companionenvy

Programming or not, Dean's a fully grown adult - one who has disagreed with and even parted ways with Sam in the past. We don't know how Sam would have reacted if Dean had stood firm, but I don't think that it would have been with the kiddie table charge, something he brings up when DEAN is making decisions unilaterally. That's the opposite of what was going on here, so it wouldn't make a ton of sense. Dean gave a pretty rational explanation for why he grudgingly followed Sam - they've worked with plenty of sketchy people (you know, like the literal king of hell) in the past, and intel is intel.

I don't think Gadreel was a betrayal. It was a violation of Sam's autonomy, which is bad, but not the same thing as a betrayal. I also don't have a huge problem with Dean's initial call to let Gadreel in in the first place - I think he handled it poorly after (kicking out Cas, not trying harder to tell Sam what was going on, or to follow up on the red flags Ezekiel was throwing up), but can't blame him for what he did to save Sam while Sam wasn't necessarily in a position to meaningfully consider the situation. ETA: I do think while Dean was acting under greater provocation/duress, what he did was legitimately more serious: it is a much bigger deal to let a supernatural being possess your brother without his consent, over a period of weeks, than to lie to you brother about who is giving you the tips for your cases, which is really what the cooperation with the BMOL came down to.

I guess for me, a betrayal is more limited. Actively working against a loved one is a betrayal. Selling out your loved one to an enemy, thwarting the loved one's plans, etc. In this case, if anything, Sam had far more reason to be pissed at the BMOL than Dean did. Dean didn't trust the BMOL, and didn't think they should be working with them - but they and the Winchesters weren't working at cross purposes or against one another. It was more a question of methods than of goals. They had even grudgingly worked with the BMOL in the past. Should Sam have told Dean? Yes, of course he should have. And the show acknowledges it. But I thought Dean's reaction - kind of pissed, but not furious -- was appropriate given the offense, and given how often the Winchesters and Cas do similar things to one another. I still think "betrayal" is a bit much.

The most awesome thing would be if it turned out that Dean suspected something was going on, and TFW had made a contingency plan specifically for this scenario - so that Sam and Cas are implementing Dean's plan in cuffing Michael. But I don't think that's what is going on.

I agree - and as someone who HATES excessively angsty endings, I thought the Angel finale was fantastic because it was true to the show and not purposelessly tragic or nihilistic. Much as I want our boys to be happy, I could cope with them dying a similarly meaningful death to end the show without feeling I'd wasted years investing in them.

Sam working with the BMOL was not a betrayal of Dean, IMO. Just because a loved one doesn't approve of your actions doesn't make those actions a betrayal. Sam not telling Dean that he was working with the BMOL - meaning that, on some level, Dean himself was unwittingly doing so -- was a betrayal, I suppose, but a pretty small potatoes one; to the extent that using the word seems histrionic to me. Betrayal would be if the BMOL wanted to kill or imprison Dean, and Sam gave him up to them. Character A doing something that Character B doesn't like and lying about it is a regular Thursday for the Winchesters.

I think I've given up on the rewatch, as I know it (IMO) is mostly downhill from here, but I'd love to read this fic. Link?

