KAOS Agent

It's so frustrating to have this show skip over what should have been an emotional reunion between Liam and Killian. This show consistently misses the character interactions that should be driving the story. I guess Regina is the only one who ever gets to have these kinds of moments. Jumping from plot point to plot point removes so much of emotion from the story and makes it super bland. And then we have the ridiculous morality where a mass murderer sails off to heaven with his victims. That Liam was apparently also the reason they were stuck in the Underworld (not knowing who murdered you apparently consigns you to the Underworld forever. Such a hopeful show this is.) makes it doubly awful. I can't even entirely fault Liam for wanting to save himself and his brother, but the part where he profited from it makes it really icky. Plus, he was a pompous, self-righteous dick about everything and was continuing to screw over everyone in the Underworld to cover up his previous actions. I'm not even sure that he was sincerely sorry for killing the crew, only that he'd hurt his brother later. I don't think Liam is a horrible person like some of the characters on this show who murder for fun, but I'm not fully on board with him moving on to heaven with his victims either.

This show has a real problem with its use of hero. I think the only time where an adult talked about wanting to be a hero and it was okay was when Emma did it in Season 1. She wasn't looking for glory, wasn't putting herself in danger (that she knew about anyway) and was genuinely trying to show that good could win by playing fair. All she wanted to do was win the Sheriff's election to set a positive example for Henry. The use of hero in that case was not as literal as it's become as the series goes on. Wanting to be a Hero is a time honored trope in so many stories, but most address the issues that come from it and usually ask the wannabe hero why they are looking to be that hero. Why are they risking life and limb in their pursuit of heroism? Robin is a moron here because he claims he wants to set an example for children that will never know what he was doing. He's not even capable of articulating why he is needed. There are plenty of better qualified people in the Underworld who can fight Hades. Sometimes it's more heroic to sit back and provide aid while others fight even though that is often a thankless task with no glory. Henry's quest for the pen to "fix" his mother and be a hero is equally dumb. I really desperately want an adult to sit him down and explain a few home truths about his glory seeking. Emma is probably the most qualified for this role since she's never been all that keen on being forced into the role of hero. At least with Henry, he is the Author and could conceivably provide aid to the people stuck in the Underworld that no one else is able to provide.

I think Game of Thrones did a decent job at taking some hits at what are often perceived to be noble causes or excuses/ justifications for atrocities. There was a conversation about Cersei late in the series where they were talking about how she might be "better" now because she would have a child to think about again and Jaime responded that every horrible thing she's ever done was for her children. A child just gives her more reason to act out her brand of crazy, so it's not at all a good idea to let her continue now. Compare that with Rumpel throughout much of Once's run. The show continually painted Rumpel as sympathetic because he was doing things for his child. No concern over the fact that he murdered Milah (twice!) and dumped her in the River of Lost Souls or turned a man into a snail and crushed him for accidentally injuring his son or arranged events so that an entire realm was cursed and children like Emma and Pinocchio were left orphaned just so he could find his son. I could go on, but you get the point. GoT had the right idea in knocking down the notion that doing it for a child does not mean you should get some sort of pass for committing horrible acts. I don't see Game of Thrones playing Regina's "no regrets" speech as the grand heroic moment that Once did.

Considering Belle conceived this baby the night she came back to town because Rumpel was such a "hero" and they totally deserve a second chance now when he had really negated Hook's sacrifice to end the Dark One forever and took on the evil entity of his own free will because power is the best, the only option besides delusion is that Belle gets off on fixing Rumpel and acting as his leash allows her to act out her hero fantasies. Rumpel is nothing but trash. I loved Rumpel in earlier seasons, but now he's just an ass who needs to die. Rumpel slut shaming Emma in his introduction to Milah is such a dick move. I wish for once they would let someone take some swipes at Rumpel where we're not supposed to sympathize with him because people are being mean to him. Call him out for being an awful person beyond his Dark One-ness. I'd even take a what the hell were you thinking? from Emma to Milah.

