By Jennifer Asencio
| Published 18 seconds ago

Daily Wire+ has been streaming the show The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin, and I have been an enthusiastic fan as I’ve reviewed it for GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT. Going into the show, one concern I had about a conservative take on a masculine fantasy was the role of the women in the story. Characters like the Lady of the Lake, Igraine, and Morgan Le Faye have classically been portrayed as passive set pieces with little role in the larger story. Morgan’s power is often deferred to her son, Mordred, and Igraine is a victim of circumstance, passed from one husband to another.

My fears that The Pendragon Cycle would follow this classical approach to female characters were unfounded. The show takes a very different approach to the women of Arthurian legend, and the result is a group that can conquer even the bossiest of girl-bosses.

The four main female characters in The Pendragon Cycle are Charis and Morgain, Atlantean sisters operating at cross-purposes; Ygerna, daughter of the experienced warlord Gorlas; and Ganieda, Merlin’s wife. All four of them begin as princesses and wind up as queens, and all four of them exhibit their own strength and bravery. None of these women sits idly by, allowing the men around them to control events.

The Lady of the Lake Is A Sexy Athlete

Charis begins as a bull leaper, which was a real sport in ancient Minoa that required physical prowess and acrobatic precision. Right away, Charis is introduced as an athlete willing to risk her life to protect her team.

This is no damsel in distress who needs a man to rescue her; if anything, she needs a very powerful man just to equal her. That powerful man is Taliesin, who gives her the nickname by which we know her in Arthurian legend: The Lady of the Lake. And yes, she is the one who had the infamous sword Excalibur made, a symbol of her power that overwhelms every man she’s tried to give it to.

As Charis, Rose Reid is always dressed in white robes that resemble the Greek garb of her homeland, Atlantis. It is modest enough to be family-friendly but just revealing enough to remind us how muscular she is. Low-cut bodices flaunt her femininity while flowing garments swirl around her. The ensemble punctuates her dignified frame and regal presence.

Morgain Is Wicked Smart

Merlin’s famous nemesis is his aunt Morgain, Charis’s jealous sister, played by Emree Franklin. Not only was she tired of living in the shadow of her heroic sister, but she also fell in love with Taliesin, only to find herself rejected.

Morgain is so sinister that the court magician at Ynis Avallach refuses to train her in the arts of magic, and so driven that she is responsible for the shocking ending of episode 2. As queen of the Isle of Fear, she rules over Lot’s house with a charm and sensuality that extends outside the walls of her castle. Being the archvillain of the piece, she must be Merlin’s mirror, and her intelligence and political sense make her a formidable foe.

Being more forward than Charis, Morgain’s dresses are cut lower and a little more revealing. Her poison green and black garments cling to her, taunting us with her sexuality but denying us that final peek. She is beautiful, which is dangerous, but she’s smart enough to know how to use her beauty, which is deadly.

The Valiant Huntress Who Caught A Wizard

Ganieda has been a mysterious vision only Merlin can see through most of the series, but in the latest episode, she is very real when she bursts out of the bush on horseback in pursuit of a wild boar. She bears an armored chest plate and a leather tunic of the silver-and-black colors of her father’s stronghold of Goddeu. She also carries a spear: she is as much a warrior spirit as she is a huntress.

Brett Cooper’s portrayal of her teases and nudges at a youthful Merlin, like he’s a loose tooth, finally winning his heart. When danger strikes, she is the first to grab a weapon and isn’t afraid to die fighting.

As a married woman, Ganieda’s wardrobe is a little less militaristic, but it walks right out of a medieval tapestry. She is the classic medieval lady, while simultaneously being the only woman strong enough to be Merlin’s wife.

The Mother Of The Once And Future King

The demure future mother of Arthur is played by Flo Thompstone, and she is not letting the world around her collapse. Clad in a wine-colored early Briton wardrobe, Ygerna is the daughter of Gorlas, a powerful figure in the Britons’ world and thus the subject of manipulations by other power-hungry lords.

