SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
Don't read beyond this point if you haven't watched Merlin on Netflix right to the end.
You've been warned!!!
I wanted to title this: Merlin's Ending Sobs The Soul. But that would've been a spoiler and many haven't watched Merlin yet or are midway through it on Netflix. I found it this past summer and have been watching it for several weeks. Some episodes I rewatched to follow a particular character arc or prophecy arc or Merlin gaining power or wisdom. Some episodes I rewatched because they were so light hearted and funny in the midst of serious. I believed that Merlin would finally succeed when he'd so often failed. I needed the ending to be filled with triumph of the good and hope.
The ending devastated me.
The ending, so raw, so grieving, so unfair, affected so many that years later, I found blogs written on the ending. Some were angry; some grieved though, for them, the ending satisfied. I found these posts because at four in the morning, emotions and thoughts about Merlin awoke me and I had to go searching for what others thought, what others felt about the ending. Although I'd wanted Arthur to live, upon reflection, it felt right that he didn't. But as I processed my thoughts and feelings today, that was about the only part of the very very end that did.
I read about Arthur, Camelot, and the Knights of the Round Table as a child. I have only the vaguest memories of the versions I read. But tragedy when you're young, before you've experienced life-altering loss in your own life, feels romantic. It evokes sadness and nascent grief, new emotions, ones you're glad to feel as they teach you about being human at a time you're learning about it.
It's different when you're an adult with extraordinary brain injury grief haunting you every day.
The Adventures of Merlin were a retelling of the Arthurian legend. So why was the ending not? Why end it with tragedy that slices like a blade forged in dragon's breath -- mortally wounding, cutting up through the heart?
Yet I'm not sure the ending really was in line with the legend, other than how Arthur died and where he died and how he essentially disappeared at Avalon. The legend has Arthur and Merlin working together with Arthur knowing Merlin is a wizard. That never happened in this series.
The scenes of Arthur learning Merlin is a sorcerer and their reconciling enthrall. I loved the poignancy of these scenes. I loved watching the deepening of their bond that transcends mere love or friendship. And then like a sucker punch, we don't get to experience the legend of Arthur working in full knowledge of who Merlin is.
For five seasons (series in British parlance), we've heard the prophecies foretold about Merlin and told to Merlin by the Great Dragon.
1. Arthur will be mortally wounded by the Druid boy. It's Merlin's destiny to save Arthur. We have foreshadowing that Merlin always fails to prevent prophesied tragedies; instead, he brings them about as he tries to prevent. We heard the Disir tell Merlin that Arthur's bane was Arthur himself, and Merlin being warned by the Cathas to not trust the Druid boy. Yet as he won the war for Camelot in the final episode, the one person who'd consumed his mistrust somehow slipped his mind? Somehow he forgot that Arthur's bane would manifest in leaving himself defenceless to Mordred's hatred and that he needed to be there to protect Arthur, not just win the war from on high? Somehow he forgot to look for Mordred and slay him on the spot? And how with all his powers was he unable to find Arthur and Mordred except by the mortal way -- picking his way through dead bodies?
2. Merlin and Arthur will bring peace to Camelot, to Albion (to be honest I never quite understood what Albion was). I suppose that when Merlin killed Morgana, Arthur reflected the fulfillment of that prophecy when he murmured, "Peace at last." But really, the way it was conveyed through the series was that they would build it together side by side. That didn't happen. They did have three years of peace and prosperity after defeating Morgana again, but we the viewers didn't experience that. If you're going to talk endlessly about peace, you need to allow the viewers (or readers) to live that with the characters. However, that brief time was not the peace foretold. It was Arthur stretching his wings while Morgana was chained up and unable to launch yet another assault on Camelot. In the last episode, with Arthur dying and Merlin disappearing God knows where, they did not build Albion together. They did not bring about peace in the land because enemies still existed beyond Morgana. Guinevere would have had to rebuild a grieving Camelot and create a new alliance between the Old Religion and the new Camelot. And . . .
