Dani-Ellie

Aww! That's me with The Exorcist (although I was 12, it was the tamed-down-for-TV version, and I was under my dad's supervision the whole time). Me: *runs into my parents' room that night, crying* Can I please sleep on your floor tonight? My mom, to my dad: What the hell were you thinking?! My dad: How was I supposed to know she'd react like this? Do you know how many times she's seen Poltergeist? She was perfectly fine with that one! I slept on their floor for two weeks, and I have since refused to watch it again, although my dad does swear the effects are really cheesy now. I have no desire to find out if he's right. :P

I was just looking Poltergeist up on IMDb (it's not as random as it seems, I promise) and I found out that a remake is scheduled to be released in 2015. I love me some horror movies but I don't think I'll be going to see that. I less-than-three the original to pieces so any remake is just going to register as a big fat nope with me. Not to mention that I think a large part of the original's charm is the early-80s-ness of it, heh.

Oh, fully agree. I would very much like for someone to tell Regina to grow the hell up and when she terrorizes an entire population, she can't then turn around and expect them to accept her with open arms just because she's "trying" to be better. They're protecting themselves and their families by keeping their distance. In my estimation, that's the bed Regina made as the Evil Queen, and I don't care what Regina/the show is selling, I feel zero sympathy for her that people don't want to be close to her now.

I see Emma and Regina as reluctant co-parents. They're tied together because of this little boy and they will be for the rest of their lives, so I do agree that it makes sense that they be able to be civil with each other. (Being a kid in the middle of two parents who don't talk sucks, and I wouldn't want to see that play out onscreen.) But could I see them meeting for coffee just because or doing something outside of Henry? No, and really, that's perfectly fine with me. I don't need them to be friends. I'm of two minds on this. I agree that Emma would want to keep Henry's other mom from reverting back to Evil Queen mode, to protect both Henry's feelings and her entire family's safety. On the other hand, I feel like Regina's a big enough girl now that she shouldn't need someone holding her hand so she doesn't go all evil again the second something doesn't go her way. At some point, Regina needs to find her own moral compass. She needs to be her own leash. I'm perfectly okay with Emma helping to guide her to that path but at some point, I need to see Regina find the strength of character to walk that path herself.

I think the disconnect could have been helped with a "how Bae became Neal"-type story. His time in Neverland and here is just as much a question mark as Emma's entire history. I mean, I can totally buy that idealistic young Bae was broken down and became Neal over all his years alone, but I think actually seeing it would have helped a lot.

How do they tell what provider you have? Does it go by IP address or something?

I didn't mean to suggest that I think Emma and Regina are equivalent in the magical talent aspect, because I do think Emma's innate magic is inherently stronger than Regina's accessed magic when taken down to brass tacks. My point was there's an immediacy to Regina's use of magic that Emma hasn't quite worked her way up to yet. When not working on base instinct, Emma seems to need at least a little bit of time to make her magic do what she wants it to do, which, in a battle situation where every second counts, could be very detrimental. I think that's why she pooh-poohed the book learning, not because it wasn't important but because they didn't have the time for something that wasn't really going to help her anyway. She didn't need the rote methods, she needed the practical application. I agree that Rumple would be a better teacher for her, if only because he seems to be able to tailor his instruction to the student. In Neverland, Regina was trying to teach Regina to tap into anger, which Emma very clearly didn't want to do. And I'm not saying this as a mark against Regina; she was just teaching Emma how she was taught herself, but Rumple's instruction to tap into protection seems to be a better fit for Emma.

I think she would have been ready enough, too, but I wouldn't exactly call that mastery of her skills, either. Maybe she would have defeated her with one magical swipe, or maybe it would have been a long and drawn-out battle in which Emma just barely emerged victorious. And that's exactly why I don't consider her a magic master yet. She can do some absolutely incredible things but she has no idea how to do them on command. Regina just opens her hand and a fireball appears. I'm assuming Emma could do the same or at least similar ... if she knew how. In a way, she kind of approached this the way she approached rescuing Henry: she didn't need to be able to do it the right way, she just needed to be able to succeed.

