Merlin: The Death Song Of Uther Pendragon Review

rating: 3

Merlin has got off to a solid if unspectacular start this season with Arthur's Bane, but I couldn't help but having been left wanting more from the opening two-parter. It fell to Episode 3, then, to lay down the gauntlet and up the stakes in terms of the fifth series' quality, but did The Death Song Of Uther Pendragon make the cut in this respect, besting its opposition to become one of the show's greatst hits yet? The answer, sadly, once again is not quite. Undoubtedly, the draw of Anthony Head's return to the cast of Merlin for one week only was at the core of the marketing team's promo campaign for this week's adventure, and rightly so. For all the theatricality with which Head was often forced to perform his regular role in the opening three seasons, Uther Pendragon was always a fascinating character thanks to his hatred of magic and the roots from which it spawned. Last year's The Wicked Day cemented this, as Uther was killed off by the very powers he worked so hard to rid Camelot of, and as such it was no wonder that our young Arthur went in search of his lost father the moment that he got the chance. I won't for a second try to deny that the central scenes involving Head's reappearances were gripping to say the very least. Bradley James and Colin Morgan were finally handed some sublime dialogue material that they truly deserved, allowing them strong reactions to the man who made both their characters lives' a regular misery in the series' dawn, and thus to justify their arc developments since The Wicked Day. It was an inspired move by Howard Overman to have Merlin reveal the truth of his gifts to the father Pendragon shortly before his exile back to the Spirit World, finally giving Morgan and Head the chance to tackle the likelihood of Arthur's discovery of the tagline 'Keep The Magic A Secret!' head-on in one of this season's finest scenes so far. Were it that Death Song had consisted entirely of emotional and engaging scenes such as these throughout its running time, I would have easily been able to rank it at the very least one star higher than I have above. The problem, then? For all its heartbreak and dramatic turmoil, this third episode was absolutely laden with horror cliches that- while effective- reeked of a copy cat air whereby hardly any of the shocks and gimmicks felt the least bit original. Past Beeb dramas like Doctor Who and Sherlock have shown that scares can be handled effectively when incorporated within the context of the narrative, yet here it felt as if half of the episode was simply dedicated to Morgan, James, Angel Coulby and a handful of the sorely misused Knights (with Mordred almost nowhere to be seen) being tormented by Uther's spirit along corridors and in the outskirts of the Kingdom. Such crude allusions to an already tired filmic genre were bad enough, without the haphazard and inconsistent series budget for special effects hampering things to the point where there was never any chance of garnering the Paranormal Activity-esque vibe some reviewers seem to be under the impression this flawed instalment reached at times. I thought Merlin was above paying homage to withering, repetitive narrative structures from 'classics' nowadays based on the relative strength of Arthur's Bane, but clearly going on the basis of Death Song the show still has a lot to learn if it wants to continue to innovate in its final run. We've been left, then, with a hugely mixed bag of an episode. Bradley James and Colin Morgan in particular offer amongst their finest performances here, with Anthony Head also making a great comeback in the scenes where he gets to chat rather than make silly hauntings. Meanwhile, though, the CGI budget and bizarre horror-stealing script choices have clearly hampered the execution of what appeared to be intended as a scary entry for the fifth season, instead turning it into a bittersweet disappointment. Much as I tried to love The Death Song Of Uther Pendragon, there were too many cliches and challenges thrown in for good measure in order for me to garner the full engagement with its emotive narrative that Overman so clearly intended. As a fan of Who, Sherlock, Game Of Thrones and the like, I don't always expect Merlin to live up to its competitors' might, but I at least expect it to give its all in trying to do so, and for me this week it just didn't feel like the show's production team had the heart to do Uther's final send-off the true justice it deserved. As it is, we're still waiting for an episode of the programme that proves it deserves to have been given a fifth season, and indeed to show that it deserves to be recommissioned for 2013.