KingOfHearts

(Not really a spoiler imo, but just in case.) This episode tried to raise the stakes and utterly failed.

There seemed to be this idea that Regina always got "short end of the stick" and could never get her "happy ending", like bad things just happened to her for no reason. (Even when they were direct consequences of something she'd done.) But instead of simply making bad things happen to her because "bad things tend to happen to bad people" as Rumple put it, or for cheap drama, they could've been turned around as stepping stones toward her redemption. Another example would've been Robin's death. Instead of making it about Regina being a victim and having to use Jekyll Juice to remove her evil self, why not use it as a test to show how far she's grown? Instead of her thinking the universe was to get her, why couldn't she decide to push forward and find happiness another way? It would've been a great sign of growth if she had decided to mourn Robin like a normal person and later start the "moving on" process in S6. I'm not saying she should've gotten another love interest in S6 (save that for S7 with the timeskip), but she could've used the time to develop her sisterly relationship with Zelena and find her place in Storybrooke. Regina really needed an "Emma moment" to decide her own fate instead of letting circumstances define her happiness. The lack of that step was one of the biggest problems her character had. It's funny that Zelena moved on from Hades so much quicker yet I'd argue her experience was more traumatic because she had to kill him herself.

It's strange that the Love Triangle of Doom was the better option for Regina's story in 4A. It would've been very soapy (which it was anyway), but it would've been better for her redemption arc for Regina to decide if she's being suspicious because she wants Robin for herself or because he's actually in danger. She would get to a point where she'd let Robin go, but then immediately after get undeniable evidence that Marian is at least up to no good. That would've been a good test for her. Then, of course, she'd have to convince Robin that Marian isn't who she says she is. All of this needed to happen without Regina being angry at Emma, full stop. The BFF stuff needed to be gutted completely. I could see Regina consulting Emma about investigating Zarian, though.

Probably Zelena to do the Zarian reveal early on in S4. Instead of Regina doing the Author stuff, her B plot could be about being suspicious of Zarian instead of being angry with Emma. Regina would try to warn Robin, then Robin would accuse her of not moving on, dramatic tension ensues, blah blah blah. Then toward the end of 4A, Zelena reveals herself to everybody and becomes a side villain in 4B. Wild, off the wall choice: The Sheriff of Nottingham. I wish we could've seen his mini redemption arc. He could've been in S4 as a "regular" as setup for a potential love interest for Regina. It would've been interesting to see Regina date Robin then date his nemesis.

It's interesting that the seance juice she used to talk to her father was brought up again in 5B, as if she was meant to set that up. Rumple has Emma use it on Hook's tombstone to try to contact him. (I think it's funny that stuff was just lying around Gold's pawnshop when we needed a whole ritual in 3B for Cora.)

I love how great it was of an homage to the Aladdin movie. I never thought of being thrown into the bottle as his demise, but when it happened, it fit really well. Unlike S6 of OUAT, it seemed like the writers actually took the time out to watch the movie or at least read the plot on Wikipedia. The writers probably intended to give them another separation/reunion before the flashforward. That's something they would do.

I honestly think the writers should've given the Underworld more backstory showing what it was meant to be before being turned into Hades' playground. Maybe it was supposed to be more like The Good Place, where people were encouraged to deal with their issues and redeem themselves before moving on. What if Hades had fell in love with someone (or even multiple people) who were passing through, only to never see them again after they went into the light? What if he was snubbed by the other gods and developed a deep loneliness, growing into bitterness? What if he loved Persephone, but in a OUAT twist, Zeus stopped his heart so he couldn't love her? I would've understood Hades much better if we saw what it was like living in Zeus' shadow or being stuck in the Underworld. The show really oversimplified Hades as a character, which made him come across as vaguely petty. The writers never went beyond "he's in love with Zelena and wants to keep people in his domain." The sibling rivalry with Zeus needed to be articulated more. We only got one side of the story, and not much of it at that. His motive kind of changed for some inexplicable reason halfway where he decided he wanted to leave the Underworld instead of maintaining subjects. His goals were so all over the place.

It would've helped if we saw that everyone got the equal opportunity to finish their business before moving onto Definitely Not!Heaven. The fact Blacktooth, Milah, and Aunt Em all got the short end of the stick is what makes it all so frustrating. It wasn't so much Cora ascending as it was she was able to and other people who did far less worse things than her didn't. That speaks to a larger issue with the show - villains like Regina and Rumple were given numerous opportunities to redeem themselves while other villains did not. I'm not sure it would be very comfortable if everyone had the opportunity to change and go to Definitely Not!Heaven without any hell, but that would be easier to gloss over than Blacktooth going into eternal punishment just because the writers needed to raise the stakes. Taking the rest of my response to the "Should've happened this way" thread.

