Speakeasy

That sounds dire, I haven't seen it yet but I'm not looking forward to that. But in this context it's given me the funny image of the Vera girls hearing about the OUAT storyline and deciding he just needs to love himself, at which point they trap him in the attic and tell him things that they love about him while he tries to get a word in edgeways to tell them that's not how it works Presumably that doesn't happen 😁 Splitting yourself in two or more never goes well. NEVER. I was always bemused on this show how people who are archetypal storybook characters or children of same-one of whom was given a magical Special Destiny as the author/recorder of stories-had not a single genre savvy neuron in all their heads.

I'd actually forgotten she knew that Gina had deliberately framed Mary Margaret-that is the sort of thing that you'd expect to generate more antipathy. That's pretty much the point at which kidnapping Henry starts to look like a good alternative. What I was getting at with the fairy tale stuff at least is that it's so much and so far outside the normal sphere of human experience that I would expect hard-headed, down to earth Emma to have a hard enough time believing in it before she worked out how she was supposed to be feeling about it-especially since shes not very good at feelings. I mean it's one thing to hate it be angry at someone for the things they've done to you after you've met them or the things theyve done to others before that, but to find out your whole life and all the pain you've gone through has been because of this person you didn't know existed a few months ago, and that you were supposed to have this whole other life and role in a whole other world and culture-that's way too much for her to know how to react. But 'she just needs a hug and some cake' also seems out of place, I'll admit. Kidnapping Henry and running away looks like a REALLY good idea at that point (though it would be unbelievably callous since she's got a whole town full of hostages) Yeah... I always laugh remembering Snow White being the voice of reason with 'Emma, she tried to kill us... Yesterday' I'll freely admit Regina has never made me angry the same way she does so many on here, not sure why. I have always found it bizarre how she's apparently ok and everyone's ok with her once she's no longer regularly killing people all the time. I was particularly confused by how popular Swan Queen was-Emma Swan seems like a nice young lady, she deserves to date someone who is not CONSTANTLY TRYING TO MURDER HER 😛

I personally thought the Frozen characters were very grating, it seemed like they were being treated extra nicely by the writers to make sure they didn't besmirch the good name of Disney's biggest cash cow. Anna was particularly grating in her flashbacks where she was both incredibly hypercompetent and filled with absurd childlike naiveté-I actually think in some ways she was more cartoonish in this version than in the actual cartoon. Ingrid, on the other hand, was a pretty good addition, I thought her backstory was genuinely heartwrenching, I think far more so because she accidentally kills her sister and it's so abrupt. There's no lingering shots or dramatic music, just -zap-crash-dead. I just wish her plan had been better than abducting two random blonde witches to be her new sisters-she didn't seem unbalanced enough to think that was a good plan-and that it hadn't been tied in to Rumplestiltskin and... Whatever that was.

The discussion on the 'welcome to Storybrooke' episode thread made me think about the relationship between Gina, Emma, Henry and the Charmings: I figure that of all four of them, David would be the only one who sees her as nothing but an enemy: Snow looks at her and she's the cruel witch who murdered her father and stole her kingdom, but also the brave girl who saved her life and the beautiful woman she looked up to for years. She can't help but feel the darkness that overtook Regina is, in some way, something she could have prevented. It's complicated. Henry looks at her and she's the mother who lied to him and tried to hurt the people he loves, but also the mother who raised him and gave him the only home he's ever known. Having Stockholm Syndrome for your own parents is complicated. Emma looks at her and... Well this could take a while. Back in the carefree days when Mayor Mills was just some small town bully things were complicated. She really wanted to be wrong about Regina, she wanted to like her, and not because she likes to assume the best about everyone but because the alternative is she handed over her child to this cruel, warped person and condemned him to a loveless childhood. On the other hand she kind of wants to be right about her so she can take down the villain and be the hero her son needs. That's in season 1 when things are simple. After it turns out, yep, Emma the orphan turned bounty hunter really IS a lost fairytale princess... Well that's really complicated. For David, though, it's simple; she's a tyrant, she's a witch, she's intent on killing the woman he loves and everyone close to her, she's a menace and she shouldn't be anywhere near his family or his people. I feel like these are not the expectations the writers had though.

