companionenvy

If they're objecting to activity purely because it is illegal, or to pretty petty wrongs, then yeah. But unlike Regina, both of them actually do have clear moral high ground when it comes to a lot of what Hook's done. Snow less than Emma, when we take eggnapping into account, but even that was a one-time aberration, not a pattern. It does bring us back to the question of how justice works in SB. It is kind of cute that the show winds up making Hook Emma's deputy, but I feel like that would actually be a really hard role for him in certain respects, given that he really doesn't have room to judge almost anyone. I guess he, and to a lesser extent, Emma can justify it by regarding it in largely practical terms; they're dealing with active problems that need to be addressed: when Hook was causing trouble in town, Emma arrested him (however briefly and ineffectively)'; now he's on the side of good, so he's the one dealing with these things. But assuming SB justice ever evolves to include anything like ordinary legal penalties, so that people not named King George could experience actual, potentially serious consequences for their crimes, it would be a little much to have Captain Hook arresting you for an assault or robbery that's going to lead to real jail time. This is why, in my head-canon, Emma and Hook's job winds up basically being catch-and-release for anything short of murder. Theoretically, magic should give Emma enough options for keeping the peace without needing to resort to hefty prison sentences, except when it comes to crimes by magic users, who are almost impossible to punish effectively anyway. And, obviously, the idea of assigning punishments as justice, rather than as a deterrent, has to go by the wayside in a town hosting so many reformed murderers. From what I've seen of S7, I did like the idea of cursed Wish!Hook being a detective, and wouldn't have a problem with him deciding to resume a version of his Rogers identity, though this may be simply because redemption for his long list of sins wasn't as big a focus of his arc.

I think it is even worse than that, again until the finale. Rumbelle is a dumpster fire, but there are consistent moments of real tenderness between them almost from the first. Selfish as Rumple is, he shows warmth and affection for her - as long as it doesn't require him to give up his power, he at least seems genuinely fond of Belle. Whereas there's really nothing, for almost all of season 1, that would suggest that Regina even really likes Henry. She's frequently leaving him by himself, never engages him, and is consistently stern and withholding on even minor things, like not letting him have sweets or telling him to spend the whole day doing work in his room. It is like she knows that a child is supposed to fill the void in your life, but lacks the emotional piece that would have given her real motherly feeling. This, too, reinforces in several ways how the show goes so wrong with Regina. For 21 episodes, the writers put essentially all of these humanizing techniques - showing bravery, capacity to love and inspire love -- into the single episode "The Stable Boy," and think that, combined with her sad backstory, is supposed to do all the work of making us root for her. Whereas, even if the sad backstory hadn't been so stupid as a pretext for revenge, it was too little, too late. We've seen a lot of this woman in the present day, and in later points in the past, and she doesn't ever again demonstrate any of these qualities. As opposed to Hook, where we're getting frequent and diverse reminders that he has other qualities even as the show really does allow him to be a villain. I also think, in story if not moral terms, it does make a difference that neither Hook nor Rumple are consistently in conflict with our heroes. Logically, we may know that Rumple is actually at least as culpable in the casting of the Dark Curse as Regina, but he's not actively trying to ruin their lives in every scene, and is sometimes even helpful. Hook, to an even greater extent, is usually concerned with his own agenda; this may incidentally put him in opposition to Team Princess (and, of course, there's an element of revenge for the beanstalk in this episode), but all things being equal, he's not particularly interested in harming them and would have even preferred to team up with them than with Cora. If upwards of 90% of a character's scenes for a full season are going to place her in deadly opposition to the good guys, then a show has to be really, really careful about seeding in these more ambiguous moments, because it is just a basic reality of narrative that we're going to be more invested in crimes against our heroes than crimes against random redshirts. And, of course, if the majority of your crimes are perpetrated against the good guys, it is proportionally harder to imagine them ever accepting or forgiving you. I think the show just took it for granted that we would accept that Regina loved Henry, even though they never bothered to show it (and, bizarrely, actually had a line in the pilot that strongly implied that she didn't), and thought that that plus Daniel was enough. But for that to work, Henry's relationship with Regina had to be something closer to Rumple's with Bae, and it just wasn't.

As I've said before, I so wish the show would have had a conversation between Snow and Hook where the fact that she was also a thief comes up, preferably in the context of a heist episode. In fact, do we ever get an on-screen conversation in which Emma having been a thief comes up? I mean, obviously we can assume Hook knew, after a certain point, but it would have been so much fun to play with these respective characters' histories of piracy/banditry/theft. The closest I can recall was Tallahassee, where there's an obvious parallel between Emma and Neal's real-world crime spree in the past and Emma and Hook stealing the compass in the present, but it isn't something brought up explicitly. But then, I watched the show so quickly on my binge-watch that the rewatch is reminding me of all sorts of things that didn't sink in at first, so maybe I'm forgetting something. Like, did the bug being stolen ever get referenced in a conversation between them or something? In a moral sense, though, I don't think Snow's past necessarily deprives her of the right to judge Hook, since with her, the writers do seem to set strict boundaries on Snow's banditry. The attack on David and Abigail is a mistake; otherwise she is only stealing from Regina and her people. Plus, she's essentially been forced into outlawry by the accusation of treason. Similarly, Snow and her allies are killing in the context of a pretty obviously just war, usually in kill-or-be-killed situations. I think Hook might be comparable-ish to Snow only if you take the most generous possible interpretation of his behavior, which is that all that really changed in the shift from the Jewel of the Realm to the Jolly Roger was that they weren't acting on the king's authority any longer, and that in effect Hook had given up a blind patriotism - in which things as bad as anything a "pirate" might do were routinely justified by the fact that a ship happened to come from foreign country X rather than my country Y -- for principled, if now unsanctioned warfare against his former king. Which is, in fact, possible. But at the end of that key flashback episode, Hook seems to be doing more than shifting allegiances after finding out the truth about the man he'd been serving; he is, if not abandoning, than at least radically revising his notion of "good form." He still has a code, of course, which is why I don't see him running around mercilessly slaughtering innocents, but part of the pirate image he is adopting is one that, I think, for him allows for a fair bit more violence than he was committing as a member of the navy, regardless of whether this would have been historically accurate for the equivalent period in LWOM history or not. Hook himself, at this period of his life, might have justified this by saying that there was no moral distinction between what he was doing and what someone like Snow and Charming would do in the wars with Regina and George, but I think that would have been his cynicism speaking, and not a valid ethical point. In any event, he's enough of an all-around jerk to Rumple that it seems he's already devolved between Good Form and The Crocodile, which - combined with how far he takes his vengeance quest later on, and the stories about at least a few hot-tempered, unjustified kills --just make me think it was unlikely that he was being terribly scrupulous about choosing his targets and keeping his body count to the bare minimum. Scrupulous enough that Milah didn't have to be a sociopath to join and fall in love with him, especially in the context of a world that did accept a higher level of violence, but not OK even by the (non-hypocritical) standards of that world, and certainly way, way worse than bandit Snow.

