Annoyingly, my laptop is now so antiquated that it seems incapable of swiping new pictures off the internet, so here's a random Arthur picture from an earlier post..
I hadn't been planning to watch The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin, partly because it has two titles and they're both bad, but mostly because I felt I'd got Arthurian things out of my system for a while by making Gwenevere. But I had a look at it out of curiosity, and I think it's at least as good as most of the films and TV shows I reviewed in my Arthurian Films series on here a few years ago.
Based on a series of novels by Stephen Lawhead (which I haven't read), The Pendragon Cycle has been brought to your telly screens by a dodgy-looking American right wing outfit called The Daily Wire, and is overseen by writer/director Jeremy Boreing. One has to admire the sheer nerve it must have taken to make a career in the entertainment industry with a name like 'Boreing', it's just such easy ammunition for the critics. But luckily The Pendragon Cycle isn't boring. Nor, on the strength of the first six episodes, does it seem particularly right wing. It is unashamedly Christian, but the Arthurian legends are Christian stories so having characters talk earnestly and approvingly about God seems perfectly appropriate – I never felt they were preaching at me.
Anyway, like most Arthurian re-tellings TPC:TROM is a mad gumbo of different historical eras and influences. Unlike most, this one kicks off long before Arthur's birth, with the bard Taliesin, here imagined as a British prince fighting the Picts and Saxons alongside Romans led by Magnus Maximus. Meanwhile in Atlantis (!) there's a whole lot of Cretan-style bull dancing going on – I detect that, like me, Mr Lawhead read Mary Renault's The King Must Die at an impressionable age. And The Lord of the Rings must have featured in his reading too, because his Atlanteans are basically Numenoreans. The star bull dancer is a young woman named Charis who turns out to be a princess. It seems a bit careless to put members of your royal family in the path of charging bulls on a regular basis, but later on she mentions something about having been estranged from her father so maybe it's a teenage rebellion type of thing.
Atlantis promptly explodes and sinks, so Charis and the other survivors move to Britain, where they are better dressed, better looking and much longer lived than the locals, who regard them as elves or fairies. Somewhere on the Glastonbury/Gondor border they build a fancy white citadel called Ynys Afallach, featuring architecture which no one else will even imagine for another 500 years or so. Here Taliesin and Charis get together, marry, and eventually produce a baby with spooky golden eyes like a hawk: Merlin himself. In episode 3 we hop ahead 75 years and land in more familiar territory, with Merlin being called in by King Vortigern to explain his falling-down-castle problem, and meeting the brothers Ambrosius and Uther who are trying to build an alliance against the Saxons...
It all looks good, with dramatic Hungarian landscapes standing in fairly convincingly for 4th and 5th Century Britain, and it feels much more real and tactile than bigger-budget shows like the ghastly Rings of Power, perhaps because the budget is smaller and it has to rely less on effects and more on real people doing real things in real places. A lot of the action very well-handled too. (Ryan Whitaker, who directs some of the later episodes, stages battle scenes like a cut-price Kurosawa). I don't know where they found the actors, few of whom I recognised, but there are some great faces among the cast. (Colin Cunningham is great as the twitchy, doomed Vortigern, and Nicholas Boulton splendidly untrustworthy as the sneaky King Morcant).
There are a few lines that sound a bit too modern ('You're out of line!') but most of the dialogue has that slightly heightened quality that reminds you these people are speaking in another language, and long ago.The structure is rather more of a problem: episodes 3,4, and 5 get a bit bogged down in politicking between rival kings and warlords. Meanwhile, slightly confusing flashbacks reveal that Merlin has been a king, has had and lost a lover, and has lived wild and mad in the woods. When we actually get to see these things happening in episode 6, it's much more compelling. I'd have put most of that in episode 3, but what do I know.
Anyway, what matters is that at least once an episode there was a moment or an image that reminded me why I love this stuff. And the bits between those moments were mostly pretty entertaining. It reminded me of Robin of Sherwood, which I used to watch on my landlady's TV on Saturday evenings in my first year at art college: a slightly guilty pleasure, but a pleasure all the same.
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