There were, to be fair, good elements of this episode. The actors were, as usual, trying their best to wring some actual emotion out of the situation, and I found both Jack's reunion with Kelly and Lily earning heaven affecting. But one big problem, as others have noted, is that death of core characters has ceased to mean anything on SPN, since it is so obvious they'll be back. I mean, Sam last died late last season, and was back before the end of the episode - yet, of course, we were still treated to grieving Dean first, and as good as Jensen is, there are only so many times I can watch these people go through the exact same emotional beats. It doesn't help that - even as someone who likes Jack and what he adds to the show -- I thought the way they were playing it was overwrought. Jack is a decent kid, and I buy that Sam, Dean and Cas have come to genuinely care for him and would mourn his death. But the idea that losing him is like losing a child is laughable. Maybe that dynamic could have worked with Cas, but the two just didn't spend enough time together. Jack has been around for, what, a year and a half, and for a significant amount of that time, he was in alt-world. Dean, especially, hasn't interacted positively with him that much - he hated him during the early days in the bunker, was gone for a couple of months while Michael was possessing him, and then apparently spent some time after that mostly holed up in his room. So again, I buy that this is a loss for him, but not that this is a worse or even as bad a loss as many of the others he has suffered. The way they brought him back adds to the problem. Splitting off a piece of his soul sounds like an appallingly bad idea, and it was too easy in any case. The early resurrections on this show had a logic to them - having established the rules of demon deals, the idea that Dean could trade his soul to bring Sam back to life made sense, and then Sam and Dean's respective roles in the apocalypse made other resurrections more or less work. Crucially, it also wasn't something that left us with the question of why they didn't just save everyone they had lost using the same methods: the resurrections were either highly specific to Sam and Dean, or required a major price. In this case, Sam, Dean and Cas basically look for a magic spell to bring Jack back because they are sad, even though they've lost other people who they haven't tried to bring back. Yeah, Jack's a Nephilim, but at this point, there have been enough McGuffins capable of bringing people back from the dead that it is hard to avoid the thought that if they had just tried hard enough, there's no reason Kevin or Bobby or Charlie couldn't have been brought back as well. Then there's the Empty. Again, in a vacuum, the empty keeper was effectively creepy. But within the SPN mythos, it just doesn't make sense that this would be a malevolent entity, or that angels would be destined for what is being presented as a horrible fate. Why would Chuck design things that way? And, of course, this means that again we have one of the team in mortal peril, with bonus secrets and lies.

Loved, loved, loved the episode. D'Arcy Carden was fantastic playing the four humans. That being said, the episode did raise some conceptual concerns. The biggest one is that while it was clear that the points system was forked up for a long time, now that it is confirmed that no one has gotten into the Good Place for centuries, it is kind of hard to avoid the nightmare-fuel thought of what that means for specific, real-world people. Before, there was some plausible deniability where theoretically, we could assume that at the very least young children or great heroes of history were in TGP. But now, we're dealing with a narrative universe in which, canonically, every single person who has existed for half a millennium has been subjected to potentially centuries of horrific torture. That's...really grim. I also think it dilutes something of the show's premise. The original problem with the points system was that it was excessively rigid, too unforgiving of human frailty and dismissive of people's continual power to change. By most people's moral systems, Eleanor would be deserving of a bad place, but we see that she is capable of genuine transformation under the right circumstances, which argues against the premise of consigning someone like her to eternal torture. Then, there's someone like Chidi, who may have had deep flaws that prevented him from really contributing to the happiness of others, but who was a more or less decent person; it isn't that the system has totally misjudged him, but that a system in which a Chidi winds up in the bad place is pretty merciless. That's undermined by the realization that no one gets in, because now we know that a) even if all four of these people had been their best selves, they were completely doomed; being an Arizona trashbag and being Mother Teresa makes no difference and b) the point system isn't just un-nuanced, it is completely broken. And I find the idea of fighting against a system that is just without being merciful a lot more interesting than fighting against a system that is transparently rigged. As others have noted, it also makes Mindy St. Clair's existence kind of baffling; her consignment to a medium place made sense only when we thought there were also people getting into the good place.

Oh, I agree that, in theory, he's right - but if motivation matters, and people who are doing it for the reward get rejected, then doing something simply because it is the rational way of maximizing your own eternal happiness shouldn't be enough. Doug's comments make it clear that he isn't actually concerned about being a good person, or helping others - if he had an insight that you got into TGP via murdering x number of people, he probably would have gone and done that, too. Which might be rational, under circumstances, but it wouldn't be good.

That's a good distinction - though it only works if you accept the premise that Doug (or the Buddhist, or Franciscan) actually is acting out of a belief that this is what it takes to be a good person and not because he wants the reward. It is probably a combination of both, but I think that the episode suggests that Doug's obsessiveness arises from plain fear that he's losing GP points, not an authentic commitment to living a good life for its own sake. From the transcript: "I saw with perfect clarity how the afterlife works. Immediately, I knew I had to live a perfect life...I designed a life that would maximize my point total and help me get into the Good Place." Later, when the sociopathic neighborhood kid forces Doug to give up his shoes: "Well, as long as he's happy. See, if I make him happy, I get the points." And after Michael tells him that he should just kick back and live a little: "I can't do any of these those things...because I can't risk it. There's an accountant out there measuring the value of everything I do. What if I relax and do something that loses me just enough points to keep me out of the Good Place and I'm tortured for eternity? No, I have to make every moment count It's the only rational way to live (emphasis added). To me, that makes it pretty clear that Doug is not in this for the right reasons.

