Speakeasy

The thing with 'Once' is it really doesn't lend itself to a prospective AU episode, because a dystopian AU that has to be reversed would always look at least s bit like a rehash of Season 1, and the Normal Happy and Boring AU is really hard to fit in when the first curse was for the characters to be normal and boring. Normal Happy and Boring for these characters has them being Kings and queens and heroes in a magical land of fable and myth! So it would inevitably be frustrating if it was taken seriously because a continued Enchanted Forest would be a fascinating and exciting place! But it's one that they couldn't stay in because it would annihilate the central relationships of the story: no Henry, which in turn means no real connection between Emma and Regina, no weird relationship between Emma and her same age parents, no pretense that Rumpelstiltskin would see any of the other characters as more than tools to be opportunistically put to work. Hook and Zelena might become significant to the rulers of Wishaven-but there's certainly no guarantee and I can't see them becoming part of the family (and let's remember Killian Jones the pirate fell for Emma Swan the bounty hunter, Princess Emma is likely to be a very different woman). So the best thing might actually be to do what they did and cleave it off into its own reality, to be periodically visited of the series went on. But doing that in a satisfying way would require putting some serious thought into the cosmology of this world.

Where do you go with a serious No Curse scenario, though? I mean the curse was meant to be a bad thing but it's the basis of the series so... Basically the overarching message of a no curse story kind of diminishes the series leading up to it, it either points out how crap Storybrooke is and how much the setting you've watched these last 6 years sucks for everyone, or you end up in some way or another saying 'hey, this curse wasn't so bad'. The actual series ended up with the second one but I don't think the first would have been more satisfying.

Man imagine of Rogers hadn't got promoted or if he'd just been hit by a car and not even died or left the force but if he had to go on desk duty... How long was she going to wait this out? Actually I've forgotten the whole chain of events in 7A... I think the whole thing started with Henry following Lucy and that made some flowers grow... But everyone in this curse had free movement in and out if the Curse Zone. What if Henry met this girl and told Jacinta 'look, Miss Vidrio?, I don't want to stick my nose in where it's not wanted but... Your kid needs help, ok? Professional help, please get it for her, this stuff she was telling me... Either she's imagining stuff or she's acting out in a really dangerous way, and you need to keep her safe,' Then he just left because he didn't want to get involved and he moved to another neighbourhood or even another city because he needed a change and like... What then? What was the plan?! Did they need Henry to come to the Curse Zone? Cos Ivy was trying to keep him away from Jacinta when he was there so that seemed like it was an unexpected spanner in the works. Did Gothel and/or Ivy even know Henry arriving was significant? Did these morons have any idea how their own goddamn plan was working?! This is why I can't help but feel sorry for Ella 'Murderella' Tremaine and her daughter (I also like her daughter because Alicia Fernandez was in 'Jane the Virgin' and remembering that show makes me happy ☺️). Her mother in law looks the same age (or younger) than her, and is always hanging around her husband being just a little too close, plus the fact she's got a body count as big as a good sized tsunami or Ebola outbreak has to make her a bit nervous... It's incredibly disturbing to think about the idea she planned that. What was her plan afterwards? Had she picked out a girl for him to marry, knowing she'd stay the same age while he got older and more frail? Was she planning on having him stay a lifelong bachelor living with his mother forever, even while he got older than her? Was she planning on him to be a bachelor if he lived with her... If she could wear him down and convince him it was normal that no one else was aging, she could convince him anything was normal... Even if that was the plan, would she have kept him when he stopped being a child, or if he got too unwieldy? Maybe she'd have gotten rid of him and adopted a new child, maybe she'd get a new one every fifteen years or so, keeping them just long enough to scratch that maternal itch before they got too much, asked too many questions and forced her to look at the reality of her life, then she'd... Make them go away, and bring in a new baby to complete her. This should be fodder for good drama, really, but there was only the most cursory if nods made toward this being a problem. It's also inconsistent with the set up for this season; is the kind of woman who purpose builds a college in her personal fiefdom so her son never has to leave, who won't let him have an hour alone to work on his bike, who hovers over him wherever he goes... Is this the kind of woman who just shrugs at the idea of her son going backpacking all on his own in the witch and ogre infested lands of fairytale? Seriously she should have been terrified by the idea 'Henry, no! If this place is anything like our Enchanted Forest it's far too dangerous; that country was full of dangerous monsters, I should know, I was one!' He had his stepdad, his grandfather and his aunty as regulars or semi regulars this season, so there was plenty of opportunity for that. Well his mother is the mayor, his other mother is the sheriff, his grandparents are semi-retired royalty and his whole home town has only a paper thin facade of modern democracy over its feudal culture, so I'm sure his teachers could be persuaded to give him good references 😉 The real tricky business comes when you have to ask about whether Storybrooke, Storybrooke Highschool or Henry Mills actually exist in any way that any other college admission boards could verify. I headcanon that he didn't get in and Regina used magic to forge those letters to make him feel better.

