Rumsy4

I just finished watching Hat Trick. What an awesome episode! It was great, and it also made me so so er...mad. Take for instance, how much of a bad-ass Emma was. She got out of the bonds and got the better of Jefferson. Compare that to Emma being unable to apparate out of the spider's web in Season 6. The writers massively under-powered Emma in later seasons to make Regina and Rumple play the heroes. And then, there's the whole Emma-Mary Margaret thing. Their interactions were so genuine in this episode. It felt like Emma really did think of her as family. That deep down, the little lost girl in her really wanted Mary Margaret to be her mother. :-/ And they just dropped the whole Emma and MM bond like a hot cake after 2A. I posted this is the episode thread, but I think an AU where Jefferson ended up back in the EF and teamed-up with Emma and Snow in Season 2 to get back to Storybrooke would've been great.

I love this episode! So many favorite lines in this episode, the best being the one about everyone wants a magical solution. Regina is total evil bitch. I teared up when Emma called Mary Margaret family. I really wanted to throw things at the screen. Emma and Jefferson have fantastic chemistry. Weren't JMo and Sebastian Stan dating for a while after this? It shows.

Oh, wow. I didn't get this part until now. heh. If David didn't really make that phone call, how did Regina manipulate the phone records? Was it just some good old editing? This is only the third time Snow and David met, and they had a TLK.

I was one of those obsessive LOST fans and I enjoyed every bit of the theorizing. I'll always fondly remember desperately refreshing EW, waiting for Doc Jenson's post-episode recaps to drop. I was actually living in Hawaii at the time and even went to one of the season premiere parties on the beach. Damon and Carlton did yank our chains with all the mysteries, but IMO, they get unfairly criticized for not answering questions. I think there were only a handful of unanswered questions in LOST. Unfortunately for some of the fans, the biggest question--what is the Island--ended up having a mystical/philosophical answer. I don't think any answer would have satisfied all the viewers. I would have hated it if it had turned out to be some nonsense like "aliens", but maybe others would have liked it. ABC also muddied the issue by putting footage of the plane wreckage at the end (why did anyone think that was good idea??!). LOST wasn't a perfect show by any means, but I do think they revolutionized television as we know it. LOST didn't have a clean ending with everything wrapped up with a neat bow tied to it, but I think that was fine. It fit the tone of the show. A&E tried to wrap up OUAT with a neat bow, but the package inside was a contradictory mess. The feel-good factor A&E were going for just didn't work because they never put any effort into creating realistic relationships or a plausible mythology for the show. The Last Supper scene at the end of OUAT Season 6 rang false because it presented an untrue front of happy relationships. The Multiverse merger and Regina's coronation destroyed the logical plausibility of Season 7 in retrospect because of all the time-line mess it created. OUAT had a lot of potential, but so much of that was wasted.

They certainly seem to have picked up the worst aspects of LOST and ignored the best (characters and relationships).

You know--the odd thing was, there was always one question about Lily's father in every EW hot seat interview. Apparently there was at least one dedicated Lily fan. And they picked Zorro. I was like--WTF??! The last 10 minutes of the series was practically a charade

This explains it. I have wondered why Eddy was so interested in Frogurt when in OUAT he was obsessed with just the main characters (just Regina and Rumple, really). If A&E had taken over as show-runners for LOST, the final season would have ended with Benjamin Linus being named the next Jacob and everyone apologizing to the Smoke Monster for ruining his life.

I liked the twist in the episode and I remember figuring it out the first time. Poor Red. Granny should really have told her. I agree that it was a writing decision just to preserve the twist, but it makes Granny look like a moron. I really wish Ruby had continued to work at the station in Storybrooke. What really was going on with David? He seemed to be in some sort of a fugue state. Was it random or was it Regina's doing? Yeah. No point waiting for a bus out of town, Ruby. My favorite line of the episode: You look like Norman Bates when he's dressed like Norman Bates's mother.

Agreed on both counts. It would've been the perfect end if Regina had declined the crown and given it to Snow instead--finally acknowledging all the wrongs she did the other. But no--OUAT had to end with a Reginagasm.

