After 1800 years, you’d think he’d have it all figured out.
He certainly thinks he does.
MERLYN’S MISTAKE
The limited series
Episode three—In Which the Plane Keeps Not Crashing
Divided into a series of blackout sketches, this episode begins with Merlyn’s lyric-poetry introduction to breath work and slowly slips into the meditative mindscape of Frankie who, following the surreal path of his thoughts begins to unpack his genuine feelings about Viv until he realizes that he senses something wrong with the airflow and abruptly breaks focus to announce that everyone should buckle up. During this segment, a couple of cut-aways give real-time concurrent tracking of Percy’s phone by the Agency. /
Segment two starts earlier, with Vivica retrieving a somewhat stunned Frankie from the cockpit. Percy cockily explains his intention to listen to the exercise and not participate. When Merlyn begins his spiel this time around, a cut-away gives us an earlier scene at the Agency, one that clearly leads to the scene we saw there during the first segment. On the plane, a little bit of the stuff we heard before we got lost in Frankie’s thoughts tells us where we are in time and now Vivica hears several more lines of the thing before she’s out. We spend time in Vivica’s experience until Merlyn calmly talks her back in based on Frankie’s intuition and then the plane falls abruptly. Then stabilizes. At the agency a significant but strangely relaxed freak-out has begun to take place. /
The next segment gives us Percy’s perspective. After setting his phone to transmit coordinates and announcing his ability to listen without participating he is gone, baby. Solid gone, lost in ethical questions about his history and his employers and Merlyn. The length of the cutaway segment at the Agency from the time we get to it and the time that it synchs up to the earliest of Frankie’s interruption beats gives us how fast he was out and when we get a whole lot of the stuff that goes on at the Agency during the flight before we get back to Percy’s tormented fantasies and. . . Merlyn awakens him in time for the plane to drop. Sofia comes on the microphone to speak in reassuring tones. And then the plane drop abruptly again.
Sofia announces that something very odd is going on with the navigation and while they have lost altitude they do not seem to be falling out of the sky at this time. She urges everyone to fasten their seatbelts as a precaution. She announces that while they are far off course for Heathrow, she does see a runway ahead, if she can just get low enough in time. The plane plummets. She announces the good news, She can now see exactly where they are and they are now low enough, and the bad news. It’s not a runway, it’s a lake.
OUT
At the intersection of Roger Zelazny and Jim Butcher stands a small monument to individual agency, This magical, funny book that calls not for accountability but responsibility. As painful truths come to light, Merlyn’s conscience compels him to redress old wrongs only to realize that he has endangered all the people he loves. Still, despite machine gun fire, plane crashes and giant spiders, they will stand by him.. When he needs them, even his old Faerie ally Nimmue will be there to do her part. Still, if he can’t unravel the last riddles woven into the Arthurian Excalibur construct they may be too late to save themselves or the world.
“Brody’s writing is brilliant.”
Robin Williams
In the words of the wise, ancient magician himself, “If I see a way that I might save the world and I don’t at least try, then I’m sort of dick.”