Fair enough then.

This bugged me too, this is a small enclosed system, with cargo mass and energy at a premium, and they have the tech in their little space RVs to convert poo into rocket fuel, AND they must have some kind of recycling system and like a herb garden or something on the ship because otherwise WHAT WAS THE HORSE EATING? 😛 Smith was genuinely creepy. I don't know that she would actually kill a couple of teenagers... But I don't know that she wouldn't. That's a good use of the character because it's entirely believable she could run rings around a couple of well meaning meddling kids, no one needs to be dumb for her to be scary here. Aww, I felt for the guy when he came back and he was like 'did you think I was going to let you crushed? Seriously?!' I mean Penny was close to getting crushed so you can't blame her for panicking, but still... That has to sting to know the girl you like thinks you'd leave her to get squished.

I thought the bear stuff was rushed and Lee Scoresby seemed a bit pointless, he's a big deal in the books but he's basically just a schauffer in the series so far... Though unlike a lot of commentators I actually like Miranda's take on him, he isn't winning any acting awards but I think he's fun and he has great banter with his Daemon. The witches are also a big deal, and they made a big thing about them but it just seemed to be Serafina turning up, being eerily beautiful, cryptic and deadly, and then going away again. Scoresby and Iorek both develop this incredibly intense loyalty and love for Lyra and I'm not sure it's quite believable, I don't know if that's down to them not having enough time together or whether it's something else. Im not really a fan of the stuff in our world, I think that ate up too much time, though I think it is probably a good idea to introduce Will here if he's going to be a big figure in future seasons. The visuals have gotten better and better as the series went on through... Yeah, sometimes it looks like there aren't enough daemons in big crowd scenes but when you see them you notice them and they look beautiful, and everything just works; the balloon, the zeppelins, the bears... The BEARS! Aren't the bears gorgeous? They're this amazing mix of like... Barbaric grandeur and fairytale whimsy. And it's a minor point because they're just evil mooks, but am I the only one who thinks those Magisterium paratroopers with the falcon daemons look awesome? With that one scene where you watched them jump out of the zeppelin and the camera followed the daemon as she followed her human? Its a new addition as well, but it really works as a little extrapolation about the world; that's the kind of daemon that would be practical for that kind of job and a falcon WORKS as a spirit animal for special forces guys. Like I said I might be the only one who likes them.. I forgot that they said Lyra was going to make the betrayal, I thought they were saying she would be betrayed... If she is supposed to betray someone, yeah, it had better be later on (I read the books as a child and don't remember all the details) because she acted in good faith all the way and it's not just inaccurate but cruel to blame the poor girl for her parents being a pair of fucking monsters. Incidentally on that score: I wasn't sure about James McAvoy when I heard he was cast because I've only seen him as Sexy Young Professor X before this, but I think he was fantastic as Asriel, he's kind of a hard guy to cast because he has to have this kind of presence and this tempered ferocity, and I think he pulled it off really well. I was going to say that he might have just been scared and it wasn't like a tiny child could do much to get away from an experienced 30-something fighter/explorer/man if action with a snow leopard Daemon... Then I remembered they were brought to Asriel's lab by the King of the Magic Polar Bears, who brought a platoon of magic polar bears with him. Bear (ha!) in mind Iorek has explained that he cannot be lied to. Roger: Ok, Mr Lord Asriel sir, so we're just going up the mountain to get a... IOREK! IOREK I'M BEING KIDNAPPED! Iorek: What seems to be going on here? Lord Asriel? Asriel: Ah, your Majesty, congratulations on your coronation, I knew you could do it... Iorek: Liar Asriel: Yes, well... Roger and I were just going to go up the mountain, I have a surprise for my daughter which has been waiting up there and I need an extra pair of hands to... Iorek: Liar Asriel: Alright... We heard that the Magisterium is coming here so we were going to make sure my secret escape route is clear before bringing my daughter to... Iorek: Liar Asriel: Ok.... Fuck, Dust is a kind of complicated and weird idea to get across, they keep mentioning it but the fact they're trying to convey is that THEY , the characters, don't actually really know what it is. The Magisterium have latched onto this theory about it being the source of all evil because it kind of fits with their theology if you squint, and they're investigating any kind of avenue to make the world a better place in accordance with their theology. I'm sure there are two prongs to their interest as well; true believers like Coulter who genuinely think Daemons make everything awful once you get to puberty* and more cynically minded people who think that having a big chunk of the working class being a somewhat more functional version of that nurse at Bolvanger could have some advantages. * I mean in fairness to Coulter, puberty is hard enough in a liberal,non magical world like ours, imagine being a teenage girl going through puberty and having to deal with your emergent sexuality in a harsh, puritanical patriarchy that told you everything you were starting to feel was because you are inherently evil AND having a creepy little monkey staring at you all the way through.