Trying to destroy magic was both a justifiable thing to do and a thing he'd realistically want. Even without the dangers it poses to the general public, just from the perspective of him wanting his mother to get better, it makes sense to take away the focus of her addiction. Considering the fact he has exclusively seen it used to do harm, it's a downright heroic and very civically minded thing to do. I think his outburst is him lashing out because he's just desperate for some kind of way to offer some hope. He loves Emma, he loves Mary Margaret, he loves Regina and at this point he cannot see any way the story can play out that doesn't see at least one of them dead very soon. He was counting on Team Hero to offer some kind of solution and they couldn't. Very unreasonable indeed, but I think it's understandable. Definitely. I think Emma being the one with the most distance from all their history (again I'd expect David to have a real effort not to shout at him) should probably have taken him out and said basically 'I'm sorry, we all wish it didn't have to be like this, and it's horrible to hear, but: yes, heroes do kill, sometimes, when it's to stop something worse from happening. The difference between my mother and Cora is-just look at her. She knows what she did was wrong, but she did it to protect all of us'-he might not have understood that but you're right, she should have tried. In fairness, taking it in isolation it was a horrible thing to do; they lied to Regina, manipulating her using their knowledge of her childhood trauma and mental-emotional illness to trick her into killing her mother and obliterating any hope of getting the love she wanted so badly (not that she would have got it while Cora was alive, I know). It was the only option they had and I think only an absurdly harsh Court of Magical Justice (which in my experience of fantasy fiction is actually most of them...) would convict them for it, BUT it was horrible and tragic. Taking it out of isolation it's... It's weird because the stuff surrounding it actually reduces the drama of the heroes doing a bad thing by giving them tons of mitigating circumstances; It was the only available response to an imminent threat to their lives, they'd tried negotiation, they'd tried force, they knew what kind of mercy they'd get if they tried surrender. From a purely rational standpoint there was no other option. Unless they were so wedded to their principles they could say 'no lies and no black magic, this the hill I and by extension everyone else is going to die on' That's before you start making allowances for emotion. Maybe no one should want revenge or be angry, plenty of philosophers have said so, but they do, and it does colour their actions sometimes even if they're generally admirable people. At this point most people would be not just ready right but would, you'd expect, want to hurt the people who'd put them through so much shit. If Snow had been so depressed because she realised to her utter horror that she had ENJOYED watching Cora die, had enjoyed the pain in Regina's eyes as her hopes vanished, had felt triumphant as the witch finally, FINALLY got a taste of her own apples, that would have worked.

Yep! But don't take my word for it! This is where I'm reaching for there to be a reason for Oz to have its own version of a Grimm story and that was the only connection I could find. As far as I remember there's no fairy tale characters translated into off-genre locations, so I figured maybe perhaps these guys being a word for word parallel version of a Grimm tale was explained by Oz being a fairytale world. But, as I said, Edmond Dantes was in a fairy tale world, as was Hercules and I think calling Hercules a 'fairy Tale' is stretching the term. I realise I'm trying to invent a system where none exists because the idea is to use famous stories. But to be honest that's why I still give this show any kind of thought after all these years, playing around with the concept of a pan-fictional multiverse. Hey why not... Actually that brings us back to the timeline issue cos... How old were the Hansel and Gretel of Oz? Gretel was around the same age as Drizella and Hansel looks maybe a few years older than Henry? Zelena's rule over Oz was contemporary with Regina's rule in Misthaven so that's... What? Fifty years ago at this point? Or was this during the first curse before Zelena came to Storybrooke? What the hell was Zelena doing all that time? Did she get conveniently frozen too? I forgot. If it was during the first curse it could have been when Henry was a kid so Hansel could be around the same age as him. It's another time when it gets weird if you think about the time spans involved and actually try to imagine this as time in which people would be alive. If Zelena wasn't frozen she was, what? Seething in her giant palace, heading out on her broom periodically to smack down uppity witches and plotting to do her time warp spell? I guess that works but it's really very sad.

