Review: The Pendragon Cycle Episode 4 – What’s Happening? (Spoilers)

Continuing with our honest review of Dailywire’s The Pendragon Cycle, Episode 4 was surprisingly tolerable, being the most logically paced episode out of the ones I’ve seen so far. Does that mean that it’s necessarily good?

No, as it suffers from the past three episodes’ terrible pacing. You still have only a vague idea of what’s going on, you don’t know why you should care about any of the characters unless you’ve read the books or are just content with what the script tells you to do, you have no idea who anyone is except for the major players, etc.

On top of that, remember how I said that this episode was probably going to be the one where we finally get Merlin’s backstory? Well, we don’t. He’s just riding around to different places for some reason doing things and having the occasional hallucination of Brett Cooper. Why is she there? Who is she? Is this the ghost of The Comments Section past before Regan took over? We don’t know (unless you’ve read the books), but since he’s supposed to be going back to where he met her in Episode 5, maybe we’ll find out then.

Maybe.

Another weak point that I noticed in The Pendragon Cycle is as the show goes on, the acting seems to get worse. That’s not to say that it feels like watching a Dhar Man video or a really bad B-film, but it’s not great. Rose Reid as Charis feels try-hard. Tom Sharp as Merlin feels incredibly flat, like his acting range stops at brooding. Whoever is playing Uther also feels very try hard and unlikeable since he just acts a jerk. The only good performance in this show is the lady playing Morgian (Morganna), because she’s genuinely unsettling to watch and feels fleshed out. Other than that, everyone falls flat so far.

Then there’s some of the bad script writing. Most of the time, it’s fine. Other times, it’s so painfully obvious what’s going to happen next or so unintelligent that I have to question the writing skills of some of the screen writers.

Finally, there’s the battle scene. Towards the end of the episode, there’s a battle in which Merlin leads a small army against the Belsae. Who are these people and why should we be fighting them? We don’t know, but a battle Jeremy Boring wanted and a battle he got. During this battle, people are dying, Uther is fighting as a soldier, and it’s meant to seem fairly high stakes. And previously, it was established that Merlin has powers over time where he can freeze things and do some cool stuff.

So, you would think he would be doing that during this battle, especially since Uther is fighting in it and he’s allegedly super important, right?

Wrong. He just sits astride his horse for most of it while people are being killed left and right, and then when he gets down from the horse, we get several dragged-out, unnecessary, slow-motion shots of him walking through the battle doing nothing that felt like Zach Snyder was suddenly directing the show.

Because that’s totally useful and does a ton to advance the plot.

And the sad thing is that this was the only decent episode so far. I’m nervous about what’s coming next.

Until next time,

M.J.