Cross posted from the 7.20 episode thread because this reminds me of an idea I had fir an alternate Wishy episode: So 'Wish you were here' was a bit of a mess both mechanically and thematically since it was, I think the Evil Queen saying 'I wish Emma's wish not to be the Savior came true!' and apparently this was a case if 'be careful what you wish for', and we can all see that is really stretching things because Emma wasnt seriously considering or trying to get rid of her saviorism and it was the Evil Queen that made the wish... So this might end up getting too dark for this show, but what if, instead of this, we somehow got Regina (good or evil version) getting a genie lamp and wishing that Emma wasn't the saviour or that 'Emma Swan Never Came to Storybrooke' I haven't worked out exactly how this happens, but that's not the important part. The important part is Regina wakes up in a world where her curse was never broken. David is still in his coma, Mary Margaret is still a lonely science teacher, etc... And Henry is older and angrier and more miserable than ever and hates his mother, he hates her so, so much. I thought at one point that she might have put him on some kind of medication to blunt his emotions and he'd be acting dull and zombie like until they started to wear off, and when they wore off he could get furiously angry or start crying inconsolably... Or maybe he could stay quiet and smile while he's working out ways to take things into his own hands, to be the hero in this story by defeating the villain for good... And modern Regina would end up here, taking the place of Wish Regina, and be horrified and appalled... But she'd be all alone in this world, no one but her would recognise that anything was different, and she'd have no magic to help her. Now I'm not sure if this scenario is better with Regina on her own trying to undo her wish with the help of Wish-Emma or Wishwashed-Emma, or if she needs to be fighting against the Evil Queen, who would be prepared to accept this new world as long as she was in charge. The point is this would be a good opportunity for her to realise how useless her curse had been and how, in a way, her having a chance at hsppiness is down to Emma arriving and breaking it and forcing her to learn how to compromise. Anyone think this could have worked? And if so, would season 6 actually have been a bit too late for it?

'I make myself look nice for you, I come out of my cell expecting a special evening and you leave me on my own with a chair and a single set of handcuffs. One set of cuffs, Maureen? Really, sometimes I think you take me for granted, and that hurts'

It's a bit if a stretch but this is certainly a more positive interpretation and so one would imagine this is closer to what was intended; Henry did after all have his big conspiracy collage in his apartment where he was apparently starting to think it was all true. In either case it doesn't look good for him because he believes this girl is his child and he barges past her to go look for his mother... But at least by your interpretation he doesn't do this after actually remembering 8 years of fatherhood. Plus if he just believes intellectually that Regina is his mother but all the actual feelings he has developed have been towards his friend, an attractive single woman about his own age, then the fact he goes and almost-but-not-quite-makes-out with her is a little better. A little. Because he still thinks she's his mother. And also whether or not he thinks or believes or feels Lucy is his daughter... Wasn't he still babysitting her whole her mother was off breaking and entering? So he still left a ten year old girl alone in an apartment while there was a hurricane coming on to go look for his crush/mother when he was supposed to be looking after her. Is this Henry Mills?

I missed the line about how everyone had agreed to put Judy in charge of the kids, so I guess she's a good choice, the kids will like and respect her and she has medical training. All you guys clamouring for Smith to die in space is making me feel sorry for the ship's Chief Dickhead in Residence, I hope she makes it 😛

This always throws me I think... I'm not sure if this is to do with the show being about family relationships and personal growth, and it would be hard to sympathise with someone who'd lost their whole family... Maybe it's just the general fact that the background characters generally seem to be treated as props for the important people-if you worried about the lives of all these peasants in the background it would get too distracting, maybe? I remember the last scene with him digging with the dwarves, it was really nice... Made all the more so just because Jorge Garcia still towers over the whole cast when he's human sized, but they all get that he's a dwarf. I think probably closer to the second one... If I remember rightly her mother said she should go somewhere else and start a new race of wood nymphs (no word on whether she needs any... assistance... to do this but apparently that WAS always an option) buy she chose to go and get revenge instead, so I think it's meant to be understandable but also sad and tragic. As you said, though, this is the only time you see her as a human(oid) being so it's not as effective as in other cases, and once she's done her Carrie thing she's become the same cold blooded monster she has been all season, no regrets, no sadness, no doubt or confusion. Just 'I must continue my vengeance forever' What kind of magic does she do at the party? I think she did something with some water to defend herself from Gothel's Audrey 2? Maybe she's a sea nymph or mermaid or something. Good magic doesn't seem to be able to do much, I think that's a major theme of the show... Maybe not a deliberate one... That you can only defend yourself or achieve anything by resorting to evil but once you do it will steer you down a path of darkness for the rest of your life. I mean look at the Enchanted Forest... Old Shady Blue and her girls weren't doing a lot to stop the ogres from rampaging into the place every generation, killing and eating everyone they could get their hands on, only the Dark One seemed able to do anything worthwhile in that case.

