Merlin Series Two Review

Riding high off the Doctor Who /  Robin Hood Saturday Night fantasy entertainment bandwagon, the latest in the line of these was Merlin, a retelling of the infamous wizard and his early days as the servant to the future legendary King Arthur. As someone who absolutely loves Arthurian Legend, I was intrigued though slightly saddened to see that the series was a mixture of light story-telling and frustrating clichés in dramatic form. So when it came back for a second series, could it muster a magic spell to improve on what could be a good series?

SPOILER WARNING.

Well…the acting is still incredibly ropey. Colin Morgan seems to struggle a lot, and I think that the writers know this as he doesn’t seem to be that focal in plots apart from ‘investigate’ and mutter some magic in the background whilst everyone else gets the credit. This leads to some very strange character development in places – and there’s the odd feeling of a reset button being pressed during the episodes.

Like the first series, the show doesn’t seem to quite fully understand how to arc-plot properly. Seeing it by the same team that did Hex, this doesn’t fully surprise me. Whereas that was a shambolic attempt to create an ongoing serial drama that seemed to make it up as it went along,  this is an episodic show which seems to throw the odd line to ‘develop’ a story. No, having a dragon repeat stuff about a promise each week is not an arc. Neither is mentioning Morgana having “magic.” Characters show up again, but Capps, Murphy and Jones (Hex guys) just cannot string together developing sub-plots properly. A ‘big bad’ of the dragon is over-shadowed by Merlin meeting his father who is then killed straight after (thus an interesting reunion between him and Uther – the king of Camelot who banished him – wouldn’t happen). The whole Morgana storyline with her and her half-sister is seemingly brushed over, despite actually feeling like the excitement levels would rise during 2×11 and 2×12 (more on that later).

This reset-thing mentioned is really frustrating though. Prince Arthur is as stupid as Clark from Smallville, which has been openly cited as an influence, and it shows. His opinion and observations about Merlin are so blind-staggeringly dumb that you wonder how he’s clever enough to stand-up against his father. His loyalty stemming towards Camelot rather than his father has cropped up more than once, which is one of the better parts of his character. Arthur and Merlin’s banter and bickering is also actually quite entertaining when it wants to be, but the development of Arthur is so incredibly misshaped and cock-eyed it’s almost embarrassing to actually watch at times. The Sins of the Father showed the ultimate in stupid-Arthur. Or at least give him the kick up the jacksey to allow him some independent thought for once.

The excitement does spark up during the aft end of the season as it seems as if there’s a serial arc building up eventually, and it does seem the show is going to be having some balls as Merlin looks to do some darker stuff for the greater good – though things twist in a way to make things not-that-bad. With Morgana’s ‘cure’ and the Great Dragon’s liberation (which felt like quite the cop-out come to think of it actually) there should be something to build on in the third series. Which I pray to the Old Religion actually starts to develop something. Or someone else finds out about Merlin’s powers. Smallville did feel like it grew slightly when Pete (and then Chloe) found out about Clark’s secret. Imagine what could happen here…

Family entertainment, but not as refined or balanced as it really should be.