Prince Arthur is a huge dick
- Thread starter broberfett
- Start date
Yes, it's a family show in the mould of Doctor Who and Robin Hood on the BBC, it's a lot better than Robin Hood in my opinion though.
I was actually embarassed for the whole cast and crew watching the first episode. I really wanted to like this, but just couldn't get over how very Torchwood it all was, i.e. awful. And sure, Morgana is attractive, but she's in it for like a minute and the rest of the cast is largely in the meh to homely range. Merlin's a prat, Arthur is indeed a dick and Uther is insane.
I'll take Le Morte d'Arthur thanks. Or even something like the Merlin miniseries a few years back with Sam Neill. I quite liked that one, especially cause you could see everyone involved was trying to do their best to make something really great. This latest incarnation is like watching the Smallville characters doing a highschool play about Camelot. I kept expecting to see Merlin "Cab-door Ears" McGee skipping around spazzing to his iPod.
I'll take Le Morte d'Arthur thanks. Or even something like the Merlin miniseries a few years back with Sam Neill. I quite liked that one, especially cause you could see everyone involved was trying to do their best to make something really great. This latest incarnation is like watching the Smallville characters doing a highschool play about Camelot. I kept expecting to see Merlin "Cab-door Ears" McGee skipping around spazzing to his iPod.
Who cares? This may get people interested in the legend and they may then go study and read up on the legend, or they may go out and watch try to find more retellings that are told in more thoughtful ways, as you put it. The legend has survived hundreds and hundreds of years, I'm sure it'll survive an unfaithful retelling.
You are so right; I mostly watch BBC but man, are there a lot of ugly people on there, unbelievable.
there are just so many actors & actress who get good steady work, in UKTV would would not even be allowed to wait tables in LA, I think its great the UK TV is not like USTV in that respect.
I was using her as an example as the kind of actress that would not get work in the US, there are many others in the EE cast who would not either.
Really all of UK TV is not scared to cast an unattractive or plain actor in a important role, god knows we even let black people in our soaps, black people who are not tokens.
arthur has... a character arc... SHOCK! HORROR!
he changes by the series end!!
plus, y'all have to stick with it for Alex Siddig's episode.
he changes by the series end!!
plus, y'all have to stick with it for Alex Siddig's episode.
I'd say in our Cliff Notes mentality society that crappy retellings would produce more people who would be turned off to NEVER do any research, and pass along the word that Arthur is a "stupid story".
--Ted
Yes, because Hercules and Xena has killed off interest in Greek myth, and Robin Hood has killed off all interest in the Robin Hood legend.
If it can survivor a thousand years where hardly anyone could read, I'm sure it can survive a not-so-faithful retelling.
I found Arthur and Merlin to both be pretty boring. They should have made Merlin the dick - cmon, he's this guy living among illiterate peasants in some godforsaken mudhole, and he has superpowers. Even Camelot is pretty unimpressive. That's gotta make him think he's superior to everyone else. Make him someone we'd want to see taken down a peg.
The problem with the setup of that show is that it's so expected and bland. Merlin and Arthur hate each other but they'll become friends, blah blah. Poor Merlin is oppressed because the mean King hates magical powers. Which of course is idiotic. If there were people running around who could turn you into a frog, of course you'd try to throw them in a dungeon. Anyone would! Even if it weren't the friggen middle ages! Merlin should already know that. The villagers back in that mudhole must have tried to burn him at the stake a few dozen times by now, right?
The real problem with the show is that it has modern sensibilities. The idea that a King doesn't have the right to summarily execute some peasant for being a witch is a modern idea. In the middle ages, it would have been seen as perfectly okay. Especially if the guy really did have dangerous magic powers. The peasants would have been glad that their King was so good at wiping out threats. That's his job, just as it's their job to toil endlessly to enrich the King.
The insistence on giving a historical show modern sensibilities is a sure sign of a show being dumbed down for the audience. I guess they figure the audience would be confused if the societal rules were radically changed from what they know. Can't assume anyone's ever read a history book, huh?