3. Gaius told the Catha warrior priest that Merlin, the most powerful sorcerer that ever lived, would unite the Old Religion with the new ways. He'd bring magic back into repute and unite peoples of all sorts. He didn't. Instead he became an itinerant wanderer, endlessly waiting for Arthur to rise again. The most powerful sorcerer doesn't use his experience and innate abilities beyond waiting? He doesn't unite the old with the new?! What a waste! What a failed prophecy! What intense grief and tragedy with no meaning!!
Merlin said to Arthur that he was born to serve him. Yet, in the end, he stopped serving him. Arthur was more than a mere mortal. He was a man with a dream to create a fair and just land. The dream made the man. Serving that dream would have been serving Arthur even more self-sacrificially than Merlin already had. But after Arthur's death, Merlin doesn't seem to have served that dream. We don't see him in the scene with Guinevere becoming Queen (if he was there I missed it). How much hope could the writers have given us if they had put Merlin by Gaius's side in that scene? How much wisdom they could have shown Merlin had gained by changing his clothes into ones of a wise warlock ready to serve Arthur's dream and his Queen, the one Arthur had said if he lost, he'd lose everything?
Merlin had spent years learning how to be a physician, learning to master his magic, growing up and becoming responsible. But the prophecy about Mordred and his distrust of him obsessed him to the point of bringing it about -- when trust and kindness can change a life's path, as we saw in one of the episodes with a young sorcerer, why does Merlin who's kindness personified not extend that powerful balm to Mordred as a way to save Arthur? Yes, you can be kind while also being watchful. That's what parents do. And in a way Merlin the elder, who'd saved Mordred as a child, had much to teach Mordred years later when Mordred became a knight, and could have. Yet didn't. Only in bites.
(That's one of the failings of this series. Scenes were missing that could've shown us nuances of character, like Morgana reacting to Guinevere being saved from her control. Or Mordred and Arthur in their final battle. Or what did Percival do after he found the dregs of the fire -- how did he learn Arthur was dead? How did anyone learn of it? I read somewhere that the episodes were 50 minutes long. Not on Netflix they ain't. Were scenes cut for North American TV and not restored for Netflix?)
I suppose that's a lesson for us. Extend kindness to people we don't trust. Teach them the ways of selflessness and its rewards and maybe you'll turn a life around.
So the show's creator averred he gave us hope in a truck passing Merlin as an old man wandering centuries later by Avalon.
That's not hope.
That's loss and pain and sobs.
My heart wrenched at seeing the utter aloneness of Merlin.
Perhaps because brain injury renders the same verdict, it hit too close to the bone. Did Merlin even have the succor of being part of Queen Guinevere's Camelot, of being with Gaius at the dinner table again, eating his favourite meal? Immortality when everyone around you dies eventually sucks if you never even get to experience a new day after death, like Arthur did after Uthur's death. On that sad day (for Arthur), Merlin was there for Arthur. Who was there for Merlin? Merlin's love, his father, and in a heart-ripping third time, his friend, all died in his arms. So much for one man to endure alone.
The Great Dragon reminded Merlin that Arthur is the once and future king, hence why Merlin waits for Arthur at Avalon centuries later and why the creator said that the final scene is hope. Arthur will rise again. The two will be united again. But in that moment the Great Dragon left. He didn't stay with Merlin, walking with him. And what about the young white Dragon, the one greeted with so much hope, given the name of light that instead became enslaved to Morgana, crippled by an evil king with the Great Dragon seemingly oblivious and Merlin only once showing compassion towards him? What became of this once hope for a dying species? No redemption, no restoration by and to Merlin?
The ending twice grieves.
That's what devastates: Merlin is alone. He has no dragon to share brotherhood with. He has no one to grieve with him. No one to walk with him. No peoples to belong to. He doesn't even have a fulfilled purpose.
One last thing: can I say what a brilliant actor Colin Morgan is! Such broad range and has wicked good fun with it, too. A joy to watch. My fave episodes have to be With All My Heart, the Last Dragon Lord, and Lady of the Lake. Also, anything with Gwaine in it. Another why? in the ending!
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