that we announced the start of Destiny & Chicken – our brand new Merlin podcast in which we were planning to go through every episode of Merlin, week by week, and bring you critical, positive (hopefully occasionally humorous) discussion of one of our favourite TV shows of… ever… – and now here we are, about to start Season 5.
Who else is scared? 0_0
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27th August 2021 @ 1:55 am
Yaaaay! I am really looking forward to this next installment of D&C! I am indeed sad it will be the last, though. ☹️
Season 5 was the most frustrating and least fascinating to me, it felt like a huge let down. I freely admit, however, that I am no great lover of tragic endings. I thought for sure it was going to end, like Ruth said, with option a.) Arthur truly becoming The Once and Future King with Merlin at his side with some sort of revelation about his magic. Imagine my surprise!
But the frustration started from the get go, with a randomly introduced, brand new prophesy of doom that conveniently overrides the original, more optimistic one of a united Albion. Do we ever see a united Albion? And what about magic, and magic users? Not to mention the surprise!immortality. 😭😤
I kept watching because the cast is amazing, and that’s about it. Seriously, that’s all. Anything less than their stellar performances I would have walked away from, the story became so annoying. Or maybe it was the Stockholm syndrome Michelle mentioned!
All that being said, I love listening to ya’lls breakdown and analysis. Can’t wait to read more Merlin poetry, too!! (I’m totally serious, I loved all of them!)
P.S. While waiting for D&C season 5 I started the Temeraire series after hearing Michelle mention it; the books are so enjoyable, thanks for recommending them! (I also listened to the Parabatai episode from TDiE and I personally think Temeraire and Laurence are definitely an example of a Parabatai bond.)
2nd September 2021 @ 4:49 pm
–But the frustration started from the get go, with a randomly introduced, brand new prophesy of doom that conveniently overrides the original, more optimistic one of a united Albion. Do we ever see a united Albion? And what about magic, and magic users? Not to mention the surprise!immortality.–
honestly, I’m sorry you felt that season 5 was so frustrating, but having just recorded the first double episode and having been ENDLESSLY FRUSTRATED, there is a bit of me that’s happy you feel this way, as at least I can stop feeling like we are raining on people’s parade… well, at least not yours. may still be raining on many other people’s parade… lol
and yay, I am so happy you started reading, and enjoyed!!!, the Temeraire series. I had the first book on my bookshelf for years and years and years, and when I finally picked it up and read it I couldn’t believe I’d been sleeping on it for so long! hahaha so always very excited to get others into the series. And yes, you are SPOT ON about them qualifying for parabatai status! Hadn’t ever thought of them that way but yes, 100%!!
M Xx
26th August 2021 @ 4:49 pm
“There’s no way a family friendly BBC show would do THAT on Christmas Eve “….. 😂 well they sure did & they ruined my Christmas 🥲 literally i was so sad … I’m still so sad to this day 😅🥲
2nd September 2021 @ 4:50 pm
I do however still admire their guts, I must say…
M Xx
26th August 2021 @ 3:11 pm
I’m also looking forward to watching Season 5 a lot! I am yet to determine what I really think about it 😀
You talk a lot about the larger picture of the whole show and whether the writers knew how it’s all going to end from the start. Well, the thing is, I did a little experiment in the hiatus and I rewatched seasons 1 and 2. That mostly confirmed my feelings from my first pandemic watching: that, while season 1 has still this adventurous, monster-of-the-week feel (although there are already hints that this is all going to end badly, especially after The Beginning of the End where Merlin realizes for the first time how ruthless the dragon can be, or when the dragon essentially tricks him and reveals his true motives in the finale), season 2 goes Full Tragedy very quickly, establishing very tragic milestones from which, I think, there’s really no return: Merlin doesn’t tell Morgana he has magic; Morgana doesn’t get much support; Merlin lies to Arthur about his birth to prevent him from killing Uther; Merlin poisons Morgana. All of those events are complex and there are no simple solutions to them – in short, season 2 seems to offer a glimpse of a mature, complex story with no clear black-and-white characters (yes, you can see now that s2 is still my favorite in the whole series :D). It would be interesting to jump from that straight to season 5 and see if it retains the same tragic feel. I have a feeling that s3 and s4 sometimes stalled a little, either in order to preserve the beloved Merlin/Arthur dynamic, or to give a bit of a clearer cut on who’s “good” and who’s “bad” for the sake of a family show (mainly by making Morgana a cartoonish villain in s3). I guess what I’m trying to say, is that to me, it can’t be clearer that the show couldn’t end in anything other than tragedy and broken promises (or promises fulfilled partially and in an ironic way, but that’s something I’m going to talk about when we reach the finale) – even though s3 and s4 sometimes wanted to prolong the false sense of security, or hope for better things.
Now, was all this tragedy intentional? I don’t know, I don’t sit in the writers’ heads, but if my years of Literature studying taught me anything, it’s the Death of the Author and the right to interpret the stories in a way that makes sense to us and is coherent, but doesn’t always agree with the authorial intention 😀 And my intuition also is that, in an adaptation of an Arthurian legend, even though it was done for a family show, it was impossible not to have tragedy as a backbone of everything. After all, tragedy is so often a parody of an adventure story: quests are not completed, heroes fail, order isn’t restored. And it’s probably one of the main reasons why this show absolutely stole my heart after years and years of obsessing over tragedy in Shakespeare, Norse mythology and Tolkien.
I’m excited and scared 😀
2nd September 2021 @ 5:06 pm
your notion of watching S1, S2, and then jumping straight to S5 is interesting and yes, I think you’re right about the ‘stalling’ element of season 3 and season 4. Which is odd if you think that Bradley and Colin signed on for 5 seasons and therefore there should have been a 5 season plan. But also makes sense when you think about shows becoming successful and suddenly the middle section is stretched out and gets saggy, in the hopes that you can make more seasons than you had originally planned to make. Which in my head is something that largly happens to american TV shows, but of course that absolutely isn’t fair, and sadly ‘British TV is awesome because it knows when to stop!’ isn’t always the case. And this will definitely be something we’re going to talk about at the end of this year, in the full show round up. I’ve bookmarked your comment for then 🙂
M Xx