It was said at one point it could only take people to worlds with magic, iirc. It only worked to summon the apple in Storybrooke because Regina had a little magic left from the locket she had with Daniel's picture in it. I'm pretty sure it's explained in "The Doctor" flashbacks. It's the scene where they're in Rumple's library and Regina overhears their conversation. Rumple had a deal with Jefferson to get the slippers from Oz, which would've worked to take him to a Land Without Magic. However, Jefferson failed to get them and asked Rumple why he couldn't just use the hat. Rumple replies it can't take him to Lands Without Magic, to which Jefferson asks, "Why would anyone want to go to a land without magic?"

That's honestly something they should've established in the writing room while initially planning the show or early on in the show's run. The entire show hinges on the fact the Dark Curse was absolutely necessary to get to the Land Without Magic. We can of course handcanon why Rumple ignored other paths, but the significance of using a curse for mass travel had to be established to justify its subsequent reuse. If you go back and watch S1, it was pretty clear that other than The Last Magic Bean, only the Curse could take people to a Land Without Magic. That was kind of the point of it.

There was also that retcon that the "walls between worlds" prevented travel between the Enchanted Forest and the Land Without Magic unless a curse had been cast. But there were so many characters that ignored that rule that even headcanoning to reconcile the exceptions is dicey. There's even an exception in the same arc - Walsh. I don't think the writers did a very good job of conveying that the characters exhausted all their other options. While the heroes casting the curse seemed novel at the time, it still should've been Zelena using the Dagger to force Rumple to cast it using Bae's heart. That would've been way more gutwrenching than whatever the hell happened in "Quiet Minds". As romantic as it was, the splitting of Snow's heart in two so Charming could cheese death really weakened how serious the Curse was. (Besides being hella contrived.) There was nothing "dark" about Curse 2. The writers did a lot of mental gymnastics and pretzel twisting to make it all work when they didn't have to.

I wish Zelena hadn't been written to be as petty as Regina. Unlike her sister, she has legitimate reasons to feel she got the short end of the stick. But she turned out to be so whiny and superficial. Detaching her from the Wicked Witch persona and looking at her background, I could see her being a sympathetic character. Rebecca Mader could've done a lot with that. Making her likable would've actually support Regina's character arc as well. For most of Regina's life, she's been no. 1 and an only child. I'd think she'd be furious to find out Rumple cared about and enjoyed training someone else more than her. If anything, she'd be the one green with envy. Rumple only ended up choosing Regina because of the price. It didn't have anything to do with his opinion of either sister. The fact Zelena saw that as complete rejection just shows how petty she was in the show that actually got written.

It's hard to pinpoint what was actually going on with the Zelena/Rumple dynamic. There's obviously meant to be some kind of sexual tension going on with the creepy shaving scene and the... Even if Rumple wasn't into her, Zelena was mostly definitely attracted to him, even if only through lustful desires. Choosing her to cast the curse set something off in her, but there seemed to be more to it later as she became more dependent on him because daddy issues. It's all supposed to be gross and messed up, but then what was the point of it all? Just to show she's a dirty promiscuous villain? Sex appeal? It didn't seem to affect the plot all that much.

If stupid always wins, that must be how the heroes always seem to stumble into victory. It wouldn't have worked between Zelena and Rumple since Rumple had zero feelings for Zelena, but if someone had intentionally hid the price of the Curse from a potential caster, that would've created some nice dramatic tension. I can see it now - Dark One finds someone to cast their curse, but they fall in love with them, so they hide the price from them and keep putting it off.

I'm actually really impressed with the costumes and green screen. At least this time around, Regina's singing part is tolerable. It's more hopeful than most of everything after 2A.

I'd argue this is a testament to one of the show's biggest writing problems. The writers only had a few relationships in mind whenever writing any given episode. That's why you only saw certain pairings and many characters were not allowed to interact with another, even when it made sense for them too. The writers rarely considered the implications for anything, including how any given character in the ensemble may react to certain events.

Zelena never seemed to be jealous of Belle, which is odd. If she was spying on people in the Enchanted Forest on the daily, you'd think she'd know that Rumple moved onto another love interest. There was also zero reaction in Storybrooke. I don't think the writers ever thought of that.

Zelena's character has gotten criticism for not being true to the Wicked Witch of the West, but the original character didn't have much to go off of anyway. That wasn't really the problem. Although, one thing I would've done instead was cast someone other than Rebecca Mader. Zelena was supposed to be someone unwanted, despised by society, and bitter. I can't the actress akin to Elmira Gulch or any other adaptation of the Wicked Witch for that matter. I didn't hate the "green with envy" idea because it's actually kind of a clever way to explain the green skin, but Regina shouldn't have been the one for her to be jealous of. I hate the way the writers shoehorned her into the main story by giving her a "relationship" with Rumple and being Cora's daughter. You could take all of that out and nothing would change. I could see her as Regina's rival and Ozian counterpart, not a long forgotten half-sister.