Even after 100 + years? The thing is, we just don't know exactly what happened to get us to petty thief Neal Cassidy. What we do know is that Bae, post portal jump: -Found a home with the Darlings, only to have to sacrifice himself again to save his foster family -Learned both that his mother had left him and that his father had killed her -Started to bond with Hook, only to be betrayed by him -Spent a century in Neverland, where he was either in isolation or under Pan's sway -Wound up in the LWOM circa 1990 presumably still physically and emotionally about 14-15 years old, with no money and no experience of the modern world. After his steadfast nobility earned him a series of betrayals and traumas, it wouldn't be surprising for even someone who started off as moral as Bae to become cynical and decide that goodness wasn't worth it. At the very least, there's a good chance that both in Neverland and in the early days in the LWOM, Bae would have had to develop some cunning and resign himself to some morally questionable behavior for the sake of survival, so it wouldn't have been a matter of going from noble Bae one day to hardened con-man Neal the next. There would have been a transitional phase where Bae was uncomfortably forced to compromise his morals - which then becomes a slippery slope to worse behavior. He also may have had exposure to some bad influences. We, frustratingly, know almost nothing of Bae's time in NL, or what relationships he might have developed there, but if he ever teamed up with either Hook or Tink, they would have promoted a different kind of morality, to say the least. He also may have spent some time with Pan and the Lost Boys, where he likewise would have been encouraged and almost enchanted into abandoning his scruples. And a teenage boy who winds up homeless in 1990 NYC is pretty likely to fall in with a rough crowd as well. Also, Neal even at his worse is not totally without conscience. He doesn't become a serial killer. He doesn't set up or leave Emma just for the hell of it, and tries to make sure that she has the means to start rebuilding her life when she gets out of jail. He wants to go legit even while living with Emma, and apparently does so sometime between Tallahassee and Manhattan. Once he is back in the EF orbit, he does once again display a capacity for bravery and sacrifice. So IMO, while it remains ludicrous that the show doesn't bother exploring the Bae to Neal transformation, it isn't thoroughly unbelievable.

My feelings after Manhattan were similar - but I still don't think it is totally beyond the realm of what is redeemable. And after his first few appearances, Neal does improve. He doesn't believe her about Tamara (understandably), but he is sympathetic to her feelings. He may still, at times, show disbelief or discomfort in her abilities, but he also praises and expresses confidence in her on other occasions. He apologizes to her for what he did, and shows willingness to fight for her and Henry - even, ultimately, when it means relying on his rival Hook. All of this doesn't add up to Neal being an awesome man or partner, but in the context of this show, it doesn't make him utterly unforgiveable either, IMO. The ongoing problem is that the show clearly doesn't want us to see how illogical his decision in Tallahassee was - we're just not supposed to really think about the fact that a)August's rationale makes no sense, as there is no reason to think Emma being with Neal would be an obstacle to her breaking the curse and b) that if Neal did want to leave Emma after what he learned, he could have done so without setting her up to go to prison. But if we go by the show's rationale, Neal did what he did out of a combination of buying into August's comforting claim that this was what was best for Emma, and unwillingness to get drawn back into the whole EF world. He was deluding himself on the first score, and being a coward on the second, but it pales before, say, Hook making multiple attempts on Belle's life (and I'm not trying to rag on Hook, here; he's my favorite character). In addition, we see in his final scene with August that Neal does feel bad about what he did (and seems not to have expected Emma to have gotten even as much jail time as she wound up with), plus he leaves her the car and 20K - not remotely adequate, but showing some conscience and concern. And, of course, he didn't know that Emma was pregnant. Once he sees Emma again, nearly twelve years have passed, and he knows she has broken the curse and has presumably been reunited with her family. So, while it is shitty that he doesn't realize how profoundly he hurt her, I can also see him having rationalized himself into minimizing what he did to her as a means of self-protection without being a total monster. I mean, compared to a century in Neverland and abandonment by your mother and father, 11 months in a minimum security juvenile facility after being betrayed by your boyfriend of a few months might not seem necessarily life ruining. Not adequately shown on screen - but again not, I think, totally inexplicable, any more than the same man being both straight-shooter naval officer Killian Jones and the vengeful pirate Captain Hook. The show just doesn't bother to show Bae's transformation into Neal. But given everything Bae goes through, I can see him losing that idealism and adopting a nihilistic, selfish approach - and adult Neal does, stupid as he may be at times, continue to demonstrate some capacity for decency and heroism.