Replying in the Hook thread.

(Bringing this over from an episode thread, as it relates to the character in general) To be fair, he's also a pirate, which implies some pretty not-good things:) The show may never be all that specific in outlining exactly what that meant, but watching this season again, I find it hard to believe that he was only going after people who had it coming (or who he thought had it coming because they happened to work for the king who sent him to Neverland), even in the days before Milah's death. I don't think he sank to the level of senselessly slaughtering whole crews of innocents - and am confident women and children would have been firmly off limits -- but I'd have to believe there was a lot of "surrender or die" involved, in situations in which plenty of good people wouldn't have surrendered. Or he may even have adopted the attitude that it was all fair game as long as he let the men on the ships he took fight for their lives first. So, not close to Regina level sociopathy, but still pretty bad. One slightly mitigating factor is that I do get the sense that piracy must have been at least a little more accepted in Hook's time than equivalent crimes would be in ours. It is obvious that Hook is an outlaw, and is seen as such, but his crew is able to hang out openly at the tavern, and while Milah isn't the most sympathetic character, she isn't depicted as someone totally lacking in morals. And, of course, his initial crew is composed of former members of the royal navy, who seem pretty gung-ho about the whole pirate thing. Come to think of it, even Snow and Charming, who is established as being decidedly not cool with the whole pirate thing, are willing to try to hire Hook to find Regina in "The Song in your Heart," whereas I don't think it would ever have occurred to Mary Margaret Blanchard and David Nolan to go out and make a deal with a mobster or gangbanger, no matter how desperate the circumstances. My take on it is that while Hook is still choosing what everyone understands to be a very bad path in being a pirate, he's living in the context of a considerably more violent culture in which killing that follows certain rules of engagement isn't perceived as quite as horrific.

I agree that this moment was key (and thanks for introducing me to the concept of the "Save the Cat moment,") but I'd say that we had signs that Hook was capable of good from the first, given the noble way he accepts his near-certain death in "The Crocodile". It isn't the same as what he does for Aurora, since he obviously loved Milah, but the fact that he wasn't willing to risk Milah by telling Rumple the truth about her, even though it was the only thing that might have even had a slim chance of saving his life, is telling, as it means he is capable of wholly selfless love. I also think the whole set-up of that episode prepares us for a villain who can surprise you - though the revelation that Milah ran off with him isn't totally surprising, given her obvious dissatisfaction with Rumple and the earlier tavern scene, at first it seems like Killian really might have kidnapped a woman he found attractive to force her into "service" with his crew. Finding out that she went with him willingly, and is apparently in a position of authority on the ship, doesn't take away from his various villainous behaviors, but it suggests there is more to him than we might have guessed. Hook is really quite evil in 2x09, however, so I can see why the writers put in the moment with Aurora's heart to keep the character a little bit gray. And no, I don't think Regina had such a moment in S1, which is the precise reason her redemption came from out of nowhere. I don't think her love of Henry counts, as, until he is literally dying, she really doesn't do anything that suggests she feels deep love for him. She is hurt that he is rejecting her, and she doesn't want Emma to have him, but until the last episodes, it wasn't clear to me that she would pass the King Solomon test, as she seems to care a lot more about using Henry to hurt Emma than she cares about Henry as anything more than an extension of herself and her power.