This episode on first watch was interesting. I liked the Rumpel/Milah flashbacks. It was something we hadn't seen eight million times before and offered more context to the relationship between Milah & Rumpel as well as her beginning with Killian. The Emma/Milah team up was really enjoyable. I liked how both barely tolerated Rumpel and were silently bonding over their utter disdain for him. That said, knowing how this season plays out, the way characters with relatively minor bad choices (in the scheme of this show at least) are treated vs ones with truly horrific actions is extremely upsetting. Milah's fate is particularly maddening. Yes, Milah left her husband and child behind to run off with a pirate. There are reasons why I think this was not necessarily a bad choice for everyone involved, but it still involved her abandoning her child, so it's a flawed choice. However, Rumpel has tortured, murdered, destroyed the lives of countless people. Same with Regina and Cora. These don't even remotely equate with Milah's actions and yet she's consigned to be a mindless husk while some truly horrific villains will no doubt never suffer anything even close to her eternal one. People will often take comfort that surely evil will suffer in death even if they don't do so in life. There's a reason why some sort of heaven and hell exist in many different faiths. That the show is now in the afterlife and continuing with its wonky morality of villains winning while average flawed humans suffer eternal torment is hard to deal with. Justice for Milah!

Ah yes, the episode where Snow declares that she doesn't want to be Mary Margaret anymore. I'm sure that will stick. Following on the heels of Regina's centric where her victim apologizes to her and other random people she murdered are sent to hell, it's particularly glaring that Hook is being tortured horribly. Hades is using a cat o' nine tails on him and he's now been mauled by a hell beast. It's clear to me that no one in the writers room saw the ridiculousness of how they were writing this overall Underworld arc. Emma is a horrible murderer whose soul is stained (whatever, show). Hook is being tortured (not to say he was all that great a person in life, but why is he singled out while others are left to roam free?). Regina is happily resolving all of her personal issues with the dead, while not being challenged by a single red shirt victim of hers. One of these things is not like the other. Oh and the freaking pen is a living thing and has unfinished business. The best thing this show did in 4B was break the pen and end the stupid Author storyline for good and now they're bringing it back. Worse, they're using the dumbass notion that Emma protecting Henry from the woman holding a gun to his head made her a murderer in order to do so. It's like every horrific part of 4B is being brought back to haunt me. We just need eggnapping and the 4B resurrection in the Underworld will be complete.

I don't watch the show either, but I've seen it and know enough to laugh at what people are mad at. So much of the criticism is familiar to those who have been attached to other similar shows. Fans definitely do like the gruesome deaths and wanton violence. One of the biggest criticisms is that certain deaths were not gruesome enough. Something I will get on board with in the fan criticism is that given the horrific deaths of many characters in the past, it's annoying to not get to see people who've really earned a particularly nasty ending not get one. Game of Thrones is obviously a much, much darker tale than Once, but many fans' feelings about Season 8 are similar to mine about Once's endings for horrible characters. People have been waiting years to see some of these characters finally meet their end and receive a just punishment and then they get the Game of Thrones version of Cora walking into the light.

I still find this to be such an odd episode. As a mid-season premiere it was seriously lacking in any really interesting long term story arcs. As the celebration of the show's 100th episode, it was a dud. A slow character study for Regina that lacked action or any of the fun of the show's early run isn't the way to kick off the half season. Why not have this be an episode with characters working together to get to the Underworld? Make it more difficult to get there beyond a simple boat ride and feature more action. The writers were touting this as a huge thing and were super proud of it. It's just not very good or interesting or memorable. I remember even many of the more positive members of the press being pretty bemused after seeing the premiere. Maybe I should take this as further evidence of the writers epic love for Regina that they devoted the 100th episode to her and didn't seem to understand that this wasn't what anyone would want or expect from a landmark episode.

Wow, this episode is full of suck. Why did Regina need to be in Hook's backstory? That was so stupid and made no sense. I forgot how hope-filled Snowing just gave up (again) and decided hanging out at Granny's was better than trying even a little bit to stop Hook and the Dark Ones. Rumpel is trash. It's always nice to see Rumpel show us what a "good" heart he has.

Apparently, she did. There was a huge plot with Merida and Arthur that was cut from the 5A finale for time reasons. They never bothered to inform the actress about the edit though, so she was promoting a whole thing that never happened. Spoilers showed everyone from Camelot leaving through a portal with Merida dragging along a tied up Arthur. One hopes that all those poor people aren't still sanded. That they never gave any conclusion to the Camelot storyline makes the whole thing a huge waste of time. This type of crap writing is why a rewatch isn't interesting to me. I know it's going nowhere and I can't get invested in a story that doesn't have a conclusion. Merlin's story was uneven from the start. What was the point of him going to Young!Emma? If he could see the future (or possibilities for the future) why would he set up events that would lead to the worst case scenario? Why set Arthur on his path? Why not warn Hook that Excalibur was extremely dangerous? He didn't seem to have issues telling people about their future, so why would he not mention pertinent information to help avert tragedy? Why the hell was he brewing a message potion with a message that had absolutely nothing to do with what he was warning them against? The storytelling on this show is awful because it's all about the twists and gotchas and ignores the very basic elements that they've already laid out.

