5x07 Nimue
Nimue was Merlin’s lost love, as expected. I, however, did not expect her to be the first Dark One.
So, who exactly is Nimue? The name Nimue is thought to be a derivative of Mnemosyne (Mneme), a water-nymph from Greek mythology. This would certainly create a connection between her and Prometheus’ flame, in case you were wondering, as I did, why he was included in the story line at all. In some legends she was an enchantress, or water nymph, or queen/protector of Avalon (allegedly the hiding place of the Holy Grail). Supposedly Merlin taught her magic and then she turned on him trapping him in some form, one of which was in a tree. She also supposedly raised Lancelot. Anyway, after she traps Merlin, she becomes Arthur’s advisor. That would be interesting to see on the show, and may explain some of Arthur’s madness.
So, the story in this episode is that Merlin gets his magic, and consequently immortality, from the Holy Grail, from which he drank after escaping from someone and wandering through the desert. Some years later, he meets and falls in love with a beautiful young Nimue, who is distraught after losing her entire village in a raid. Merlin proposes, but explains his immortal predicament, and devises a plan to “cut” the magic from himself so that he can live a normal life with her. He takes her to a special place that houses the flame of Prometheus (according to Greek myth, the source of all fire on Earth), which is the only flame strong enough to have forged the Holy Grail to begin with, and thus reforge it into a sword powerful enough to cut away his magic (Excalibur). The assailant of Nimue’s village shows up. A fight ensures in which he kills Nimue, except she didn’t really die. She gets back up, and rips out his heart. Merlin realizes that she snuck a drink from the Holy Grail, but tells her that if she kills Vortigern, that she will henceforth commit atrocities beyond her imagination. She didn’t really care, consumed with anger and the passion of her new found power.
During the season four finale, the apprentice told Emma that long ago the sorcerer battled the darkness and he was able to keep it from consuming the realms. He tethered it to a human soul that could be controlled with the dagger. That makes it sound as though he was the one who put it into a person as a way to control it, but now with the Nimue storyline it seems that he only tied the person to the dagger, or the darkness to the dagger, but in no way put the darkness in the person, unless he blames himself for her drinking from the cup.
In the forests of the past, Emma passes Merlin’s test by resisting the lure of the darkness. She didn’t go through with killing him. As they are returning to Granny’s, Merlin is poofed away.
In Camelot, Zelena betrays the heroes (gee, I didn’t see that coming), and helps Arthur use Merlin’s tethering spell to tether Merlin to Excalibur, meaning Arthur now controls Merlin. He uses it to summon Merlin, who apologizes to Arthur for not being there to guide him. He then forces Merlin to poof our heroes away. My guess is that there is a showdown between Emma and Merlin that leads to Emma accepting the darkness. How else could she have defeated him, and yet with Arthur controlling him and determined to destroy her, how could she not?
In Merlin’s message to Henry, he said that the only one who could help now was Nimue, but how? Is it that Emma’s salvation is really in the restored Excalibur? Merlin told her to leave it alone, but his visions of the future are not always as they seem. Will she be able to cut the magic from herself? It’s hard to know for sure, because his message is interrupted by the dark one, presumably Emma, but it seems to me that he could have recorded that message at any time, with any one of the dark ones pursuing him, even Nimue herself. It could have been a message he left right before she turned him into a tree.
I can image that Nimue would want him dead because with him gone, she could finally let go of the love she still has for him. That would free herself. What could happen for her to change her mind, for her to come back from the darkness within Emma? Isn’t that what Merlin meant when he said Nimue was the only one who could defeat the darkness? Nimue has to change her mind somehow. She has to let go of it, of the anger. Will Emma’s love for Hook and perhaps his sacrifice for her remind Nimue of what Merlin told her? Of how precious moments outweigh power and immortality?
At the end of episode six, Hook wonders aloud what Emma could have done to Merlin. Perhaps she finally killed him. Scenes from the next double feature show Emma battling Arthur, but it’s Emma with her Storybrooke look, so I’m wondering if it is with the newly reforged Excalibur that she is fighting him. I would think that she would be vengeful for using Merlin against her, and costing her freedom from the darkness. What good would killing him do though? It says that her dark plan will be revealed. It has been foretold that Excalibur can be used to snuff out the light, but the Emma deep inside doesn’t really want that. It seemed that she tried to resist the darkness even after Excalibur had been made whole. She mutters that Merlin told her not to do it when she was a girl, but the whispers of all the dark ones before her telling her to take the power won over her as she grabbed the hilt of the sword. We know that in the end, good will win. It’s just a matter of what we must go through between now and then. How will they rescue Emma? And, is anyone else wondering what role Lily will play in all of this? We may not see her until the second half of the season, but I have a feeling that somehow she will interact with the Dark Swan.
More questions to ponder:
Is it ironic that the Holy Grail (last cup from which Jesus drank, a relic of the Christian faith) was used to create a sorcerer and a dark one? And why, if her motives were not sincere, was Nimue not destroyed when she sought to drink from it? Some suggest it was enforcing the balance between good and evil.
Why couldn’t Merlin have drank from the cup a second time with the request that his powers be removed?
Will we ever know Merlin’s backstory before the grail? Who did he escape from?
So who is Lily’s father? What are our other choices from what we’ve seen so far? I’m still confused about the whole half dragon thing anyway considering that the ability to transform into a dragon was supposed to be a manifestation of her level of mastery of magic. Whatever. It was once theorized that Lily was the love child of Maleficent and Merlin in dragon form, but now it seems as though that would not be the case with him being in a tree and so in love with Nimue. But, who knows, I mean he did some how appear to Emma as a man when she was a child and that was during his period of confinement in the tree.
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