Dani-Ellie

I kinda can't wait. I love the Charmings to pieces but I love when we get into the angst (qualification: intentional angst) because it feels more real to me than just okay, we're a happy family now. I'm also willing to bet that Emma's going to be more upset about the fact that Snow and Charming are keeping The Dark Secret from her than whatever The Dark Secret is.

Not to mention that one of Emma's favorite threats is to punch someone in the face and she was willing to kill Ingrid. Emma threatening violence is not something way out of the ordinary, is my point. I take that more to be Snow overreacting than anything having to do with Emma as a person.

He can't cultivate something that doesn't exist. Regina took a couple beans from the field and torched the rest; I'm assuming the destruction went down to the roots. The beans Regina took were used by Greg and Tamara to take Henry to Neverland and then Hook et al to follow them. There are no beans or bean seedlings left in this world. This. I didn't feel like Hook was all "But I can't get my happy ending because I'm a villain!" but more that he was all "I'm getting a taste of it now but it could always slip away again."

I think it would have helped had Regina not framed her desire to find the Author way back in 4x01 as because the Author is not giving her a happy ending. By her own logic, this Author is giving everyone else happy endings but her only evidence of this is a book in which the only one who won at the end of story is her. So the logic of Regina's original position doesn't track because like, the Author gave you your happy ending, Regina. The fact that it ultimately wasn't your happy ending is just life, not the Author's fault. If she'd framed her desire to find the Author as a way to find her happy ending rather than because the Author gave everyone else one but didn't give her one to begin with, I think it would have gone down easier. This. Less is more with this stuff. It may be fun to show your villains being villains but you can't then turn around and cry "But they deserve happiness too!" when they've been shown irreparably ruining other people's happiness.

Don't quote me on this, but I believe the thinking is that the older viewers are more set in their ways. If they've been buying Ivory soap for the last 30 years, what are the odds they're going to switch to Dial? On the other hand, the younger viewers are just starting to get out on their own and making their own decisions as to what to buy for their own homes. (It may sound silly but I remember when I moved out on my own being psyched to be able to buy grated parmesan cheese as opposed to the romano my mom bought because I liked parmesan and she didn't.)

I don't know that this is any different that Cinderella and Thomas getting to keep their baby or Hansel and Gretel finding their father. It's about reuniting a family. And I do think it was important that they had a former villain trying to make right what he'd set asunder in the first place and showing that it worked.

I am dead (no, seriously, I am typing this from beyond the grave ;)), and on my headstone it shall read, "Here lies Danielle, killed on the 22nd of March by OTP." I actually really loved this episode. There was forward momentum. There was character development. There was a happy ending like it was season one back up in this place. And Emma is Killian's happy ending! I'm sure I'll have more when I stop flailing. ;)

There was a very lengthy discussion in the Emma thread about this past episode, and I would like to state again that I do not at all believe Emma's freakout was all about Regina, and I do believe the show actually did tell us this. Canonically stated, there is much more going on in Emma's mind than "omg Regina," not the least of which is the fact that the people closest to her are keeping something from her and she senses it but they're all sitting there going, "Psh, Emma, everything's fine" when it's not. I really do understand the impulse, especially with these writers, to harken everything back to everything being about Regina but in this case, I do believe it's not in fact baiting and there is something bigger going on that has more to do with Emma herself than anything.

This. I don't trust a single word that comes out of Regina's mouth when it comes to Snow. She's too blinded by hatred (and in this case, jealousy) to see anything for how it really is.

These are problems that have nothing to do with Storybrooke as a setting. They're writing issues. And I disagree that it's not grounded whatsoever because the little bits like Ursula and Rumple arguing over ramen or Hook pressing the Emma button or seeing Elsa in her Arendelle finery sitting in a vintage yellow Beetle are the kinds of things I'm talking about. It is pretty awesome but at the same time, how many times can we realm-hop before Rumple's need for the Dark Curse to get to the Land Without Magic becomes ridiculous? According to some, it already is. We give this show all kinds of shit for having no world-building or magical rules and then we give it shit for staying in one place when it's been previously stated that getting back to the Land Without Magic from the magical realms is supposed to be hard. It's like it just can't win sometimes.

