Rumsy4

One can understand why Emma distrusts the Foster System, but there definitely should have been a positive counterpoint to it. As such, the show does come off as anti-adoption and anti-fostering, without providing any alternative solution. Why did Emma think uniting the kids with their father who didn't know they existed was a good thing? She didn't know his character or personality (unlike the audience). This really was a missed opportunity.

The signs were there all along. We were just fooled into Hoping for the best.

With red arrows pointing to the line. :-p

Maybe. Or maybe he had given up on Regina by then due to her withdrawal and persistent aloofness. We're (intentionally) only given one side of the story.

The only time he did anything to stop her from killing Snow, he let Regina crush the heart of some enslaved black knight. Nobody cared about the red shirts. He was complicit in Regina becoming the Evil Queen. Later flashbacks muddy the issue here. Leo was either neglectful or extraordinarily stupid. He married Regina so she would be a mother to Snow, but it's obvious that she never bothered to even be a friend to Snow, let alone a mother. It doesn't even seem like she and Leo ever shared the marital bed. It was a sham of a marriage, and Leopold must have known it. Did he ever try to bond with her? Or did he leave her to her own devices from the start? We have large chunks of the puzzle missing. Regina kept herself aloof from her husband (whom she chose to marry even after shoving her mother off to Wonderland) and step-daughter, and started taking magic lessons from Rumple on the sly. Did none of the castle servants and knights notice her sneaking off? Did nobody in the kingdom see her cavorting with evil sorcerers and fairies and dragons? It doesn't make any sense. And once again, this Show proves that good people are morons and that kind acts will come back to bite one in the err...neck.

This was not an interesting episode to rewatch. It was not fun to see Emma being so easily duped by Sidney and Regina. The backstory was better, but it still predicated on people being stupid and Regina being cleverer than everyone else. She played Sidney like a fiddle. Regina acting sad when Leopold praised his daughter as the greatest gift only made her look like the stereotypical jealous step-mother. I guess Sidney bought it. However, I didn't like Leopold reading Regina's diary. And it's not clear if Regina really was under house-arrest or if that was also part of her manipulation of Sidney. David and MM's private picnic was cringey. All in all--meh.

I really enjoyed this story. This is a modern AU with Emma and a much older Killian.

Bo Peep was such a fun twist on the nursery rhyme character. This is the sort of whimsical take on fairy tales that I would've liked to see more of. It's when the show took itself too seriously that it failed the most.

Who is Robbie Mills? I'm confused. Anyone who disses Haig's performance as Elsa needs to have their head examined.

This would have made the season way more interesting in the middle. I remember being extremely frustrated with the mid-season episodes, especially with such duds as 7:15 AM and Dreamy. The whole affair plot made me cringe. Like @Camera One said, it made me feel guilty about rooting for Snowing, even knowing it was the Curse that was making them act wishy washy. Emma, too, started acting really naive by trusting people like Sidney for the sake of plot. Seriously! I liked August as a character the first time I watched Season 1. Now, I just want to punch the smug look off his face. Does this mean I have dark spot in my heart?

I don't think he did necessarily. Maybe the EF forest birds are somewhat magical and can locate people by their names. :-p It fits the fairy tale aspect.

And then candy being withheld forever after that point. :-p

The David Nolan-Mary Margaret affair sub-plot was absolutely unnecessary and had zero impact on the story other than to introduce artificial drama. If David and Mary Margaret had started remembering things becasue of each other like Graham with Emma, that would have been interesting. But David Nolan stayed wishy washy until the curse broke. And Snow ended up retaining the worst of her Mary Margaret persona. What A&E did to Snow was really inexcusable, all the while (wrongly) boasting of being the first people to put a sword in Snow White's hand.

The present day Snowing stuff is awful this episode. I didn't like it at the time either. I deeply dislike wishy washy David Nolan. David was having sex with Kathryn but thought she was on Birth Control, but was also maneuvering his schedule to see Mary Margaret each morning. Even though it's technically becasue of the curse personalities, both Mary Margaret's and David's behaviors make me cringe. Poor Stealthy. RIP. Snow holding a flaming torch over a small pile of hay and threatening to burn the castle down was ridiculous. Loved all the Emma-MM scenes. August's mystery box speech reminded me of JJ Abrams's, which was probably the intent.

