The DailyWire+’s adaptation of Stephen R. Lawhead’s The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin dropped on Amazon Prime, providing us with a Season 1 (7 episode) dramatization of Merlin’s rise to fame.
I grew up watching Excalibur, John Boorman’s 1981 saga of Arthur Pendragon and his Camelot, and we haven’t seen its like since then. Our heads were turned by Star Wars (pantheism in space), Star Trek (science in space), the Lord of the Rings (Christian values in Middle Earth), Harry Potter (Christian values among witches), Game of Thrones (a terrifying but moral universe developed by atheists nurtured by a Christian culture) and other tales, but nothing approaching the legends of old that mixed with Christianity to form Western Civilization.
As such, I hope the series takes off, finds more funding, engages a new generation of viewers and advances the “Kingdom of Summer” in our current time of discontent, foreign invasion, and pagan influence.
That said, Christian fantasy is a genre with a bad reputation, well deserved. The characters tend toward allegory and the plots are simple, relying on spectacle, sentimentality, and nostalgia to win the day. They haven’t been critical darlings, and tend to be niche, the property of a Christian subculture while our nations bathe in anti-heroes, woke politics and historic revisionism that crater so much intellectual property.
Again, THAT is why I want The Pendragon Cycle to do well! The Daily Wire is a conservative-leaning organization fighting an increasingly left-leaning Hollywood machine. But as I’ve expressed in other articles, the challenge Christian content has in impacting our culture isn’t necessarily political, but literary. They don’t get the story right.
The Rise of Merlin, Reaction and Analysis by Episode
To enjoy the full weight of the story, watch the originals. YouTube’s policies force me to severely edit and obscure the material to avoid copyright issues. I try to maintain the important plot elements, but do seek out the full episodes on Amazon Prime or DailyWire+ to encompass the great orations of the “Kingdom of Summer.”
Episodes 1-2 — Origins. A prince rescues a mysterious child from a river in post-Roman Britain, destined to become the bard Taliesin, while across the sea Atlantean princess Charis survives the fall of her civilization. Their forbidden love, and Charis’s conversion to Christianity, sets the prophecy in motion that will eventually produce Merlin.
Episodes 3-4 — Escalation. Decades later, an adult Merlin emerges from the wilderness as a prophet and power broker, negotiating alliances and confronting tyrants while the “Sons of Constance” — Aurelius and Uther — work to unite Britain’s fractured tribes against Saxon invasion.
Episodes 5-6 — Convergence. Flashbacks fill in Merlin’s mysterious lost years and his slow-aging Atlantean heritage, while the political alliance nears a breaking point and Merlin returns to a divided kingdom to meet Ganieda, the woman who will test his destiny.
Episode 7 — The Finale. Britain gathers for war. Merlin crowns Aurelius High King rather than claim power himself — but the same sibling rivalry that once tore Charis and Morgian apart resurfaces between the Pendragon brothers, seeding the tragedy still to come.
Doing YouTube reactions is a different experience for me. We writers prefer to meditate on material and compose thoughts over time. That’s not what YouTube wants. I have to be emotionally present, articulate, and opinionated on the spot! That typically means the most immediate thoughts spill out and some of the more significant ideas remain suppressed until I’m falling asleep or taking a shower.
Primary Notes on the story
I reacted as best I could, though rambling. Here are my concise notes:
- The first episode failed to ground the audience properly, causing both mystery and confusion. Confusion breeds apathy, but I persisted. I guessed at what I didn’t grasp, and I was usually right. That means the writers let the audience get ahead of the story
- Merlin’s “ghost” (the backstory that haunts him in the present) is failing to save Ganieda and the horror at harming her father Custennin. He believes these make him unfit to be king of his envisioned Kingdom of Summer. The problem is, neither are his fault. Nor would they prevent him ruling effectively
- Ganieda as “insta-wife.” There was no impediments or friction in their relationship. Does she represent the “normal life” option as opposed to his calling to bring about the Kingdom of Summer? Actually, nope. Perhaps she should be! That’s what this season is about, so her character should be used to define, or serve as counterpoint to, the hero’s journey
- I think the true antagonist and villain of Season 1 (and perhaps the entire series that I haven’t read) is Morgian. She doesn’t have enough screen time with direct (or even indirect) conflict with Merlin
- Deus ex Machina: the entire season turns on the decision of a minor character – Morgian’s stepson Lot – totally unrelated to Merlin. That makes it seem like we followed the wrong character over 7 episodes. Sure, he’s boring but he’s the one who makes the moral decision that resolves the story’s Essential Question!
Again, the series is still worth watching, but these are story problems that writers need to overcome.
Fixing Pendragon Cycle Season 1
In my Pre-Script Pro-Strategy Seminar, I discuss ways of viewing the story to avoid these pitfalls. Primary among them is to understand how to set up and deal with the “ghost,” the thing that’s haunting our protagonist and preventing him from success.
