As Merlin winds to a close, fans are beginning to worry about how the show will actually end. Read our top 5 theories and vote for your favourite!
We here at Hypable have decided to embrace the fact that Merlin is ending in less than a month by kicking off A Month of Merlin: celebrating the BBC series with a variety of different columns examining the show’s past, present and future.
A few days ago we posted the article The 5 biggest plot points that need to be resolved, and had a staggering amount of feedback! But most of you seem to believe that there’s no way the BBC series will actually satisfy us before the end… which begs the question, just how will it actually end?
Selina Wilken and Pamela Gocobachi have joined forces to bring you these five theories about how Capps, Murphy and the BBC might be planning to wrap it all up on December 24. Check out what we have to say, then cast your vote as to which theory is most likely to come true – and tell us in the comments what you think will happen!
1. The ret-con: Would the real King Arthur please stand up?
Destiny is a tricky thing. Yet it also seems like by the show’s definition, it cannot be avoided. So far, everything that has been prophesied has come true, despite (or because) of Merlin’s attempts to avoid it. So it stands to reason that while Arthur is destined to die at Mordred’s hand, his joint destiny with Merlin which sees them uniting all of Albion will also have to happen in some way.
But barring a time jump/flash forward, there’s no way all of this can happen before the finale, right? Well, no, unless the Arthur we know is not actually the Arthur who will unite Albion. Think about it: the biggest discrepancy the show has made as far as the legends go is to make Arthur and Merlin the same age. We’ve seen a lot of things go from AU to Arthurian canon over the course of the series, including Morgana starting good but turning evil and Guinevere going from servant to queen, so perhaps this is another aspect which will have aligned itself with the legends by the end.
Here’s what will happen: Mordred kills Arthur at Camlann, as the prophecy says. But Gwen is pregnant, and gives birth to a son she names after his father. And it turns out that this is in fact the Arthur whom the dragon was referring to when he told Merlin that he and the king were two halves of a whole, and that they would unite Albion together. This would also make sense Arthurian legends-wise, because there is more than one historical figure who is said to have been THE King Arthur, and some say that the different people each embody one aspect of him. As such, Bradley James’ Arthur would be King Arthur, yes, and a lot of the original legends would refer to him (Uther being his father, Guinevere being his wife, and Lancelot, Gwaine etc. being his knights), but parts of the story – specifically the parts about Merlin helping him become the Once and Future King – would refer to his son. Arthur 2.0, if you will.
We’re gonna go out on a limb here and say that very few fans would be happy if this actually happened. Not only would it essentially nullify the “destiny aspect” of the Arthur/Merlin relationship, leaving a lot of viewers feeling very cheated, but it would also ret-con the entire series. We’d have to go back and look at every prophecy made about “Arthur,” and everything Kilgarrah ever told Merlin, and determine whether it was said about original!Arthur or Arthur Jr. We’d have to accept that we’d been essentially taken for a ride for five years, all for one spectacular bait-and-switch ending.
But despite the outrage from fans, and the inevitable plot holes that’d result from the twist, it would be a huge “gotcha!” moment and we’re not sure the writers would be able to resist that.
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