And this is exactly my point. It's not the place that makes something interesting but how the place is used. I think the appeal here is the untapped potential because we've only seen it in bits and pieces, but who's to say that if we go to Oz for a half-season, it won't be just as "boring" as Neverland? There's only so much that can be done in 8 days on a TV budget and the location is such a small fraction of what makes something interesting. Frankly, going to Wonderland for half a season would be a nightmare for me. Part of the reason I didn't care for the Wonderland spinoff was because it was missing that real-world grounding. I don't care for high fantasy, so Storybrooke is what helps keep this show cemented in reality for me. This.

So Storybrooke is boring and yet when we went to Neverland, I seem to recall there being a lot of complaints of walking around a jungle of potted plants being boring, too. There's only so much a location can do. It's part of the setting, not the whole kit and kaboodle. It's up to the writing team to make the location interesting, and wherever the action in this show takes place, it's going to have the same writing team, which means that no matter which land we go to, we're going to have the same problems there as there are with Storybrooke.

I really like Storybrooke as well. Part of what attracted me to this show in the first place was the idea of fairy tale characters in the real world. The enchanted lands for me are great vacation spots but they're not home, you know what I mean? If I wanted to watch high fantasy, I'd watch Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. Give me Rumple, Cruella, and Ursula at the drive-thru or devil boxes and Emma buttons and talking phones and big yellow driving machines over high fantasy any day.

This is what I don't understand about the hugely vocal SQ crowd in general. Swan Queen is a fan-created ship. It does not exist on the show, especially now that both characters are canonically involved with other people. When I was in the Casey/Olivia fandom, I don't recall people getting pissed off with Mariska Hargitay or Diane Neal when they did interviews and didn't address Casey/Olivia. Because we understood that it wasn't a real thing. Them's the breaks with a fanon ship. Get the hell over yourselves, peeps. I just do not get it. I really, really don't. This, too. Maybe people would be more inclined to throw them a bone if they weren't such nasty abusive asshats to begin with.

Ooh, do tell! (I am avoiding the interviews until after the ep and I fear the spoiler thread for the same reason.)

I also agree that the story, as they presented it, was fine and served its purpose and was paced correctly. But we didn't really get into Neverland, you know? We were there, we saw it, we played with Peter Pan being a villain. But we didn't really get into the mythology of the place as presented on Once Upon a Time. There were things that were hinted at between the Neverland characters that were never fleshed out. What kind of work did Hook do for Pan? What was their arrangement? How did Tinkerbell fit into any of it? Wendy, Michael, and John were given token appearances. We touched on the Neverland mythology but we never saw it in depth, and that's my problem. They take the broad strokes of the story and put their own twist on it, but they never fully explore those twists and how those twists change the story we know. I wasn't saying go to Neverland for a full season. But digging deeper into the mythology would flesh out the story and make things feel more real and resonant.

I agree that it's very easy to sit here and armchair-TV-write, but at the same time, I think if they hadn't felt the need to blow through so much plot and character development in the blink of an eye, they might not seem to be stretching so thin on ideas. I think the aftermath of the curse should have been given far more attention than it was. I think both Neverland and Oz, if allowed the room to breathe and actually get into the mythology, could probably have been a season each. It's not so much the ideas that are the problem but the pacing and execution. Nothing happens in the middle of an arc and then an arc's worth of shit happens in the last two episodes. Character beats are skipped over in favor of zooming the plot from Point A to Point B to Point C, so the characters are constantly running around but they have no time to react to anything. Like, even with the end of the Frozen arc ... how does Emma feel about Ingrid now? Does she still hate her? Is she angry? Is she sad for the time they did spend together when someone actually wanted her? We don't know because the show never saw fit to get into how Emma feels about it now that it's over and she knows the truth. And that's just one example. All that emotional development that would help these stories really resonate and help these characters actually be three-dimensional people who have emotions and feelings is skipped because it's onto the next plot. I just wish the show would slow the hell down and delve into these stories on more than just the surface level. Go big or go home, you know? If you're going to take the story into Oz, let's freaking see Oz. Let's enmesh ourselves in Oz, let's let the characters go there, see it, feel it.

