Interesting how the advisors call their dungeoneer "David" and also "Jock" - surely a nickname related to his being a Scot dwelling south of the border. Nicknames were a rarity among Knightmare teams.
At the end of reciting the first riddle, Olgarth gives us a one-word impression of Popeye. Is it pure coincidence that the chemical symbol for silver, as in spurs of squiredom, is also the syllabic basis of Popeye's laugh?
Treguard implies that three truths might have led to Olgarth giving "magic" to the team. I wonder what it would have been. The ideas of a wall monster giving out a spell, and of a spell being inessential, are both odd ones.
In the past, I've assumed that Olgarth's advice was for the team to go right. But it's then impossible to reconcile what he said with the fact that, in the team's first left-or-right situation, the talisman matched the Great Corridor's left-hand exit symbol (a rune called gar) and indicated that left was correct. However, if we interpret "justice lies on the right" as meaning "justice is false on the right [so true justice is on the left]", then Olgarth's statement complements the symbol clue rather than conflicting with it. We can only speculate on what the team would have encountered through the right-hand exit - an instant-death bomb room perhaps - but it would seem that not taking the lamp had put them in losing status anyway.Billy wrote:"Justice lies on the right" was what Olgarth said, yet the correct Talisman was placed in front of the left door. That goes to show how hard the early series were, especially this one, as answering one riddle wrong in Level 1 lead to death.
It's also possible that, irrespective of their clue object choices, the team were on a second chance, or in losing status, through doubly bungling the pick-up itself. They were going to leave without any clue objects until Treguard stopped them; then David nearly put the ruby in his knapsack, which would have led to it being "consumed" and unavailable as a gift for Lillith. (As an attractive gift at any rate.) Once a team is in losing status, in a sense it doesn't matter what happens to them and why, because a dead end has been laid down for them somewhere ahead.
From the Knightmare pilot script, upon which this first quest was based, we can be confident that the room in which the quest ended would indeed have turned out to be a wellway room. In the pilot script, the wellway was guarded by Richard Bonehill's scimitar-wielding chromakey guard, but that was never incorporated into Series 1, so we can only speculate on who or what was lurking under cover of darkness. Just because we never saw Mogdred in Series 1...
The dungeoneer's final action of the quest is quite fitting, for Knightmare too was destined to uphold its charm. To paraphrase Elton John, the Campbell burned out long before the legend ever did.