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- TV Series: Merlin
- Episode: A Remedy to Cure All Ills
- Starring: Colin Morgan, Bradley James, Richard Wilson, Anthony Head
- Written By: Julian Jones
- Directed By: Ed Fraiman
- Network: NBC
- Series:
Merlin: A Remedy to Cure All Ills
If it Sounds to Good to be True it Probably is By
Stephen Lackey
July 14, 2009
Mania reviews NBC's Merlin: A Remedy to Cure All Ills(2009).
© NBC-Universal
Merlin continues to be a series without surprises. Some viewers may take comfort in that. You know the viewers I’m talking about, the ones that made a horribly uninteresting series like According to Jim a hit. I’m a LOST and Battlestar Galactica fan myself so I expect more out of my science fiction and fantasy. This episode isn’t terrible once it gets moving but it again, like previous installments, isn’t a new story. The basic story here has been told over and over again. I mention that it’s not terrible “once it gets going” because the opening moments of the episode are horribly assembled and augmented by terrible sound design. Everything that happens prior to the opening credits looks and sounds like a big mess.
A mysterious scarred doctor appears at the gates of Camelot at the same time as Morgana has taken ill. Gaius hasn’t been able to make any progress with her and if something isn’t done soon it appears that she will die. The mysterious doctor tells Arthur that he has a cure and after some convincing the king allows Arthur to bring the doctor into the castle to try and help Morgana.
What follows is a by the numbers sort of story where the new guys subtly makes the current guy appear to be a failure. The goals of the mysterious doctor are the same as we’ve seen time and time again even if his methods are a bit different than in other series. We do see that Merlin isn’t the only person to visit the last remaining dragon locked away under Camelot for advice. The difference is that the dragon, played by John Hurt doesn’t seem to hold as “warm” a place in his heart from Gaius as he does Merlin. Through exchanges with the mysterious scarred doctor and the dragon a bit more information about Gaius’ past is revealed. At another point, the King almost apologizes to Gaius for some of the things he has ordered Gaius to do over the years they’ve been together. Part of the point of the slow reveal of these characters past deeds is supposed to build depth for these characters over the length of the series but the truth is if we knew everything now, maybe they would all be more interesting. At this point, we know just enough of the basics so that character actions make sense. The writers should really consider making these back-stories a part of the storytelling process rather than a tool of plot design just to make twists in stories feel plausible. Most of the characters on the show still at this point just feel wooden, lacking any real depth. Taking into account the familiarity of the story once things get rolling the story is inoffensive enough and maybe younger viewers could really like the story overall. There are just a few eye candy moments of magic use here too.
Merlin is the Smallville retelling of the King Arthur story and for some people, that’s just fine and for others it’s disgusting. It took me quite a while to settle into the destruction of a great classic story and seeing it rebuilt into a soap opera/after school special version with Smallville. The thing that made that redo acceptable in the early seasons was that some of the characters were fun to watch and honestly some of the stories, regardless of how different they were from the mythology, were still fun. For me, Smallville has already sort of crashed and burned over the last few years and Merlin is in that same spot but that show has only been on one season.
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I'm getting ever so close to agreeing. I found myself bored byt this episode.