Except on top of everything else, the messaging is totally incoherent. This show, even when it is good, isn't exactly subtle in its use of flashbacks; if they aren't advancing the story (which these aren't), there's usually an obvious parallel with what is going on in the present. In this case, I'm actually not sure what the writers want us to take from the parallel. It seems pretty plain to me that, despite the consequences, we're not supposed to see Snow showing mercy to Regina in the past as a huge mistake - killing her would have been the mistake, and Snow does the right thing in refusing to go through with it. She's also pretty clearly supposed to be right when she decides that Regina's claim about only regretting not causing more suffering was just Regina pridefully lashing out. But either way you slice it, it is hard to play this as a story about Regina being victimized in the past. Yes, everyone else wants her dead, but Snow ultimately does show her mercy, and she responds with the Curse. The present situation has some similarities, in that we have people - and some of the same people -- deciding how to handle Regina. But, once they introduce to suspicion that Regina has killed Archie, the parallel totally breaks down. In the past, the question was whether or not to execute Regina for crimes she was known to have committed. In the present, the question was whether or not to trust that she had changed in evaluating her culpability for a crime the viewers know she is innocent of. Then any thematic integrity more or less breaks down when the whole thing is mooted by Emma getting what seems to be incontrovertible evidence of guilt - which means, in the end, no one is making a real choice about whether or not to trust Regina. They're just getting duped, because it would have been impossible for them not to be given the information they have on hand. So...what is the takeaway? That you should always show mercy, even though the end result might be getting tons of people killed and having your life destroyed when the villain turns on you, because it is possible that the next time a quasi-similar issue comes up, the same villain will be innocent of the particular crime you happen to be accusing her of in that moment? Really, it is a case of the heroes being damned if you do, damned if you don't. Snow lets Regina go in the past, to horrific consequences. Snow is suspicious of Regina in the present, and she's wrong. Emma does the "right" thing by being willing to extend Regina benefit of the doubt, but still winds up wrong because she literally has what anyone who doesn't know that a shapeshifting Cora is in Storybrooke would have to see as ironclad evidence of her guilt. Hell, even if Emma were still skeptical, it would be malpractice not to arrest Regina on at least extremely reasonable suspicion. The only sort of thematic point I could see them making is "Regina rejects the opportunity to change in the past; ironically, she is working really hard to change in the present, but isn't being trusted." This, of course, feeds into the vile Regina as victim narrative, so I hate it anyway. But the show also seems to want to draw some sort of parallel between Snowing's argument in the past and Snowing + Emma's argument in the present, but the actual details of the two situations make this really strained.

It would also help if there were any reasonable basis for the supposedly deep feelings of affection that Snow had for Regina in the first place. But, aside from the very, very early days of their relationship, there is no evidence of Snow and Regina being close, and a lot of good reasons why they wouldn't and couldn't have been. At best, Regina would have been able to keep her intentions under wraps enough to keep up a token pretense of motherly care. But frankly, Regina was a pretty lousy mother to Henry even without factoring the curse into account, and that's a kid she hadn't sworn undying revenge against. Snow had a doting father and memories of a loving mother, in addition to being the beloved princess of the realm. I don't believe she was so starved for affection that she would have lapped up any crumb of feigned warmth she could get from her stepmother, and I don't believe Regina would have been offering her more than that. If she had, her marriage to Leopold probably would have been better than it was, as he married her primarily so that Snow would have a mother. And if Regina was a skilled enough actress to play mother-of-the-year to Snow, there's no reason why she wouldn't have been able to parlay that skill into a better relationship with her husband the king, and, consequently, a more powerful position in his court. Certainly, there is no evidence in "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree" that Regina and Snow are close; to the contrary, Regina is presented as the outsider in a loving father daughter relationship between Leopold and Snow. The flashbacks in "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" seem to set the limits of the relationship: Regina is apparently covert enough in her evil that Snow - who, let's remember, likes to think the best of people -- assumes she feels some grief for Leopold and reaches out to comfort her, but not covert enough that Snow doesn't almost immediately realize Regina must have sent Graham to kill her. That's not a relationship out of which you get a love so strong that it would survive the murder of a parent, the killings of your allies, and multiple attempts on your own life. At least it hasn't, as of the Cricket Game, survived the curse and the separation from Emma, as, unlike Emma herself, Snow is not presented as sympathetic to Regina in the present. Ooh - that's a fantastic idea!

