Episode: Camelot 1.07 – “The Long Night”
Original Air Date: April 13, 2011
Morgan puts on a feast for Arthur and his Knights over at Castle Pendragon, which quickly turns to bedlam as the castle seemingly comes under “attack”. As Arthur and Morgan’s men join forces to fight, Morgan schemes and plots right out in the open for all to see if they bothered to look.
I’m going to be honest with you all. This was absolutely, hands down the worst hour of television I have ever sat through in my entire 30 years on this planet. And I’m including those times I watched episodes of Perfect Strangers. I literally cannot wrap my brain around the fact that people actually got paid to create this, that’s how atrocious I thought this ep was, and I apologize for the fact that this review is basically just about what I didn’t like. I usually don’t like doing that in a review, but I’ve got nothing I liked about this episode. It starts out with Morgan catching some random creep we’ve never seen before jerking it outside her bedroom/bathroom while she’s bathing and it continues to roll downhill at an ever-increasing speed from there on out.
My first problem with this episode was the fact that Arthur continues to have a super massive black hole-sized blindspot when it comes to Morgan and her glaringly obvious ill intentions. I understand Merlin’s reasons for not having any protests about everyone heading across the street to Castle Pendragon. He wants another chance to find out what she’s up to. However, as the episode drags on he, for reasons that are absolutely not known to the viewer, completely forgets that Morgan is up to something and totally buys her poorly played out plot like everyone else from Camelot. I thought having Kay right up front be like, “This chick is the reason our parents are dead and we can’t trust her so why are we feasting with her again?” was fantastic because I felt that finally someone had pulled their head out and had started using it to think instead of to sit on. That lasted until Morgan got them all drunk and had boobies flashed about by what I think was supposed to be the Medieval version of Ladies of the Pole. Yeah. He has a problem with the person who had his parents killed until the opportunity to have drunken sex with her back alley sallies pops up. The only one who went in with misgivings about Morgan and basically kept them throughout this long episode was Igraine. Too bad she’s more about talk than action, and even then the talk isn’t aggressive enough to get everyone out of this sinkhole of a plot and save herself from her eventual fate. Which was another thing that really irritated me — the fact that not a single person, not even Merlin, noticed that Igraine wasn’t herself at the end of the episode. That right there was just full on ridiculous because by the time they all got back to Camelot, Igraine/Morgan was practically twirling her bad guy mustache. So obvious it was painful.
My second problem was the siege plot itself. It was poorly played out and in no real life situation would anyone trained for leading or combat have fallen for that. I refuse to believe that people during the time period this is supposed to happen in would be this stupid when it came to a supposed assault on the castle they are lodging in. First, there’s the mysterious fire that just pops up in one place and that’s all that happens. A few fire arrows hit an area of thatched roof …. and then nothing. I mean, what kind of siege is this supposed to be? They get all the troops together and hang around. Then, the creeper from the beginning of the ep rides in wounded claiming to have scouted a host of men preparing for an attack. Wait, what was the fire arrows thing a few scenes ago? Morgan takes this opportunity to send out a handful of her men to “surprise attack” this Old Wolf. Because ten dudes are going to overtake a host of battle ready men.
At least Gawain agreed with me, and I felt like he was going to be the one to pull this episode out of the “OMFG, are you even kidding me with this stupidity” realm it have swan dived into at about five minutes in. He did not. He let Leontes talk him out of going out to where Old Wolf supposedly was gearing up and talked him into staying at Castle Pendragon. So, instead of figuring out they’d all been duped in the most rudimentary way, they waited around all night for a whole lot of nothing to happen. When morning comes, only one guy who rode out during the night came back, claiming everyone else died in the fight (which they won, by the way). Everyone takes his word for it and no one goes out to the battlefield to verify. That right there was the most egregious act that happened in this episode for me. That no one would either go out there to find proof Old Wolf was killed or (more importantly and time period accurately) go out there and collect all the swords, shields, armor, or anything that would have had value and import back in those days is a serious misstep in detail when trying to give a story such as this a sense of authenticity in reality.
In the end, this was all a poorly conceived reason for Morgan to turn into Igraine and infiltrate Camelot to create the rift between Leontes and Guinevere/Arthur that we’ve all been waiting for since episode 1. Unfortunately, after this episode, I don’t care if Santa Claus shows up and grants everyone their Christmas wish of clean teeth and for that burning itch to go away because this one episode pretty much killed any reason I was watching this series instead of the ten thousand other shows/movies about the Arthurian legend that don’t need to rely on sex scenes or drawn out traveling scenes to fill out a 50-minute hour.
Rating: 1 / 5 Stars
