We know that stories shape how we see the world—especially stories filled with kings, prophets, and the promise of a better kingdom. In this conversation, Laura reflects on the adaptation of Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle, a series that attempts to bring together Arthurian legend, Christian imagination, and the enduring appeal of myth. With a careful balance between appreciation and critique (not an easy task), she explores the show’s moments of beauty alongside its struggles with pacing, character, and theological coherence. Along the way, the discussion turns to deeper questions: What makes a story truly enchanting? Can myth still carry truth without becoming heavy-handed? And what might it look like for Christian storytelling to recover both imagination and depth in an age often marked by division and fatigue? Drawing on the thought of the Inklings and the enduring power of mythopoeia, Laura invites us to ask not only whether this is a successful adaptation, but whether Christian storytelling today still knows how to delight as well as instruct.
Our reviewer’s bio:
Laura Van Dyke, Ph.D., teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing and in the Foundations program at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C. Her doctoral work focused on twentieth-century and contemporary British literature, with a focus on what alchemical metaphysics has to offer literary representations of materiality. She is a co-editor of The Inklings and Culture (2020), the first essay collection to treat all seven Inklings-related authors, and is an executive advisor of the Inklings Institute of Canada, housed at Trinity Western University, which hosts regular evening lectures and discussions about the life and writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers.
Names mentioned:
Stephen Lawhead, Harvey Weinstein, Rose Reid, Jeremy Boreing, Saint Patrick, George R. R. Martin, C. S. Lewis, Frederick Buechner, T. S. Eliot, Max Weber, Baldur, Joseph Campbell, J. R. R. Tolkien, Horace, Walter Hooper
Characters from the Pendragon Cycle mentioned: Avallach, Hengist, Denethor, Morgain, Uther, Ambrosius, Merlin, Taliesin, Charis, Ganieda, King Pelles, Igraine.
Books, texts, and works mentioned:
The Pendragon Cycle (by Stephen Lawhead)
Taliesin (by Stephen Lawhead)
Merlin (by Stephen Lawhead)
That Hideous Strength (by C. S. Lewis)
The Lord of the Rings (by J. R. R. Tolkien)
Brendan (by Frederick Buechner)
Godric (by Frederick Buechner)
Miracles (by C. S. Lewis)
“Myth Became Fact” (essay by C. S. Lewis)
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (edited by Walter Hooper)
Ars Poetica (by Horace)
Wheel of Time (TV adaptation reference)
The Witcher (TV adaptation reference)
Sword of Shannara (TV adaptation reference)
Legend of the Seeker (TV series)
Radix: Thank you so much for doing this! It’s always both fun and enlightening to hear your thoughts. Before we even get into the show itself, how much do you think its reception has been shaped by who produced it—namely the Daily Wire? And if we bracket that out, how does it stand purely as storytelling?
Laura: I think this is a good question to start with. I might begin by thinking about whether the Daily Wire is worse than . . . insert any other film studio run by people probably worse than Harvey Weinstein. In conversations with people, especially other fantasy readers who I know liked the Stephen Lawhead books, I’ve asked if they’ve watched the show and I’ve heard over and over, well I wish I could but I refuse to give the Daily Wire my money. I have no horse in this race because I’m a millennial so I pay for my avocados but not for my entertainment, but I am curious whether there are any major film studios that are in morally-pure territory.
I think it’s interesting that this show could only get made, seemingly, by something like the Daily Wire. Why didn’t other studios go for it? What does that say about the two-America problem, with two different halftime shows? We’re not even watching the same entertainment anymore. But yes, I think the reception of the show so far has been completely shaped by the fact that it came from the Daily Wire. So on the one hand, you have rabidly loyal fans who are claiming this is the best show ever made, and then on the other hand you have people who hate everything the Daily Wire stands for who refuse to even watch it.
I’ll just say right away, I didn’t love it: but I also didn’t hate it. It seemed equal parts boring and incoherent at times, and then also had moments of beauty that were really moving, and I enjoyed some of the scenes especially finally seeing great moments from the books on screen in a visual medium. I’m interested to see how the series will end up sitting as time goes on—whether it’s able to transcend its pigeon-holing as conservative Christian media.