Seconding (thirding? fifthing?) everyone who sees this episode as a steaming pile of crap. The shame of it is that beyond the show's treatment of Regina being totally outrageous, it seriously detracts from what would have been a great opportunity to write an episode addressing Charming family dynamics. There are a few good scenes of Emma and her parents interacting - the famous "tacos" scene, all of them sheriffing together, Emma admitting that she's afraid of not knowing how to be a parent to Henry, and Snowing admitting that they're dealing with the same thing. But all of that is swallowed up by the show's bizarre need to bring everything back to a focus on Regina. At this point, we should have gotten an episode something along the lines of the Price of Gold, where the emotional emphasis winds up being on the way in which Emma helping Ashley keep her baby forces her to deal with her own feelings about giving up Henry. Really, this was the time for a one-off in which the arc-plot mostly took a backseat and we get to see these people trying to figure out how to be a family and ultimately recognizing that they've all suffered an irrecoverable loss, but are going to work to find a way to move forward together. That realization could have been helped along, ala the Price of Gold, by some external issue they're dealing with, but it shouldn't have taken a backseat to the martyrdom of Regina. Even Emma's legitimate worry about her ability to be a mother to Henry is totally undermined by the absurd comparison she makes between herself and Regina. Sure, Emma should be concerned about her fitness to suddenly be the primary if not sole parent to an eleven year old. But it shouldn't be because she's worried that she'll revert into who she was pre-series, which doesn't seem like a realistic fear for her at this point, and even if she did, there's simply no analogy to be drawn between Emma having been a drifter and petty thief (which she had evidently given up by the time Henry came for her anyway) and Regina having been a murderous despot. Just, no. The idea that Regina deserves a chance to change because Emma got that chance is offensive. At every turn, Emma's attitude toward Regina is nonsensical. First of all, as a few of us noted in the thread for "The Queen of Hearts," Regina did not "save" Emma and Snow. She backed out at the last second from a plan that would have killed them, and only because Henry was begging her not to do it. But I guess the show has to pretend that's tantamount to a great act of heroism, because otherwise, there's just no explanation for why Emma would now be on Team Regina. Possibly the worst line in the episode is where Emma says something like "I know in your world she was the Evil Queen, but here, she's Regina." Even if we bought that these were two separate identities - which they aren't, as Regina kept her memories -- what exactly in Emma's experience of Regina would make her "being Regina" be a reason to do anything but head for the hills? It was Regina who tried to poison Emma, Regina who framed Snow for murder, and would have killed the closest thing she herself had to a friend to do it, Regina who trapped the entire town in a free-will negating curse for 28 years, and Regina who, as Emma must realize by now, if she isn't a total moron, killed Graham. At no point until the season finale, when Regina thought Henry was going to die, did she ever show the least bit of decency or concern for anyone, and her first reaction to the curse breaking was to try to resume her evil ways. The fact that she's been making some effort since then might be a reason to grant her cautious, supervised visitation with Henry. It isn't a reason to invite her to family parties or ignore that she's the primary reason for basically all of the pain that Emma, her parents, and her son have endured throughout their lives. It is also egregious that no one brings up the possibility of bringing Regina to some form of justice in the present, apart from when they think she's killed Archie (which I agree was a terrible idea, as it sets up a situation in which Regina is an innocent victim, and everyone else winds up being wrong despite acting on what seems like rock-solid evidence). There are a variety of reasons why they might try and fail, or why they might even decide not to try at all, but there should be some acknowledgment of the fact that this woman does not deserve to be walking around free, let alone getting invited to family celebrations. I actually think it would have been fantastic if Emma had basically said to Regina "You want to prove you've changed? Then agree to let yourself be locked up. I'll bring Henry for visits." Obviously, that's not a state of affairs that could have lasted for long, but Regina spending some amount of time in jail - even if the circumstances of the next crisis du jour wound up with her inevitably getting released -- would have gone a long way to giving Regina's redemption some credibility and would be a far more rational response to her than what we see. The irony is that Regina's redemption itself isn't handled terribly in this episode. With the usual caveat that it takes some suspension of disbelief to buy that Regina is capable of redemption at all, she has been showing signs of change during 2A, even with the temptation to kill Emma and Snow, which she was only willing to do because of the greater-good justification provided by Rumple. The scene where she asks Emma, fairly humbly, if she can have Henry for a night, becomes immediately cruel and insulting when Emma refuses, and then apologizes is a really good one for her, establishing that she hasn't totally become a different person, but is sincerely trying for Henry's sake. It also, crucially, involves her not getting something that she very much wants, lashing out, but then apologizing for it rather than stewing in self-pity. It also helps that Emma not agreeing to the sleepover with Henry is the one time in the episode she shows anything approaching a normal degree of caution towards the woman who, let's not forget, recently tried to kill her, in addition to a long rap sheet of other crimes. Too bad the show couldn't keep that up for more than the space of a scene. People have already addressed the idiocy of Snow's decision in the past, but one more element of it that I wanted to comment on is that throughout the flashbacks, both the script and GG's acting try to retcon a relationship between Snow and Regina that really hasn't been established as existing. The scenes work somewhat better if you view these women as people who were once extremely close, to the extent that Snow might still feel great pain over what Regina has become. But there's really no indication that Regina ever spent a lot of time as Snow's loving stepmother, and it is implausible to think that she did. Little Snow had a brief period of idol worship over the sweet woman who saved her, but Regina was barely restraining herself from wringing Snow's neck even before the wedding, and it isn't that long after that that she begins falling under Rumple's sway in earnest. Regina would have had to be the greatest actress of all time to have established what seemed to be a genuinely close relationship with Snow while also taking lessons as a dark sorceress and, eventually, plotting to murder her. A few final points: - NItpicky, but I hate that David calls Snow "Mary Margaret" during the party. It makes no sense, and it is lazy writing. - I love, on the other hand, Emma's little smile when she tells Regina she has magic, and Snow's obvious pride in that revelation. Yeah, we don't get to linger on it, but I'll take my moments where I can get it. - Yes, this is a great moment. I wonder if it was scripted, or if that was Colin's decision. Either way, a wonderful way of establishing his character. Although I must say, otherwise, Hook is really at his worst in this episode, as he seems if anything admiring of Cora having killed a random person to make everyone think Archie is dead, and he's clearly looking forward to (or doing a good job pretending he's looking forward to) torturing Archie. Whereas usually, as in the fish scene, he doesn't seem to take pleasure in causing pain to innocents, though he'll do it if it serves his purposes. He's vengeful and selfish, not a sadist.

Agree that this is a mostly satisfying episode. I actually don't even mind the Sadface Regina that much, as I didn't actually see it (at this point) as the show demonizing Snowing for not inviting her, and I didn't think the moment of sympathy for her was enough to seriously jeopardize the Charming-family focus of the episode as a whole. I do, however, seriously side-eye the concept that Regina "saved" Emma and Snow. No, Emma and Snow mostly saved their damn selves. Regina gets credit for an assist for casting the sleeping curse that let David tell Snow about the squid ink, but she doesn't play substantially more of a role in their return than David, Rumple, Aurora and Mulan or even Hook, for the help he gave Emma in getting the compass. The fact that Regina decided not to go through with the deadly plan that she herself set into motion does not constitute having "saved" Emma and Snow. Moving onto villains who don't make me want to tear my hair out, Hook continues to be interesting. What I find so satisfying about his depiction is that the show is managing to create a character who is a legitimately terrible person, at this point, but shows just enough signs of depth and even conscience that he isn't just a mustache-twirling villain. On one hand, he steals Aurora's heart, knocks Belle out and leaves her a prisoner, agrees to carry out an assassination for Regina with no concern for whether or not Cora deserves it, proves willing to switch sides on a dime, and generally acts like an entitled jackass in his behavior to Emma. On the other hand, he's not wrong to hold Belle in contempt for her defense of Rumple, he does make the effort to save Aurora's heart and give it back to her, and you get the sense that he's dead serious when he tells Emma he wouldn't have done to her what she did to him on the beanstalk. Although I'm not 100% sure that the showrunners intended it, he also has to have been holding back in the swordfight with Emma at the portal; even as it is, it is really stretching credulity that she does so well against him, but there's no way in hell that it should have taken a skilled swordsman more than a couple of seconds to take out a woman who just used a sword for the first time a few weeks ago. I love the first appearance of Emma's magic, as well as her conversation with Rumple, which reinforces for me what a great character he was, at this point. Rumple is always looking out for Rumple, and just this episode, he was engineering a plan that would have led to Emma's death. But, in contrast to his behavior in some of his flashbacks, SB Rumple is not purposelessly cruel, and is even capable of a certain decency if it doesn't conflict with his overarching goals. He's willing to kill Emma and Mary Margaret in order to stop Cora, but once Emma does survive, he's also capable of reassuring her about the limits of his interference in what winds up being a genuinely lovely scene. This is consistent with much of his behavior in S1, in which I'd argue that there are scenes in which he seems to be at least somewhat fond of Emma and Henry independently of his desire for the curse to break. Not fond enough to avoid selling them out in the finale when he chooses bringing back magic over saving Henry, but enough that, all things being equal, he's in their corner.