I think the show has demonstrated that Regina's One True Love is Henry. Now she's got two of them.

They shit on the whole Charming family with "Awake" simply so that they could have the random magical flower that opens portals. That moment where they closed the door on an innocent little girl's happiness was awful. That it was brushed off by Emma and never mentioned again made it all the worse. An action like that needs to have consequences. Snowing didn't forget that moment happened, so it should reflect on all previous interactions with Emma in earlier seasons. This exactly the type of storyline that shows how unrealistic it is for the audience to believe everything is all sunshine and roses in the Charming family. There's no way these people who have no real history with each other and only met a couple of years earlier when all were adults would be able to play happy families with no serious issues. A biological link isn't enough to get past the choices Emma's parents made that affected her life so badly. And it's not like the writers don't understand this. The way they developed the Emma/Henry relationship in S1 is a direct reflection of this. Henry showed up at Emma's door and neither was immediately overcome with familial love for each other. They didn't even experience a real connection until several days later and that was more of an understanding of each other than an emotional connection. It took the entire season for their relationship to grow and reach the curse breaking level. And Emma/Henry was a simple case of a young mother who couldn't care for her baby and gave him up so that he could live a better and happier life than she would ever be able to provide. There may be some issues to work through with that (and they actually did spend screen time doing that), but it's not like it's this huge barrier to having a loving mother/son relationship. There was no darkness-ectomy or self-righteous rejection of options to take out Regina without needing a Saviour or weird age difference or sacrificing a child's happiness for everyone else or crazy expectations that Henry give up his life in service of other people's problems.

This is really where the show falls down on heroism. You don't do good things to get a reward, you do good things because it helps people. It might feel good to help people, which is a nice reward on its own, but this show generally punishes people when they do good things. Poor Hook was only trying to help and his reward is to get a small cut that means immediate death followed by immortal darkness engulfing his soul and undoing his hard work to let go of the darkness and become a better person. And there's Emma, who took on the Darkness to save them all, being psychologically tortured and suffering alone and then rejecting all the power offered by the Darkness only to have that moment rendered moot almost immediately because she can't bear to lose yet another loved one and saving the life of someone who was cut by Excalibur makes you evil or something. Just looking at the events surrounding Emma & Hook, I'll never understand why Regina is constantly upset about her lack of reward for not killing people. Does she never look around and see how awful the heroes' lives are? Why on earth would she think good things will come to her?

They were also running into the problem of having killed off all of the root-worthy characters. They needed some character moments to make the remaining characters more relatable and humanize them, as well as provide some lighter fare for what is a really dark show. Reunite characters who have been apart for years. Give some sort of happy moments before everyone inevitably dies in horrible ways. Once never really understood that you need to return to things that the audience enjoyed in addition to the newer things. Why give the audience six different episodes pairing Regina/Emma instead of having an episode of Emma/Snow or Emma/David? Bring things full circle. Emma and her parents had years with some major issues. None of this was ever addressed. The writers simply told us in interviews that they loved each other and everything was great. How is that possible given the events shown on the show? There wasn't any down time for them to have even processed what happened much less to have gotten past it. An adventure with Emma and her parents containing some small character moments reminiscent of S1 would be a great way to show their relationship as it is today.

I was reading an editorial/article today that was discussing the rather disturbing trend of Hollywood glamorizing mass murder and serial killers. This particular story was talking about a bunch of upcoming releases about Ted Bundy and Charles Manson as well as the Gianni Versace miniseries. He discussed how upsetting it was to find himself rooting for the psychopath and how they manipulated things to make you like these horrible people. Zac Efron plays Bundy and he mentioned that they had Zac go shirtless multiple times in the movie just so everyone could see a hot and sexy Bundy. What was interesting to me was that this writer went out to find what the victims' families thought of these movies. Sharon Tate and her unborn baby weren't redshirts who meant nothing. Her sister is disgusted with portrayals of the Manson Family as anything less than horrible villains. A childhood friend of Bundy's 12 year old victim is outraged at the glorification of Ted Bundy. She's tired of seeing her friend's murderer on TV or in the movies. He's so handsome and charming, he must have a good reason for murdering a little girl and lots of other young women. The trend of making villains into misunderstood heroes or simply anti-heroes has been around in fiction for a while and now Hollywood is trying to do the same thing with real life villains. Reading the story brought to mind Once for me, especially the part about the victims' feelings. How ridiculous is it to think that anyone who committed such atrocities would ever be viewed as a good person or even accepted in general society by their victims? It may be all fiction, but when you take similar stories of real life villains and try to do the same thing as Once did in its fictional universe, you see that it's not even remotely close to reality.