It seems like the showrunner and writers were at least aware of the problem of how Christians often make just bad art, and reduce stories to message-driven propaganda, which is a good sign: Rose Reid, for instance, who plays Charis and is credited as a co-writer on two of the episodes, said in an interview with The Telegraph that “One of the biggest problems with Christian film is that there is something about being preached to or being forced into a conversation. Maybe there is a message, but you let the audience find that message. You don’t shove it down their throats.”
So I’m not sure how you felt, in terms of whether Jeremy Boreing and his team were “shoving a message” down your throat, but I’d say they do succeed here in not making the story overly preachy—which is a real feat, because as much as I enjoy the novels for what they are, the source material they were working from, Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle, does at times decline into simply preaching.
Radix: I have read a good number of critics call this show confusing or uneven, especially early on. Did the narrative feel coherent to you, or did it struggle?
Laura: There were for sure pacing issues, and amateur writing especially at the start of the season; partly, the problem to my mind was that they were trying to tackle two novels in one seven-episode season, which is pretty ambitious. The first two episodes cover Lawhead’s novel Taliesin, and then the next five episodes of the season cover the second novel in the series, Merlin. This made for some choppy and uneven storytelling.
When I sat down to watch the first episode, and there’s Charis doing gymnastics tricks with a bull and she looks like a gladiator but surprise she’s actually the princess, and oh! the bull is a god! and oh, they’re in Atlantis! I wondered if non-book readers would have any clue what was going on. But in a way, I kind of don’t mind shows that are truly made for the fans—compared to how the Wheel of Time did things, or The Witcher adaptation, or other recent fantasy shows that sacrificed fidelity to the source material over appealing to a broader audience than just book fans.
I said “amateur” earlier, and maybe I’ll just qualify that I don’t use that pejoratively: amateur, etymologically, means “lover of” in French and it carries the idea of doing something for love rather than financial gain, and in that sense I’m a big supporter of amateur art. I don’t care if the acting is a bit clunky or the special effects aren’t too polished if it’s clear to me that the whole story is being told out of love for the material. This show reminded me of other lower-budget fantasy TV, like Sword of Shannara and Legend of the Seeker, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Radix: The Legend of the Seeker! I actually quite enjoyed that. It was a show where they were having a lot of fun.
Laura: Yeah, maybe too much fun.
But yes, the first two episodes relied way too much on quick scenes and time jumps (one twenty-year time jump, and another seventy-five year jump!), and you just never get to breathe in this world. What I would have liked was for them to slow down, and also for them to have more fun—the show fell into this trope of everything-has-to-be-so-serious all the time (and to be fair to them, this seriousness is part of the source material that they inherited from Lawhead). I wonder if it just worked better for me in novel form though, because Lawhead had more time to develop his characters and the world.
The core of Lawhead’s world is really fascinating: he zeroes in on this liminal time in British history when the Roman empire is on the decline, and areas of what we now call the United Kingdom began to transition from Celtic polytheism to Christian monotheism in the fourth and fifth centuries. England became Christian enough by the fifth century that they were sending missionaries to places like Ireland: Saint Patrick, for instance. The show portrays the Saxons, who were Germanic migrants increasingly moving into England in this time, as the villains—they’re cast to look really unhinged and barbaric, so that it’s clear they’re the baddies, and the show’s heroes need to show them what’s what, which mostly means they need to shout at them that Jesus is the only true God, and that they either need to accept that or be killed.
Radix: Not that I am an expert, but it seems like a lot of modern medieval fantasy leans pretty heavily toward cynicism or grim and dark. This show seems to resist that, while still allowing real suffering. What are your thoughts?
Laura: Yes! The grimdark fantasy has been increasing at least since George R. R. Martin came on the scene. Like you I’m soooo tired of it. This is a confusion for me: like why use fantasy as a medium, if you want grim and dark? Just do realism then. The appeal of fantasy is that it has color, and magic, and sparkle.
So here I want to give a shout-out to the cinematography in this show—the scenery was beautiful, and the highlight for me. Filmed in the forests of Hungary and mountains in Italy, with proper lighting (is it just me and my middle-aged eyes, but is TV way too dark now?)
Lawhead’s series feels more like historical fiction than fantasy, at times, but it makes it into the fantasy genre for me mostly on the basis of its inclusion of the Atlantis myth. That’s where the sparkle and light comes from, and the show captured some of that in how it portrayed the Fair Folk. Charis is always dressed in white, for instance, which was a good costuming choice. I would have liked the Fair Folk to feel just a bit more distinct from the Britons, though—the main marker of difference just seemed to be the fact that they live longer, but they’re also supposed to have a deeper connection to the natural world, and to have a way more advanced civilization, which is signalled really quickly in one scene, when Taliesin’s people are awed by Avallach’s castle, but it was another blink-and-you-miss-it moment.
