Speakeasy

I actually think this dynamic, if not the more sensible timeline, might have been what they were going for, just going by the way he appears and she seems kind of hesitant but that she still kisses him even though she knows it's wrong. I would have thought that in her Evil Queen days there was a reason she had a sex slave instead of a lover; she needed to be in control of everyone around her. She'd deal with Rumpelstiltskin on equal terms because she had no choice, and maybe she'd visit Maleficent from time to time, but I can't believe she'd let someone get intimate with her unless, at the very least, they were an ordinary mortal she could overpower and kill anytime she needed to. A powerful sorcerer who could actually fight her and use the relationship against her? Not likely. Your solution works a lot better. Of course their Facilier would need to have been a lot more interesting to justify her falling for him against her better judgement.

Had the show decided on who it's villains were going to be early on, sketching out a super-team of evil witches as enemies and laying clues about who and where they were when transferred to the real world could have been a lot of fun. Especially if you included the possibility that some of them were oblivious and some wanted a fresh start. Like you said, we have no idea if the doctor just had a curse backstory about removing an embarrassing tattoo or whether she was awake and trying to leave her life of evil behind her. Given her job healing children, I wanted the doctor to be Medea, but that's not the kind of reference this series made 😉 The other confusing thing was how Hansel suddenly lost 30 IQ points when it came to attacking Ivy and Zelena; his first two killings were so smart and methodical, with him even leaving false flags for the police, then when he gets to number three he just lunges at her with a knife? Also, Ivy is rich; if her mother has just been murdered and someone is killing witches, and she would presumably know who the other witches are so she would at least have reason to think she was on the list, why not get a bodyguard?

Hmm. I suppose this is where I think her being interesting is more important than her being reasonable or likeable (I did like her though, partly this is because Parilla was charismatic and partly because the way the character was done was fun and inventive particularly seeing the maniacal Evil Queen alongside the calculating Madam Mayor and tracing the similarities). When it comes to the extent of her cruelty I just take what we're shown and try to imagine how it is that she'd be driven to that kind of action, and I've never found 'some people are just bad' to be a satisfying explanation. Some people might have a tendency toward particular behaviours but I don't like the idea of that just making some people inherently and irredeemably evil. As far as her doubling down on her sadism when she had other ways out, I understand that as another self defence mechanism; if she stops trying to punish Snow White for her crimes she'll have to take a look at herself and realise how hollow her quest for vengeance has really been. That should be liberating, right? Not when she's sunk so much into it, especially once she's in Storybrooke, it would destroy her to actually admit that the curse was pointless, that she killed the only person in all the worlds she loved and who could love her in return, and it was all based on delusions. I guess I see her as a tragic figure. I definitely don't agree with her creators that she's suffered more than anyone else... at least not due to anything that anyone else has done to her. She suffers a lot but the vast majority of her suffering is self inflicted, based on her own obsessions, her wilful isolation and her, ironically considering the mirror fixation, lack of reflection. And there's a long tradition of tragic and fascinating protagonists who do evil things because of their own misplaced feelings of resentment or obsession. People can have some kind of sympathy or empathy with Captain Ahab, Macbeth and Milton's Devil, right? All monsters (though I guess of those only Satan himself meets Gina in terms of evil... Better to reign in Hell, indeed) but all compelling and even sympathetic because you can see how they're trapped by their own dysfunctions. Ok, I'm not sure if that answered your point very well... Basically I try to connect with her on the basis of thinking about how she is feeling and I'm interested in her because the reasons she feels that way are interesting. The abrupt change in personality is a weakness, in this episode and in general and, hell, in fiction nin general, this idea that people flip from good to evil on a personal tragedy, it's just not true and it's not interesting. I am still trying to headcanon up some reason she would seem all sweetness and light in this episode without falling into that trope. Maybe she was trying to impress Daniel or to distance herself from her callous mother and cowardly father, of both? One thing you can say for Regina is that, as far as physical danger goes, she is brave, or at least not cowardly (I've always considered bravery to be acting in spite of fear, and if she is, clinically, a psychopath, she'd just have less fear than most people). I like seeing her home life in this episode because you can imagine that, if this is her model for relationships she'd really have some work to do to connect with anyone in an honest way. The model her parents are presenting is one where a relationship is based on fear and dominance, you can either instill fear of you can submit to domination. She certainly seems to take that lesson to heart later on.

