Episode: Camelot 1.08 – “Igraine”
Original Air Date: May 20, 2011
Morgan hides in plain sight as Igraine so she can begin her plan to drive a wedge between Arthur and his men by being obviously not Igraine and telling Leontes that Arthur and Guinevere slept together before he got hitched to her.
Down the road, Igraine tries to find a way out of Castle Pendragon and gets harassed by a nun and raped (because this is a Starz series so there has to be at least one sometime during a season). Yeah, this was a real winner of an episode.
Okay. So, after the last episode, I wasn’t expecting the remainder of the season to be anything more than something to grit my teeth through since I’m committed to doing reviews of the show for Fandomania. I was right. Basically, this was “A Day In The Life Of” with Morgan/Igraine doing a crap load of evil mustache twirling with everyone (even freaking Merlin!) falling for her ruse as I had predicted. I think the thing that got me the most irritated was the fact that Merlin slept with Morgan/Igraine. Now, part of me wants to believe there’s no way he didn’t know that was really Morgan in an Igraine suit, especially since we found out that he knew Morgan was pulling crap on them in the previous episode with that shoddy siege fakeout. The other part of me isn’t going to hold my breath because the way this show is going it’s going to turn out that he had no clue because NO ONE had a clue. Guinevere didn’t pick up on it when Morgan/Igraine was prodding for details (out of character), the orphan boy didn’t pick up on it when she was being stand-offish (out of character), and Leontes didn’t pick up on it when she was dropping bombs in the church about Guinevere and Arthur (out of character). Everything she did was so out of character, I couldn’t even fake suspension of disbelief to get halfway into a majority of this episode. However, there were a few things I did think were interesting.
The first thing was Sybil trying to get Igraine to confess her sins. This is a good example of something that irritated me and interested me at the same time. I found it irritating because Sybil was standing there, accusing Igraine of being a whore who has a bastard son and blah blah blah the standard slut-shaming. I found it interesting because I thought it was known what Uther did to get Igraine (this also added to the irritation because we know what happened to her). By all regards, Uther was a bastard and maybe Igraine was trying to do Morgan a solid by not trying to get Uther to keep her in the family/court. We don’t know, all we know at this point is that Igraine wasn’t going to go against her king. Before the scene ends, we do get to see Igraine go into action and try to strangle Sybil unsuccessfully.
The other thing was when Vivian starts to find out what’s going on in Castle Pendragon. There have been a few times where Vivian has had that look on her face like she is seriously doubting her employment. As is the case here. She tells Sybil that she is faithful to Morgan, but I don’t think that they’re talking about the same kind of faithful here because Vivian lets Igriane escape. I do believe Vivian cares greatly for Morgan and can see that she is hurt inside and lonely and a bunch of other things that make life harder or unpleasant for herself, and I think that makes her want to be a faithful friend to Morgan. I don’t think that means she’ll follow Morgan down the path she’s going or encourage Morgan to go down it (like Sybil is). It should be interesting to see where this goes for her.
While the boys are out camping and doing manny-man-man things (talks of a rough outline of the Knights of the Roundtable were had), Leontes has an interesting encounter. The wolf that visited Morgan when Lot had her tied up came to visit Leontes. It didn’t do anything but kind of stalk him and then disappear. Later, it shows up in a mirror while Morgan/Igraine and Merlin are having sex, but it’s never really said what it means when it shows up. I guess we could interpret it in a traditional way (i.e., it’s a wolf and black so it must be evil or a demon), and it might be a safe conclusion to jump to with this show, but I’m hoping it means something a bit more interesting than that.
Finally, this wasn’t as much interesting as completely adorable. That little orphan boy could have melted a frost giant’s heart. I liked that his thread in the episode was to show or tell Morgan that she’s welcome in Camelot, everyone’s welcome in Camelot, and there were a few times where it looked like it might stick with her but didn’t. I think the way they have this character set up, she’s just too reliant on her anger and hatred that to give it up and be happy would be impossible. She is her father’s daughter to the extreme and it’s destructive to not only those in her way but to herself ultimately. The fact that she killed the orphan boy and left his body on the ground overnight showed her lack of compassion and redemption, in my opinion, and I think having Merlin say that whoever killed the boy deserved to be burnt ruined any chance of her getting the message of what Camelot is supposed to represent.
Rating: 2 / 5 Stars