The problem with the setup of that show is that it's so expected and bland. Merlin and Arthur hate each other but they'll become friends, blah blah. Poor Merlin is oppressed because the mean King hates magical powers. Which of course is idiotic. If there were people running around who could turn you into a frog, of course you'd try to throw them in a dungeon. Anyone would! Even if it weren't the friggen middle ages! Merlin should already know that. The villagers back in that mudhole must have tried to burn him at the stake a few dozen times by now, right?
Or go back to the original source - the legends date back to pre-Roman times. That would be an interesting time period, since so little is known about it. I really hate all the late-Middle-Ages trappings - the clothing, armor, architecture - it's been used for Arthurian legend way too much. I'd prefer anything else, a sci fi version, whatever, to more of the same.
The real problem with the show is that it has modern sensibilities. The idea that a King doesn't have the right to summarily execute some peasant for being a witch is a modern idea. In the middle ages, it would have been seen as perfectly okay. Especially if the guy really did have dangerous magic powers. The peasants would have been glad that their King was so good at wiping out threats. That's his job, just as it's their job to toil endlessly to enrich the King.
The insistence on giving a historical show modern sensibilities is a sure sign of a show being dumbed down for the audience. I guess they figure the audience would be confused if the societal rules were radically changed from what they know. Can't assume anyone's ever read a history book, huh?
well, your first paragraph after the second quote makes it seem like you haven't. King Arthur's a fucking middle ages legend. Knights didn't exist before the Middle Ages. Knights, armour, castles and all that are part and parcel of Arthurian legend. that's why that Keira Knightley Arthur flick was so fucking stupid. it was set in totally the wrong time period and fucked it up.
Yeah, dates back to around 400-500s AD as far as I remember... Where'd you get pre-Roman from Temis?
Aren't Middle ages, Dark ages, and Medieval synonymous?
The medieval romances all write about Arthur in roughly contemporaneous terms. Someone writing about Arthur in the 12th century would describe Arthur's world as something familiar. This was done more for audience convenience than anything; considering the limitations of literacy during the times, shorthanding motivations and descriptions to match with what was then familiar makes the stories, which were often recited orally, more accessible to audiences. Malory, the writer of Morte d'Arthur, took Arthur and gave him a roughly 15th-century setting, for similar reasons. That Malory was also able to use his story to criticize the Wars of the Roses was just bonus.
Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur film attempts to place Arthur in roughly the right time. Germanus and Pelagius were real persons, and Germanus was sent to Britain to combat the Pelagian heresy. Unfortunately, it gets a lot of other details wrong, and places the Saxon invasions (and Badon Hill) a few decades early. The historical Arthur was probably the final gasp of Romano-British culture; the western Roman Empire had fallen, the island was on its own, and the Saxons moved west across the North Sea to take the land. The legends may be more interesting -- and more familiar -- but underneath there's also an interesting story of cultures in conflict.
People who can turn you into a frog can also heal the sick, raise your loved ones from the dead, and and make your barren wife fertile. There are benefits, great benefits, to such powers. Most sane people would not give up these benefits so easily.
Merlin has modern sensibilities, the show, not so much. They go out of their way to paint Uther as a good man doing what he believes is right, even if he has lost all perspective and is, in fact, harming his own people by slaughtering otherwise peaceful people and driving the survivors to acts of terrorism.
yeah, Uther's pretty much a 'divine-right-i've-got-a-bigger-sword-than-you-so-fuck-off' type of king. the fact that he throws Morgana in jail for dissing him shows that.
I was expecting something more epic, not a middle-ages version of smallville.
To me, Dark Ages is from the fall of the Roman Empire to, well, the Renaissance, maybe a little earlier.
Middle Ages/Mediaeval, is from 1000-1100 or so to around 1600.
The Dark Ages are actually only 'dark' because they're so poorly documented. Archaeological evidence recently shows that the time wasn't all out war barbarian plundering as once thought. Though the Vikings and the Normans were abroad...
The Middle Ages, when documentation and records and the like appeared, also advanced medicine and science significantly, to say nothing of Shakespeare and Cervantes.
For all of the above, YMMV. That's what I was taught back in the Dark Ages.
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