Glad to see I'm not the only one thinking like that, I just see his 'heroes don't kill!' outburst being referenced a lot as when he became intolerable or showing that he was stupid or that he should have known better or something. I'm totally in agreement that the show was always weirdly lopsided in the way people reacted to things but I think if we're saying the characters 'should act like human beings' then a traumatised and confused child thrown into a warzone should be allowed to be irrational. The adults all being so listless is not s good look for them though, yeah, that is a bigger problem. I mean it's not just that the adults aren't taking charge of the situation, Emma and David don't seem to have any emotional reaction either. I don't know how I'd expect Emma to feel, but I keep thinking about David's situation and the word that springs to mind is RAGE. Unless he's just been so beaten down by all this that he can't react properly, he wouldn't have to be an angry person to be absolutely furious at this situation. Everything he and his family have suffered, everything they've lost, and after all these years, all these battles, here they are; cowering in an attic while the Evil Queen stalks them, merciless and invincible, and they have to rely on the good will of the Dark One to stay alive. What was the point of any of it, if they were just going to end up back here? You'd honestly have to be emotionally dead or have achieved some amazing level of philosophical enlightenment not to be just boiling with anger after all that.

I think this board is too hard on Henry in this episode; is he an asshole to Snow? Yes, but he's also a 10 year old child who's had an incredibly warped upbringing and has been through a lot of shit in the last few months at this point. He's been lied to his whole life, he's discovered that HOLY SHIT MAGIC IS ACTUALLY REAL AND EVERYONE I KNOW IS FAIRY TALES, people keep lying to him all the time, his mother is getting better then she's worse then she's better, now she's worse now his new scary grandmother is dead and his mother's sad again and it's all his nice new hero grandma's fault because she lied and everyone lies all the time everything is lies everyone is killing each other and... You know, it's a lot, is all. I don't think it's quite fair to write him off as a Bad Seed because he doesn't have a very consistent or nuanced understanding of wartime ethics at this point. Speaking as a husband, though, David comes out looking really bad for not interrupting Henry's tirade; he should have a more nuanced and consistent view of wartime ethics since he and his wife have led armies into battle, and he should, you know, stick up for his wife when she's feeling sad and this dumb kid is making her feel worse. Instead he does nothing. Charming.

I've tried to work out the cosmological implications of Hansel being the Hansel of Oz... I don't think I've come up with anything that makes any sense. I guess the implication is that there are different versions of all the fairy tales happening in different fairy tale worlds and since the Wizard of Oz is actually called 'an American Fairy Tale' that means that Oz will have its own versions of the recognisable Grimm/Disney bunch. Also since there are 2 wonderlands with 2 Alices that story repeats too, and the world that the Alice comes from doesn't particularly matter as long as it's recognisably different from the Wonderland she goes to. Presumably there's similar rules for different Neverlands and some of them have Darlings arriving from 1950s superhero comics worlds or something. But then you have the Count of Monte Cristo being in the Enchanted Forest, so I don't know how that works. The line between lands, worlds and realms is very unclear... The Enchanted Forest, Arendelle, Agrabah, Camelot, Fantasy Scotland (Dunbroch is Merida's surname, it is not the name of the country, just wanted to put that out there) and Fairytale China all appear to be in the same world while we assume Oz and Neverland are in different ones because people get there by magic... But then Ruby and Mulan got there and there's no mention of them.using magic, they mentioned Ruby following a scent trail, I can't imagine you can do that through a magic tornado so... I don't know if there's a line at all really.

