Yeah, that thing

[trude]

1. My main reaction to the news that the show would end after series five was relief. I think that as long as it was being produced, I would hang around in some capacity, wishing for things that the show would never deliver, and now I don’t have to do that.

2. I might watch S5 some day (because apparently there is the occasional scene of Gwen being queenly, plus one scene where Gwen and Elyan talk about Tom, and grown-up Mordred seems to be more interesting than little Mordred), but I haven’t for a moment regretted my decision not to watch it this year.

3. Having said that, it is still my primary fandom. I still visit Merlin-related communities and blogs on a regular basis, I still have the occasional hissy-fit about it on Tumblr, I still read fic now and then, I still have Gwen and Lancelot on my desktop-wallpaper. When I change that wallpaper, it will really be the end.

4. The good stuff about the show and the fandom: It helped me through the second half of 2010 (NOT a good time for me personally). Over the years, I’ve had some great conversations about the show with some really cool people. There has been good fic, and pretty fan-art and FUN in general.

5. Because it deserves it’s very own point: thanks to the show, I’ve read more Arthuriana than I ever thought I would, both the medieval texts and modern retellings and some scholarship. (One day I have to take a photo/make a list of the Books I Bought Because of Merlin, the most obscure probably being a copy of Wendy Mnookin’s Guinevere Speaks that was culled from the University of Wisconsin Platteville textbook center and which cost me £0.01 for the actual book and £4.02 for postage and packing.

6. Because it is a bit of a mixed blessing: I now know how Tumblr works, and I use it on a regular basis.

7. The bad stuff: oh, there has been plenty of it, from the serious to the merely annoying.

8. How I think they could have made the last two-three years of the show better (yes I know this is a bit preposterous when I haven’t watched S5):
a) Morgana – keep her plotline, basically, but add some in-story explanation why she wasn’t recruiting support from other magic user’s on a larger scale in S4. Given how interesting the Pendragon family dynamics where in the early years I wish her hate towards Arthur had been more personal and also more hesitant at times. (Same goes for him.) I also wish she had spent less time going after Gwen, but that is mostly because I found the recurring victimization of Gwen creepy.)
b) Gwen, Arthur and the A/G/L-clusterfuck: let Gwen be the one who initiated the temporary break-up at the end of “Queen of hearts” and make it a bit more bitter and seemingly more final. Let Lancelot fess up and apologize about his S2 actions in “The coming of Arthur” (and leave it at that, cause Gwen should be pretty angry with him then). Start S4 with a status quo where everyone involved knows that G/L has a realistic chance of working out and A/G sort of doesn’t and then let the first two episodes play out as they did anyway. (Not uncomplicated, but it could possibly work with a “everybody doing what’s best for Camelot-spin.) And then Lancelot STAYS DEAD. Episode 4x3-4x7 happens as they really did, with an added subplot of Arthur and Gwen reconnecting and eventually getting engaged. Episode 8 is happy wedding/coronation episode and the rest of the series is about the status of magic in Arthur’s Camelot, with some version of “Herald of a new age” actually happening and Gwen’s banishment possibly being replaced by Merlin being banished. And spend some time on letting Gwen and Arthur grow as a couple and putting Gwen’s political skills to good use.
c) Merlin: let him spend some time in S3/4 learning more about/testing the limits of his magic for some other reason that it is necessary to resolve the weekly plot. And let him actively seek out some other magic users. And have a reveal at the end of S4.

9. I generally try to avoid saying that creator’s don’t “deserve” their own characters or worlds, but dammit, those showrunners didn’t deserve Gwen. I guess this was our only real chance of seeing Angel Coulby as Guinevere, but given how people have added to the Arthurian tradition for centuries and borrowed bits from each other, I hope that other people will make variations of Guinevere the maid, Guinevere the blacksmith’s daughter, Guinevere the woman of color and Guinevere who had complex relationships with both Merlin and Morgana before she got involved with Arthur. Among other things.

10. The only Merlin-episode I’ve actually watched this autumn was “Love in the time of Dragons” from series three, and it felt like there was a bit of a lost opportunity buried there. Yes it was slow, yes it had a possessed woman who had to be rescued by the men, yes Gwen and Morgana were sadly absent. Still, there was a number of things about Alice that I found quite interesting – she seemed to be accepted and well liked by the non-magical population of Camelot(‘s lower town), she was presented as an unusually skilled magic-user who seemed to find joy in her work, her chosen field of magic was peaceful. It would have been interesting to see how King Arthur would have reacted to her, or someone like her.