KingOfHearts

Oh I agree, I don't mean to say anything otherwise. The writers really don't care. (Which makes me wonder why I care myself to even watch! But yet I still will...)

Even if Happy Families was the goal, you can't get there with a clean slate without horrible inconsistency and incoherency. After the Curse broke, their new personalities came so quick that it broke up the mojo that S1 grooved with. It's as if Adam and Eddie said to themselves, "Yay! Curse is finally broken! We can do whatever we want now!" Regina/Snow need to work out their rivalry, and jumping to "Happy Families!" just doesn't cut it. The most critical question regarding their past is "Why?", and it hasn't been asked yet.

I ponder that question, especially after we've been shown that Snow and Regina have actually had good times together in the past. Is it me or are Regina and Mary Margaret the only two characters that are completely different from their Enchanted Forest counterparts? Charming, Hook, Granny, Red and Archie don't act very differently at all, but Regina and Snow are treated as totally separate characters from their past selves. Snow insists she be called Mary Margaret (gag), Regina's sins in the Enchanted Forest are pretty much "forgiven" and absolved in Storybrooke, Snow is way too gullible to ever come close to Bandit Snow, Regina is accepted into the Charmings, and Snow doesn't even want to adventure any more. Of all the characters that have been butchered on Once, I think these two got it the worst. Going further, cursed Mary Margaret was better than current Snow, and Mayor Mills was better than Woegina. Mary Margaret was more interesting because her character was not as set in stone as Snow. Her affair with David showed that not-so-innocent side of Snow, just like Evil Snow did in Heart of Darkness. Mayor Mills was just flat-out evil, but actually had the brains to scheme with. She's gone from being a cunning, sadistic mayor to crying over her week-long boyfriends, and frankly it's distasteful for Regina fans. Snow and Regina need to start a workshop for assassinated characters. That is one similarity they have with each other.

Replying in Relationships thread.

White Out could mean... "Elsa gets a job at the Daily Mirror as a 1980s typewriter typist. She falls in love with Sydney Glass, but when Regina finds out, she crushes Sydney's heart as he dies in Elsa's arms." Or... "The Evil Queen finally kills Snow White."

There was actually a deleted scene where Archie walked by Mr. Gold's shop and saw the puppets in the window. He looked distraught, then just kept walking.

With the Giancarlo Esposito announcement, he may have been recording as the Magic Mirror for a Regina-centric.

Henry's character is in a precarious place. He is in this transition stage from kid to adult, and I can imagine it only getting more awkward as he becomes an older teenager. Plus there's the We-Are-Both thing with Henry also having memory-less Henry inside him still. He can't just be surrounded by his family all the time without doing anything himself. If he's going to lose his NY life, I hope he at least gets to go to the Enchanted Forest some day and have a fulfilling life somewhere. I really hope we get to deal with NY a little more. That's probably not going to happen, but I'd really like to see Regina go with Henry to New York to help pack. That would stop the Woegina antics for a couple of eps, give Regina some perspective, and give Henry an easy C-Plot that wouldn't require lots of time to shoot. Just an example of stuff they should be doing with him.

That maybe why she didn't give a flip about Regina in Bleeding Through. She thought Regina killed her, perhaps. It seems Cora actually did have a little respect for Snow (she complimented her at Eva's funeral, and tried to teach Snow life lessons), so maybe that's why she was willing to give the information to Snow and not Regina. It's just a theory. Regina: "You officially have a better relationship with my mother than I do - and you killed her."

But did Cora know that Regina wasn't the killer?

K is for Killian Jones!

That's exactly what I was thinking. They really could have had fun with how Henry and Emma begin to believe, like going to Oz as you said. What if Emma/Henry were camping in Maine (of all places!), hid in a shack from a cyclone, and got transported to Oz? That would have been really cool because they would try to find their real home, and Henry would be Toto. The Wizard would provide the "way home" for Emma, but in reality, it would be a memory potion for her to remember her "true" home of Storybrooke. Meanwhile, the Wicked Witch is doing everything in her power to stop Emma from getting to EF to save her parents.

G is for Good Form, what Hook compliments Emma on!

Yeah, that's right. I didn't know they knew about the engagement either!

Wow, I didn't even know Storybrooke knew about the wedding, besides Archie and Moe. If it was known enough to be in the newspaper, I'm surprised it was never mentioned at the coronation party or by the main cast members.

I understand a little bit why Regina teamed up with Cora at first, but it was so sudden and inorganic that it just kind of felt weird. Regina desperately wanted her mother's approval, and her mother promised her Henry and everything she wanted, so I can see why she went back into daughter-mode. Cora chose the perfect time to go after Regina according to her plan - right when Regina was hurt and broken the most. In Regina's vulnerability, she went for the only hand reaching out for her. But after all the Cora-betrayal-suspicion moments, it really doesn't make sense. Perhaps she was afraid of what her mother would do if she turned on her, I don't know.

