KingOfHearts

What's the point of being good when you can be evil and still get everything, right? If Regina can TLK and use light magic just as much as Emma, there really is no point to be good or even have a pure heart for that matter. If anything, this show has said evil wins if your name begins with R. In reality, good doesn't reward evil - good fights evil. You can't be both evil and good, they don't just coexist. Everyone may do wrong things from time to time, but the difference between being good or evil is conviction. (Which Regina has none of.) Romantic love for your boyfriend from a week should not be enough to conjure magic stronger than Glinda the Freakin' Good Witch. Also, if magic comes from feelings, and you can't feel love without your heart...

I don't have a problem with Emma having fewer emotions. In fact, that's one of her best qualities at times. While Regina is balling, Snow is overly optimistic, Charming is in protector mode and Hook is flirting, Emma is usually the most level-headed and logical one there. She doesn't get dramatic about stuff and that's why she's the perfect candidate to be the mediator and crime solver in Storybrooke. This system worked well in Neverland as well when she was leading the Nevengers on even when they bickered. ITA that Emma's lack of backstory is a major part of the problem, but I also think part of it is that she's not as "useful" or relevant any more. They didn't need her in 3B at all because it was all taken care of by Regina. Regina, Hook and Rumple probably could have done Neverland by themselves if they cooperated with each other. Emma hasn't really "saved the day" since S2. This makes her unappealing to casual viewers, as they'd rather root for whatever character is being focused on at the point in time.

Well too, Neverland seemed like a random adventure. "Here, lets toss our heroes into a quest and see what happens!" The way it setup pretty much promised they were going to come back safe and sound. Saving Henry really doesn't sound like an epic mission anyway. (I'd rather see him become a Lost Boy or )

I think the fact her heart hasn't exploded from all the hypocrisy and sobbing is what makes it resilient. Haha. You're probably right, but in the story I could tell they definitely didn't care. Snow and Charming had a new baby, got back to their thrones ASAP, started taking charge of everyone, pepped talk Regina to get over it and never said they missed Emma iirc. If you take in the Echo Cave Speech and how Snowing handled the Going Home sequence, it really didn't appear to be out of character. They don't really want Emma, they just want the Savior to save their butts once in a while. (It's mostly Snow, but Charming usually follows wherever Snow leads.)

This episode is ok on its own and when you compare it to the rest of the season, but as a finale it was very underwhelming for me. The Neverland twist wasn't nearly as exciting as the S1 ending. It's probably unfair to weigh it with 1x22, since they're both in different leagues practically, but that was just one major disappointment to me.

I totally see this happening, because for one neither Regina or Emma would let Henry even near that stuff unless they stole a dose of Snow's stupid pills. He's probably sneaking around to do it, or his mothers are just too busy to realize what he's doing. With Neal gone, I can see Henry exploring the dark side of his family tree. Which is good, because that kid desperately needs an interesting plot no matter how small.

What annoys me most about it is just the whole disconnect. They're played out like whole seasons, but when you have less episodes, the climax doesn't hold the same weight. Then you have PLOT PLOT PLOT, which crowds out 90% of the character moments. This is because the premiere and finale are so close to each other. You go up, then down, then up again in a few episodes. Killing the villains off in the finales also infuriates me because it's so darn predictable. I understand that overarching Big Bads make the heroes look stupid, but they could at least A) banish them, B) take their power away, or even C) redeem them. Zelena could have had her power taken away and gotten an interesting dynamic with Regina, but nope. Cora could have been banished to another realm to parallel We Are Both, but nope. When they just kill these characters off, it feels like a shallow Disney cartoon.

That's what I miss about S1 - the slower pacing. You got to see the little things everyone does, and even the secondary characters got legitimate stories. I, myself, am not a fan of the half-season format. The reason they're doing it though is probably so they can have enough productive time to not need rerun weeks. You could maybe have a lesser threat for the half-season, then have a greater threat encompassing the whole season in a more subtle way. We could get some of the slower character moments in the first-half, then in the latter part of the second-half, get into the nitty gritty plot stuff. For the winter finale, just have a smaller victory like a blow to the villain instead of a full defeat. That's what I wish they'd do.

