Merlin Season 5 Round Up
Join us for the Season 5 Round up, as we discuss all things Merlin Season 5.
Thank you to everyone who listened and wrote in; everyone who discussed, debated, and made friends on the website; everyone who played the Lesson Learnt game, became a Patreon or supported us through Ko-Fi, purchased items from our Red Bubble Store, liked and shared our content on social media, and was all around awesome. It’s been a trip…
Check out The List of Destiny to see where we ranked all Merlin episodes.
Visit Poetry & Chicken to delight in our listener’s creative output.
We love hearing from listeners! Come talk to us on Twitter and Tumblr, or email us and please review us on iTunes.
If you wish to support us, you can do so from $1 a month via Patreon, or as a one off, by buying us a Ko-Fi or two. Thank you.
29th December 2021 @ 11:15 pm
OK so I’m fully aware that I’m late and there’s the full round up already out but sometimes it’s 10:43pm and you have Thoughts and there’s a comment box right there, so… hi. I finally got around to rewatching the end of Merlin. Nearly all of what I could say about the episodes I didn’t comment on has been said, so I shan’t ramble about that here.
What I do want to ramble about is something I’ve brought up before after the Supernatural Thinky Thoughts episode, and was reminded of again when you were talking about the “This show is quite good” to “I love this show and I therefore know it’s awful” process. I commented about how there are shows, such as Sherlock and Supernatural, which I convinced myself I liked because I was invested in the potential of characters and I enjoyed the world created in the show, despite disliking most of the actual things that happened in the plot. I enjoyed merely being in the world of Sherlock – the music, the set dressing, the character dynamics all pulled me in. I guess it was the vibes, to put it simply! And yet I knew as I watched the final episodes that the show was not… good. I read Sherlock fic for /years/ afterwards. There are two that I consider very high up there in the Best Fics I’ve Ever Read ranking – one was a huge part of understanding my own gender identity. The world of the show and the potential the characters had made me think I liked the show itself, when what I really liked was the daydreams it facilitated! On the other hand, though I don’t otherwise watch much TV at all any more, there’s plenty of media in general that made me think “it’s technically good, it did everything right, and yet I personally found it utterly uninspiring.” Merlin, though, is a total wildcard. It can be SO good and SO bad in the same episode, let alone the same season. I don’t know why I never rewatched the show after it aired – I mean, I used to hate rereading books (I feel differently now), so for a while that could be why, but I rewatched films sometimes and watched clips over and over. I debated characters with the other young teenagers on Fanpop, but I don’t remember actually putting much emphasis on the /plot/ even in discussions immediately after episodes, to the extent that (as my past comments here often mentioned) I had forgotten at least 80% of the plot before rewatching. Despite that, I /felt/ as if I knew the show – I could talk about the show and the characters at length at any point since finishing it, even when it wasn’t an active special interest. The way I engaged with it seems to put it in the “love the potential, actual show is bad” category but that feels utterly wrong having just finished the series for a second time and felt more fascination than frustration even when the frustration was intense.
If I can make some semblance of sense from my rambling: I think it says something (and the shape fandom often takes says something) about the media that grips us, in that a) it’s more important for it to be emotionally resonant than anything else and Merlin sure as hell was/is emotionally resonant for me, and b) we (or perhaps just I!) can be so susceptible to what a show suggests to us through everything /around/ the plot. Engaging characters are 90% of the battle because we’re social creatures through and through. And half the fun of media is /living in it/ – we refer to “consuming” media but I don’t think that’s right – when something is engaging and interesting we don’t consume it, it consumes us. It’s really no wonder so much fic is centred around domestic scenes! And it’s why I can say “Ruth is right, the show is inconsistent as hell and there’s no point analysing the Old Religion too closely” and then immediately proceed to analyse the Old Religion – because what the writers were trying to say isn’t the point, the point is to remain in the world of BBC Merlin for as long as I can!
26th December 2021 @ 12:17 am
Thanks again for doing this. It’s been a fantastic ride and I’m so glad I found you.
One aside, I did get to meet John Bradley when he was filming the Merlin episode and all the knights lined up at one point and signed autographs while they were waiting for the next scene and he did, too. 🙂
I will definitely miss you all.
12th December 2021 @ 7:48 pm
(Sigh)
I really really really appreciate your discussion over the worst line of all of Merlin! Now that it has been a couple weeks since I last watched that scene, I have cooled down and I admit I agree that saying “I love you” would not have been in character with emotionally constipated Arthur. As you suggested, I really think deleting that line and ending on “Please, just hold me,” or the LOTR line “I’m glad it is you who is with me,” would have worked absolutely beautifully. You are absolutely right! Down playing it and not having that distracting/teasing line would have allowed us to really focus on the hard work Colin and Bradley are doing. I feel so much better now! Thank you (no pun intended 🤣)!
I was discussing “what ifs” and the current photos of much more handsome/grown up Colin and Bradley that are constantly bombarding my Pinterest and it occurred to me that a petition should be started to remake the show now with some of the suggested re-writes mentioned in this podcast! How amazing would that be!?! Sexy Merlin the entire time!? With some scruff!?! Oh….dreams…
I feel absolutely honored to have said “the most fandom thing” that anyone has said on the podcast. (Bowing) LOL “Kill him pretty!” 100% 🤣😂🤣
Oh! Also sorry for failing to write any comments on the roundups… it was a bit overwhelming to think about and I figured others had much more intelligent things to say then me. 🤷🏼♀️