I don't get Merlin.

[kaigou]

I keep hearing about it (good and now a lot of bad) and figured I'd see what the fuss was about... and I can see there's fussing but I'm not seeing a lot of about. Morgana is a stereotype, badly written, and not very well played, either. Uther has some variation in him but that, I suspect, is because Tony Head is a damn fine actor stuck doing an Obi-Wan -- that is, if not making gold from lead, at least making the lead passable. Merlin might have potential, as does the actress playing Gwen, if not for the TSTL moments from early on, and we won't even go into the fact that for a moment I was delighted by the cheerfully anchronistic multicultural cast, until I realized it's only multicultural to the extent that non-white equals working class or servant, while white means being anything from lowest to highest.

Gaius drove me bonkers from the get-go; he's such a freaking stock-character (and played like one) that it's not even amusing, and I'd probably hurt someone if I had to watch an entire season of faux-science-doctor man-of-all-trades (who gets the books out at the drop of a hat) because I've seen the librarian stunt pulled before, and it worked on BtVS (with a better librarian, I might add) but it just didn't jive, here. Gwen's dad is the amiable friendly big black man when he had justifiable reason to be mightily righteous angry black man, and is it just me when I notice that the bad-guys were (a) women and (b) beautiful and (c) dark-haired and pale-skinned? Could we have some variety in our big bads, please? I might've stuck it out if Eve Myles were kept around for more than two episodes, or better yet, if she'd been cast as Morgana and let that Morgana-chick get shrill and strident on some other series.

And don't even get me started about Arthur. I don't mind going with the character development, but there's got to be some kind of redeeming value in him somewhere, and frankly, I didn't seen an iota of it. I was left with the conclusion that (a) we're supposed put up with this because hey, the legend-Arthur was a good guy, so this Arthur must also be a good guy, and that (b) in the meantime, we enjoy the fact that he's good-looking. Except he's not; if he has model good-looks then it's the model for your local Kmarts' weekly circulars, not model-good-looks for anything better known, and besides that, why is it that his looks are supposed to make up for the fact that he's a freaking asshole?

So, nope. Not wasting any more time on that one, and from the critiques I'm seeing around the net on S2, I suspect I'm not really missing anything.

Comments

[branchandroot]

Bingo.