@Camera One Maleficent 2 is very pretty but it is nonsense. It's worth watching fir the visuals of the It also makes it look like both the human and fairy kingdom have a population of about 100-maximum, and everything is right next to everything else, so that's familiar. Oh, also Aurora and Philip are much more like actual characters in this one, Philip actually gets to do something which is at least adjacent to plot relevance and Aurora is actually trying to help and be useful and they look like they could conceivably be a couple So yeah, it's fun. It's better than Maleficent's OUAT backstory which if memory serves was 'has some beef with Aurora's family, couldn't sufficiently mess with them, became a mopey drunk, met Regina who told her to stop being a mopey drunk, stopped drinking, cursed Aurora'

Does anyone think that more could have been done with the Camelot people, maybe to the extent of being a big, non-personal-drama plot in season 6? During 5B I plotted out a head fanfic called 'Snow White and the Immigration Crisis' where I imagined what might be happening back in Storybrooke, given there was this whole new population whose government had been wrecked by the main characters as essentially a side effect of their investigations into their personal crisis. I decided they'd have descended into civil war between Arthurians (because some people would have to rationalise and besides how do we know this 'lifting the sands curse' isn't the real illusion? Oh, the Evil Queen and the Dark One told us, well then...)and Guinevereans/anti-Arthurians and the local Storybrookers would be fucking sick of it by the time the heroes got back. This, by the way, is where Snow White can decide she wants to be Queen Snow White. And you can introduce all sorts of characters, since Arthur says in 5A that many of his knights are rulers in their own lands, and they could well be people who want to get home but were staying out of the way while they were still sanded. Aladdin and Jasmine could easily have been in Camelot and you could bring them in that way (hopefully with a better storyline). Does mean the visuals for the Land of Untold Stories aren't necessary but you could still find reasons to put it there, I'm sure, it's be a shame to lose that.

Hook would 'pop in occasionally'? The man whose final big plotline was being all guilty because he killed a stranger 60 years ago who randomly turned out to be his future girlfriend's granddad and whose parallel universe alter ego was literally a recovering alcoholic? The man who keeps the murderbling from all his murder victims so he can remind himself what a bastard he used to be and once knocked out his past self and expressed disgust for his own history of sleazyness? He'd be there every week, even when no one else showed up. Archie seems to be the only psychologist or counsellor in town but given that Regina got him to gaslight her son for her I wouldn't tell him shit. Um... Not sure who else would work for it Maybe Granny? She did coach her granddaughter through her lycanthropy, so she might have some sympathy for people who've done horrible things because they've made a mistake at some point. Or maybe Ruby herself since she's been through that and knows about having the urge to do violence and hurting the people she loves but now she's a hero and she's great! And she's so very happy with her wife, VERY happy, Dorothy is just busy these days so you know if she can't make it to a romantic evening that Ruby spent weeks putting together that's just... She's very busy, ok? They're FINE. Anyway we're not here to talk about that.

Foetal Dream Gideon basically told her to stay away from his father when they were in the dream quest. This was also where Rumplestiltskin did his Beauty and the Beast dance number and it completely backfired because she remembered all the times he'd lied, coerced and generally been a prick to her.

Adult Gideon was probably going to be a villain... The snarl of plot twists in 6B suggests (to me anyway) there may have been a few different ideas that got smooshed together, some where he was mind controlled and some where he had his own agenda. Maybe the Saviour Shakes were triggered by Rumplestiltskin's dream quest where they introduced Adult Gideon since that was what set off the events leading to his birth and ultra quick aging?

I suppose that's a fair assumption, maybe I'm seeing sinister Communist plots everywhere when it's more likely they just didn't know what to do with her Hah... Yes, always a sidekick, that's definitely a low point for someone who's such a big deal in China. I think the writers and audience being unfamiliar with her was probably a factor there. It might be easier to just use her as a swappable sadsack sidekick rather than trying to adapt her story. Even using the Disney movie woulf be tricky because while Mulan herself is a Disney icon, no one besides Mushu the Silly Dragon is really widely remembered from her movie-which I think is a shame because Shan Yu deserves to be an iconic villain, and he'd be a very interesting OUAT villain, being a Fiction Land Muggle who would, despite that, be ABSOLUTELY FUCKING TERRIFYING. ... OK, well I understand the reasoning there and as this is an iconic story that's going to be taught to children around the world I suppose it's important not to legitimise that sort of thing. And besides which I'm pretty sure Pretty Captain Shang isn't part of the authentic Chinese version, and it's not like theirs is one of the great romances of legend. ... TWITCH ...