Radix: Some of the characters, Morgian for sure, but also Uther, at least at first, felt flat. Was I wrong?
Laura: Nope. I cringed through most of Morgian’s scenes. Very unfortunate. I think perhaps it was a mix of writing and acting, but I’m not sure exactly what went wrong there. As for Uther, he felt like a bro you’d find next to you at the gym (I say that as if I go to the gym).
Hengist the Saxon King drinks goat blood and it dribbles on his chin like Denethor attacking tomatoes, so we know he’s bad, and also he’s got tats and a thick accent, and then there’s our heroes, who are called in episode five the “men of the west,” and speak just like us (and they notably don’t drink blood).
Everyone was good or bad, or maybe even very good and very bad: no room for neutral characters, so yes there’s a flattening effect because we don’t get much complexity in the characterization. This is a shame, because it’s not very true to the Celtic world in which the story is set. I’ve read scholars who have suggested that when Saint Patrick famously explained the concept of the Trinity to the early medieval Celts, they had no trouble integrating it into their worldview because they already saw the world in triadic ways: things could be good, bad, or neutral, and reality was divided into three parts, land and sky and also sea, etc. For the Irish, parables come in Triads: it’s always this is true, and this, and this, just like how there are three great rivers in Ireland called the “Three Sisters.”
So the Fair Folk should be neutral: they’re supposed to correspond to the elves or fairies, or the sidhe in Celtic folklore, in-between beings from the spirit world that are neither angels nor demons, but indeterminate forces. But the show couldn’t seem to deal with leaving them indeterminate, so we have to have some of them (i.e. Charis) be perfect saints and others (i.e., Morgian) be super duper evil—she’s a cartoon villain by the end, covered in blood, and we never learn why she made the choices she did.
My sense throughout was that uncertainty is the enemy: no one second guesses their interpretations of their dreams or visions, or wonders if their intuitions are accurate. Merlin is the clearest example of this: and I know you liked him more than I did, so maybe that’s worth unpacking!
Radix: Yes, I quite liked him.. And much better than many of the other Merlins out there. He was real. He was given to violence. He suffered. But he also made for a good hero. I thought, anyway. You?
Laura: Perhaps I am of two minds. You’re right, he has more mythic stature than some of those other Merlins we’ve seen lately. I think for some viewers, though, he will appear as a villain more than a hero.
It was unclear to me what Merlin wanted: he seems to reluctantly turn down being high king, but why? And why is he immediately pro-Ambrosius being high king? He doesn’t even know him. Has he had a vision, off-screen, that we don’t get to see?
In most Arthuriana, Merlin is the character in Arthur’s court who links Christian Camelot back to the pagan past, to the time of magic and ancient knowledge, so he’s often a force for a kind of wild, untamed magical energy. This is how C.S. Lewis uses him in That Hideous Strength, for instance.
In Lawhead’s books, Merlin is very different: he becomes, like his father, a Christian prophet and is almost missionary-like in his zeal to spread the message of Christ. Yet because of his parentage, he remains a kind of bridge figure: he’s the son of a Druid who became a chief bard/ high priest, and a pagan mother who converted and became the Lady of the Lake. So Lawhead does portray him as a bridge between the old ways of the Celtic pagan past and the new ways of the Christianity of the future.
The show captures the books’ sense that the old pagan ways contain glimpses of the truth, glimpses that come into their fulfillment in the Christian mythos: this is a very Inklings theme, common to all their writing, and likely Lawhead encountered this when he was a student at Wheaton College.
So Merlin’s character arc is to move from being an enchanter to being a Prophet (as the title of the last section of Merlin, the book named after him, indicates). And yes, as you say he does suffer: he’s a wounded prophet, and though I wanted the show to make clearer connections between his experiences of loss and the choices he ends up making, I saw the finale as the show writers setting up a potential second season (not greenlit, but being discussed) that’s more focused on him and his relationship with Arthur
Radix: Ok, maybe something tricky, especially considering our modern conceptions on the whole area, but the show seems especially comfortable with hierarchy – very pro kingship being equated with just rule – without modern democratic ideals. This was surprising.
