Merlin: The Lady Of The Lake

Young Merlin (Colin Morgan) spots a pretty girl who has been captured by a brutal bounty hunter and decides to free her after Gaius (Richard Wilson) tells him she is a druid rounded-up as part of Uther's continuing anti-magic purge.

Totally smitten, Merlin hides Freya (Laura Donnelly) in the catacombs of Camelot and plans their escape from the fortified city, dreaming of an idyllic life together, despite her protestations that she is "cursed" and "is not like him".

Meanwhile a magical creature is killing random people within Camelot and it doesn't take a genius to realise that this is the manifestation of Freya's curse - at midnight she transforms into a giant, winged panther; a creature Gaius calls a "bastet" (after the Egyptian goddess, I presume).

It was inevitable from the start that Merlin's first love was not going to end well - primarily because the nature of Merlin is usually to dispose of new characters in a single story to allow the next story to begin again from square one.

Luckily for Merlin, his master, Arthur (Bradley James), had reverted to his oblivious and trusting self from the first season because the lovesick sorcerer was incredibly cavalier and careless with his magic - using it at every opportunity in his mission to help Freya.

A surprisingly straight-forward and uncomplicated story after recent weeks, The Lady Of The Lake was a touching, small-scale drama about a teenager blinded by emotion, and made an interesting change of pace for the series.

It's just a shame, as usual, that Merlin's format required both Freya and Halig the bounty hunter (Richard Ridings) to be written out in a single story - although, I guess, there is the possibility that Freya will somehow return as the titular "lady of the lake", echoing TH White's Once And Future King take on Arthurian myth, which had The Lady Of The Lake as Merlin's lover.

The actual "lake" connection in this particular story was tenuous at best - Freya's fondest memory of her childhood was growing up near a beautiful lake - but it didn't really matter in the context of this intimate teen romance.

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