It's a sad testament to working conditions for the police today that they need to do favours for mad dreadlocked cult leaders to make ends meet... Maybe his wife was one of the anonymous women he was having sex with but he happened to fall for her and that put an end to his rakish ways (or she just turned up at his house six months pregnant) If he's decided he doesn't care about his dead family because they're fake memories then that opens up more questions... Because surely that means his memories of all these one night stands are also fake... Unless the curse algorithms have worked out he doesn't care about his dead family and have just given him a bunch of new memories as damage control to try to maintain some kind of internal consistency. The curses themselves honestly seem smarter and more powerful than the people casting them sometimes, they're like some kind of hyperintelligent AI straightjacketed into maintaining the existence of a curse neighbourhood and given free reign to warp time and space however they can in order to keep the curse going. ... At this point, with the Wish Realm establishing that an entire world can be retroactively inserted into the history of the multiverse via genie magic, maybe it makes the most sense to assume that the Hyperion Curse actually retroactively changed the history of the Land Without Magic. It makes as much sense as anything else. Maybe Gothel had a completely different goal but she wanted to go so deep undercover that no one would ever know her real goal,not even her, so she actually changed her own past to cover her tracks. 'it's not that, that's stupid.' Yeah but is it more stupid than what's actually there? I think for her to be fleshed out Gothel and the whole backstory of prehistoric Seattle would have to have been more fleshed out so we had some kind of context for her to exist in. Like why she has magic, why everyone else hates magic, who exactly these people are/were, whether there were different groups etc... She was the only black Ancient Mean Girl, wasn't she? Is that significant? Like... Did anyone see the animated Disney movie about Atlantis (Atlantis: The Lost Empire, I think)? The Atlanteans were dark skinned there, at least the ones you saw,including the emperor and the princess, and they blew themselves up with some kind of nuclear magic... Were they thinking of that? Was this society a post Atlantean remnant that hated magic because it had destroyed the mother country and Serafina had powers because she was secretly descended from Atlantean royalty or nobility, but had to keep it secret because everyone was violently paranoid about the possibility of sorcerers blowing up the world again? What was her relationship to Gothel? I don't think thst was worked out. But then who were any of these people in relation to her? This coven she had was bizarre, if they were all dupes like Ivy who she'd caught as angry teensgers and groomed to be her minions that would have worked (would be an interesting and eery use of the age/appearance dissonance if, for instance, we saw Blind Witch 2's backstory and she, as a young girl, had been taken in by Gothel, who looked like she does in the rest of the series...) But she was inviting Regina and Zelena to join her gang, when both of them were old, experienced witches with families and goals of their own who had both been screwed over by a creepy warlock posing as a teacher, so they weren't really likely to go for anything she was offering, even if she had been offering something appealing.

I liked the sappy stuff with Judy and John, tiny four year old Judy was adorable 😊 and I thought that present Judy running from the dinosaurs was a really good action sequence. In fact I appreciate this show doing exciting action sequences in which no one is shooting at each other! I liked Judy's 'dont you die on me you son of a bitch!' motivational speech as well. Ah... Penny, you are not good at this.

It wasn't a space whale it was a cloud fish 😛 And the point was to have a giant cloud fish! And also to make the situation more tense and have the visual of Maureen's space forklift plummeting into the clouds.

I think Smith is a very fine character it's just the situations that go on around her are frustrating. The justification for her being in the show is that she can sneak into an incredibly advanced unbelievably exclusive spaceship by stealing a lanyard and wearing a wig. The justification for her staying into the 2nd season and it bring locked in a closet is that in the 7 months between seasons none of the other security personnel watched those tapes and the chief didn't explain what she'd done or tell all the other crew 'Caucasian female, black hair, yay high, permanent frowny expression, this woman is dangerous, she's come on with false documents probably stole an ID chip, and killed one of our security guys, tell us if you see her, do not approach' Her relationship with the Robinsons is interesting because it seems like she respects and sometimes admires them but the fact she respects them makes her immediately resent them. I think they could do without her or they could do without her being as obviously adversarial. I think the show does well enough with them facing external threats. Something more like Baltar in the early seasons of Moore's Battlestar Galactica? Where he was working with the other characters but he was keeping a bunch of secrets to protect himself and generally acting shady and weird but not actively against them (because that would be dumb because he needed them to survive) I have to say I was confused as to how John Robinson has the authority to appoint his 19 year old daughter as the legal guardian for 95 children who aren't his. Shouldn't Captain Kamal be making that call? Or maybe Victor, who the colonists have voted as their leader?