I think I still like Demons of the Punjab better, and possibly even the Witchfinders, but I also liked the episode quite a bit. The twist with Grace was a little emotionally manipulative, and I agree with Llywella that the moment where Ryan calls Graham "granddad" should have had more impact than it did, but I was thoroughly interested by the mystery of it all and found the end scene with the Doctor and the consciousness absolutely brilliant - even down to the delightful absurdity of the consciousness being in the form of a talking frog. The Doctor had just been interacting with it as a threat - but, perhaps because there's a level on which she relates to the plight of a brilliant, singular, lonely mind, she can quite genuinely feel affection and pity and a kind of love for it. Significantly, it is a moment that can only take place without her companions, because they wouldn't have understood, reinforcing the parallel. The Doctor's quirky dialogue has worked for me, in this episode and for most of the season. Maybe I'd have issues with it with a less capable actress; to me, Jodie is nailing the Doctor's whimsy. Really, it is striking that I've wound up pretty bored by all of the Chibnall penned episodes this season, and enjoyed all of the ones written by other writers. Hopefully next week will break the mold.

I don't get the sense that Snow wants Emma to get back with Neal because of some moralistic belief that having a kid together (and maybe even having sex in the first place) means that you should definitely be married. Rather, I think it is more a Fairy-tale land belief that everyone has a One True Love and that separated lovers - especially one whose meeting in the first place almost has to be seen as a manifestation of fate -- are bound to find each other again. This is helped by Emma's own claims about loving Neal. Cora's experience suggests that there is some taboo on unwed mothers - but then, despite its relative commonness today, in most of modern American middle-class society, there's still some taboo against having an unplanned pregnancy outside the context of a monogamous relationship. Most communities won't shun a woman for it, but she'll be gossiped about, and it will be taken as a sign of irresponsibility and/or promiscuity. We really don't get a good sense of EF values - but if we want to give more thought to it than the show does, there are some indications that it isn't supposed to be a totally sexually repressive society. AFAIR, nobody from the EF without a curse download (i.e, Aurora) seems to have any particular response to the fact that Emma was not married to the father of her child. And Belle seems to have begun a sexual relationship with Rumple before the wedding, and Mulan is poised to tell Aurora about her feelings for her before she finds out about the pregnancy, so she presumably doesn't think Aurora is going to recoil in horror at the idea of same-sex attraction. People who did have the curse download would at the very least have modern values in addition to whatever conservative mores the EF had possessed, and in any case, I don't think there is other evidence that post-S1 Snow has a notably old-fashioned morality. Charming, maybe a little, but not so much that he stands out as anything more than slightly paternalistic. But yeah, it would have been really interesting to see conflicts between the different moral systems. Another missed opportunity. Though I think a good writer could have pulled that pairing off as well, that one's harder for me to fanwank because I think Hook at this point in his life really needed someone who he saw as morally superior to him if a relationship was going to be anything more than an exercise in mutual self-loathing. Hook might have been able to puncture some of Regina's self-pitying garbage, but I don't think identifying her BS - and acknowledging the waste that his life had become -- would have been enough for him to have actually reformed all that much; at best, he might have given up active villainy and retreated behind a veil of cynicism, innuendo and alcoholism. Correspondingly, Regina might not have actually developed self-awareness, but by S3 she at least knew she didn't want to be a villain anymore - so a Hook who had more moral intelligence than she did, but who hadn't been inclined to move over to team hero wouldn't have appealed to her. Ironically, I think that if Belle had met Hook before Rumple, he would have been a much better match for her; he's a villain who needs saving, but he actually does have more good in him than Rumple does, and he's also a man of action and courage who could have given Belle a life closer to the one she seemed to want, on a much more equal footing than she ever establishes with Rumple. I don't, on the other hand, think Belle had enough of an edge for Hook - despite occasional hints of her own darkness, which the show never commits to, her whole MO is too earnest and goody-two shoes to seriously attract him.