Ygerna sees what they’re up to and is willing to speak up to Gorlas in favor of the Pendragon brothers, despite Gorlas not getting along with Uther. Ygerna has met Uther, and the seeds of their future romance have already begun to sprout, leading this young lady to a huge destiny.

The Pendragon Cycle Doesn’t Make Women Strong By Turning Them Into Men

All these characters are forces to be reckoned with in their own right. They don’t need to be rescued, and in fact do some of the rescuing themselves. They all take matters into their own hands, despite the world they live in being mainly concerned with the machinations of men. They are not the traditional princesses of fairy tales or Arthurian legend. They are not victims, even when they are.

In today’s world, the media often portrays women as the only smart people in the room. They’re hypercompetent, often bossing around the men around them. It is as though the men can’t function without them, but the women don’t need them because they can do everything themselves, from programming the big computer to bashing around mooks twice their size.

This is intended to combat the idea that women have historically been portrayed as weak and helpless. That’s not entirely true, however. Classics like Charade (1963), His Girl Friday (1941), and North by Northwest (1959) feature strong female characters who are anything but helpless. More recent offerings like Heathers and Mean Girls are all about female power. Yet there have been enough damsel-in-distress female leads in movies and on television that the response to the trend has been to make women, as DH Lawrence writes, “just like the men, only better, because they were women.”

The women of The Pendragon Cycle don’t have to be “better” than anyone. They know their own strengths and weaknesses and those of the men around them. With the exception of Morgain, they are the companions and supports for the men in their lives; Morgain exhibits strategy and calculation worthy of any male villain. They don’t outright reject men, but they don’t let them get away with acting the fool, either.

The Pendragon Cycle strikes a balance between damsels in distress and girl-bosses by portraying women who can be powerful while still embracing their femininity. Their strength comes as much from being wives and mothers as from their abilities to survive the masculine world around them, but they are never just “trad wives.” They don’t have to be nude or sensationalist to get our attention, but they can still have the agency they deserve. Many women could learn from their example.

The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is streaming on Daily Wire+. The final episode will be released next Thursday. Catch up on this great show, and enjoy this sexy quartet of brilliant female role models.

Easttown, Pennsylvania, is an unforgiving place, but it has nothing on Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet). The fortysomething detective is no-nonsense and shoots from the hip, and she doesn’t have time for fools. When a teenage mother is found brutally murdered in a ravine, she has to figure out not only who did it and why, but also how it connects to a young woman’s disappearance in the recent past.

If it were just a mystery show, Mare of Easttown would merely be great. But the genius of the limited series is how it also functions as a character study of a woman barely holding on under the weight of overwhelming trauma. Mare is imperfect, and she’s frequently haunted by the mistakes she made in her past.

Winslet embodies Mare warts and all, and gives a performance that ranks as one of the best on television in the last decade. She’s as superb as the show she’s in, and the stellar cast (Jean Smart, Julianne Nicholson and Evan Peters) who support her. A second season has been talked about, but nothing has been confirmed yet. Cross your fingers that Mare returns to solve another case and battle more of her inner demons.

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 43 seconds ago

Ever notice how fans go crazy for deleted scenes, especially when it comes to their favorite shows? If you love a series hard enough, it’s easy to look at deleted content like something that was taken from you. When the scene in question is good enough, you might even start to wonder why it was cut in the first place.

Well, very few series are as popular as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show with more than a few deleted scenes. This includes a snippy interaction between Willow and Cordelia in “Phases” that many fans wished had been kept in the episode. However, it’s good that this dialogue was cut because it would have completely changed Willow’s character, effectively hinting at her later transformation into a much darker character.

A Self-Defense Class Gone Wrong

“Phases” was, of course, the episode where we discover that the eternally Zen character Oz has quite the secret: he’s a werewolf who transforms into a dangerous, ravenous monster by the light of the full moon. The Slayer keeps the big, bad wolfman from harming anybody, and she also stops a hunter hellbent on making Oz his latest prize. Along the way, our Sunnydale High students took a self-defense class, and some dialogue between Willow and Cordelia was ultimately removed from the final episode.