I guess that's the kind of man she thought Henry would want as a father--a hero.

She really was the worst! Those two kids did a great job. I really liked this episode and how Emma saved them.

After watching this episode, I've decided to insert Graham into the CS/Snowing fic I'm writing just so I can save his life. #JusticeForGraham2018.

The writing was on the wall even this early on.

This was a good episode. Coherent, and not retconned into oblivion. For some reason, I remembered some details wrong. I didn't remember that Rumple knew from that start that killing the DO would turn him into the DO. So, I felt less sympathetic to him in the rewatch, especially when he made Bae complicit in the arson. And what kind of an idiot walks into a burning fortress wearing a robe? I guess plot-armor saved him. Poor people really get screwed over in the EF, don't they? Poor Bae. I really loved that kid!

I guess we could fanwank that Ford hid all that information in her brain. He really was the Wizard of Oz. But if that was the case, they should’ve shown it in a flashback. They should have shown Dolores reading Hale’s digital book rather than Strand’s. Why would she even know Strand would be arriving soon?

The Westworld Season 2 finale was a big old mess. This season has suffered in quality compared to the last, but there were a couple of standout episodes (which, incidentally, largely focussed on side-characters). But the finale didn't really pay off the scrambled timelines and philosophical monologues we had to sit through to get there. Reading post-season interviews, it seems like the showrunners fell into the same traps as A&E. They started writing to one section of the online fanbase (reddit in this instance). They made the timelines non-linear just to confuse viewers and deliver a couple of "shocking" twists, which in retrospect, seems completely unjustified. For a season with just ten episodes, there was a whole lot of filler. And they really wasted some of the phenomical cast they had on needless wheel-spinning. The finale was overcrowded. There were plot holes worthy of A&E. One character recognizes a dead person whom she has presumably never seen before as an adult. People suddenly became all-knowing for no apparent reason, etc., etc.. The writers had a whole year and a half to plan this season! This is not to say I didn't enjoy the season, but the finale rather dampened my enthusiasm for the show.

Why was Snow walking to the Summer palace with no luggage instead of taking a carriage? Is the kingdom that small? And why walk through the woods to get there?

I'm not sure he entered the Forge at all alive. Because by the time Bernard got out, the place was already flooding. Unless he returned after the waters had receded (wow-I just got the Noah's ark symbolism). If so, what did he find there? Only hosts could enter the virtual reality of the Forge. All he would've seen was dead Dolores. How many days is it between Bernard leaving the Forge the first time, and his return? How did MiB survive until then? It looks like he was only found by Stubbs' team at the end. I had the same questions! Do the dead robots automatically regenerate in bot-heaven? Otherwise, at some distant time in the future, there will not be many bots left in paradise. I agree. The only reason they scrambled the timelines this season was to be intentionally confusing. Besides, they left some discrepancies that make no sense even in retrospect. For example, how did Teddy end up with the other bots? How did Dolores recognize Emily? How did she know how to change the coordinates for the satellites or even what to do? I think the writers should have added some flashbacks to explain all this instead of spending so much time on philosophical monologues.

I was seriously depressed until Dolores re-printed her own body. lol I think it's still the human MiB at the end critically injured. The post-credit scene, OTOH, takes place at some indeterminate time in the future, as the Forge is derelict and looks abandoned. I'm wondering if there is a regular-bot vs hybrid-bot war in the future, and the human-hybrids think the only person who can defeat an out-of-control Dolores is the MiB, and that's why they're trying to recreate him. I still didn't understand what MiB was planning to achieve. How would he know if he had free will by going to the Forge? And what was the game Ford had planned for MiB specifically? Even Ford wouldn't be able to predict that MiB would end up going mad and shooting his own daughter.

I agree. If it had been brought up, the episode would somehow still be Regina throwing a fit, and Emma, Snow, and Henry groveling at her feet for having upset her by bringing it up. I mean, the series ended with Wish Henry accepting Regina as his mother, the woman who murdered his grandparents and kidnapped his mother (as he thought).