I could theoretically see Swanfire as a valid ship, even given Neal's betrayal; Emma does, after all, wind up with someone who has, objectively, done much worse than Neal ever did. Granted, Hook's crimes were mostly not committed against Emma, and he never betrayed her once they were in a situation in which trust might have been expected (indeed, everything he did or tried to do to her was after she had - however justifiably -- done the first bit of betraying). Still, Hook was a bona-fide bad guy for a long time, including a period in which he was in direct conflict with Emma. I also think that after his first couple of appearances as Neal, in which he is unaccountably douche-y to Emma, Neal is played as genuinely regretful about what he did to Emma, reasonably respectful to her, and determined (sometimes in stupid ways) to do right by Henry. In other words, he isn't, to me, irredeemable in the way that Regina is (in general, but certainly as a viable partner for Emma, even if their sexualities were compatible). The problem is that for Swanfire to have worked, it would have had to be a very slow burn in which Emma and Neal began to establish an adult relationship centered around co-parenting Henry well before either of them had any real thought of restarting a romantic relationship. If Neal had floated the idea in S3, Emma should have gently but firmly shot him down and suggested (rightly) that he was trying to restart a relationship with her out of confusion over Tamara's deception, guilt over what he had done to Emma himself, and a desire to create the semblance of a traditional nuclear family for Henry. The show should have validated this perspective, rather than having David and Mary Margaret cheerleading for Neal and suggesting that he might be Emma's true love. Had the show wanted to go in that direction, Emma should probably still have wound up choosing Hook at first, while Neal would have remained part of the team during crises and spent time building relationships with his father and his son. During this time, he and Emma would be reliable allies and sometimes have to work together in situations involving Henry. In this version of the show, Hook would have stayed dead at the end of 5A, and only some time after that - possibly after Neal and Emma had gone on an ultimately unsuccessful quest to rescue Hook from the UW, perhaps because Hook himself chooses to stay behind or move on -- should Emma and Neal have wound up together. So while I don't think the ship was DOA, the way the show was trying to sell it from the latter part of 2B on - as if Emma and Neal still loved each other and always had, even if events had conspired against them -- was bogus.

To be fair, Emma told Snow and Charming that she loved Neal several episodes ago. I may think as a viewer that Emma is misinterpreting her own emotions, but Snow and Charming can't be blamed too much for taking her at her word, especially as they didn't hear the Echo Cave speech where Emma sharply qualified what she meant by "loving" Neal. Two questions that will never be answered: First, when did Emma get the impression that being "savior" is a permanent job title, rather than simply a description of her destined role in stopping a single, specific curse? If Emma feels that she has to live up to the reputation she acquired in breaking the first curse, that's one thing, but there shouldn't be any actual reason that she can't allow herself to move on and live her life at least as much as Snow and Charming can. Second, wasn't Eric a prince in the EF? And now he's a fisherman? Are he and Thomas and all the other ex-royals all OK with becoming working-class average Joes? Aren't some of the people of SB their subjects, rather than Regina's (and, really, Snow's)? It was a minor detail in this episode, but it reflects a major worldbuilding fail.