That's a major kick in the face to Emma, too. Instead of defending her daughter and speaking up for Emma, she's encouraging the woman who tried to murder and poison her on separate occasions. Snow is seriously bipolar - at times she wants to kill Regina, then other times she's her advocate. We saw both of this in Evil Queen... in the same freaking scene! The difference between killing the baby and this particular genocide, at least to me, is that Regina had absolutely no benefit or reason to do it. Neither is justified, but expecting a kingdom to love you after slaughtering villages isn't just evil - it's stupid. When Rumple kills someone, it's a calculated murder. When Regina kills villages, it's because she's having a bad day. It's not that Regina did a horrible act, but that the writers just threw it in there without thinking how much it harms her redemption in the long run. It doesn't compute in the grand scheme at all. It was just very dumb, especially if they were trying to redeem her, which we know now they were. Yeah. In the timeline, Evil Queen happened before Cricket Game, which makes it all the worse. Snow openly contradicts herself. Humorously, Rumple also makes a remark about Regina in Cricket Game. "(laughing with sarcasm) Regina redeemed? What a novel thought."

When you look at Regina now it's not all that out of character, but at that point of time it did, because Regina hadn't done anything that low or genocidal up to that point. In S2, there was still hope for Regina to turn out to not be a super psychopath, but the writers threw that down the toilet with this. It basically sent the message that since Regina is supposedly redeeming herself, they don't care how bad she was in the past. But the more evil and psychopathic they make her, the less and less sellable she becomes in the present as a redeemed character. It's counter-productive is what it is. There is really nothing "glamorous" about killing innocent people for no good reason. It wasn't that they were trying to keep her Evil-Queen-ish, but I see it as though it was just a plot device to stop Snow from forgiving Regina in the past. That's what the writers don't realize - when they throw in their twists and plot devices, it wrecks the characters in the process. The inconsistency really glares when you see Snow saying Regina can't possibly turn around after seeing the dead bodies, and not long after she thinks Regina is just misunderstood. Her craziness and blindness is probably what makes her the perfect candidate!

I actually thought Lacey was a funny episode, if you don't think too hard about how creepy it is. Belle the Barfly cracks me up a little, with the "Don Juan" joke in the same scene. Even the flashbacks weren't that bad, and I wholeheartedly agree about Robin Hood. I would probably root for Outlaw Queen more if we had the original guy instead. Overall, Lacey is decent for a 2B episode. The Evil Queen isn't a bad episode per se, but it totally ruins Regina. Regina was literally seconds away from redeeming herself in the flashbacks when she was talking to Snow, then wham - the writers quickly knock it down with a village massacre. If all it took for Regina to repent was being told by Snow she had good in her, she should have been redeemed a looong time ago. I personally found the village killing out of character, to the point that I've blocked it out of my memory from time to time. Before this point, I knew Regina was sadistic, but I also knew she had a definite goal she was trying to accomplish. It's not that all the villagers were in the way to Snow, either. It was entirely possible that some of them never even saw Snow, and didn't know what to say. I knew Regina was bad, but not that bad. Killing masses of people because she couldn't find Snow seemed really stupid, and I for one don't understand why the writers even wrote it in there. If they were trying to sell us on Regina's redemption arc, why do they keep bringing Regina lower and lower? My favorite line of the episode was... "Through the charred remains of their homes, I'm sure that will be perfectly clear." Even Rumple is more sensible than Regina.

I kind of doubt Henry wants to go back to New York, since there wasn't even a hint of that in the past few episodes. In fact, he was looking for houses in the classifieds. When Emma mentioned wanting to go back in Snow Drifts, he was totally shocked. I think he'd want to invite a friend over (who will turn out to be Humpty Dumpty's long lost son no doubt), but he's always been attached to his fantasy life in Storybrooke.