If there are a thousand parallel Cinderellas and Snow Whites you'd imagine there would be other tree nymphs or equivalent, since they exist in the myths of almost every culture that knows about trees. Maybe she went to them first and they just weren't convinced by her plan. Gothel: 'Sisters! I have come from another world, where like you, my people frolicked amid the woodland glades until the BASTARD HUMANS slaughtered my mother and sisters! I wreaked my vengeance on then and destroyed all the humans of my world, diwnbti the last child, but in doing so I left the world bereft of magic. Now me and my faithful servant Patsy...' Patsy: 'My name's...' Gothel: 'Have come seeking allies so that once humans have re evolved from lungfish we may be able to return to my world, to restore magic and DESTROY THEM AGAIN! Sisters, will you help in my quest?' Patsy: 'Wait...all the humans in the world? I thought you said the land, like the country around that party... By the Outer Gods! My little brother! what have I...' Gothel: 'Quiet Patsy!' Head Dryad: 'Umm... Yeah... Gothel, right? I... I don't think that this is really our kind of thing, and I'm really, to be honest I'm not sure what we get out of it... Why are you waiting for humans to re evolve on your world any... Look, doesn't matter, the answer is no, thank you though, for thinking of us, it really means a lot...' Gothel: But... Lieutenant Dryad: She said no you lunatic, now get the hell out of our woods! Your friend can stay though. And it was thousands of years of that until she worked out she could get more recruits by preying on confused human teenagers and keeping her plans vague-since I doubt even Ivy would have gone for helping destroy another world because the ancestors of its population/a previous race of precambrian humanoids had killed their tree nymphs thousands or millions of years ago. Yeah... The logical progression of this storyline is that she'd want Alice for, at the very least, something other than a doorstop to let her out of her tower... Which is a problem because the pathos for Alice's storyline is that her mother was so cruel and cold to her. Plus you would need to explain why she hadn't had a mixed race child before if that was an option-both of which are possible; maybe she could only conceive Alice with Whook because he was created by magic or because she used that magic flower, maybe she's cruel to Alice because she can't love her when she's half human, or she's had her War Face on for so long she just doesn't know how to be kind any more. You'd just need a bit of exposition dialogue and a few more world building notes. This, also. Earlier on in the season I could have believed they might have been building to her being some kind of totally inhuman being: Her tests could have been because she was some particularly mean spirited god of judgement, Nemesis or something. She could have been some kind of spirit trialling witches so she could devour the strongest ones and absorb their power, or some equivalent to the Dark One but with different rules, and actually seeking out a replacement who could kill her and take her place-not to be reunited with her lost love but just because That Is The Way. I mean maybe her being detached was the point, that she'd been doing this so long shed become just this heartless thing that just caused pain for its own sake as much out of habit as anything, no longer caring one way or the other. This is where, as half assed as the treenymph backstory was, I can see the vague shape of a potential... Something there... If you'd played her as a corrupted nature spirit, and that Alice could be tied into this whole spiritual legacy and her heroes journey could include taking on her mother's power and allowing it to grow in a healthy way again... I don't know... Still doesn't explain the Guardian or the Dagger stuff. All good questions with no answer...I'm guessing she needed a Dark Curse for the same reason Rumpy did-to make sure she still had magic when she arrived, but for the others I'm not sure, she certainly didn't seem as discussed as Rumple was, especially if she'd had thousands of years to work on it compared to Rumple's 300 years maximum. Another good question being I notice it's a recurring theme, Nimue, Percival and Tiny also had their home and family murdered and were in the wrong for wanting revenge... Ok, Tiny WAS going for the wrong guy, so maybe he doesn't fit the pattern. Still, I think there is kind of a pattern of 'lose one loved one to violence=sympathetic and you should get some leeway when you do bad things; lose your whole family to violence=sad I guess but it's no excuse for doing bad things' Maybe the idea of mass murder or genocide is honestly just too big for most of us to connect with. Someone kills your mother, you can imagine that, you can imagine how angry you'd be at the murderer and how you might become bitter and angry at the world especially if it seemed like there were other people trying to stop you bring angry or somehow getting in the way of however you decided to cope with it. But it's hard enough to imagine someone has killed everyone you know before moving on to how you'd react to it. But you know... It does happen, and the more I think about it, which I shouldn't because this story isn't good enough to deserve that much thought, the more unpleasant it is to introduce the idea of such a horrible crime for it to be automatically dismissed because 'its no justification for whatever bad thing you are doing now' ('you mean like trying to kill the actual person responsible? I asked her earlier, she didn't even deny it! Witch! Did you murder my village?' 'I dunno, I did a lot of stuff')