This. The way I see Emma vis a vis magic is that Emma is raw, untapped potential. She's the kid that throws the hundred-mile-an-hour fastball the first time she picks up a baseball. And just like the kid with the baseball, she has no idea how to harness that ability and really make it work for her. That's where the training becomes necessary, because raw potential is great but it's also unwieldy. We don't know how she would have fared against Zelena because the show never saw fit to show us. Emma thought she was ready but who knows if she really was or not? Poofing a mug of cocoa across a diner is of course amazing but it's a far cry from being able to hold one's own in a magical fight.

That I do agree with, especially the not sticking. Oh, how I would have loved for Henry to get his memories back of everyone but Regina.

No, but Regina's "prices" weren't confined to Regina, either. Never seeing Henry again may have been her price to pay for stopping Pan's curse but Snow, Charming, Neal, Hook, Emma, and Henry all paid for that, too. For the most part, I like that evil is far-reaching with consequences beyond what someone might immediately think. If the show actually followed through with those kinds of consequences more, maybe the power distribution wouldn't feel so imbalanced.

Y'know, I kinda liked the irony of the Neal situation. Like, he is the reason Rumple spent centuries plotting and planning and did all this and he still died in the end. I liked that, in this instance, evil machinations weren't rewarded. (Because goodness knows "all magic comes with a price" doesn't usually carry much lasting price for the villains.) I would have liked it a lot better, though, if there had been follow-through with the stories Neal was involved in. Let's see him and Emma hash things out beyond, "I didn't have a choice" "Yeah, I know." Let's see him and Rumple hash things out beyond "I'm still mad at you" "I know." Let's see how he and Hook became relatively friendly again in Neverland. Basically, let's see the full emotional journey here so that Neal's death means something to everyone. Maybe then everyone on the show calling him a hero to the point that Snow and Charming named their baby after him would be a little less ludicrous.

Oh my goodness. I want him to read me the encyclopedia. ( ... Accents are hot. Shush. ;))

The Daddy Charming side-eyes are my favorite thing, hee.

That kind of thing is what happens when the writers don't take the consequences of their own story seriously enough. Zelena's crack I'm sure was written as a standard Snarky Villain line. Neal's "You said you have a thing with lies, but I never believed it" I'm sure was written as a standard "oh, come on now" line between old friends. The only problem is, here you have this character who has nothing. It's taken her three years to accept the savior position, and she and Neal were not old friends. Prior to Neal coming back into Emma's life, the last time she'd seen him was just before he sent her to jail. So both of those lines can be taken as a gut-punch to poor Emma when I highly doubt they were intended to come across that way.

No, she should apologize to all the people whose lives and homes the curse displaced, she should apologize to Emma for taking her parents from her, she should apologize to Snow for taking her father and child from her, she should apologize to Henry for trying to kill every other member of his family, and she should apologize to every single family member of every single person she indiscriminately killed in the name of trying to achieve her vengeance. (And that's just off the top of my head ... I'm sure there's more that I'm leaving out.) The fact that she is a woman has absolutely nothing to do with it, at least for me. And like I'd said previously, evil isn't a contest. It's entirely possible for all three of Rumple, Regina, and Hook to be evil at the same time. Measuring the three of them against each other doesn't diminish any of their crimes.

My problem with Regina's "I regret nothing because it got me Henry" stance is that feeling remorse and regret over the curse and being grateful Henry came into her life are not mutually exclusive. The world isn't that black-and-white. She can still be over the moon that she has Henry while feeling sympathy and empathy for the countless innocent lives she destroyed to get him, especially considering casting the curse was never about finding Henry for her. Casting the curse for her was vengeance, pure and simple, and the fact that her machinations got her Henry is a silver lining in a very dark cloud.