I was not a fan of Regina in later seasons for most of the above mentioned reasons, but I did enjoy her in S1 and into S2. She was a great villain who seemed genuinely scary. This is mostly true for Mayor Mills and less the Evil Queen. As later seasons made her more and more of a cartoon, she wasn't particularly interesting to me. However, I think the biggest mistake they made with Regina was taking away her agency. I don't mean that she wasn't making her own decisions and shouldn't have responsibility for them, but more that they kept having other people use her very predictable reactions to manipulate events. Regina stopped being scary or a threat when everything that had made her seem smart and formidable was ultimately revealed to have happened because someone else was orchestrating things behind the scenes. Rumpel using her to cast the curse was cool and made sense. And even if she was manipulated into it, it was still a win for Regina. However, as time went on, other people were constantly using Regina to do their dirty work. She always responded exactly the way they planned. She was basically a puppet. It removed a lot of what made her such a threat. If Regina was the one planning and acting to get to a certain outcome, she's a highly intelligent, powerful woman. When it's revealed that her actions are very carefully managed by others to achieve their goals, she's not all that formidable. Worse, it showed that Regina was mostly just a petulant, spoiled child. Her magic made that petulance dangerous and particularly awful, but she wasn't a cunning villain. She destroyed lives not because she had some grand plan to rule the world or whatever, but because she was sad or because she enjoyed it or simply because it was Monday. They removed her intelligence and left her without a high level motive (revenge on a secret telling ten year old doesn't work to explain mass murder). This is what destroyed the interesting character from the early seasons and it most definitely fed into my complete lack of belief in her redemption.

That does sound compelling. Now, how much can you explore in one episode? Not very much, but that's the extent to which Adam and Eddy are capable of fleshing out a concept, LOL. And yeah, expect none of those questions to be answered, or at least answered in a very very very very very very shallow way. Nothing like doing what's already been done before. There's a movie out there where a 1980s air craft carrier goes back in time to just before Pearl Harbor was bombed. With the ability to wipe out the entire Japanese fleet, should they do it? How do they affect the people they meet? It's not a tour de force by any means, but it was a fun movie to watch and it did have some surprising depth to it. I think you get less of that in an hour long show. I'm not sure that Once's writers ever truly made me care about a new character in just one episode. "Hat Trick" came pretty close and dealt very well with some complex concepts all while sticking to the overall theme running through S1. Sadly, it was not penned by Horowitz and Kitsis and I can't think of a single other episode of Once that managed to do what Spielberg claims "Amazing Stories" will do.

I don't understand how it's wrong that Emma is angry and unwilling to run off with the girl who stole her foster family's vacation money. Lily is a selfish, spoiled bitch. That it was less about getting money and more about wanting Emma made it all the worse. Manipulating events to screw Emma over and ruin another potentially decent relationship with a foster family by setting up a situation where Emma is told exactly where she sits with the family (she's not a true member of the family) is a despicable move. Why would anyone consider Lily anything but toxic? Of course on this show, Emma is supposed to be the light that makes Lily's life better, so Emma is awful for not wanting to stick with a wanted criminal who deliberately destroyed Emma's relatively happy foster placement. There's never any evaluation that maybe Emma would have maintained a friendship with Lily if there had been no thievery and manipulation. It's shades of Rumpbelle only in a platonic relationship. Again this show is requiring Emma to shoulder the burden of others' actions. Emma shouldn't be required to fix Lily, just as she shouldn't be stuck with the Saviour role and continuously sacrificing herself for the happiness of others. It gets tiresome seeing someone who was not even born during the events she is meant to atone for/fix suffer and be portrayed as wrong for not really being keen on any of it.