Witch Hunter Hansel was odd, because he was saying to Henry that there aren't any good witches which seems like they were going for the X-Men villain thing of him just having an irrational hatred of all magical people... But with the exception of Zelena, who had personally hurt him and terrorised his country for decades, his other victims were dangerous enemies to the main characters. If you wanted to show him as a dangerous bigot the way to go would be having him go after Alice.

See this is where I differ from most of this forum, and I dont know if this makes me a horrible person or not, but I think her actions are understandable; I've certainly experienced times when something made me angry or bitter and I allowed myself to stew in that anger until I just became angry and bitter at life and people in general and thought that I'd be happy to see other people be unhappy. I don't know if I'd actually have taken pleasure in the pain of others and I certainly didn't go around trying to hurt random people, I DEFINITELY never fed any children to witch 😉 But I understand the feeling, and, you know, my parents are nice people, my wife is alive and well and Regina's problems are my problems, enlarged? Try 'scrawled across the sky in letters of fire stretching from horizon to horizon', but adjusting for scale I think I can understand her thinking and even sympathise with her. And the fact that I can do that makes her an interesting character to me.

I'm going to make myself unpopular by saying that I actually like the explanation given in this episode fir Regina's evilness. As I see it, she hates her mother, hates living with her, but thinks of her as essentially invincible and besides has a kind of loyalty and maybe even love for the old monster. So she pins all her hopes for resisting and escaping her life on this romantic fantasy of running off with the stableboy, and I think it's telling that it's a young , tall, blue collar worker who fulfills that fantasy rather than someone if her own class; he's in some ways the opposite of her doting and aristocratic but small, cowed and impotent father. I agree that it's entirely possible their relationship would have been disastrous. People here speculated she'd have ruined things with her entitlement but we know so little about Danny it's entirely possible that, once the adventurous shine had worn off their romance, he'd have left her in a pigsty with their 4 kids to make his own way in the world. Anyway. The way I see it, she has gotten fixated on this guy as a symbol of escape, of love and freedom and happiness and so on, then her mother kills him brutally just ran the point home that she needs to stop all this nonsense. So all her hopes for a better life are gone. Who can she blame? There are four people involved: first there's Cora, she's the most obvious but she's Gina's mother and, besides, she's Cora, hating her is (from Regina's perspective) as pointless as hating a thunderstorm or a plague. Second there's Daniel, but he represents all her ideals and wishes and he died before she got to see him as a full human being rather than her dreams come true, so he's essentially beatified as far as she's concerned. Thirdly there's herself, she should have known better... But where does that lead her? It's almost an act of self preservation to go for the final and least responsible target: Little Snow made a promise, and she broke it; you can't hate a storm for smashing your house, you can't blame saint Daniel for anything and you can't blame Young Regina, she's just a girl in love, she can't be held responsible for her actions... In her very twisted mind, the ten year old child is the only one with any agency because she had the option to: Just. Keep. Her. Mouth. Shut. But she didn't. It's not justified and it's not rational but it is, to me, interesting, which is far more important in a story, particularly for a villain.

... Ok. Don't remember that... Extra weird since by then they'd established Regina as going in a lot more rampages besides her flashy wedding crash. Hang on, how did she react to Rumpelstiltskin claiming to be her fairy godfather back in season 1? Was she all 'but there's no such thing as fairies and magic!' back then?

Now it's possible I'm just being a snob here but I really like the first one, that is a clever reference which is relevant to the character, while the second one seems obnoxious to me.

I have never seen the season 1 Cinderella episode, that is... Ridiculous. Maybe Cinderella of Fairyland One was just so isolated that she thought the stuff about rampaging witches and kings turning their future sons in law to gold were just tall tales? Even so, though, I can't help but think magic should be a commonly accepted part of life in a world like this, even if you never encounter it. Believing in magic should be like believing in boats.

Is Baron Samedi a clever name for a Voodoo sorcerer? It seems too on the nose to me, and I just can't believe a real person would be named that unless it was a Freddy Mercury kind of thing where he changed his name. And even so, would you buy a house from a guy who changed his name to match the Voodoo king of the dead? I'd have called him... I don't know. Mr. Smoke-as in Smoke and Mirrors, which possibly fits the cartoon better than this version, but whatever. Was there any significance to the names Sabine or Tilly, for that matter?