Laura: Yes! I thought the same. I found myself thinking a few times, hmm that divine-right-of-kings stuff sure seems silly. I sense something didn’t translate. When Aragorn gets crowned King of Gondor, you’re like oh yes, excellent, long-live-the-king, but with Ambrosius there needed to be way more backstory for us to buy into this “he’s the rightful king” business!
For a contemporary audience, this feels like nonsense. You really want someone in the show to walk up to Ambrosius, or Merlin for that matter, and say “Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!”
I think we all would have had an easier time accepting a show about Arthur being the rightful king, but watching Ambrosius gain the throne feels underdeveloped, unfortunately. This is a spoiler, but in the books he gets poisoned soon after becoming High King and becoming the father of Arthur, and Uther becomes King and marries his widow Igraine, so for Lawhead Uther is just Arthur’s stepfather.
Radix: There was this line in the show, delivered by an obvious protagonist, that caught me: “You traded strength for peace, but there’ll be no peace without strength.” This made me very curious about the author’s idea of… well, like, how much “strength” is needed? What does that look like? And is there room for nonviolence? You know, like that pesky idea that pops up in the Bible about turning the other cheek, etc.? So, for you, how does the show seem to understand “strength”?
Laura: Great question. For me, there was some theological incoherence with the show’s depiction of just war/violence and converting the Britons at the point of a sword. But then some back-peddling in the finale, where Merlin says no to direct violence, even though he’s facilitating Ambrosius’s war against Hengist from the backseat.
I would want to situate this too in Lawhead’s own work, where he’s writing as an evangelical who’s uncomfortable with fantasy “magic” and so re-envisions magic as prayer, or miracle. So magic comes directly from God, not from nature. But this raises so many other problems: Merlin (and Taliesin) get their power from Jesu, so it’s like God is acting in the world through them. But then God has clearly chosen a side: he likes Britons, and doesn’t like Saxons.
Taliesin has this beautiful vision of the Kingdom of Summer, which is akin to the Kingdom of Heaven. But how will he establish it? By killing everyone who disagrees with his interpretation of what “peace” is? Yikes.
This is the key passage, where Taliesin shares his vision with Charis:
“I have seen a land shining with goodness where each man protects his brother’s dignity as readily as his own, where war and want have ceased and all races live under the same law of love and honor.
I have seen a land bright with truth, where a man’s word is his pledge and falsehood is banished, where children sleep safe in their mother’s arms and never know fear or pain. I have seen a land where kings extend their hands in justice rather than reach for the sword, where mercy, kindness, and compassion flow like deep water over the land, and men revere truth, revere beauty, above comfort, pleasure, or selfish gain. A land where peace reigns in the hearts of men, where faith blazes like a beacon from every hill and love like a fire from every hearth, where the True God is worshipped and his ways acclaimed by all.” (Taliesin 443)
OK, so again, that sounds great. Like I said this is clearly analogous to the Kingdom of Heaven. And maybe it’s here that we see such a sharp fault line in contemporary Christianity today: how are we to achieve the Kingdom of Heaven? Through violence? Through dropping bombs on people we don’t like? Through shouting on the internet? We’ve tried these ways, and many more.
The idea of this Summer Land is a beautiful vision to have. But then what we see in both Taliesin and in Merlin is that they seem to assume it will be achieved through the sword, through force. We’ll just coerce people and override their will! Then we’ll have a utopia of “justice and mercy.” This is the old mythic temptation, maybe the old lie: a utopia gained this way turns into a dystopia.
So when Taliesin converts to Christianity, he has a dramatic spiritual experience and then it’s done, it’s happened, and maybe, dare we say, this reflects a very modern American evangelical view of conversion where poof you were one thing and now you’re another thing, and then two minutes later he’s holding his sword to people to make them Christians too. Do you remember the scene, I think in episode two, where Taliesin goes to Maridunum, and I don’t recall the name of the lord there but Taliesin gets into a debate with his Druid priest, and when the priest goads Taliesin, Taliesin uses his magic to turn him mute (rendering him only capable of childish babble). This scene is from the books, but the show adds Taliesin giving him a good kick in his ribs, when he’s crouched on the ground.