This is another Regina episode where the episode more or less works if you ignore just how terrible she's established to have been. A complex villain is one thing. A psychotic mass murderer who, as recently as about a week ago, was planning to kill everyone in a town who wasn't her and her son in order to avoid having to share him with the members of his biological family - whose lives she ruined on the flimsiest of pretexts -- is another. If Regina's crimes had been proportionately less, then the tree of regrets moment isn't that bad. Being what they are, the idea that this is a triumphant moment is ludicrous. But beyond that, the flashback only works if you forget that Regina turned out to be a terrible mother to Henry. However they want to retcon it, Regina, on top of gaslighting Henry ,was a shitty enough mother that her ten year old - otherwise a child who seems naturally loving -- has no problem seeing her as nothing more than an enemy. She willingly hurts him to score points against Emma, often seems to leave him alone, and is never shown making any kind of authentic connection with him. It is fine if the show wanted to walk back the strong implication that early S1 Regina didn't love Henry and start the complicated work of building a relationship between them, but you don't get to write heartwarming episodes about how Regina adopted Henry. The child she would go on to emotionally abuse. And who she adopted illegally. And whom she was only in a position to adopt at all because she had ruined the lives of his bio-family, leaving Emma to a life where she wound up as a pregnant, homeless, incarcerated teenager. In a vacuum, Regina drinking the memory potion was a good moment, and I even believe she might have done it. The problem is with the whole premise of expecting us to view the story of how Regina - a genocidal despot responsible for destroying so many other families, including the Charmings-- adopted Henry as a sweet origin story. Oh, and Regina's pity-party statement to Emma about how she has her parents, a pirate, and "that person" while Regina just as Henry is disgusting. No, you evil witch. Emma has two peers who may indeed love her, but will never meaningfully be her parents because you forced them to send her away as a newborn to save her life, damning her to a loveless childhood spent partially on the streets. "That person" abandoned her to deliver his child while in prison, leading to her wrenching choice to give Henry up for adoption. He was engaged to another woman less than a week ago - at which point love interest number two was still a villain. Since breaking the curse, Emma hasn't exactly had an easy time of it, either. So, at best, after a miserable 28 years, Emma now has a chance of developing loving relationships with several people around her - but, of course, no chance to bring back the years with most of them stolen from her by Regina.

That's fair; I agree that changing into Pan shouldn't have altered Malcolm's intelligence level. But even there, I think a huge boost in confidence and power level, combined with a huge decline in fear, might make a person significantly more competent; there's evidence that if, for instance, you make a comment about an Asian girl's Asianess before a math exam (thereby reminding her of the stereotype that Asians are good at math), she'll do significantly better than if you make a comment about her gender (thereby reminding her of the stereotype that girls are not good at math). And regardless, it seems to me that the transformation/change in circumstances would reasonably cause enough changes that it isn't totally destructive to the plot that Pan is so different from Malcolm, even if there are elements that may be iffy. No answers on whether or not Pan should have known either that Bae was the boy on Hook's ship or that he wasn't the Truest Believer, but IMO his attitude toward Bae could go either way - it would be reasonable for Pan to want to avoid all memories that he ever had a son, or that time was still passing -- but it also seems plausible to me that he might revel in the evidence that time is passing for everyone else, but not for him. The thing that makes less sense, to me, is a version of the same complaint a few posters have articulated about Neal's behavior toward Emma in S2 -- it is a lot more logical for Rumple to be spiteful toward Pan than for Pan to be spiteful toward Rumple, given that Pan's the one who abandoned him. Instead, Pan acts as if he is the aggrieved party who would have reason to enjoy further ruining Rumple's life.

This may be a fanwank, but I think some of my attitude toward the Malcom-Pan progression comes from the fact that, for me, the disparities can be explained by the radical differences in situation - not to mention the emotional/hormonal changes that would come with being turned from a middle aged man into a teenage boy. I'd say that the shift from Malcolm to Pan is more comparable to the shift from weaver Rumple to Dark One Rumple -- which I find believable -- than the one from Bae to Neal, which (without further insight into how the change occurred), I don't. DO Rumple is radically different from weaver Rumple, but the transformation from meek coward to the violent, supremely authoritative DO makes sense given the context: beyond whatever changes the Darkness wreaks on his psyche, he's gone from being a powerless, derided peasant to an all-powerful immortal being. The two encounters with Hook in The Crocodile are a case in point; he isn't willing to face Hook the second time around because he's become a braver man, but because now he's the infinitely more powerful party in the conflict. One of the main reasons for fear is the awareness of consequences. Once Malcolm becomes Pan, he's immortal, magical and (through a process that I agree isn't sufficiently well explained), the main power on the island. He doesn't (until many, many years after his arrival) have to worry about dying, let alone supporting a family or navigating social dynamics in a world where he's decidedly not of the privileged classes. Yes, his Machiavellian grip on the island contrasts with Malcolm's haplessness, but even there, he only has as much responsibility as he wants - he doesn't care about the well-being of the Lost Boys, or have anyone to hold him accountable for his treatment or mistreatment of them. Recruiting a tribe of devoted lackeys as your companions on a magical island is very different from acknowledging responsibility for a child in the real world. I think a lot of people would change pretty radically if instead of having to worry about work and relationships, they became the undying, never-aging ruler of a magical island overnight.

