I've officially lost interest in the show. I deleted this week's episode from my DVR less than halfway through. The deciding point for me was Amberle's "test" in the tree. When the illusion told her "Your heart is your weakness and you need to stop caring about individuals and be willing to kill your friends to save the world," I was expecting that to be a trick, that the real way to pass the test would be to see through the deception and say "No, my heart is my strength, and my caring for the people is what motivates me to save the world," something like that. Instead, she just went ahead and killed Fake Wil and that was supposedly success. First off, I don't like the moral message there, that ruthlessness is right. More to the point, though, it strikes me as poor writing. It's not very impressive to pass a test by just doing what someone explicitly tells you to do. That's a very low hurdle for a heroine to face, and it fails to prove her worth to the audience. It doesn't make her strong or smart, just obedient. She didn't prove she was strong enough to sacrifice people for the mission -- she proved she was too weak-willed to stand up for her principles, and too passive to think of her own solutions. That's not what makes a hero. And it's not a very clever way to write a test scene in the first place, just to have the answer explicitly stated up front without any twists or subtleties.
Now, maybe I missed something in the second half, something that belatedly revealed that she could stand up for herself and reject the tree's moral standards. But it didn't feel it was heading that way. It felt like the test was just done that way to set up some arbitrary teen-romance angst with Amberle pushing Wil away so he'd fall into Eretria's arms. And that didn't hold much interest for me. The young actors just aren't engaging me.
I'm also getting sick of the heir-apparent guy continuing to stridently deny the existence of magic even though the king -- the guy who taught him that magic was dead in the first place -- has repeatedly told him that he was wrong to teach that. Rather than having a plausible dissenting perspective, he just comes off as gratuitously hostile now -- and with the king deciding not to abdicate, it's now becoming clear that he's going to attempt to overthrow his father or something. I just don't find him an interesting enough character or actor to care about that.