Weirdly, as the issues seem at first unrelated, I think this is of a piece with the problem of the show's wonky morality. In both cases, the writers have the germ of a reasonable idea - people do exist in shades of grey; sometimes, in certain genres, it is better to fudge or handwave some logistical details in the service of the larger story. The problem is that they have zero sense of proportion. Shades of grey is fine, but you have to have some consideration for what lines a given character will and will not cross, and what lines that character should and shouldn't be able to cross if you want to keep them redeemable; you also can't pretend that character A's negative actions are meaningfully equivalent to character B's negative actions unless they actually are. Similarly, it is OK, at least in my opinion, if the rules of magic are occasionally wonky, or if the timelines aren't 100% consistent. That's within the realm of what I accept in a genre show with a lot of balls in the air. So, A&E's contention that fans shouldn't sweat the details has some merit to it. But that doesn't give you carte blanche to have major plotlines that make no sense on even the most cursory level. Ignoring that Henry's motorcycle is still running after years in the EF, or even that adult Henry's meeting with pregnant Emma seems to suggest that she and Hook waited an improbably long time before having a kid? I can do that. Ignoring that multiple time lines seem to have merged with zero consequences, meaning that older and younger versions of the same characters are coexisting, in addition to any number of clones? Especially when it is unclear how the future characters can possibly come to exist now that they've altered their pasts so fundamentally? Nope, not going to do it. At the end of the day, what unites the two issues may simply boil down to lazy writing. Writing my own first long fic gave me a certain amount of appreciation for what writers go through, but ultimately, it also reinforced how egregious the writing for this show really was. On one hand, there were points where I realized I had to cut a certain amount of plot exposition in order to keep a scene from getting unwieldy and maintain emotional integrity, which meant readers weren't necessarily going to get every detail about how a certain plan was put into execution. Sometimes, I didn't even figure out all those details myself - i.e, having established that Hook is an accomplished thief, I have him going on regular supply runs for more or less ordinary items without feeling the need to explain or figure out exactly how he is pulling off his robberies. Even here, however, I was mindful of the need to create some limits; there are things I realized I couldn't have Hook plausibly do unless I was going to give some sense of how he managed it. But what struck me as I was writing was how often I made changes - big and small -- to account for character logic. I'd be writing a line for character X, and suddenly realize that if character Y was supposed to be in the room at the time, she was going to have to have a reaction to that comment, so I either needed to address that or figure out how to remove Y from the scene. Or, to use a small example, I had to be very aware of when characters should be calling Hook ""Hook" and when they should be calling him "Killian"; it was important to me that Emma should definitively switch over to the latter at a certain point, but if they're interacting with a character who knew him for years as "Hook," that's what the character would logically be calling him, even if the character now knows his actual name - and if the character decides to call him "Killian," that's a conscious choice that needs to be acknowledged as significant. This occurred to me as I was watching "The Cricket Game," where David, to me inexplicably, calls Snow "Mary Margaret" during the welcome home party - in the context of the two of them always finding each other, no less. After dealing with similar issues in my fic, that's just an inexcusable level of sloppiness.

Depends whether he realizes he's still possessed or not.

I mentioned this on another thread a while back, but I believe one way of improving 5A would have been to replace Head!Rumple as the devil on Emma's shoulder with non-DO Rumple - who, rather than an over-the-top snivelling coward, should have more or less retained his personality as it had developed over centuries; unlike Imp Rumple, especially in the early days, Gold actually seems to have pretty well integrated the Darkness, and it takes a lot away from the character to make him undergo that radical a shift. How can I really invest in Rumple if the core of his being can be explained away by a curse? In any case, I would have loved seeing non-DO Rumple as Emma's sketchy dark magic teacher - the kicker being that he would actually, be encouraging her to use her powers for good, being more the Machiavellian figure he had been (in the present day, at least) through 3B than the evil cartoon he became in Season 4. Up to a point, Emma "embracing the darkness" would have wound up being Emma learning the difference between navigating moral complexity and crossing the moral event horizon, at least until the moment where she willingly took on the risk of losing herself/losing control in order to save Hook. Although, given that this was something the writers clearly had no idea of how to do or represent, Shanna is right that Dark Swan was almost certainly doomed from the start.