Thank you for posting that, I still have no intention of seeing this movie-I don't have much interest in any of these live action remakes except maybe The Little Mermaid when they get round to that-but it's very interesting to see the kind of issues that were faced in making it. I think this also highlights that doing Mulan any kind of justice on OUAT would have been tricky-I mean, sure, OUAT is not high profile enough that the CCP would take that much notice of it but still, anything that MIGHT damage Disney's share of the Chinese market is going to be something to be wary around. I do wonder what the right approach would be for her. In theory she should have had her own story arc, with an appropriate duly researched storyline but, well, time and money and stuff, and if you do a big Mulan story and mangle it in some unpleasant way it's worse for publicity than mangling King Arthur because, as the article says 'she belongs to China'. And from the other side there's the fact an American audience will, by and large, ONLY know her from the Disney movie and no nothing about Chinese myths and folklore in general... And if this was a different kind of show that'd be fine because you could just introduce the Chinese figures through dialogue the way that something like 'Teen Wolf' or 'Supernatural' or any number of magiccy genre shows will introduce an unfamiliar creature, but because OUAT was based around 'here's a character you recognise, now here's the TWIST!' then that wouldn't have worked.

The story of Cinderella's stepsister was probably the only example that really counts as an untold story, that's what you'd expect-the stories of supporting characters from famous narratives. It's an interesting theme but I'm still wondering how you justify these stories having their own world. Someone basically needed to sort out how this whole Author and Realms of Story business actually worked- Now my own model for the OUAT cosmology is very tentative and not properly worked out but the essentials are-the cosmos is chaotic, and the existence of Saviours is an attempt by the gods to impose order onto the randomly emergent patterns that they see. The Saviour is a divinely-empowered warrior-poet-chieftain-prophet-(add job as appropriate to circumstances) whose job is to take the stories playing out around her, to get involved where appropriate, to observe where appropriate, to understand them, retell then, to inspire her people to take charge of their own stories and to have faith in the course they are taking. She has an inherent power to do this that comes from the gods, but by her actions she spreads this around to the people she meets, and when they retell the stories then it gets spread further, diluted, but still there. This is the golden tapestry of Fate. The Author is both a refinement and a debasement of this, created by Merlin because he didn't think the Saviours had enough power to cage the Darkness he unleashed on the world. The Author can rewrite reality, and when he records a story his story is definitive, it cannot have been other than the way it is written (this is where it would get hard to explain and there is timey wimey stuff; without this sort of stuff going on, time isn't reliable, cause and effect can be mixed about by any number of magical accidents etc). But the Author's pen cannot spread this power to others. The Untold Stories, in my version, would be people who have a link to the Authored stories but whose threads were left hanging. Their existence is vulnerable to the tides of Chaos in ways the main heroes and villains' aren't. The Land of Untold Stories is some kind of pocket reality where they end up, and other than that the idea would be the same, except they'd actually be side characters, not people like Dr Jekyll or Captain Nemo... This is why I shouldn't write for network television of course: how many people are going to sit through that kind of rambling nonsense on a Saturday evening, much less follow it up by watching the cast joined by Dr Jekyll's butler or Captain Nemo's first mate 😁😉

😄😄😄 What's even funnier is that in the very episode that introduces that book, Gaston actually comments on its tackiness both in the present and the flashback. Whatever the truth about Belle in the original cartoon, Gaston is, definitively, meant to be a violent, illiterate oaf, and here he apparently feels he can look down on the intellectual princess for her trashy taste in literature. Also wanted to say i thought about creating a sockpuppet account to give extra likes to your post about the Power of Reading and the Power of Science. There are different books about different things! A person only has time to read a certain number of books and know about a certain number of things!