I think Parker Posey is doing a great job with the character, it's just a pity that she requires the universe to bend over backwards to accommodate her. It's frustrating, particularly because you could have adjusted her backstory to get rid of these problems: I was sure through S1 she was going to be revealed somehow to be the one who changed Will's grades. You could have had her be running a smuggling/identity fraud operation while posing as a mechanic or crew member-hence Dr Smith could be an alias for when she's doing her shady business (and NO ONE would know her real identity so there would be a good reason to keep calling her Dr Smith). And she would have dirt on lots of people on the ship so she'd be someone potentially dangerous. Or you actually have her be a doctor, maybe an exobiologist to help out with the alien creatures they run into, but with the same kind of 'if it's you or me, or you and your kids or me, I pick me, sorry' kind of attitude. If she survives, which she will because you dont kill one of your headliner's off screen like that... I don't know I hope there's some kind of repercussions, like she's sustained a bunch of nasty injuries or one if the bad robots has stuffed her with nanobots to use as a sleeper agent-though honestly that would demonstrate a good deal more patience and intelligence than these particular robots have demonstrated thus far; 'Hey, how did the horrible meat creatures capture one of us before? Could they have set some kind of trap? Should we maybe send a dozen or so robots into the room to see if there's a trap in there ahead of the main group? Nah,it's probably fine...' They could all be on the same side but maybe the attacking robots are just ultra-focussed-i think Maureen was actually commenting on them being monomaniacal-and Scarecrow had just worked out there were different groups among the horrible meat creatures and they shouldn't all be killed, but the soldier/retrieval bots were just locked on and weren't going to listen-so he had to resort to violence. They might not even be especially bad by robot standards they just don't think horrible meat creatures are really people (the way the Men in Black guys were justifying torturing Scarecrow because he was a robot), and Scarecrow just looks to them like he has a tragic case of Stockholm Syndrome that's sent him violently crazy. I hope we get a third season to at least look into the possibilities with this...

The writers enjoy the idea of it being a madcap adventure series where anything can happen, something like Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where you could have any combination of characters working together in wacky combinations to defeat outlandish threats and overcome bizarre problems. Adam Kitsis and Edward Horowitz are not Alan Moore. Like, that line at the end where they say 'oh yeah, Lily's dad was Zorro' 'Zorro is a dragon? Huh' I liked that line, I thought it was funny as a kind of 'this show, huh? Why not?' throwaway. But it seemed at times like they tried to make the whole story of throwaway lines and allusions to 'woah, this show huh? Crazy, anything could happen!' But you can't build the story out if that, a crazy story that mashes people from different stories together to tackle bizarre problems needs to follow normal story rules, it needs to have substance, it can't just get by on saying 'woah, here's, fuck, I dunnow, Cinderella 2 and Tiana-you know the black princess?- and they've got a food truck, ain't that whacky?'

It's just such a huge backstory with such massive ramifications for the rest of the setting that it's hard to believe the season wouldn't have been tied into it if it had been planned from the start. The main villain's backstory taking place thousands* of years in the past and having wiped out some antediluvian civilisation and created the current world is the sort of thing you build the whole season, if not the series, around. The fact that there was NOTHING suggesting she was a nature spirit rather than a human witch, that she was thousands of years old or that she had destroyed the world before just leads to the conclusion that it CAN'T have been planned. I mean the alternative is that they had this plan all along and this was there on a big writers storyboard during all the months of writing that went into making season 7 and they just looked at that note about the main villain being Fairytale Cthulhu and said 'hmmm, should we throw in a hint about her being Fairytale Cthulhu? No, no I think we need a scene with Jacinda and Sabine buying a food truck/Henry making his kinda-girlfriend a mix tape/something about Victoria (man, what are we going to do with Victoria? Can we just kill her? I don't know what we were thinking with her...) I'm sure we can fit in Gothel's backstory before the finale' Which is just baffling. The more I think about it the more it iris he as well that this episode uses genocide and environmental devastation in such a throwaway manner-ok it's the genocide of an imaginary race if dryads in bad sparkly makeup but still... It's just so cursory, I can't believe many people were more sympathetic to Gothel after this episode, it just seems like the writers decided bad guys need to have some reason to be evil, losing a loved one makes you evil, so losing your whole culture would make you Super Evil. But it's not as if anyone particularly gives a shit about either the dryads or the Antideluvian 80s Victorians, not the writers and not the viewers, and the whole rest of the season seems to be very clear on saying Gothel doesn't deserve a shred of sympathy. And it's... Urrgghh.... It's going through the motions because they built up this pathos for they're villains in the first few seasons where personal tragedy or hardship DID at least partly explain they're motivation and they're taking that idea of the moment, like Rumple losing his son or Regina losing her boyfriend or Hook losing his hand, and just making a bigger and more horrible version but without any of the stuff around it that makes it work. Those other characters all had a villainous mask but you could see behind it to see their sadness, their guilt, their fear, their rage, their isolation, their humanity. Gothel shows none of that in the whole season, she's intimidating in the right lighting but she's hollow. So invoking violent racism and making her backstory a bloody, genocidal massacre seems a bit tasteless for such a disposable character. *That's assuming the thing about lungfish is poetic license otherwise it was millions-no-hundreds of millions, of years ago and those are Pre-Cambrian Victorian 80s Mean Girls.

