I can’t really rouse myself to be exceptionally excited about a modern-day Merlin. The legend isn’t exceptionally ripe for an update given current events as was the case with Sherlock Holmes. And we’re awash in magic-inflected pop-culture people these days. It’s a bit hard to remember what made Merlin unique other than advising King Arthur in the midst of all these vampires and wizards and werewolves and whatnot.

I always thought one of the great innovations of The Mists of Avalon was making the Merlin an office, rather than a person. It let Marion Zimmer Bradley switch aspects in and out, while making different characters accountable to a similar set of rules, and showing them succeeding or failing to meet those obligations to varying extents. I’d be curious, but doubtful, to see if a new adaptation places a similar emphasis on office and the conflict of office with personality. But if you don’t come up with a good concept, jumping Merlin into the future mostly means you get a wizard in board shorts:

You know what might be interesting?  A movie where Angelina Jolie played twitchy and nervous but ultimately effective, and Johnny Depp played calm and collected to the point of ridiculousness. This is not that movie:

Oh, and where Paul Bettany played something other than menacing.

With the exception of voice work in cartoons, and maybe Franky in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, it’s worth noting that Jolie’s never really done a straight comedic role. It’s a huge lapse in her resume, and I’m surprised she’s never tried to rectify it. Maybe vamping’s easier. But it’s also lazy, and frankly, only one kind of fun. Gut-level laughts are good for the soul, no matter what kind of package said soul comes in.

I think io9 is a little quick to dismiss the similarities between the Harry Potter books and some earlier works in this analysis. But I don’t think that makes J. K. Rowling some sort of plagiarist, either. Rather, it’s a matter of a monkeys and typewriters.

There are a lot of people out there writing a lot of fiction. And in the age of the internet, there are even more people disseminating it. Within the context of extent technology, class systems, gender roles, institutions, etc., those writers are going to come up with most of the possible ideas for things that can happen, staircases that people can live under, dynamics that can develop between small groups of people. And those extant technologies, class dynamics, gender roles, institutions, etc. help shape, direct, and constrain our fantasies and our sense of what will be plausible in fantastical and speculative fiction.

The real possibility for originality lies not in a single, novel concept, then, but in the juxtaposition of contexts. It’s not that a smart girl, or an orphan boy, or a magical school, or a poor but kind family, are novel creations. It’s the combination of them with centaurs, souls, vaults, prophecies, snakes, and London that matters. That alchemy is less hard to achieve than a truly new concept, but it’s still hard. It’s just too bad that more people and entertainment companies don’t even aim for that.