Pros: * Mother/Daughter moments with Snow and Emma. Yay! * Pan's mind game with Emma. * Camelot reference. * "I"ll make sure you get 14 years of bad luck!" * "If this were Excalibur, I couldn't do this!" Love Rumple. Cons: * Weak fairybacks that never had to exist. * Weak David Dreamshade twist at the end * Emma Orphan plot that * No Emma flashbacks! That would have worked so much better than the lame Regina/Snow chapter.

My theory is Oz has a special connection with other realms. Since Zelena, Dorothy, Glinda and Walsh all traveled to and from it, I'd say Oz has some kind of "opening" that Enchanted Forest doesn't have. There's even Silver Slippers, a type of item Rumple was never able to come close to finding in EF, and then the cyclones. The "wall between realms" probably doesn't apply there, either. On a slightly different note... I was really hoping Glinda would come to Storybrooke and be an actual new character, not just Blue Fairy 2.0 for two episodes.

If there's a conspiracy to kill Marian, it might be fun to watch, especially if Rumple is involved. If Regina stops it at the last minute because of her redemption, that's fine, but I'd like to see at least some of that. I miss the whole "puppetmaster pulling the strings" to manipulate people in S1. Maybe Regina calls off the murder, but the murderer doesn't care and does it anyway. At least Regina would be partially responsible for initiating it in the first place. Then the gunman misses, and shoots Robin instead! (Parallels Lacey when Rumple "missed" Robin when he shot at him.)

A lot of people watch for the characters, though. There are characters you love and love to hate. Even though I dislike a character with intensity, sometimes it has the opposite effect - you wonder if they'll get better or worse, so you keep watching even when they get the spotlight. As FabulousTater said, crappy writing goes in, crappy characters come out. If a character did something stupid once, I could blame the writing. But when a character routinely and habitually does stupid stuff, it's accountable to both the writing and the character. In Snow's case, I see her character flaws as real flaws. It's stuff I just can't handwave, because it happens over and over. She has developed an entire personality that was created by the crappy writing, and she's acted inside that personality ever since. It has become her character. She and Regina have the same problem going here. Their characters morphed into completely different ones after S1, and they've acted the same way ever since.

There could be very valid reasons why Snow didn't want to execute Regina, but they didn't go off of that. iirc, the reason Snow didn't want to do it was because felt like it was the wrong thing to do entirely, not because she felt compassionate toward Regina. If, for some reason, the magical prison wasn't available (maybe it wasn't ready or they had no means to construct it yet), there really were no other options other than executing Regina. Anything else put the lives of the citizens at stake because Regina would be gaining her power back soon. I agree Snow is a very potentially complex and awesome character, but ever since S2 she's gotten blander and blander. I loved the dynamics in S1 of Bandit Snow and Mary Margaret, because neither of them perfectly aligned with the original Snow White persona. They both added a new level of depth to the icon, which made her more relatable and human. S2, especially with Cricket Game, the dark heart and diner speech, really killed her character. (Then S3 comes along with the Echo Cave Speech and Midwife Zelena...)

Perhaps she feigns to be Glinda, then we finally see in the flashbacks who Glinda really is. The Miss Gulch character could look more like the Wizard of Oz witch (not ginger) to throw everyone off the trail too.

Forgiving Regina is one thing, but enabling her and throwing everyone else under the bus is another. Executing Regina was not revenge or a sinful thing to do - it was for the protection of her people. Rulers have to make tough choices like that for the good of their subjects. It's not personal, but with Snow, everything is personal. She can't be objective or straight-faced about anything. This is where Emma and Snow have a huge disconnect. Snow is not helping Regina because of compassion - it's because she feels guilty about Daniel and killing Cora. She feels like she has to make "amends", which with what she's doing is not going to work. Forgiveness is about moving on, not trying to kiss up because you think you owe a debt. She spends more time trying to "fix" Regina than with her own daughter. That is not "goodness" or healthy, Snow - it's Stockholm Syndrome. Sometimes I wonder by what moral standard Snow holds herself at. Is there some kind of Hero Code book we don't know about? Who is to say what's "good" here?

