The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin

Gods, Men, and Green Screens

It’s been obvious for a while that Jeremy Boreing and the Daily Wire want their own version of Hollywood. Wanting it, though, and actually making a prestige fantasy series are very different things. *The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin* is fascinating mostly because of how badly it wants to prove itself. Adapted from Stephen R. Lawhead’s faith-soaked Arthurian novels, it gives us a grim, half-ruined Britain caught between fading pagan gods and encroaching Christianity. The whole project arrives with a chip on its shoulder, eager to show that conservative independent media can mount a big historical fantasy. Sometimes you can see the ambition. Sometimes you mostly see the seams.



Boreing, stepping out from the executive suite to direct, clearly loves this material. You can feel that in the quieter scenes where the show pauses long enough to let people wrestle with faith, power, and a world in transition. But the production has trouble carrying the size of the idea. The costumes often look more curated reenactment than lived-in antiquity, and the CGI, especially in the early Atlantis destruction, feels startlingly dated. The Hungarian forests help. They’re damp, cold, muddy, tangible. Whenever the series stays close to the ground, it can almost sell the illusion. It’s when it reaches for the giant digital vistas that the whole thing slips.



There’s an early scene by a river between Taliesin and Charis that more or less crystallizes both the show’s strengths and its problems. Charis, played by Rose Reid, embodies the old world, power, blood, inherited order. James Arden’s Taliesin stands for the creeping Christian alternative, all gentleness and conviction. Arden plays him with calm, almost irritating serenity, while Reid holds herself stiff with suspicion. The contrast is good. The problem is the show can’t resist over-explaining it. The scene starts as subtext, turns into text, and then drifts into sermon. That happens a lot across the season. The writers don’t seem to trust the audience to catch the spiritual conflict unless they underline it in heavy ink.



Then Merlin finally appears, late enough that the subtitle is doing some real labor. Tom Sharp, who apparently came in through an unsolicited self-tape, is a genuine find. The season spends so much time on his parents that you start to wonder if he’ll ever show up, but when he does, he immediately changes the energy. Sharp’s Merlin isn’t whimsical or grand. He’s wild-eyed, overused, and haunted. His long frame moves with a nervous, worn-out jitter, as if prophecy has physically irritated his skin. He brings something alive and unstable that the scripts don’t always deserve. Reid, too, does admirable work as Charis, even when she’s forced to process paragraphs of exposition no face should have to carry.

In the end, *The Pendragon Cycle* feels like a lumpy artifact of the moment that produced it. *The Catholic World Report* praised it for "capturing this important metamorphosis, especially in the arena of faith," and I can see why. The thematic ambition is real. But ambition doesn’t automatically make television good. The pacing sags, the budget keeps betraying the scale, and the dialogue can suffocate wonder by naming it too directly. I admire the attempt. I just wish the show could lift the weight of what it’s trying to be.