The episode wasn't as bad as I remembered, but that's not saying much. I couldn't help comparing the scene of Dreamy hatching out of an egg with Saruman's hybrid orcs bursting out of eggs in the LotR movies. I liked the Miner's Day festival. It's super annoying that we never got any resolution with Grumpy and Nova after the Curse broke. Anyone remember the DVD extra? Why didn't Nova not want to get back with Grumpy? It really was super-annoying to see Emma continuing to work with Sidney. She could easily get those phone records in legitimate ways as the Sheriff.

I’m behind in the rewatch. I really enjoyed this episode. I liked it the first time too. It was so refreshing to see the “other” woman (Abigail in this case) not being treated like a bitch. I didn’t get why MM told Kathryn that she and David had never lied to her. I mean—she had been carrying on an illicit affair with a married guy. Just because she decided to come clean doesn’t mean what she did was okay. I love that scene! When OUAT still did subtlety.

He probably deserved it. Poor Regina was forced to kill him because he had the temerity to pretend he was a hero while she was crying over Daniel’s grave.

I’m totally expecting it.

Crushing viewers' dreams one "amazing" story at a time. I will have Hope that this time, the master-writers will truly amaze us all.

The Dream Team is back together.

They should have put Roni in a relationship with Weaver. :-p Or Henry. Don't beat me!

I think that’s partly why fanfic can be so satisfying. The readers are already invested in the characters. The stories tend to follow certain fanfic writing rules that have been established over the years. For example, there’s the Coffee Shop AU, where the main characters—guess what—meet at a coffee shop. If the story is tagged “angst”, I’m not going to go in expecting fluff. In many ways, TV and movie writers want to set themselves apart from the tons of other similar shows and movies out there. But in trying to avoid it, they fall into other pitfalls. I guess one of my main beefs with the new Star Wars movies is how badly they undermine the hopeful ending of the original trilogy. Did you suckers think Han and Leia lived happily ever after? Pffft... Did you lot imagine Luke became a successful Jedi? Hahha nope. In a bid to raise the stakes, Disney turned the Star Wars movies into stories about a long series of failures by a lot of different people. Where’s the hope in that?

This week, we'll be discussing What Happened to Frederick and Dreamy (the fan favorite episode ;-)).

Completely agree. In Season 1, it was much more believable to buy that Rumple/Gold was a layered character with complex motivations. In later seasons he became more cartoonish and two-dimensional. In S1, he seemed to care about Emma as more than a pawn. Later, he was ready to murder her. I think it's consistent that he tends to punish the easiest target for his worst mistakes. He beats Belle's father within an inch of his life becasue he thinks he had her love and shut her out and locked her in a tower. Which is what he did with Belle. He also brutally murdered Milah for abandoning Bae, when he also did the exact same thing. Too bad how Belle's father and Milah never got to make up for their mistakes, but Rumple got chance after chance after chance. Rumple really was an idiot, huh? He never checked to see where Belle really was and he never checked to see where Bae really was. Otherwise, he may have gotten them back much sooner and more easily. Rumbelle's foundations were flimsy from the start--his first romantic gesture was linked to murder and she wanted to be a hero--but there was something there that could have turned out real. Instead, they turned it into an abusive relationship that was romanticized. It's hard to see it as anything but Stockholm Syndrome now. Regina as she is depicted in this season, is a total sociopath. She is narcissistic, manipulative, and has zero empathy. It's impossible to buy the transition into the matronly Roni of Season 7 who ended up being crowned Good Queen of the freaking Multiverse. Speaking of Season 7, I still find it hilarious that adult Henry's attempts at True Love's Kiss failed with both his wife and daughter, but worked with his mother, as she lay in his lap, dying. Lovely.

When this episode aired, I was all-aboard the Rumbelle train. On re-watch, it doesn't hold up. The feel of the episode is so entirely different from the rest of the Rumbelle relationship, that it's hard to emotionally connect it to how it all turned out. Yeah, OUAT--what kind of message did you want to send? Ugh, David Nolan is the worst! It's hard to feel sorry for him, even though I blame Regina entirely. I still feel bad for MM, even though she is also complicit in this affair. I guess I always assumed they were having sex. I love Gold's line: Love is like a delicate flame. And once it's gone, it's gone forever.

You’ve convinced me @KAOS Agent. :-) That makes me feel better, because I actually do like this episode.

This show ended up justifying every stereotype about blood being more important than found family (except with Regina-Henry), and romance being more important than friendship or even one’s children. Sad.