The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin

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 mostly isn't boring. 

 

It's a mad gumbo of eras and influences, including Romans, Britons, Druids, Atlantis (!) naff Rennaissance Fayre broadswords and the majestic mountains of East Anglia - but Arthurian tales have always played fast and loose with history and geography. It's also unashamedly Christian: a lot of modern versions locate Arthur at the point where Christianity replaces paganism, but they tend to be sad about it. ('The one God comes to drive out the many gods,' sighs Nicol Williamson's Merlin in Excalibur. 'It's a time for men, and their ways.') The Pendragon Cycle, however, thinks it's literally the best thing ever; all the magic the druids and Celtic wise-women have been doing was just a kind of taster for the miracles of the True God. But the Arthurian legends are Christian stories so it makes sense that the characters take their faith seriously. I never felt they were preaching at me.

 

The series is really a prequel to the familiar Arthurian story, riffing on the legends of Merlin's boyhood and his time as a wild man of the woods. But it kicks off long before even that, with the bard Taliesin, here imagined as a British prince fighting the Picts and Saxons. 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. He clearly read Tolkien too, since his Atlantis is basically Numenor, and the inhabitants, like Numenoreans, are better dressed, better looking, and much longer lived than lesser mortals. Their star bull dancer is a young woman named Charis who is also 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 her fellow survivors move to Britain, where the locals naturally assume they're elves. 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. Here Taliesin and Charis get together, marry, and eventually produce a baby with spooky golden eyes like a hawk: Merlin.

 

All that happens in the first two episodes, and while they're a bit cheesy in places, they have an earnestness and narrative drive which I rather enjoyed. Unfortunately, the pace slows in episodes 3,4, and 5, which jump forward 75 years and get bogged down in politicking between shouty rival kings and warlords - it's obviously building towards a Big Battle, and you wish they'd just get on with it. At the same time, slightly confusing flashbacks keep giving us glimpses of cooler stuff that's been happening in that 75 year gap. It seems that Merlin has been a king, has had and lost a lover, and has lived wild and mad in the woods.When we finally get to see all this properly, in episode 6, the narrative drive kicks in again: it's powerful stuff, and some of the shouty kings become much more interesting once you understand Merlin's relationship with them. I'd have taken a more linear approach myself, but what do I know?
 

When the Big Battle finally arrives in episode 7 it's suitably spectacular. In the aftermath, Uther is annoyed to see his brother getting betrothed to Ygerna, daughter of the king of Cornwall. Merlin senses trouble ahead, and so will anyone who knows the stories. Anyone who doesn't may find it a bit confusing. Hopefully a second series will explain all.

It all looks good, with dramatic Hungarian landscapes standing in fairly convincingly for 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 is well-handled too. (Ryan Whitaker, who directs some of the later episodes, stages his battle scenes like a cut-price Kurosawa). There are a few bits of dialogue that sound too modern ('You're out of line!') but most of it has that slightly heightened quality that reminds you these people are supposed to be speaking in another language, and long ago. 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 excellent as the twitchy, doomed Vortigern, Nicholas Boulton splendidly untrustworthy as the sneaky King Morcant, and Steve Varnom is rather moving as the gruff no-nonsense northern King Custennin. Tom Sharp is an effective Merlin, too.

 

 

Anyway, 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.