Good choice! The ordinary people weren't important, it's a story about family relationships and personal growth (which was also oddly handled in many ways) not about government or society. I think the writers, and a good number of the viewers, don't really worry about the fact that these characters are supposed to have civic responsibilities. I find this a bit odd because the show creates a new type of society with the fantasy land people forced to live (kind of) in modern America in a weird existence that's neither really one place or the other, but there you go. I even find the absurdity of the ending to be an interesting springboard from a world building standpoint because now you've linked up who knows how many fantastical worlds and introduced them to modern technology. I've tried looking for fanfic that continues after season 7 that imagines what the reign of The Good Queen might actually entail, but it looks for the most part like soppy romance and 'domestic fluff' as far as the eye can see.

Crazy theory perhaps, but given how many people were pulling for those two to get together, maybe the writers wanted to recreate that magic 😉 My main takeaway from this episode is I want to know Baron Samedi's backstory, not Facilier*, the curse persona; I need to know what possible justification the curse could come up with for a successful Seattle real estate developer (or whatever he was) with a posh English accent to be named 'Baron Samedi'. How do those things fit together?

When we watched this episode my wife turned to me and asked 'does she know her mother RAPED her father?' we shall, it seems, never know. And that's a shame because, first, if your story includes such a horribly absurd and absurdly horrible scenario, you should at least commit to it and think about the consequences. More importantly, though, that's a fascinating source of drama. People on here have pointed out that Zelena in this season seems so much nicer than she was in previous seasons, and you can easily imagine her being an incredibly affectionate, supportive and loving mother. Now imagine you're a teenage girl and you live with this warm, kind, generous woman, the kind who just lights up a room when she arrives and is there for you with unconditional love through all your troubles... Then learning that she once killed a woman and took her place in order to violate your father (who, incidentally, you've grown up hearing praised to high heaven, you're named for him and he was such a great hero) and that's where you come from. How the hell do you reconcile those two ideas? How can you see yourself as carrying that heroic legacy when you suddenly know you're the product of such evil? Even if you know about Uncle Hook's Murder Bling or that Cool Auntie Gina was once The Evil Queen, Kinslayer, Worldsbane, Tyrant of Misthaven and Destroyer of Multitudes, it would be a shock because this would be so much more personal. And what about her mother? How would she cope with having to face what she'd done, again, and facing up to the fact that the best thing she'd done, raising her daughter, was built on one of her most gruesome crimes? That this crime continues to hurt people, to hurt the daughter she loves so much, and might always keep hurting her? And what kind of relationship can the two of them have after this all comes out? Ah... Nevermind; hey, it's the talking head lady from the haunted mansion ride... That's fun. And now Zelena has her magic back and Robyn can go do archery*. Sorted 😛 *Because masterful, combat archery is something you can just pick up. It's not as if medieval longbowman had deformed spines because of all the practice required to get good at pulling a 100lb bow.

Everyone but O'Donoghue, Kane and Reynolds can go, based on their performances this season. It's not that everyone else was bad but none of the others stood out, not even Carlyle, as far as I'm concerned. Just out of curiosity, I'm in agreement with most of the forum (I think)that Ramirez was probably the worst of the new arrivals. Does anyone have a fantasy recast for her role?

It could work, you could do a lot with Eloise being a cult leader, make her a doctor who's lost her license for unethical practices then she sets up some kind of alternative healing therapy group that's actually a cover for her to test her unsafe drugs on vulnerable young people, and there's her connection to poor Alice. And Victoria is using her influence to protect this shady shit in the hopes that it will provide a cure for her daughter. I think this could really work. The thing I'm less certain of is Lucy bringing her favourite author to town to help her and, more importantly, him agreeing to stay and help on the basis of him being smitten with her mother. I'm also wondering what kind of hold Victoria would need to have over Jacinda to make her stay under her thumb as an adult, and what her motivation would be for doing so (maybe Jacinda's father set up a trust for her and/or Lucy and Victoria is trying to get her hands on it by manipulating them, I don't know)