Seconded so hard. Emma telling Nimue that she was never nothing might be my favorite moment of the entire arc, and the show completely undermined it at every turn. I mean, I guess Emma isn't nothing, but she's certainly not a person who is ever allowed to exercise any kind of agency without being told how wrong she was and it coming back to punish her. No wonder her final victory happens because she decides laying down and dying is the correct course of action. Whether it is killing Cruella, rejecting Lily as a kid, or saving Hook, from 4B on, as far as I recall, Emma's active choices to assert herself and her desires are always framed as negatives, while she is given rewards for suppressing her desires in suicidal or near-suicidal ways: even before the finale of season 6, we have Emma taking on the Darkness to save Regina because somehow Regina's development counts more than Emma''s right to happiness. I like the end of the Underworld arc a lot for Hook's story, but it really sucks for Emma in the context of the rest of the season. Everyone coming to the Underworld with Emma was supposed to be an acknowledgment that her family really hadn't supported her enough during 5A and was making up for it. It was also, seemingly, a validation of an admittedly selfish impulse on Emma's part, a moment where she decides she's not accepting that she has to risk it all for everyone's happiness except for her own. It is still excessively dumb that all of these people willingly leave their infants and bring along their 13-year old son and grandson on a jaunt to hell to save Emma's ex-villain boyfriend, but at least it is dumbness in the service of Emma, and the show's heart is in the right place with it. But then that's effectively destroyed by having Emma fail to save Hook- which would have been fine if she had had either a more central role in saving the day in 5A (her killing Hook at his request is primarily Hook's heroism, not hers) or in defeating Hades. Instead, she's again largely sidelined in the battle against Hades because she is too upset to be trusted. So much for her family having her back. It is funny. For all the claims - ones I myself have made at times -- that Hook winds up being neutered to the point where he's reduced to Emma's lapdog, in season 5, he is way, way more of a hero than Emma in both halves of the season.

Is that true? I used to believe that, but then someone on the boards reminded me that Emma was going to have zero potential for darkness only provided that Snow and Charming were careful to raise her right - otherwise, it was going to come back. That's why Snowing were still worried that she could go dark in 4B, in spite of what they had done to Lily. The question of what Dark Emma should have been like is an interesting one. To give the show credit, I do think that there's some character logic to the differences in the way the darkness affected, respectively, Rumple, Hook, and Emma. Rumple had spent his life feeling powerless, so he becomes a murderous bully. Hook is vengeful and prone to anger, so he returns to an over-the-top vengeance scheme when he feels betrayed by Emma. And Emma is, cosmic propensities aside, as pretty fundamentally good person, but one with a tendency to close herself off defensively from others. Consequently, Dark Emma succumbs to a cold, calculating detachment rather than to real evil. The problem, IIRC, is that this is only true of SB Emma, not Camelot Emma, so I'm not sure how coherent it winds up being. In the end, I would have liked it if the darkness had brought out legitimate anger that Emma has been suppressing - mostly, against her parents and Regina. So, rather than lashing out at Snow for failing her in Camelot, from the beginning, she's lashing out at Snow for things like the eggnapping and being so freaked out by her magic during the Frozen arc, or (fairly or not )for not taking the time to actually develop a relationship with her since "replacing" her with Neal. She would have to find a way to actually deal with these real issues in a healthy way lest the darkness take hold. I did like the twist that it was an act of love that ultimately let the darkness take over. I would have preferred it, however, if the narrative hadn't, as per usual, so severely punished Emma for it; imagine a version of the story in which she is able to save the day in the end precisely because she succumbed to the darkness out of love rather than hatred, permitting her to wield its power as light rather than dark magic. This could be presented as powerful enough to turn Hook back to goodness before he dies, but not to avoid having to kill him entirely, leaving the UW arc intact. Hook would still ultimately sacrifice himself, but Emma would have had a much more active role up to that point - one that would have, crucially, had Emma herself being the one who really overcomes her darkness.

I think Dark Swan could actually have been a great idea - and even as it was, there were elements of it I liked a lot -- except for the writers turning it into an Emma-shaming angst-fest. Pretty much everyone treats her like she's a rabid dog even when she seems to be under control, her parents give up on her in an inexcusably short time, Regina thinks it's fun to control her with the dagger, she's barred from using her magic - which had been previously established as an essential part of her that she shouldn't have to hide -- and circumstances play out so that she's forced into a wrenching choice in which the "right" decision is letting Hook die. When she, quite understandably, can't do that, the narrative punishes her severely for it, and in the end, the closest we get to a heroic conclusion to the arc is the even angstier turn where she has to kill Dark Hook. Especially given that this is a character whose past includes so much pain and isolation, it simply isn't enjoyable to watch. This ties in, I think, to some of the posts from earlier about declining ratings. The reason the show lost viewers so quickly was, IMO, a fundamental misunderstanding about what people wanted out of the show. I don't think writers should pander at the expense of story, but it isn't pandering to show some awareness of the kind of narrative you're writing. S1, for what it was, wasn't simplistic - Rumple/Gold was set up as a nicely complex character, Emma's emotional issues were given some depth, the flashbacks offered a couple of interesting inversions of expectations -- but it ultimately worked because it led up to a narratively satisfying conclusion where good wins, and wins with style; before we get the TLK, we have the fun of Emma taking on a dragon with Charming's sword. This is a show that was capable of taking on more serious and subtle themes, but in order for it to continue working, it had to stay fun, and it had to be more generous than it wound up being with unambiguous wins that didn't lead to moral crises (or, worse, unwarranted moral condemnation). Let Snow killing Cora or Emma killing Cruella be an actual badass moment to be celebrated. Give us flashbacks of Snowing triumphantly taking back the kingdom, not of yet another one of Regina's or even Hook's crimes. There's a place for moral grayness, even among heroes, but Once wasn't ever going to be Breaking Bad or The Wire, and it shouldn't have wanted to be. Drama doesn't only come from putting characters in super angsty situations and blurring the line between good and evil. I'm a little more sympathetic to writers regarding the initial drop-off between the first two episodes of season 2, because I actually did enjoy those episodes and can see what the writers were going for, even if I think the separation should have come an episode or two later. But I can also understand why, even at this early point, viewers who had liked season 1 felt jerked around; after becoming invested in Snow and Charming through the flashbacks in S1 and spending the season waiting for them to reunite, having them indefinitely separated again the same day that they've found each other after 28 years is pretty rough.