Exactly. This is the biggest missed opportunity in the entire series for me. When Cora was trying to convince Regina to kill Henry's entire family, I honestly thought the situation was going to come down to Regina having to choose between Cora and Henry. That Regina would finally see that Cora did not in fact want what was best for Regina and that she never did and that Cora had manipulated or helped manipulate so very much of Regina's hardships. It would have been a powerful and empowering moment for Regina, to finally see the truth and to choose to rise above it, to refuse to be complicit in it anymore. But nope. That's not the direction they chose and I don't think I will ever understand why.

I unexpectedly had to put down my pet three nights before the show aired, so what Regina did to that horse struck me as unbelievably cruel. So frankly, I don't give a shit if there's no mainstream media outcry. Regina destroyed something Snow loved simply because Snow loved it. Plain and simple. It was cruel and it was petty and it was evil, and it did absolutely nothing to endear Regina to me.

She even says as much to Regina, that ever since the evil trio came to town, her superpower's been going haywire. She knows something's wrong but no one will admit it to her. I just did a rewatch for my reaction post and I paid specific attention to what was going on with Emma because of this discussion and the other negative discussion I'd seen elsewhere, just to make sure I wasn't arguing headcanon with no evidence to support it. There's so much more to Emma's turmoil here than just "omg Regina's in danger!!!!oneone!" and the show is in fact trying to tell us this. It's a clumsy attempt that maybe came too little too late, granted, but it's not like they just left it completely up in the air. They are trying to explain why Emma's so worked up over this by having Emma herself admit that what she's feeling and what she's being told are completely at odds with one another.

I'm still seeing Emma's verbal freak out as a product of character development. No, I could not imagine the Emma Swan who drove into Storybrooke with Henry in the pilot ever freaking out like this but after three and a half seasons, she shouldn't be the same person. She should have grown. The fact that she feels comfortable enough with Hook to be that vulnerable and freaked out around him said more to me about her development as a character than anything having to do with Regina.

I don't really think it was. She was trying to catch up, she had no idea what was going on, and she was operating on pretty much zero information. I think it also matters here that Emma as of right now is a much more open Emma than we're used to seeing. Emma from before would bury her concern and not allow it to show but that didn't mean she wasn't concerned. When Henry ate the poisoned turnover, she attacked Regina, dragged her into a supply cabinet, and threw her against shelving and lockers. When Henry was lost in Neverland, she allowed Regina to take a Lost Boy's heart. When Hook was drowning in the trough thing, she gave up her magic to save him. When Hook and David were going to become skewered by Ingrid's icicles, she flung them out of the way with her magic. These are frantic gestures from Emma and I don't buy that just because she was verbally freaking out over this as opposed to physically freaking out like we've seen before that it was in any way out of character for her.

That's what I don't get about voting against anybody at this stage of the game. It's just petty. (Which, this whole exercise, in the grand scheme of things, is ridiculous, don't get me wrong ... but rallying people to vote against a TV couple that's managed to make it to the top two in an internet poll? Really?)

This. Because look, Emma is the bail bondsperson. In her mind, this is her area. Undercover ops is how she made her damn living. This is what she knows, and this is what everyone knows she knows. So to find out that everyone had arranged this thing without her has to be at the very least disconcerting and hurtful for her. Because ... why? Why not include her? What's going on that they wouldn't ask her at least for freakin' advice? And then when she finally forces the truth out of her parents, things are already not going according to plan. Regina was only an hour late but any number of things could happen in 60 minutes. Emma knows that any number of things could happen in 60 minutes because, again, this is how she made her living. Regina could be absolutely fine -- like she was -- but her cover could have been blown and the evil trio could have tossed her in a ditch. She could be hurt, she could be in over her head, she could have decided to screw the good guys and turn again, which meant the evil trio would have become an evil foursome and that would have been even more trouble for Storybrooke. They didn't know, and that was the issue. I'm kinda getting tired of seeing the characters judged as if they had all the information we do. The characters don't know everything we do. We knew Regina was fine and still playing at being evil. Emma did not. Not to mention that she was jumping into a situation she had no hand in creating but she knows how quickly those situations can turn because that was her job. I'd be hella worried and feeling like everything was spiraling out of control, too.

This. I also never felt that Emma was worried about Regina's safety as much as she was worried that sending a newly reformed evil queen undercover with her old cohorts was tantamount to locking a recovering alcoholic in a brewery. Not to mention that the decision was made without consulting her at all. I get that they needed someone to infiltrate but at the same time, how many times has Regina backslid? Not worrying about it would be just as ludicrous.