What I didn't understand is that after having scenes where Regina even questioned Cora (Stable Boy flashbacks) and Snow placed seeds of doubt in her mind, Regina still relentlessly allied with her mother. The writers hinted Regina was going to betrayed her mother in a very logical way, but then they gave Snow the kill for their big Dark Snow twist. Then for the rest of the season, Regina just intends on killing everyone in order to get to Henry. It's like all her redeeming in 2A was reverted for the failsafe plot. If they kept her redemption stuff from 2A, I don't think she'd be trying to kill everyone. It makes her look absolutely insane to think Henry could love her after that. It's all bark and no bite with these writers when it comes to Regina's redemption.

What I mean is that they didn't care about the main arc, Missing Year, Zelena's story, or the just general plot. They focused on Regina's epic romance yes, but I didn't see the same attention to detail in 3B as I have with other seasons. The first two episodes were fine, but everything after that didn't have the depth nor intricacy of past story arcs.

V is for Vendetta, his revenge against Captain Hook. (Alright I could have said "Vengeance", but there would be no fun in that!)

Is it possible Adam and Eddie had no intention of making 3B good at all? It seems like all they wanted to do was get to their time travel adventure and Frozen ASAP. The episodes nor Oz nor even Zelena got much special attention in the storytelling. The whole Zelena/Missing Year arc wasn't very epic or climactic at all. Watching the 3B winter break promos just makes the letdown more real.

Oz had a great setup. It was implied that in Oz, things magic normally couldn't do could be done, and the impossible was made possible. For instance, the power of the four witches together was able to break the laws of magic. The Wizard had Silver Slippers that could take you anywhere - something that Rumple spent several lifetimes looking for. There were cyclones that pulled people from other realms, even from lands without magic. The witches had pendants that let them be some of the most powerful magic wielders ever. All these attributes of wonder make Oz look whimsically magical compared to even EF. What I also loved about Oz's setup was that it was a land that not many knew about - like a mysterious world all on its own. Not even the Enchanted Forest citizens, minus Regina and Belle, even knew it existed. The idea that there are secret realms few know about intrigues me substantially. Regina said in New York City Serenade she knew Oz existed. It was alluded she had dealt with Ozians and the Wicked Witch before, but since that didn't seem to be the case, I'm not sure why "the bookworm's right, it's quite real" and "I know exactly who we're dealing with - the Wicked Witch" were thrown in there. Oz had a lot of amazing worldbuilding potential, and I had a lot of ideas for how it could have worked prior to 3B premiering, but it really got the short end of the stick. It certainly had a lot more to go off of than Arendelle. On a side note, the Emerald City was my favorite CGI scene of the show.

They gave Glinda the Blue treatment and made her a carbon copy of the bland fairy herself. Couldn't she have some kind of off-the-wall character that would make her remotely close to memorable? Nope. She got dumbed down enough to give Zelena a pendant that made her elite. She's another plot device. Why couldn't Zelena have a relationship with the other witches? Perhaps the Wicked Witch of the East could have been the protector who joined forces with Zelena, and then Zelena could have casted the dark curse with her heart. But instead, Oz basically had its shining light in one-and-a-half episodes, and it was gone. It's far more popular than Neverland, which got about a 10 episodes for spotlight. As a major Oz fan, I really don't get it. I liked the idea of Zelena, and sometimes I enjoyed her scenery chewing, but her story was her major downfall.

Zelena could have been an interesting character if they had done more with her backstory than just scenery chewing. If, as the prophecy states, Zelena was the "greatest evil Oz has ever faced", shouldn't they have shown Zelena terrorizing the land? She took their ruler the Wizard, banished Glinda, had an army of flying monkeys, supposedly had spies in multiple realms, and seized Emerald City with a mere flick of the wrist by taking out all of two guards. If she's such a powerful force to be reckoned with, why does she spend 90% of her time just muahahaing to Enchanted Forest folks? Why couldn't she be portrayed as the Evil Queen of Oz? She was just shown as a petty brat who happened to have overpowered magic and a lust for sparkly imps. The Wicked Witch of the West is so iconic, so great for a Once twist, aaaaand we got Zelena instead. She's Cora daughter - you'd think she'd have some of her cleverness genes. If they were going for Cora 2.0, they failed miserably. It was a golden opportunity, too!

Well, since Rumple basically orchestrated it all in the first timeline, he could do it again. Not to mention he also helped them considerably with the glamour spell, party invitation, telling them where Charming would be, making a forget potion for himself, replacing the peasant clothes and using the crystal ball to show where Snow was. He could have fixed it himself, but he didn't because he was too busy with finding a solution. Rumple seemed pretty entertained to see two dumb time travelers running around.

In the S3 finale Emma says "He wasn't bringing me to Storybrooke to break a curse - he was bringing me home!" As sappy as that sounds, I don't find that completely true. Yes he wanted Emma to be his mother for him, but I think breaking the curse was a higher priority to him at the time. It smells of retcon for the sake of emotional drama.