Of all the bits of Avalon, the failure of the ‘main’ antagonist is at once the most surprising in retrospect and the clearest. Surprising, because I can remember how dangerous Morgian seemed, how appropriately threatening and powerful; clear, because when I trace the bare facts of her work, precious few redeeming qualities appear in her. That close inspection, thankfully, also reveals at least part of why she seemed to work way back when I read and re-read Avalon first.

Articles I-IIb and IV-V are already published on my Substack.

Her Outline

A sum-review of Morgian’s actions is the proof of the problem, albeit it will spoil the plot rather much. Remember always the rule which damns her: the antagonist, human or environmental or otherwise, must credibly threaten the protagonist, and he-she-it proves that threat by successfully harming the protagonist or his friends in ways that matter to the plot.

1. Morgian sets off the inciting incident by manipulating a man into killing himself. This is the first of her three successful murders in the story, and it gets the the most sensory detail and effect.
2. We learn that this woman (not yet revealed to be Morgian, though I don’t think it’s hard to guess for a reader of the series. It’s hard to assess these things on a re-read) is the long-time mistress of the Prime Minister, Thomas Waring, the secondary antagonist of the story.
3. Morgian murders an ally of Merlin shortly after the protagonist meets with him, while said ally is engaged in constructing a critical tool for the protagonist (documents, not weapons).
4. Around this time (I’m running off memory; forgive me), Morgian goes diving into the ocean in pursuit of an ancient magical artifact she expects will make her immensely more powerful- quite a promise to the reader, you’ll understand, particularly joined to Merlin’s later dismissal of the potential (unwise? perhaps).
5. Morgian kills another ally of Merlin, one we rather like, on the night of his great victory, immediately after he launches an important asset for the protagonist’s cause.
6. By this point, across several scenes, we understand that Morgian has immense influence on Waring, though not enough to completely control him (he bucks, but does not quite revolt), and little regard for his influence. Her influence operates here, as in all instances, via seduction-heavy manipulation.
7. Morgian organizes a frontal full-violence attack on the protagonist, which fails spectacularly, immensely aiding his PR campaign (remember, this is a political drama centering on a referendum).
8. She fights Merlin via magic after seduction, briefly attempted, fully fails; she strains him but loses decisively, to Merlin’s eye (and, due to perspective, to the reader’s eye as well).
9. She drops a bit out of the narrative in the later parts of the story, after this repulse, though she is still engaged in hunting that magic relic.
10. She attacks the protagonist via luring him to a gas-soaked car and setting it alight; this fails due to ‘destiny’ interfering (in the form of almost-precognition which the protagonist has to ignore for her trap to even partly come off). She is badly burned; she tries to finish the protagonist (or his wife) off using a pistol, but takes a throwing knife to the chest and has to flee, though she inflicts a bad wound on the protagonist.
11. After the protagonist has won, she stages a one-woman knife-and-magic attack on the protagonist and his wife; after her magic sputters, she gets into a one-on-one fight with said wife, knife v trowel (she has the knife) and loses fatally. Thus ends the book, effectively.

In Detail

Already some problems may be apparent, but let’s look at several of those points in more detail. Morgian achieves several apparent victories across this narrative, points to make her a threat: the induced suicide, the two murders, the successful manipulation of Waring, the three putatively credible attempts on the protagonist’s life. We should look also at that magic item.

The induced suicide, first, is the inciting incident; it establishes an initial possibility, albeit we get only implication, but it relies on her later actions to become more than a promise. In fact, it is a promise of her threat, not a proof. The more this is true as we learn that the man she baited to suicide was no great paragon of virtue or resistance; he was a weak-souled lush kept in a padded cage all his life. The deed, at this stage, is promising, but it is not proof of her credibility as an antagonist capable of delivering defeat, death, and even destruction of character.

The two successful murders of Merlin’s (and thus the protagonist’s) allies are initially impressive. Indeed, they care well-done in themselves, particularly the second, whose tension, based on the previous assassination’s success and modus operandi, builds across into a sudden silence and then a realization of the deed done. But their place in the plot compromises them. The first, while it seems at first to deliver a stunning set-back to the protagonist, is swiftly revealed to have done no such thing; the critical work of that character was accomplished already. The promised set-back is erased in retrospect, a violation of promise to the reader worse than never having promised at all.