In the scene, Cordelia is about to spar with Xander, who sarcastically tells her, “Be gentle with me.” Matching his sarcastic vibes, Cordelia turns to Willow and says, “You’re first. I wouldn’t want to be accused of taking your place in line.” In response, Willow replies, “Oh, I think you pushed your way to the front long before this.”

Girls Can Be So Mean

Things get increasingly snippy between the young women, with Cordelia claiming, “Hey, I can’t help it if I get the spotlight just because some people blend into the background.” Willow frostily responds, “Well, maybe some people could see better if you weren’t standing on the auction block, shaking your wares.” Cordelia tells her, “Sorry, we haven’t all perfected that phony ‘girl next door’ bit” before Willow brings this deleted scene to an end with a distinctively vindictive response: “You could be the girl next door, too. If Xander lived next to a brothel!”

Important context for this episode is that Cordelia and Xander have been secretly dating behind everyone’s back. However, Xander is preoccupied with Willow’s relationship with Oz, even stopping his makeout session with Cordelia to wonder what his witchy friend sees in this wolfy senior. While Willow isn’t directly aware of this particular relationship drama, that same drama helps to explain why Cordelia was being so mean in this deleted scene from “Phases.”

A Girlfight Scarier Than Any Vampire Fight

What the drama doesn’t really explain, though, is why this scene portrays Willow as a Cordelia-esque mean girl in her own right. Historically, early Buffy the Vampire Slayer portrayed Cordelia as the preppy mean girl and Willow as the mousy nerd. The two women had a rather cantankerous relationship going back to before the show starting, and in their very first onscreen interaction, we see Cordelia criticizing Willow for how she dresses.

In early Buffy episodes, Willow wasn’t afraid to get back at Cordelia, but she usually did so in relatively subtle ways. Perhaps the most infamous (and funniest) example of this is when Willow tracks the other women into deleting an assignment on the computer by convincing Cordelia that the DEL key on her keyboard stands for “deliver.” However, she didn’t really push back against Cordelia’s snark more directly until Season 3, which included the messy plot point of stealing Cordelia’s boyfriend (they are openly dating by this point), Xander.

The Mousy Girl Bites Back

In this deleted scene from “Phases,” however, Willow’s sarcastic replies seem out of character, much more in line with the snappy repartee of Buffy Summers. Willow basically tells Cordelia to her face that the other woman, despite having advantages like wealth and beauty, is still neurotically obsessed with being popular. She then calls Cordelia a prostitute, accusing her of selling her body to men before outright saying she belongs in a brothel.

Is it funny? Of course, and it’s not like ditzy mean girl Cordelia didn’t have it coming. But I keep reflecting on the fact that this is much more like what we’d expect of Willow in Season 6: that was the season where she began recklessly using magic, needlessly resurrecting Buffy, brainwashing Tara, and eventually becoming a threat to the entire world. Dark Willow was always great for sassy quotes, including calling a foe “superb*tch” and saying “bored now” right before she rips the skin off another human being.

A Scary Glimpse Of What She Would Become

Obviously, the Willow in the deleted scene of “Phases” isn’t in danger of ripping the flesh off anyone’s body. But she is in the business of dropping the kind of harsh truth bombs that Dark Willow would be known for, and like her later villain persona, she’s suddenly not taking crap from someone who gives her attitude. This is arguably an improvement over mousy Willow, of course, but it’s also completely out of character with the Willow of Season 2, one who had yet to fully come out about her love of magic (among other things).

Long story short? It’s good that this Buffy the Vampire Slayer scene was cut, even though countless fans would give up their Mr. Pointy replicas to see it in the final episode. Cutting the scene meant cutting out a severely out-of-character moment for everyone’s favorite girl next door, and that helped make it all the more surprising when Willow later stopped playing by the rules and showed everyone just how dangerous a mean girl could really be.