It doesn't really make sense anyway because Emma's "darkness" never meant that she would be super evil. Snowing were told that she had the potential to be evil. If she was raised right, she could be a great hero. Lily was raised by a couple who loved her and cared about her. She seemed more spoiled than anything else. She ran away, but used her parents' credit card to live. She broke into her family's summer home knowing it gave her a safe place to stay. She played at being like Emma, but had no need to do so. She wasn't even a criminal during their first meet (although I wouldn't be surprised if she hadn't been a shoplifter because she thought it would be fun). None of this was a sign of great evil. She came off as more of an overindulged brat. By the time we see Lily in this episode she seems to have pushed her parents too far. I guess armed robbery was their red line. She was simply reaping what she'd sowed. Cut off from her money sources, she's still a manipulative bitch who has no qualms about screwing over Emma. It's still more of a mean girls move than an evil one. Lily is much more of a Regina George than a Regina Mills on the evil scale.

Pretty sure Regina cursed a horse, who presumably doesn't have True Love with anyone and so can't be awakened, in a fit of pique early in 4B. The baby dragon at least had some chance of surviving and living life. The poor horse is effectively dead.

The writers can talk all they want on Twitter or in post-episode interviews about how they saw the incident, but this was not at all clear onscreen. They needed to be explicit about how the whole thing worked because as far as I can tell, the Author writes the story and it happens. It doesn't make sense that he could write a story that was happening in front of him and only control one guy's actions during the story.

To be fair, the character has no memory of her prior life. She was basically a blank slate warrior. The world building wasn't all that clear on her life other than that she was training to become a warrior and having weird dreams. Whether she had a life with friends (were there other trainees she bonded with?) and a way to express herself and live a life beyond being a strong independent warrior was not clear. Was it all training and emotionless existence all the time? The main point was that she was an outsider without a history. They didn't show her outside of her warrior life. And they stressed that she needed to control her emotions because reasons. I don't think her being shown acting that way was meant to be a positive thing. It's a pretty crappy existence. But let's not lie, fleshing out her character's current life wasn't their priority. They have a brief setup and need to get to the action sequences ASAP. It's a bit like Emma and her parents after the curse ended. When first encountering Emma on the street, Snow and David are super excited to see her, but Emma is not so keen even though she knows who they are. Snowing love their daughter and remember all their hopes and dreams for her, but Emma has an entirely different mindset and all she is is uncomfortable and stiff. While she's pretty stoic about it all and it's upsetting to Snow that she isn't happy, that's a realistic reaction to the news that the curse was real and Snowing are her parents. I think that when there are reasons for why a character is standoffish, it's less about sticking to a strong independent woman trope and more about a reflexive self-protective tendency to not let anyone see your vulnerabilities.

I think the actress was pregnant somewhere in there, but they weren't going back to that story anyway. She wouldn't have fit in Camelot in 5A or in the Underworld in 5B. Maybe they could've gone back there in S6. They threw everything at the wall in S6; what's to stop them from adding in a dragon daddy hunt? I think they needed to not have Lily specifically mention sticking around to look for her father if they didn't definitively plan to have that be a part of S6. Why not have her say she was leaving to search for her father and that would explain her absence and still leave the door open for the search to involve the Storybrooke crew somehow later on.

This was the episode that crushed my interest in the show. Prior to this I was still anticipating each episode and excited on Sundays even as the stories kept getting worse and worse. Once I read the post-episode comments from the showrunners about how Emma had "crossed a line" and a bunch of other nonsense, I never had that feeling of anticipation again. Had Regina killed Cruella to protect Henry, she would have been heralded as a hero. Self-defense and protection of innocents does not make you evil, but this show consistently makes the "heroes" play by an entirely different set of rules than the others. You must stand by and let villains kill you or others because defending yourself/others is the easy path. By this shows morals, killing Stalin to stop him from murdering millions would be worse than standing by and doing nothing. I hate everything about this.

The problem with all of the later villains on this show is that they already have people in Storybrooke with a much darker and villainous history than anyone they bring in. Even the Queens of Darkness call out Regina for her multiple village slaughters. Cruella is a mean girl, but doesn't have any magic, so she's not much of a threat beyond that of the average person. Ursula has tentacles that hit and squeeze or something. Why is Ursula dangerous again? Maleficent is definitely the biggest threat of the three and she's been watered down. She hasn't shown any real interest in going after her many enemies other than Snowing. And she was shown in the past as not being on board with the use of the Dark Curse, which shows there is a line she doesn't want to cross. Having Regina and Rumpel running around town diminishes every threat in town. With each new villain they'll tell you it's the worst villain ever and all I can think of is that this person better be carrying the nuclear launch codes or some sort of horrific biological warfare because that's about all that can top the massive body counts Regina and Rumpel have racked up over the years.