'I have destroyed the entire human race, good riddance to the bastards... And yet it will all be for nothing, one day they will re evolve from lungfish and it will all be useless, USELESS! Come Patsy! We must away to another world to plot our revenge on the vile humans once they have re evolved from lungfish!' '...um... I have a few ques... Ok, ok, murder face... Yes. That sounds like a good plan...' 😉

Well it'd better be a good reason because there's almost a hundred of them crammed into one space RV and they piled on in a hurry so I don't think they had time to bring lots of supplies. And I don't imagine they're going to go back to the colony in the first episode of season 3. Me too, good luck to them 😁 The best option they've got seems to be to hide on the ring planet since the army of angry robots is coming from EVERYWHERE ELSE. I want to ask though, why didn't the adults try to follow the kids when Robot opened the wormhole? Clearly more than one ship can go through at a time. Don, Maureen and John wouldn't have made it since they left the Resolute last, but what about all the other Jupiters?

I've been very pleasantly surprised by this series after being ready quit in the first half if season 1, it's really solid with the space adventures and the visuals are absolutely amazing. I am fervently hoping this gets a third season. I wonder how a season 3 will get everyone out if their current situation because it really looks bad fir everyone. Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't all the adults minutes away from getting killed by a ten thousand angry robots? And the kids are all stranded over a destroyed planet with, I imagine, not much food or water (though if Smith's on board as might have been suggested then there's at least a temporary solution... No? Not that kind of show? 😛)

Emma's heart was already darkened when she took on the Darkness because she had killed Cruella, though. Don't look at me like that, it was in the script! It was a huge plot point, that they needed her to be darkened to use her blood to make the magic ink. I'm going with the idea here that any use of magic to kill darkens your heart, in the same way as using the Grail for violent ends, even if they were understandable, created the dark one. Hence also why Snow got her dark spot for killing Cora because she used dark magic where neither of the Charmings ever worried about hacking up black knights all day. He melted his father, though, so he couldn't forgive him 😋 Also I'd assume if he dies in the LWM and his power just boils away then he doesn't get to take it with him... Maybe he's not keen on the idea of going down there without the ability to freeze people or TK them into the river of souls. Let's not forget if the Wish People are real and retroactively have real pasts that intersect with the rest of the real multiverse there's presumably a Ghost Wish Milah and Ghost Wish Gaston down there, maybe a Ghost Wish Fairy Godmother and a Ghost Wish Carter and a Ghost Wish Beowulf and... Wait... Yes; THE UNDERWORLD, we see MR GOLD huddling behind a pile of crates by the dicks, a thick mist covers the scene, he is breathing heavily, gritting his teeth. Suddenly we hear CLANG-CLANG sound of something heavy and metal being banged against a railing, a voice starts to sing in a slow, mocking voice. GHOST WISH GASTON: Through the mist (CLANG)/through the woods (CLANG)/Through the darkness and the shadows... A silhouette emerges from the mists behind MR GOLD, he frantically gets to his feet, crouching and scurrying away, ducking behind some barrells. GHOST FAIRY GODMOTHER: It's a nightmare/but it's one exciting ride... MR GOLD glances nervously over the barrells to see more solouhettes all around him, he sinks to the ground and crawls toward a low wall... GHOST TAMARA: (walks out of the mist, crosses herself) Say a prayer/then we're there/at the drawbridge of a castle... GHOST BEOWULF: (shakes his head, snarling;) and there's something truly terrible inside... two sillouhettes emerge ahead of MR GOLD, he stops and drops down to the floor, close up on his face, he is terrified... GHOST WISH MAURICE: (Emerges out of the fog, roaring angrily) It's a beast!/He's got fangs!/Razor sharp ones! GHOST CARTER: (points accusingly at MR GOLD) Massive paws/killer claws for the feast! MR GOLD pushes himself to his feet, snarls and charges forward, stumbling and snarling he manages to evade GHOST WISH MAURICE'S attempt to grab him. GHOST WISH MAURICE doesn't seem too put out by this, and just watched him run with a sneer. The ghosts all line up and watch MR GOLD flee, a final solouhette starts walking our if the mist in the midst of them all, singing slowly, in a voice full of resentment and quiet fury.... SILHOUETTE: See him roar/see him foam/but we're not going home/til he's dead.... the SILHOUETTE emerges at the head of the ghosts, it is of course GHOST WISH MILAH GHOST WISH MILAH: (in a voice mixing unfiltered rage and vicious exultation) Good and dead! KILL THE BEAST!