Simply, a story is about a protagonist Merlin who WANTS to usher in the Kingdom of Summer but he NEEDS to overcome his GHOST in order to succeed. He has set up COPING MECHANISMS, ways to keep him safe, but they’ve outlived their usefulness and they’re preventing him from a full life.
The plot, therefore, runs on two tracks:
- Merlin assembling a fighting force to defeat the Saxons
- Characters in conflict slam his coping mechanisms until he recognizes them and takes a new moral action
Currently, Merlin’s coping mechanisms involve “Don’t ask me again” and silence. But we continue as ALL of his relationships ask him why he’s not king, and he doesn’t have a good answer. We NEVER get a satisfying answer.
But we the audience know Merlin has to resolve the story. In the final battle, he prays and argues with Morgian, but the story turns on Lot betraying the Saxons. That works only if we connect Merlin’s prayer to Lot’s moral struggle.
That is, Morgian has poisoned Lot’s mind, making him think the only way to survive is to join the Saxons. He presents the Saxon king a gift from Morgian that we never see. We need to, and it should be Morgian’s vision of Aurelius’ battle plan involving the marsh.
What we should have seen is Merlin “clouding Morgian’s mind” to his true plan: to use Morgian’s deceit to trick the Saxon king into Aurelius’ hands. And that plan works because he’s calling on God to change Lot’s mind at the right time.
That’s it in a nutshell. How that gets dramatized is the actual task of the writers. Again, they didn’t do that.
The Deus Ex Machina Trap
I explain “God from machine” in Episode 7. It’s anything other than the main character turning the story. The challenge in a Christian fantasy is that the true source of power is GOD HIMSELF and/or a fantasy element within the story world. How is a protagonist supposed to resolve the story conflict while contending with those influences?
Most Christian stories don’t satisfy because they’re unable to dramatize — to externalize with conflict — an internal struggle. It’s easier to have God intervene – a MIRACLE! But stories aren’t built on miracles, but memesis: man in action.
If your protagonist receives a download — a vision, miracle, or random providential rescue — the writer solves the story problem without plot, without a series of events leading to character change, and that kills tension, and the audience.
As I’ve consulted with many writers, the answer is that God’s intervention is never the last line. It serves to open up the protagonist’s field of vision, to look beyond his ghost, his pain, his limited perspective, and gives him the clarity needed to take a new moral action, but it’s still the protagonist’s job to TAKE THAT ACTION!
Dramatizing a Faith Journey Without Flattening It
Conversion and faith are internal, gradual, and often quiet. In other words, difficult to dramatize. Not every character gets a “Damascus road conversion” like Taliesin. Merlin doesn’t. Or does he?
Merlin’s struggle is poorly defined. He holds great power but hates his propensity to massacre. Is that why he doesn’t think he’ll be a great king? Or that he can’t hold both great power and responsibility (I mean, hasn’t he seen Spiderman)?
Lesser writers would compress a faith journey into a single emotional scene: a character struggles, then has a vision or a conversation, then believes, fully and permanently, from that point forward.
We must do better. We use coping mechanisms that manifest as doubt, fear, anger, avoidance, but are revealed to be universal human struggles like guilt, pain of losing love, losing control, losing our way in the world. We don’t overcome those in one scene. They require faith, patience, false steps, experiments and paths to nowhere.
Like life, they require multiple scenes where a protagonists takes his lumps, counts the costs, recognizes his conflict with others for what it is, calls for Divine guidance, listens to wise counsel, and takes moral actions.
Charis’s conversion in the early episodes is more compelling than Taliesin’s blinding visions. We see her carry both her old grief and her new faith at once, rather than becoming a new character overnight.
Promoting Values Without Preaching Them
There’s a difference between a story that embodies a value and one that announces it. I’m always picking on this example: Denzel in The Book of Eli, where Eli slaughters his way through a wasteland to protect a book, only to declare at the end that it’s better to give than receive. (Record scratch!)
The STORY IS THE MESSAGE.
Don’t be like CS Lewis and fall into preachy dialog or “Jesus porn” because, God forbid, someone in the audience might not grasp your theme. Take the pains to infuse your ideas into the core of your story so let it work.
Some context is important. I don’t know what the “Last True Bard” means to Merlin, and Taliesin as bard was never fully realized so we don’t grasp Merlin’s job in Episode 7. We’re more comfortable with him using his magic to kill Saxons! Again, take the pains to explain as needed, but it’s best through characters in conflict.
Why This Is Worth Getting Right
A clumsy Christian fantasy (or other genre) doesn’t just violate story rules, and it doesn’t just reduce the audience and potentially lose money. Actually, most Christian films make their money back if they can find their well-defined audience where they gather: church. Unlike social media and other traditional marketing channels, Hollywood can’t compete on holy ground.
Christian stories fail when they make the faith journey look cheap. Or unrealistic. Or simplistic.
God bless the writers working this Pendragon Cycle. As I’ve said, I hope they are inspired and funded to complete this legendary tale.
What do you think? If you have thoughts, start a conversation on X or YouTube. It helps the algorithm and lets my justify all this movie watching.