In the second murder, meanwhile, Morgian kills a man who has just accomplished both of the concrete deeds he proposed to do over the past chapters; while he has potential for more, no real promise is made of this, no concrete ideas for the reader to grab on to. Here, again, Morgian kills only after her victim has achieved what he wanted. Nor is this redeemed by that success-despite being a desperate snatch out of her victory. A few days earlier (possibly even hours), and the first murder delivers on the promised setback; a day earlier, and the second assassination stops the victim’s great victory. Neither victim saw it coming; neither was racing against a clock.

The second murder, meanwhile, exposes a tendency of Morgian which blossoms in her three murder attempts on the protagonist (which all fail, of course, but the way they fail!). In sum, while Morgian’s presentation is as a mastermind manipulating from the shadows, al a Sunday (The Man Who Was Thursday) or the foe in Towards the Gleam (go read it, please; T.M. Doran did very, very well), she repeatedly goes off to kill on what seems like impulse, in pure response to a foe’s success. It may be in-character (I don’t remember the earlier series well enough to say), but it kills much of her effect, her credibility.

Her three attempts on the protagonist, then, come next, and…. They are nearly farcical. The first is arguably responsible for his victory in the book overall, in a way eminently predictable, as it hands him a massive PR victory.

The second injures her as much as him; it doesn’t backfire the way the first did, in PR, only because the protagonists make the baffling choice to not let it do so on the theory that it’s improper to use ‘I was physically assaulted by the other side’ as reason to not vote for that other side. That decision is only revealed several pages into the referendum, after the reader spends those pages wondering why the PR effect isn’t being mentioned. As seen already with Morgian’s first murder (not the suicide), Lawhead has a bad habit of setting up pay-offs, not paying off, and then revealing that no pay-off was ever actually possible.

The third is the final scene of the book and features her loss in close combat to a woman who has never before been in combat (though this third is the best, with the first being the worst, largely because the protagonist’s love interest is one of the two best characters in the entire story).

A Better Man

It is the first murder attempt which reveals the reason Morgian seems to work on first read: Thomas Waring, Antagonist #2, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. According to the text’s assertion, Morgian exerts much influence on him, his senior in antagonism. She gets, therefore, some of his credibility, as a tribute of the lesser to his greater. And Thomas Waring is one of the two best characters in the story overall, with far more screentime than the other and significantly outpacing #3 (who is Merlin, by the bye, with honorary mention for the side-character who is Morgian’s second victim).

Waring, when he’s not being manipulated by Morgian, is a successful antagonist, defeated only by great might and main (and by the backfire of Morgian’s efforts). He has a backstory of success; he exhibits competence in running his political machine; he repeatedly drives the protagonist’s political hopes down into the dirt. Waring is actually a pretty well-done antagonist, particularly when he’s not in the same room as Morgian, with clear motives, a clear concept, interesting character traits, and believable personal relationships to boot.

Morgian never directs him in any of these maneuvers. She seems, in fact, to operate effectively independently of him, neither materially determining what he does or materially affected by him, despite the text’s implicit assertion that he is her minion. He actually volubly protests her first murder attempt on the protagonist, when she apprises him of her attention. She goes ahead with it over his protests: she sets a skinhead gang on the protagonist in public, in front of video cameras, where the military-trained, physically fit man proceeds to win melee combat with said gang, saving a child in most dramatic fashion on camera. This has predictable effect on his popularity and credibility; it rescues him from the PR doldrum Waring drove him into. And it’s all Morgian’s fault, over Waring’s objections.

(Morgian, because she contributes nothing to Waring’s choices, gets little credibility from his success, when the reader pays attention.)

So Morgian is the less credible villain here, not helped by Merlin outright dismissing her potential after their one-on-one fight, relegating her to a knife in the dark, a role she fails at, soon after. Her second attempt injures the protagonist, but only after he has done all that he could to win. He spends the climax in a hospital, but he has no complications to his recovery and no impediment to his success, as he finished his part before being wounded. But, at least, she has still that magic relic, repeatedly hinted to…

Coup de Grace

Well, though I think earlier books in the series may have set this up fairly clearly (I haven’t read them in years on years), that magic relic comes to nothing. She never gets it; she never even gets close, unless you count the final fight, in which she dies under the trowel of a female sculptor (albeit said sculptor is a reincarnated warrior queen who thereafter has her first flashback to being Guinevere).

Morgian never makes meaningful impact on the protagonist, except when she prosecutes an attack against the counsel of her supposed-sidekick, himself a far more effective antagonist (who would make a better lead villain), and hands the protagonist at least one massive win on a silver platter. She has no credibility as an antagonist. But she’s promised as the Big Bad, as a great danger, and the resultant contrast makes her failure very, very damaging to the story overall.

God bless.