![]() ![]() While voiced brilliantly by John Hurt, the dragon looks like he was animated on a Sega Saturn the dodgy effects add an oddly comforting sense of camp to the show, saving it from a burdensome need to be taken seriously. Hotels near Merlin Theatre: (0.13 mi) Mercure Sheffield Kenwood Hall & Spa (0.23 mi) OYO The Briary (0.60 mi) Brocco on the Park (0.46 mi) The Psalter (0.28 mi) The Old Coach House. Practically every episode features Merlin convening with the last of the great dragons, which lays imprisoned beneath the castle. There’s a refreshing lack of pretense to the show’s presentation: Each episode boasts a new beast ripped from the pages of legend, be they giant spiders, fairy-like Sidhe, or a plague-spawning Afanc, and because of the show’s relative low budget and BBC-quality production values, the CG used in constructing these monsters harks back to Jason battling Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonauts. It’s all quite familiar territory to the genre, and the shreds of overarching plot sprinkled throughout each episode do little to alleviate the nagging sense that the show is heading exactly where it seems to be. Much like Smallville, from which this show draws major influences, Merlin and his friends must fell magical monsters of the week through trickery and cunning, all while keeping Merlin’s own sorcery a well guarded secret. Merlins Magic Shop and Theater in New Port Richey, Florida, welcomes professional and budding magicians to visit their shop for the ultimate magic. Merlin follows the titular wizard as a young man (played by Colin Morgan) when he first arrives in Camelot, a kingdom where magic is outlawed and Arthur (Bradley James) stands as a mere prince. It is testament to the sharpness of the writing and demonstrably evident it is written purely with the audience’s entertainment in mind, something occasionally lost in some productions. ![]() Make no mistake: Merlin is just the type of show where a knight on horseback skewers a griffin with a glowing lance. The hot potato is constantly passed to one another and the meta-in-jokes might tick the box for corny and clich, but they landtime after time. While popular sci-fi and fantasy shows like Heroes and Lost have been successfully marketed to a wider, largely non-genre audience, the 13-episode British import maintains a niche appeal limited solely to fantasy fans. It seems odd, then, that Syfy’s parent company, NBC, would go on to pick up the shamelessly geeky swords-and-sorcery series Merlin to lead its Summertime Sunday night lineup.
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