So for me the oddest thing about all of this was the anger towards other people—like the Druids—who don’t immediately believe Taliesin when he tells them hey guys, guess what, the true god is actually Jesus, and you need to get on board. They don’t get on board, so then there’s shouting and killing. Apologetics at the point of a sword tip. Is this a wish-fulfillment dream of American Christianity? Was I watching this with too much suspicion, because it came from the Daily Wire? Maybe, but I think I was right to be uncomfortable. Again, wow. I don’t think the show writers meant to make Taliesin and Merlin the villains, but that’s how they’ll appear to many viewers.
So the show struck me as very theologically inconsistent: sometimes, the Britons’ fight against the Saxons is framed as a holy war. Merlin states explicitly that Jesu is on their side: he’s their God. But then, when Morgian tempts Merlin with power in the finale, she uses the Nietzschean phrase “will to power” and he has this internal battle over whether to join the fight with his sword, and eventually decides not to. Because suddenly violence is bad?
There’s a struggle in the show about how to frame magic, and the violence that magic can produce. It seemed to me they didn’t want to allow Merlin to use what we’d think of as traditional fantasy magic (wands, incantations) instead favoring direct divine intervention, or what I was somewhat facetiously calling “prayer magic.” I’m remembering a scene in episode three, I think, when Merlin as a young boy prays, and lightning strikes the bad lady trying to kill him. So God here will kill people who our main characters ask him to kill. It’s very strange to watch.
Radix: I am somewhat biased but I get really annoyed when “Christian” tv shows or movies sanitize to such an extent that the production just isn’t real: you know, shirts buttoned to the chin, minimal real-world violence, etc. But in this there was blood and gore—and even some cleavage! I rejoiced. Like, it’s a bit more true-to-life. I thought this a great win for the show.
Laura: I definitely agree that clean, sanitized Christian art is silly. There’s been way too much of it, and it’s just a joke to people at this point. I guess the big three of the unholy Trinity are violence, sex, and swearing, which makes me think about another Christian, writing at the same time as Lawhead—I’m reading Frederick Buechner’s novel Brendan (1987) right now, which is very bawdy and not-clean, so maybe it’s worth thinking a bit about why evangelicals haven’t embraced fiction like this even when it comes packaged as a very Christian novel, explicitly about a Christian saint.
I searched some reviews of the show, and on one Christian site (that will remain unnamed) there was a red “X” for nudity: and I thought huh, really? I must have missed that, and so I scrolled down and, I’m not joking, it said “upper male nudity” which is a really dramatic way to say that we see a shirtless man once.
Radix: I appreciated how the show spends time showing grief and loss. Did anything in its portrayal of suffering or moral growth strike you as particularly true—or unconvincing?
Laura: Hmm, I’m not sure; I’ll confess I had a hard time connecting with either Taliesin or Merlin, because of the theological incoherence I was talking about, though I quite liked Charis, and her grief was compelling to me (I wanted more of her! And of the Fair Folk). Rose Reid played her with a lot of gentle gravitas and poise, and I found her by far the most compelling character. In the first book of the Pendragon Cycle, Taliesin, Charis is actually the narrator, and this made for a stronger point of view, I thought, than the one the show took which was to centre Taliesin and then Merlin over her.
In the books she’s the one who carries her husband Taliesin’s vision of the Kingdom of Summer forward, after he dies when Merlin is just a baby; the first book ends with her vowing to keep his vision alive.
Her father is Avallach, the Fisher King, and the show missed a huge opportunity here to really explore grief and loss and suffering: the Fisher King is one of the most emotionally resonant heartbeats of the Arthurian mythos. He’s the keeper of the grail (which we see nothing of in the show, unless I blinked and missed it—maybe that’s ok, since it doesn’t become a big plot point until book five in the series). Usually called King Pelles, the Fisher King is the Maimed King, who bears a wound in his thigh that cannot be healed unless he is asked what’s sometimes just described as “the question”: namely, why do you suffer? What is the nature of your woundedness? This very human question, which we all need to be asked if we’re going to experience healing.
The Fisher King is often closely tied to the land, so until he’s healed the ravaged Waste Land outside his castle cannot be either, and it’s destined to remain as desolate as T.S. Eliot describes the modern waste land in his great poem. We hear a brief reference to the fact that he’s converted to Christianity in the show, but it’s another scene that happens way too fast and isn’t given the space it needs to develop Avallach as a real character.
Merlin’s grief at losing his wife and child was handled well, in the sense that it was given a lot of screen time (though I have questions about what being a wild-man in the woods for seventy-five years entailed), but it’s unclear whether this experience really changed him simply because we don’t have enough to go on: I’m not sure he was any different before he lost Ganieda vs. afterwards.