That seems unfair; at that point they were working together towards a common goal where they'd have a better chance at success with a dark sorceress on their side. Emma trying to make sure everyone stayed on task was what she saw as necessary to make sure they got her son back home safe, not any kind of moral judgement in any wider context.

If my memory serves I think King Henry just removed the Guardians powers, Rumple still had his powers which was why he could take his own heart out. I think. I'll say that for me this aired at an unfortunate time re. Rumples sacrifice, since if just seen the end of Capaldi's run on Dr Who and season 2 of The Good Place, both of which discussed the idea of acting out of genuine compassion Vs expecting a reward with infinitely more heart and commitment.

Do there are three lines of evidence as far as the sympathetic link between wish people and prime people go: there's the final death of the Dark Ones, there's Wish Henry changing his mind about Regina and there's the existence of wish people whose prime versions died. So it seems like killing a person from either side normally doesn't effect the other version-the evidence here is circumstancial though: Pan and Cruella both died before the Wish was made, and we've only seen wish people die post wish without impacting the originals. On the other hand, Wish Hook wasn't bothered by the idea of killing his prime version... On the other hand he's a pirate Captain, not a Doctor of Applied Narrative Cosmology. So again, circumstancial. The Death of the Dark Ones could indicate that killing the original kills the wish, BUT, I think it would make as much sense thematically at least, if this was unique to the Dark One and how he died; the dark one cannot be killed by age, disease or accident, and violence can only transfer it. Destruction cannot destroy evil, but a sacrifice that renews the life of another can. And maybe we can say that even if there is a wish dark one, there is only one Darkness, or one way in which Darkness can enter the world. This is all speculation though, nothing on screen backs that up. Wish Henry's change if heart seems to indicate that he was feeling his prime versions emotions. We can assume this is proximity related since.. well that's the entire point of the episode- though maybe he was struggling between being himself or Prime Henry the whole time and eventually King Henry lost out when he had to kill the thing the other him loved most. In any case, this is a link that only seems to go one way as Henry Prime doesn't seem any more harsh to his mother in this episode.

You know one thing I'll say in this episodes favour is that Alice's big hero moment and her romance with Robyn is actually made better in the context of the show's history of wonky protagonist morality: Here you have two young women conceived through deception and violation for selfish reasons. Robyn indeed doesn't just have her mother but her aunt and grandmother forming a whole clan of evil witches who have used magic to kill, control and terrorise people by forcibly removing their agency. And Robyn's moment if glory, where she saves the world from an evil witch who has enslaved her lover after seeking to constrict and control her for her whole life... Is in taking this girl's hand and asking if she can help, no magic, no trickery, no pressure or pleas or demands. She just wants Alice to be alright and is offering to be there for her. It's an ok scene on its own, but if you think about it as also being Robyn definitively cutting herself free from her family's poisonous legacy-which then allows Alice to finally free herself from her own toxic relations, and even to symbolically give Gothel a chance at some kind of peace- it's pretty beautiful.

I'm gonna say spider eggs 😉

Anyone remember the much maligned 1998 movie where Gary Oldman gets turned into a space spider monster? Maybe the robots saved this Smith when they reactivated and that's what's going to happen to our girl June, just with robots

Late to the party and behind the times (no season 2 for me yet)because of geography-hello! Does it make me a hipster douche that I wanted Macy to get with Harry from the episode where they found out about the necromancy onwards... But now the show looks like they're doing that I don't want it? Does it make me a racist if I'm happy Galvin's dead because he was bland and annoying? Does it make me... I don't know but probably a bit dysfunctional, if I want Niko to get her memories back and Mel to be all hopeful that she can make amends... And Niko just tells her: 'you know the last thing I remember from the old timeline? (Mimes freezing motion) I wouldn't even have remembered anything, and still, you couldn't look me in the eye and tell me you were sending me away, taking my choices and memories, my life... not if you might have seen me cry, or if I might have answered you back...' I like Mel I just kind of also want to see her suffer... That's not right, is it? I also want Sorority Lucy to become their new Token Muggle who's in on the secret-and I will make no apologies about wanting to see more of her because she's adorable😁