5. Merlin: Reincarnated!
Come on. You know you want this to happen, even though it’s silly.
Whether or not Merlin ends with the characters reincarnated in present day (one of our major theories, though it may be a crackpot one), there’s nothing we’d like more than to see the exact same cast gather together and continue to portray the characters we’ve fallen in love with for the past five years.
And maybe the actors are right and there’s nothing left to tell of the story… but then, hey, why not just start it all over in the present day? Tabula rasa!
Let’s set the scene: The events of Merlin are summed up in a hazy dream; we see the characters live, love and die as Camelot stands and falls and the passing of time sees the landscapes paved with roads and the monsters retreat to the depths of the earth as magic seeps out of the land.
An alarm clock beeps loudly and Merlin Emrys wakes up in his cramped London flat. Damn, he’s gonna be late for his PhD seminar again! He hurries out, wondering what those crazy dreams he’s been having are all about… only to run head-first into Arthur Pendragon, stuffy businessman who has absolutely no time for a lazy student with wrinkled clothes who’s spouting off about destiny and royalty and all kinds of crap.
Throw in Merlin’s best friend Gwen and her brother Elyan, Arthur’s raucous football buddies Percy, Gwaine and Leon, his posh and haughty sister Morgana, the sexy foreign exchange student Lance and Arthur’s stern, controlling father Uther, and you’ve got yourself Merlin: Reincarnated!. Yes, the exclamation point is very important for capturing the tone of the story, which is fun and frivolous, and we’re actually half considering pitching this as a musical instead.
If this sounds like the beginning of a fanfic, it’s cause it probably is. The fandom has embraced the reincarnation idea from the very beginning, imagining the characters in modern settings, and having them rediscovering their destinies and their relationships to each other – and while an AU timeline is a very popular fanfic trope across all fandoms, we can’t help but think that in the case of Merlin, it might actually work.
Let’s forget for a second that this has about a 0.1% likelihood of actually happening in real life, considering that the actors probably wouldn’t be on board, and that it’d be super cheesy.
The reincarnation idea is actually a big part of Arthurian Legends, and it has often been said that King Arthur will return when Britain again has need of him. And seeing as Merlin very intentionally tried to modernise the legend and make the characters behave in a very contemporary manner, it is very easy to imagine them actually existing in present time.
It’d be a chance to (re-)reinvent the legend, too. The short-lived Starz series Camelot failed because it tried to tell a very well-known story in a very unimaginative way, but Merlin: Reincarnated! would take the legends we love and re-contextualize them, making them even more relevant for modern audiences than even Merlin itself did.
Plus, in this beautiful alternate reality in which this show would actually exist, we’d get to keep the entire ensemble cast, which we can’t imagine that any fans would have a problem with. Let’s Reincarnate!
Now it’s your turn
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You can read all about A Month of Merlin right here on Hypable, and check out the other columns we’ve done so far. If you want to submit your own piece, go here!
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