I give Henry something of a pass for what he did here, because he is a kid and Pan is a skilled manipulator. Even a kid without a hero complex might have trouble resisting a person him telling him that he is the most special person in all creation. Henry also comes from a family that has showed him the importance of heroism and sacrifice, and Emma and Regina have both lied to him before - and have good motive to do so here. The only caveat is that Henry's first meeting with Pan demonstrated pretty obviously that Pan is completely untrustworthy, but the show has been consistent in suggesting that the longer Lost Boys are under Pan's influence, the farther under his sway they fall, so I'll accept eleven year old Henry being less than totally shrewd about the whole thing. I concede that Pan doesn't make a ton of sense as an extrapolation of Malcolm, but still feel like the reveal that Pan is Rumple's father is a good pay-off for all the hints they've been dropping of the dynamic between them, and one that enriches our sense of Rumple's motivations. Him wounding himself at least in part to avoid abandoning a son, and his feelings about not following Bae through the portal, take on new texture when we realize that Rumple himself was an abandoned child.

As someone who didn't have any problem with Snow's Echo Cave revelation, I do have a massive problem with the fact that Snow treats it as a matter of course that she will stay on Neverland with David forever. And, on one hand, I get it. Snow knows that Emma is her daughter, and has come to have a certain affection and respect for her, but they haven't built up a relationship over the years, whereas she and David have. But at the end of the day, Snow and David are Emma's parents. They brought her into the world. Sending her through the wardrobe may have been the best thing they could do under the circumstances, but Snow has to recognize, on some level, that it is her decision not to end Regina that led to her daughter growing up alone and miserable. Yeah, Emma is an adult, but it is Snow's responsibility to do what she can to make it up for her. Emma's a good person, so I'm sure if Snow declared she was going back with her rather than staying with David, Emma would give her permission to stay, and I wouldn't blame Snow for taking it. But the fact that, after telling Emma just days earlier that it is her job to make Emma not feel like an orphan anymore, Snow sees staying with David -- thereby never seeing Emma or Henry again -- as the obvious and only choice, is pretty awful.

The whole system of justice they have is terribly un-nuanced. Even if we accepted that these people deserved the Bad Place, it seems hard to argue that Chidi or Tahani, especially, deserve the kind of eternal torment that has been described. Ironically, Michael's neighborhood in the first version actually did strike me as proportional punishment for those two, at least until things got really over the top with real Eleanor's arrival and the subsequent crisis. To punish Chidi by giving him a thorny moral crisis that involves lying, or by telling him his dissertation is terrible, is fairly proportional to his crimes. Ditto for ruining Tahani's parties or letting her know that she was the lowest point-scorer.

Except in TGP, faith or lack thereof isn't an issue; you don't get points for belief. Rather, your actions are judged based on your motivation. Original Recipe Tahani didn't wind up in the bad place because she had any special knowledge of the system; she wound up in the bad place because she did a lot of good things for selfish reasons. The same, in effect, is true of Doug. Whether he is right or wrong about how the system works is immaterial - presumably, if some crazed fan did some heroic act because he thought if he did, Miley Cyrus would fall in love with him, he isn't eligible for points even though his belief that heroics = reward of Miley's love is incorrect. That doesn't make the action any less self-interested. It just means he isn't actually going to get the moral dessert he was hoping for. As I said earlier, I'll buy that the average believer in the afterlife isn't disqualified because, in practice, very few people really have the faith to live day by day thinking "I need to do x, y, and z to get an eternal reward when I die," to the point where that is guiding all of their actions. But that is exactly what Doug Forcett is doing. I also agree with those who think that, logically, Michael telling TSS that they are disqualified from admission to TGP should actually preserve their eligibility; they now believe that they are hopelessly damned, which means the good deeds they've been doing are purely selfless, with no chance of reward. I had thought that that was Michael's plan - but now that they're dead again, it would seem like a moot point. Plus, even if they had a chance at the good place, the bar for admission has been set so high that I doubt they would have much hope of making it anyway (and people like Pill Boi and Eleanor's mom would have even less of a case).