Thing is though, Snow knew Emma as Mary Margaret. She knew full well about Emma's walls. It wasn't until after the curse that Snow expected Emma to be someone else she couldn't be, namely her baby. As far as bossiness goes... it's fine to take charge (Emma does that all the time), but a lot of the time Snow is either wrong or undermining others or both. She doesn't think about how others would feel about the decisions she makes. When Charming does a sidebar and tells her the facts, she doesn't listen to him. She thinks her way is best, when 80% of the time it's not. Basing choices on feelings is not a good attribute of a leader at all, which is one major reason I dread seeing her rule Leopold's kingdom.

Rewatching Broken. I'm doing a rewatch of S2 and S3 before the premiere! So Snow's reaction to Emma after the curse broke bothered me. I understand she was excited and in the moment, but you could see a contrast with Charming's in it. Here's dialog from one of the scenes: Is it me or does Snow come off as bossy at times? Charming seems more like a sidekick a lot of the time. She's been trying to baby Emma since they reunited in Broken, and when she didn't get what she wanted, she replaced Emma. Snow is fine before she married Charming, but then after she married him, she got like this: Does she come off that way to anyone else? Bossy and kind of whiny? I love S1 Mary Margaret and Bandit Snow, don't get me wrong, but after she married Charming in the flashbacks and got uncursed in the present, her character changed somewhat.

This. Zelena's overpowered magic was so lame, and her having the dagger only made it worse. If they really wanted Wicked Vs. Evil, they should have at least leveled the playing field a bit. I suspected Zelena to be an exact match for Regina, but I was wrong. Big Bads are only threats if they have massive handicaps, apparently. The question of who created the curse should have held more weight than it did. In the past, the curse caster had control over everyone under the curse. But since that got washed away with Snow's half-hearted curse casting (Pun intended), there was no reason to know who cast the curse. It made no difference if Zelena had casted it, or even Granny for that matter. There was no dark and nefarious plot tied up with it - the curse itself was just a plot device to undo the reset. They should have waited until the last minute to reveal Zelena's plan. After the ending to 3x16, I knew exactly what was going to go down, and it was predictable from there on out. There was a million other interesting ways Zelena could have gotten exactly what she wanted without breaking the laws of magic. I feel like the time travel plot was thrown in there for A&E's Back to the Future adventure, quite honestly.

I agree. If Zelena wasn't so obvious (or she was actually a total misdirect), it would've been a more thrilling half-season. It's the mysteries the audience doesn't know the answers to that keeps viewers talking and coming back to see what's going to happen next. I know I did in 3B when I wanted to know what in the world Zelena's plan was. (As you can imagine, I was disappointed at the outcome.) S1 had the same thing with the Kathryn murder. It was so obvious that Regina was the answer... but Kathryn being alive in the end kept it climactic somewhat. In both scenarios, Emma thrived. I just wish the outcomes were more investigative and less contrived.

Jean, yes!!! Campy! That's what I love about this show - when it's campy! If EM is evil, I'm at a loss at what her intent is. As long as it doesn't involve breaking the laws of magic or endless muahahaing (which I doubt we'll get from EM. She's just not that kind of actress.), I'm game for whatever it is. Running an ice cream shop is less suspicious than an instant midwife, that's fore sure.

And then her magic wasn't even what saved the day... it was Regina's out-of-a-hat light magic. The only time Emma ever used her magic was to save Henry from Zelena. As for her crime-fighting skills, she used them briefly in Witch Hunt and The Tower, but all that was useless at the end of the day because it was Rumple who gave the witch's identity away. I really loved her teaming up with Regina, and then with Team Hero, because it grasped the best of both worlds, magical and physical. After Quiet Minds, this tapered off and turned into the Regina Show for the remainder of the season. (Which by the way wasn't even that entertaining of a show because it was 90% Ragdoll Regina being tossed everywhere, with Outlaw Queen sprinkled in between.) Emma's toughness is always seen as a bad thing on the show, but it can really come in handy when you're dealing with crazy people like Zelena.