It's Hook's self-awareness that's doing it for me. When he thought he'd achieved his centuries-long vengeance and it still didn't fill that hole in his heart, he recognized that his entire worldview was wrong. He'd wasted those centuries because vengeance was never the answer, and all he'd done for those centuries was keep himself in stasis, physically and emotionally. Compare that to Regina who, when she got her vengeance and still wasn't satisfied, decided the answer was more vengeance. And when Hook did let that anger go, recognized that he was the only one who could make himself not miserable, and allowed himself to move forward with his life, it opened up all these doors for him, doors he'd thought were closed forever. His and Regina's "tragic backstories" aren't too far from each other, after all; both had their loves' hearts crushed right in front of them. It's just that Hook has at least recognized that his path was the wrong one.

Merida is the main character in Brave. (Here's Brigid Brannagh's IMDb page, just for kicks. :) She's basically been in everything.) Wouldn't she just?? Now I really want this to happen, haha.

Since Once is now snagging the cast of Army Wives (Sally Pressman is known to me as Roxy Leblanc, who was awesome), I'd like to put in my vote for Brigid Brannagh as a grown-up Merida.

I liked this, too, up to and including Emma addressing Regina as Regina. I love the little fish-out-of-water bits of the fairy tale people not quite grasping things in this world (Cora's "enchanted box" in place of "computer speaker" cracked me up) but I also loved these moments of Emma not quite grasping the propriety and the politics of the fairy tale world.

Y'know, who did The 4400? Because I liked that show a lot. They had the Big Ideas (because, c'mon, 4400 missing people all get plunked back down in a ball of light and all of them have some kind of crazy supernatural ability??) but they had the script tightness, too. I remember being super-impressed when a line at the end of the second-season premiere came to fruition in the second-season finale. (It also needs to be said here that for me, this was coming off the heels of Charmed, which wasn't exactly known for the tightness of its scripts, either, heh.) And I really liked that they subverted a lot of expectations, like how the abductors of all these people weren't aliens or how Tom and Diana were allowed to remain a male/female partner team without the cliche UST stuff (and when they did do the rare UST nod, it was played for laughs). I still mourn the loss of that show. *sigh*

I don't buy the "sorry doesn't matter" argument. I see it a lot, usually as a way to excuse Regina's lack of apology, and I just don't buy it. When I'm hurt, I like to hear an apology as an acknowledgment that someone's actions have affected me in an adverse way and that they understand that. It's an acknowledgment that the methods and actions were wrong. It's an acknowledgment that the person was wrong for behaving the way they did. One of the first things parents teach their children is to apologize when they've done something wrong. In my estimation, sorry matters very much. Regina's apologized to Henry for how she treated him throughout season one, so we know she's capable of it. Not only that but the show has had Snow apologize to Regina a couple of times now but all that Regina's allowed is that "it's complicated." Where's the reciprocation? Where's the "You were wrong, but I was, too?" Because Regina was wrong, and I'd like to her see acknowledge that. Sorry isn't going to make everything better, but the point of a sorry isn't to make things better. It's to provide the foundation for mutual understanding and for healing.

In terms of life experience, I don't think August was much older than Emma herself. Magic poofed him into a seven-year-old, but how long had he been a puppet beforehand? How long was he a real boy before Geppetto sent him through the wardrobe? A couple of years, if that? A child that young hasn't the first clue how to take care of a newborn baby. I don't know if I blame August for leaving. An impossible burden had been placed on his very young shoulders. I understand the thinking that he should have stayed with her because someone in Emma's corner is much better than no one, but who knows if they would have even been kept together anyway? They may have entered the system together but they weren't related. Even in August's cover story, they weren't related; she was just a baby he happened to find by the side of the road. Now, his not coming back for her when he came of age and then him and Neal completely screwing her over afterward ... that's when the steam starts pouring out of my ears.

Or he'd have Emma decide that Hook hasn't dated enough since Milah and he should date other people first. (I'm sorry. It's been a bazillion years since Sports Night and I still think the Dana Whitaker Dating Plan is one of the most needless relationship angst things I've ever seen. [/Casey/Dana shipper])