Very much a nitpick, but: shouldn't some of the people in SB regard George as their king? It seems like everyone in SB considers Snow and Charming their rulers (although oddly, despite having evidently ruled for at least a little while in the EF, they are still referred to as princess and prince rather than Queen and King), but if George was taken up in the curse, presumably, so were his subjects. Come to think of it, Cinderella and Thomas were also the rulers of a separate kingdom, and while, IIRC, Belle was a noblewoman and not a princess, she and her father, too, seem to come from somewhere other than Regina's corner of the EF. So, it is actually kind of weird that we've defaulted to Charming being the leader. Much less of a nitpick: the townspeople shouldn't have been so quick to go after Ruby. It is believable that some would panic after Gus died, especially given prior prejudices against werewolves, but these people also know Granny and Ruby as staples of their community, people for whom they presumably have some affection. So coming out with pitchforks en masse seems to be a bit much.

This refers to both episodes for this week, but I'm posting here because the points I'm making are fundamentally related. Child of the Moon is a pretty disposable episode, but it has the dubious distinction of, IMO, offering our first instance of Regina's victims responding to her in a totally unrealistic way: the scene where Regina is babysitting Henry, evidently at Charming's request. I noted in the thread for "We are Both" that I totally buy that Charming would see Regina as someone who is not an immediate threat to Henry's physical well-being, which is why he doesn't go into Defcon five when Regina kidnaps him. That's legitimate. Probably he should at least have made an attempt to imprison her early in the season, but as by the time the dust clears, she's already got enough magic back for that to probably be a losing battle, that is kind of understandable as well. But even though Regina is, at this point, showing some willingness to help Charming, it is utterly nonsensical and trivializing to suggest that mere days or, if we're being generous, a couple of weeks after the curse breaks, Charming is going to invite a mass-murdering tyrant who has made multiple credible efforts to kill him, his wife, and his daughter to babysit his grandson. A grandson who she has abused, and who she would have killed (albeit accidentally) if not for the TLK. That is simply not something I can even fanwank into a normal human reaction. In a situation of extreme duress, in which there was literally no one else who could protect Henry from something? Maybe. If Henry had requested to spend time with Regina? Again, maybe. But not in the way it happens here. "Into the Deep" makes matters worse. I know that Charming thinks that Snow will be able to TLK him out of the sleeping curse, but he knows there's a risk involved. The fact that he is going under a sleeping curse with no one monitoring him -- and no one to watch Henry if something goes wrong -- except for Regina and Rumple is insane. Beyond any concern for Henry,Charming should be worried that Regina is planning on using the cover of the sleeping curse going wrong to murder him without raising Henry's suspicions. Then, of course, there is Snow telling Emma that if they want to play the blame game, none of this wouldn't have happened if she hadn't told Cora Regina's secret. Which on some level is true, in the same way if, G-d forbid, a loved one died in a car accident while coming to pick you up from the airport, you might feel intensely guilty despite not having done anything wrong. But I don't think the show is presenting it that way - certainly not in conjunction with what came after, and not even in conjunction with a couple of earlier moments, like flashback Snow's admission to Charming in S1 that she did ruin Regina's life, or Snow's nonsensical claim to Emma that Cora is worse than Regina (which may actually be the case, but shouldn't be from Snow's perspective). In that context, it comes off as something closer to an abused spouse or child claiming that it is really their own fault that their husband/father hit them, because they had done x or y to make him angry first. At least this time around, Emma throws out a "blame Regina." But for the most part, these episodes are part of the process of something that is less a redemption than an absurd normalization of Regina's presence as anything but an antagonist or, at best, deeply distrusted and even hated ally-of-convenience. In the latter capacity, she might be able to earn something more if she stays on the straight and narrow, but only after she's done a lot more to establish credibility.

Hmm... maybe being the Savior would have made baby Emma immune to the time-freezing element of the curse. That hadn't occurred to me. Interesting thought. I think, though, that it is probably a moot point, because once Regina found out about the savior-clause, she added killing a baby to her to-do list. So, she wasn't planning a version of the curse in which Emma was in SB. She was planning to kill Emma before the curse was ever cast. I suppose theoretically, events could have turned out in such a way that both the wardrobe gambit and Regina's efforts to kill Emma failed, in which case presumably baby Emma would have wound up in SB, but it wasn't part of Regina's plan. If infant Emma had wound up in SB, Regina could have offed her there as well, I suppose, though I've also thought before that her planning to raise Emma would have been consistent with her character. I could see her creating a reality in which Mary Margaret knew she was Emma's bio-mom, but had lost custody of her for some reason - or, to strengthen the parallel with what actually happened with Emma, Henry and Regina -- had given her up for adoption because her life was in a shambles.

Leaving aside the issue of whether Dean being back that soon is a good thing or not, it really seems like the writers are talking out of both sides of their mouths. Episode 4 sounds like a fun one-off, which means Dean has to be Dean again by the end of episode 3. That makes the writerly hand-wringing about it being hard to write episodes sans Dean, or about Jensen and Jared not filming together as much, seem like overblown dramatics. Think there's any chance that Michael!Dean is put on pause rather than done entirely by episode 4? I could see several scenarios where it would be possible: - Dean manages to throw off Michael's control but not expel him entirely; later in the season, Michael takes over once again -Sam and/or Cas find some McGuffin that lets them temporarily suppress Michael, but everyone knows they're on borrowed time -Michael is playing a long con and willingly staying dormant, ala Gadreel, to suit his own interests. -Dean expels Michael, and then winds up saying "yes" to him again under duress, ala Jimmy Novak letting Cas back in in order to stop him from taking Claire. I don't know that I actually believe this is what's going on, but it would be a way of reconciling some of the conflicting hints and information we're getting.