If I wanted to be charitable I'd say maybe Emma could have done that but when she sucked up the Darkness her heart had already been darkened so she was no longer pure enough to be a Guardian, so she became a Dark One instead because there was just enough darkness inside her already for the Darkness to latch on and darkify her. Um hang on: Rumpy-poo had a shiny new pure heart and he still managed to be the Dark One again at the end if 5A. Well, maybe his heart was darkened when he fucked everyone over by casting that spell to get the darkness back. Plus he wasn't any kind of chosen one at the time so he couldn't be a Guardian anyway. Oh, but that would have been so like Rumpelstiltskin though, and to then act like he'd taken on this great burden for Alice's sake because he couldn't let an innocent suffer in his place, that's classic Gold. Plus his wife was the one who did all the research while they were at the edge of realms, it's not like Alice or Hook could tell if he was lying. Yes. This is what happened 😋 I thpugh Morrison did a pretty good take on Dark Swan when she was pretending to be really evil, she gave this impression she was seething with resentment, disgust and anger, and Dark Hook was fun particularly when he was mocking Runplestiltskin in challenging him to a duel, hand gestures and all. I'd like to think that both of them were around trolling Rumpelstiltskin all throughout his retirement. Again this would have been fun, if really nasty for Alice. You could really get into the idea of what separates the two versions of the guy, and what really defines him as a person, if it can be boiled down to anything so simple. Arrange it in the right way and that could be as good a reason to keep them separated as the heart curse was, or at least a better way to separate them so they could get heart cursed than Fairyland's Best Dad Wish Hook putting his daughter's future at risk to fight some preening stranger for calling him names. Well, Alice did agree to it and, taking the story as written and ignoring the plot holes and Chekhov's Guns, it was a big deal for Rumplestiltskin to genuinely put the needs of another person, and more an acquaintance/lackey than someone he was close to, ahead if his own. I mean from what we can see he is rapidly sinking into darkness and insanity, and it seems like in the past he's stayed lucid because he had a plan to work on (Curse 1 to find Bae) or someone to hold his attention (Belle), at this point he was looking for the Guardian but he's just given that up and accepted that he will probably be doomed to cold lonely madness, accompanied only by the jeering, hateful whispees of a thousand evil ghosts. Forever. I don't know if Wish Hook would appreciate all that though. Maybe he just thought being nice to him would stop him from trying it again?

When Alice had the dagger it looked like it was melting, am I right in thinking she would have absorbed it? So would she be the Dark One or would she just have the power contained inside her and be obligated to live forever because the power would keep her alive? See I don't know any of this but the thing is Rumpelstiltskin doesn't either, the dagger has apparently been passed from Dark One to Dark One since it was created, it's never been taken up by a Guardian, so all he has here is the theory. I would guess he hasn't let someone else stab him because he doesn't think he'll get to Heaven if he willingly passes his powers and evilness to the kind of person who would want to be the Dark One, since they would inevitably be a bastard who would go around being horrible otherwise they wouldn't want to be the Dark One. But he has no idea if giving it to Alice is any better. Maybe the whole Guardian thing doesn't actually work, Alice melts the dagger and then the Darkness emerges as a big blob of evil and eats the world, as was the fear in season 4. Or maybe Alice becomes the Dark One but with no dagger to rein her in, the poor girl is already a bit unstable, how well is she going to react to hallucinating a vision of her dear Papa stomping around her saying that if she really loved him she'd get justice on the people who hurt him? I mean does this Guardian thing mean she's so supernaturally nice she can hold out against all the temptations of evil forever, or is it just a magical mechanic that lets her melt the dagger? Cos Emma was a magical chosen one and a nice enough lady but she was ready to kill a stranger within hours of being the Dark One, on the prompting of a hallucination of someone she doesn't even like. And does it make her indestructible or just immune to age? Why was Gothel looking for the Guardian? Knowing her 'so I can have her suck up the Darkness then eat her and absorb the power myself' seems like as good a guess as any. So Rumpelstiltskin might look callous fir attempting to force immortality on an innocent girl to serve his own ends, but if you look at it from his perspective it's actually much, much worse.