I actually really like Rumple in 3A... for the most part. It's fun to watch him try to be the Rumplestiltskin of the past, only for his heart to be no longer in it. He was just done and ready to die. It's always be a fascinating concept in the show (except with Regina) to see a villain who no longer cares about doing evil but not because they've become a good person all of a sudden. Maleficent was another example. I just wish the writers hadn't Rumple in 3A with the stupid doll thing and basically everything with Malcolm. I could see Pan and Rumple being rivals who used to be friends as children, but not father and son. One thing I would change about this show is have more gray characters and situations where standings on the moral spectrum don't matter as much. It was always about picking the side of the angels or the side of evil, but that never worked because the morality was so wonky. It was always fun to see the heroes and villains working reluctantly together, like Hook and Emma in S2 or Team Wicked Hero in S5. Being a hero shouldn't mean riding in on a horse to stop a curse and being a villain shouldn't mean nonchalantly ripping people's hearts out. Robin was supposed to be a chaotic good character who did somewhat morally ambiguous things like stealing for the benefit of others, yet he was portrayed as insufferably stupid or "code" abiding. Ivy didn't need to be a merciless killer if she was going to be redeemed a few episodes later. If the show wanted to be fairly black and white like classic fairy tales that's fine, but it consistently tried to be morally complex and failed in every area. The writers rarely had the characters doing something for pragmatic reasons. It always revolved around the characters' beliefs in either "hope" or "revenge", to the point they were only doing good for goodness sake or evil for evil's sake. "I'm a villain so I must do villainous things to show evil I am!" or "I'm a hero so I must do good things to show heroic I am!" Real human beings don't tend to make decisions like that. They're not constantly fixated on grand destinies. They want basic things. It's fine if you have a few people who want to save the world or plot revenge, but when everyone starts doing that, there's nothing grounded to weigh it down. Even Emma, who in my opinion was supposed to help ground the show in realism, kind of stopped doing that after S3. OUATIW was even more fanciful than its parent show, but its characters were written so organically that it still retained the human aspect.

When Cora went up to the light, Ted Danson walked up to her and said, "Hello, Cora. Welcome to The Good Place." But it was not, in fact, the good place.

I would've rather her come to this sort of realization at a younger age than post-Neal in the Cleo episode. Obviously it's not so black and white that she just woke up one day and decided to totally give up on her parents. Her jadedness was a slow burn over time. But it seemed like in the Cleo episode she was still wearing her heart on her sleeve when she had been beaten down so much already. Cleo shouldn't have been the tipping point. If anything, that would've been Neal. Of course it doesn't help that 3A had three episodes that were just "Regina vs. Snow" stuff, each in an episode that wasn't really about them. "The New Neverland" was probably the most consistent with its theme out of the three. I think they were just there to remind people what show they were watching during the whole potted plant phase.

Emma desperately needed a flashback in that episode, or at least in 3A. The writers shouldn't have waited until the 3B finale to show her young self. She probably could've joined a group of runaways for a while who weren't literally Lost Boys of Pan's. Perhaps she could've been in denial at a young age, thinking someone would adopt her or that her parents would come looking for her. But in the end, she's convinced to join the runaways and live life off the streets. She could've befriended a boy who looked a bit like one of the Lost Boys she later meets in Neverland as an adult, which sets off her hesitation when she's fighting one of them in that episode. The flashback didn't really seem to connect for me with Emma's character struggle. I realize in retrospect what the writers were attempting to do, but it didn't seem to flow thematically. Snow concluding she's a ruler and Emma concluding she's an orphan are two very different things.

But then we might've missed the flashback where Snow needed fake excalibur to believe in herself, or Pied Piper Pan.

So he would've become Lotso from Toy Story 3?

There's also the fact Rumple said point-blank in 1x22 that he created the Dark Curse. But in 1x08, it's implied the Curse already existed and Blue knew about it. And at one point, the Black Fairy implies she knew everything about Storybrooke, as if it were in her plan to begin with, but all she wanted was to transport all the children to the Land Without Magic, so what does a small town in Maine have to do with that? At least with Regina, although it was a stretch, she wanted an idyllic place to live where she was in complete control. The Black Fairy's ploy to stop a prophecy by kidnapping/banishing children probably had a better solution. Makes Blue look a little shifty. Was she planning on using it some day to banish the Dark One or something? Was it Plan B in case the whole Last Magic Bean thing failed?