‘Pendragon’ takes the long road to King Arthur — and makes it worth the journey

A reasonable viewer could spend the opening minutes of “The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin” wondering whether he clicked on the wrong show.Daily Wire promised an Arthurian epic, yet here are the doomed inhabitants of Atlantis, bull dancers, pagan priests, and a princess named Charis fleeing a civilization about to sink beneath the sea. Camelot is nowhere in sight; neither is Arthur.Christianity belongs to the world of 'Pendragon' as naturally as its mud, blood, and steel.That bewilderment contains the key to the series and its considerable ambition. “The Pendragon Cycle” is not another retelling of the sword in the stone. Instead, it attempts to dramatize what had to happen before Arthur could arrive: the transformation of a pagan world into one capable of producing the Christian king of legend.Passion project “The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin,” a seven-episode series that premiered earlier this year exclusively on DailyWire+ and arrives on Prime Video in the U.S. today, was created by Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing and draws principally from “Taliesin” and “Merlin,” the first two novels in Stephen R. Lawhead’s sprawling “Pendragon Cycle.” Boreing has dreamed of bringing Lawhead’s books to the screen for nearly three decades, and it shows. Nobody could accuse “Pendragon” of cutting corners.Consider Atlantis. Rather than have its inhabitants speak English with exotic accents, the production hired classical scholar and Daily Wire contributor Spencer Klavan to invent an Atlantean language, complete with grammar, vocabulary, and a fanciful linguistic genealogy reaching back before the Fall.Shot in Hungary and Italy, “Pendragon” also makes splendid use of forests, mountains, rivers, and untamed country. The CGI impresses when called upon, but some of the show’s best special effects were provided by God. Nature is beautiful, immense, and frightening, as it ought to be in a story about men trying to build a civilization from the ruins of another.Multifaceted MerlinThe largely unfamiliar cast helps. Tom Sharp carries Merlin through a formidable range — warrior, husband, broken exile, prophet, and bard — without turning him into a wizardly caricature. James Arden gives Taliesin a searching, otherworldly quality that makes his eventual conversion feel earned. Rose Reid anchors the strange Atlantean opening as Charis and, thanks to her people's extraordinary longevity, provides a living connection to that vanished world. Finney Cassidy makes an appealingly restrained Aurelius, a would-be king of the Britons, while Myles Clohessy supplies the martial force as his warrior brother Uther. Brett Cooper, probably the one face Daily Wire viewers will recognize immediately, disappears effortlessly into Ganieda, Merlin’s wife.The history underneath all this is real enough. Roman rule in Britain effectively collapsed in the early fifth century, leaving a fractured country vulnerable to invasion and internal warfare. It is somewhere in this murky post-Roman world that the distant roots of the Arthur legend are generally thought to lie.The legend itself came later and accumulated over centuries. Brittonic tales of a heroic Arthur were expanded and transformed by Geoffrey of Monmouth, French romance writers, and eventually Thomas Malory, gathering along the way Camelot, Lancelot, the Round Table, the Grail, and the explicitly Christian moral universe we now associate with King Arthur.'A new power at work'Lawhead, who served as a producer on the television adaptation, works backward from that inheritance. He takes the myth and plants it in the soil of post-Roman Britain, imagining the people, conflicts, and spiritual transformations that might have prepared the ground for Arthur.Christianity is crucial to that transformation, but Lawhead doesn’t have it simply sweep away the enchanted pagan world that preceded it. The bard remains a bard; prophecy, mystery, and supernatural power remain. What takes place is closer to a baptism of myth, in which the old stories and powers are not discarded so much as given a new orientation.That begins with Taliesin and Charis, Merlin’s parents. Both inherit pagan worlds and find them spiritually inadequate. Taliesin encounters the Christian priest Dafyd; Charis has already watched the splendor and religion of Atlantis fail catastrophically.The decisive contrast arrives when Morgian, Charis’ sister and a powerful pagan priestess, sacrifices a foal she and Taliesin had once saved, then offers herself to him and proposes that together they build a world more powerful than Atlantis. He refuses. “There is a new power at work in the world,” he tells her. “I’ve seen it. A God who does not ask us to sacrifice what we love, but who sacrifices what He loves for us.”Charis eventually embraces Taliesin’s faith and is baptized. Their son therefore inherits the bardic and prophetic world of his father and the lost Atlantean world of his mother. Merlin’s struggle is not to acquire power — he already possesses plenty — but to discover what that power should serve.His answer eventually becomes explicit: “Not by my power, Jesu, but thine.”RELATED: Cry 'God for England' Nina PowerChristianity unsoftenedThis is unapologetically Christian television, yet it rarely feels like a stereotypical “Christian movie.” Christianity belongs to the world of “Pendragon” as naturally as its mud, blood, and steel.That allows the series to be dark without becoming decadent. There is war, lust, treachery, mutilation, and genuine evil. But unlike HBO's “Game of Thrones,” “Pendragon” has little interest in treating sexual degradation or cruelty as proof of adult sophistication. Its Christian worldview actually permits it to be darker rather than lighter: The world is fallen and men do terrible things, which means courage, mercy, and sacrifice can also mean something.That same idea shapes the series’ understanding of leadership. Uther is the more formidable warrior, but his brother Aurelius begins to reveal a different kind of strength. When warned against risking himself for people under Saxon attack, Aurelius replies, “I have only one thing to offer my people: everything.”There, in miniature, is Lawhead’s conception of Christian kingship. The pagan conception of power sacrifices others. The Christian king sacrifices himself.Trusting the materialBoreing and company don’t always make things easy for the viewer. Seven episodes carry a formidable load of characters, kingdoms, generations, and mythology, and the chronology occasionally doubles back on itself. This is a show that rewards close attention — you’re going to want to put your phone down. In an era of television designed for “second screening,” there’s something refreshingly demanding about that. “Pendragon” assumes its audience is willing to keep up.A more cautious, commercially minded adaptation would get to the familiar beats immediately: the boy, the sword, Camelot, Guinevere, the Round Table. Boreing has enough faith in the material to let it breathe. He spends an entire season on Atlantis and Taliesin, the retreat of Rome, the making of Merlin, and the spiritual formation of the Britain Arthur will inherit. Only in the final moments do we reach the threshold of the Arthurian story most of us know.There is plenty of story waiting on the other side. Lawhead’s central cycle has been complete for decades, with “Arthur,” “Pendragon,” and “Grail” still ahead of the television series. A second season has not yet been announced, though Boreing says a first draft has already been written and the cast is ready to return.Most Arthurian stories begin with a Christian moral universe already in place. “The Pendragon Cycle” goes backward to imagine how that world came into being — how pagan myth might be gathered rather than discarded, how power might be subordinated to something higher than itself, and how a shattered country might become capable of producing a king.