Radix: The series presents pagan gods as real and often oppressive. How does that compare with how the Inklings approached pre-Christian myth and spiritual realities?
Laura: It’s worth asking, and a real question today as we’re getting more examples of “dark enchantment”—the corollary to what most people mean today when they say we need a more enchanted world again. It’s one thing to lament what Max Weber called the disenchantment of modernity, but it’s another thing to want only good, happy enchantment and not the darker, scarier kinds of enchantment.
C.S. Lewis said that a pagan is just a pre-Christian: they’re way closer to the truth than an atheist, who is a post-Christian. Not surprisingly, I’m with the Inklings here in how they conceive of many myths in the pre-Christian world as signposts of God readying our imaginations for the entrance of the divine into time. In his book Miracles, Lewis defined myth as, “at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination,” and in his essay “Myth Became Fact,” he says, “We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology” (what a great line!).
So in other words, Lewis says we shouldn’t be nervous about parallels between paganism and Christianity—between Baldur and other dying gods and Christ. They should be there. Lewis in his essay “Myth Became Fact” says it like this:
it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.
Radix: Speaking of myth: first would you mind defining mythopoeia; and then I’ll ask if you think the show achieved it, or, sadly, fell into more message-driven storytelling.
Laura: Yeah, so mythopoeia simply means “myth-making” (in Greekmuthos “myth” + poiein “to make” = “myth-making”). So “mythopoeic” art is art that makes myth. Mythopoeia or mythopoesis is when a writer intentionally sets out to make an artificial (literary) myth, vs. writing about a myth that developed organically over time. So what Tolkien did in The Lord of the Rings is mythopoeia, because it’s an artificial myth or a literary creation—there aren’t really divine beings named Manwë or Varda out there who participated in the creation of the world, but inside Tolkien’s subcreation they internally cohere with the narrative he’s writing. (What people like Joseph Campbell did is scholarship on myth, like what literary historians do: analyzing myths that really exist in the primary world, that have shaped cultures).
My final verdict: I think that the books offer some mythopoeia, but the show failed to in any real sense. Stephen Lawhead gets close, I think, at times, to developing his own sub-creation: especially when he’s bringing the Atlantis stuff into his Arthurian narrative, he’s near to making his own distinct myth, but ultimately he is more of a re-shaper than a myth maker.
As for the show, again my sense is that they were too restricted by what they wanted their message to be. There’s a distinction that the Roman poet Horace drew, just over two thousand years ago, that still offers a really good way to evaluate the merits of a work of art: he says in his Ars Poetica, one of the earliest works of literary theory we have that we still talk about today in literature classes, that art should both “instruct and delight.” So some writers will lean towards one or the other—they’ll primarily seek to either teach something beneficial, like they’re imparting a message or insight (we’ll say colloquially that some movies gave us a “take-away,” for instance, and we’ll contrast this with a movie that we say was a “guilty pleasure”), or they’ll try to entertain us by amusing or delighting us. Ideally, the writer should blend both: this is what makes for great art, when there’s both pleasure and instruction.
Where the show was lacking was in the pleasure. I confess that watching it was sometimes a slog: there’s nearly no levity at all (I think only two scenes where anyone smiled or had humour?) and so over all seven episodes it was just this relentlessly serious doom-and-gloom story, and thank you but I have my newsfeed for that.
So my overall take is that this leaned too much towards message-delivery vs. art, with the consequence that we saw some of the flattening we were talking about earlier. I wonder if the creators of the show thought that would make it more palatable to their target audience?
I don’t know, maybe this isn’t actually true anymore, but I want to hold onto a belief that people will always want good stories to lose themselves in: that we’re narrative beings (we’re homo sapiens but we’re also homo fictus) and something in us longs to be told a good story.
So even though this show disappointed me on some levels, I want to affirm that more stories like this make it to our screens! I think there’s a hunger out there for quality fantasy and we so rarely get it. So here’s to hoping they get a second season, and that they find their stride and make something magical.
Radix: Two cheers to that! Thank you for your always timely and nuanced thoughts.
Works Cited:
Lawhead, Stephen R. Taliesin. Avon Books, 1987.
Lewis, C.S. Miracles. HarperCollins, 1947.
Lewis, C.S. “Myth Became Fact.” Edited by Walter Hooper. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Eerdmans, 1970.