To give the show some credit, the first episodes of 2A do make it clear that it hasn't changed and fixed everything. The scene where she sees her nursery is key in showing her how loved and wanted she was, but even there, I think some of the dialogue in Tallahassee, where Hook recognizes her as a lost girl, confirms that that wasn't a quick fix to years of emotional baggage. So, I'm not sure that finding out about Neal is supposed to be a 100% fix it either, but I think the comparison to Snowing is instructive, because the show seems to see the situations as comparable when they aren't. To the writers, both abandonments are basically the Dark Curse screwing everyone over. And while Emma is technically right that her parents could have made a different choice, they really (when it comes to the events leading up to Emma's birth and trip through the wardrobe) didn't have another reasonable option. Had they refused to part with her, presumably, Emma would have been caught up in the curse, and she would have spent eternity as the well-loved infant daughter of what I'm assuming would have been struggling single mom Mary Margaret Blanchard, as there's no way Regina would have left the family intact. Whereas Neal...could have done literally anything else, and would have been just as likely to increase the chances of the curse breaking as he was to decrease it, unless we pretend the thing written in the box was a super-secret copy of the Dark Curse reading "And the Savior can break the curse after her 28th birthday, assuming she's first spent a year in jail and suffered an emotionally devastating personal betrayal, but if you feel really bad and want to leave her with a stolen car and 20 grand, that's cool."

It isn't that Neal's an asshole. It is that it isn't clear the writers see him as an asshole, and actually a lot of evidence that they don't. At worst, they think he made a bad choice for good reasons in an impossible situation. The problem, of course, being that that logic simply doesn't hold up. I think even these writers, however, recognized that if Neal knew Emma was pregnant and still did this, that would genuinely be unforgiveable, which is why they don't have her find out until after. Agreed on your spoiler. It wasn't necessarily impossible to sell that, but it would have taken a ton of work that the writers clearly weren't interested in doing (and maybe shouldn't have been interested in doing, but then you have to modify the character accordingly, not just say "let's not and pretend we did").

As you know I totally agree with you on the substance of what Neal and August did - but I think the show's (nonsensical) rationale is that Emma's WALLS - like her prison term --are a sad but necessary byproduct of putting her in a position where she can break the curse. So, Neal does the right thing, but since apparently all of this falls apart if someone, you know, talks to Emma, the psychological scarring is just part of the package, and doesn't invalidate Neal's sacrifice. As for Emma and Hook, I don't think the show is terribly judge-y about her decision to leave him, but I do think they're clearly portraying it as something that is a manifestation of her damage, and not the sane and rational thing to do, under the circumstances. Like, they get that Hook being a villain means that this is not an intrinsically horrible thing to do, in the way that betraying, for instance, Aurora or Mulan would be - but it is still, in the writers' eyes, the wrong call; Emma knows (via her superpower) that Hook is actually telling the truth, and only doesn't accept that because she's too afraid of being burned again.

So, while watching Tallahassee, with its nonsensical "you need to leave Emma or the curse will never break" bit, I realized I had some larger questions about how the curse and Emma's role in it worked, or was supposed to work. What is unclear to me is to what extent Emma being the savior is a prophecy - in which case, presumably, her destiny would have been to break the curse no matter what, and people wouldn't have had to worry so much about putting her on the right path - and to what extent it is simply something that is possible for her and only her because she is the only one who, as the child of true love, has the power to possibly break the curse. The fact that everyone in the know seems concerned about making sure she breaks it suggests that it isn't a prophecy. But the idea that this is something that has to happen when she is 28 years old would suggest that it is: if it were simply a matter of fulfilling the conditions in terms of parentage and belief, it would seem that there isn't any reason a much younger or older Emma couldn't have broken the curse just as easily. Assuming it is prophecy, then basically, this played out the way it had to play out. Maybe something could have happened to subvert it, but the reason the prophecy says it is going to be Emma at age 28 isn't because there is something special about the number 28, or even, necessarily, about Emma (in theory, maybe a non-cursed Snow could have broken it by TLKing Charming) - it is simply a statement of fact based on foreknowledge. In this interpretation, it was basically fated that Emma would wind up going through the wardrobe alone, give birth to Henry, etc, because that was the timeline upon which the prophecy was predicated. But if it isn't prophecy - and, as I indicated above, the evidence is mixed -- my question is what exactly needed to happen for Emma to break the curse, and how it might have worked in a world without Henry? In our particular timeline, it winds up being a TLK between a mother and son, which both revives Henry and, apparently, demonstrates sufficient belief to break the Dark Curse as well. It is interesting to note, however, that the curse doesn't break as soon as Emma believes, as she clearly believes in the Dark Curse and magic earlier in the episode, yet nothing happens until she kisses Henry. This suggests something more specific than "Emma Swan shows up and believes" had to occur. So...let's suppose Emma had been raised by Snowing in the Land Without Magic, having grown up knowing about the EF and Regina and her destiny, and, presumably, never having a kid who she gave up for adoption. What could breaking the curse have looked like in that timeline -or would I just not have happened? Is there a reason it had to wait until Emma was 28? Like, what if she had showed up in SB at age 16? Or what if August hadn't intervened, and she and Neal had been raising their ten-year old and maybe a couple of other kids in Tallahassee by the time she turned 28? Would a TLK with Snow or Charming theoretically have worked? What if she hadn't made it to SB until she was 35? Of course, the later Savior mythology complicates all of this further... Just curious to hear other thoughts on this.