S04.E20: Lily

[Shanna Marie]

The problem with all this is that only the good guys ever seem to get punished for the few bad things they do, while the bad guys get their slates wiped clean with little to no effort. All Cruella and Ursula had to do was say they were seeking redemption and they got a pass, other than getting bad service at Granny's. The trio plus Regina went on their little spree of destruction. Nada. Mal may have "retired" but it wasn't because of her having a change of heart that Philip got saved from the curse she put him under or that Aurora was saved from her sleeping curse, and we haven't seen Mal making any effort at making amends with them (and even if the actors weren't available, she could have said something -- like making a snarky remark when Snow and David finally came to her about how she apologized to Aurora before they got around to doing so to her). So it continues the villain double standard in which a hero doing one bad thing dooms them to hell for all eternity and can never be forgotten or forgiven, but once the villains do one good thing or have something bad done to them, the slate is wiped entirely clean and their bad deeds can never be mentioned unless someone is on the road to darkness.

 

Yes, Snow and David did an awful thing to Mal, but she's not entirely innocent herself, and hypocrisy is NOT a worse crime than burning people alive. She's getting a free pass now because they did one bad thing to her, and that's not justice. It's not that I want to see the heroes getting away with it, but it would be nice to see at least one villain have her crimes acknowledged. (I say "her" because everyone except maybe Belle depending on what day it is does acknowledge Rumple's evil, even if it does sometimes get waved away with "but he's family," and Hook is still mistrusted and even getting slapped from time to time. He's the one reformed villain who's treated somewhat realistically, in that his attempts to do good are acknowledged, but his bad deeds aren't entirely forgotten and dismissed.)

[Zuleikha]

So it continues the villain double standard in which a hero doing one bad thing dooms them to hell for all eternity and can never be forgotten or forgiven,

What hero has been doomed to hell for all eternity and never be forgotten or forgiven? Even with the current eggnapping--which was pretty freaking crappy of Snow and Charming--the only one punishing them for it is Emma, and the show is portraying her as wrong/going dark to do so. 

 

Also, I don't see how the villains are being given a pass. Ursula, Cruella, and Maleficent haven't been put in jail, but Team Hero hasn't been in a position to put them in jail. Cruella is now dead. In general, if a villain isn't part of the core cast, the villain gets killed. If a villain is part of the core cast, the villain gets redeemed--or in the case of Rumple, at least the appearance of redemption.

[Dianthus]

IDK, Lily seems pretty pissed about the egg-napping (granted she was in it at the time), and she definitely wants to punish Snowing. Mal has been down on them for it too, never mind all the people she's hurt/cursed/killed.

As for the doomed to Hell thing, you might be taking it a bit too literally. OTOH, Rumple pretty much consigned Killian to Hell in 4A. Never mind that Killian is way out ahead of Rumple in the race for redemption and was/is more of a man than Rumple could ever be.  

[txhorns79]

Yes, Snow and David did an awful thing to Mal, but she's not entirely innocent herself, and hypocrisy is NOT a worse crime than burning people alive. She's getting a free pass now because they did one bad thing to her, and that's not justice. It's not that I want to see the heroes getting away with it, but it would be nice to see at least one villain have her crimes acknowledged.

 

Which villain hasn't had her crimes acknowledged?  I'm honestly not sure what is expected here.  Anytime a villain has a complaint, someone stops to remind them of how horrible they are?  It's not a competition to see who is worse.  Snow and Charming did something awful to Mal and her innocent baby.  She's rightfully pissed.  That Mal did horrible things to other people is interesting, but not really relevant to that particular grudge.     

[Serena]

Neal wasn't even on my list.  He was neither special nor moving.  I thought it would be Graham, then I was like well that will be awkward for Regina.  I cursed at my tv when they said Prince Neal, then I almost gagged to death.  It's better Emma feels awkward about that than Regina.  

Yes, but if you've ever read a Ginny Goodwin interview from season 3, she is like one of the twelve people in the world who looooooooves Emma/Neal. So when she started talking about how she cried (and not from frustation) when she read the baby's name, it kinda became obvious.

[KingOfHearts]

I discovered Lily's adoptive father is named James Page. The mother is Priscilla. Caught it in the newspapers Emma was researching.

[Donny Ketchum]

So now we have Zelena pregnant with Robin's baby and he knocked her up when she was disguised as Marian. I'm pretty sure the writers stole this plot straight from Passions. Or was that Days of Our Lives? Either way it's stupid.

That was Passions, for sure.  Kay used magic to turn into Miguel's true love, Charity, who was also her cousin, and slept with him.  She turned back into herself when her sister, Jessica, walked in on them and saw her (as the spell only made Miguel think Kay was Charity, but not anyone else who saw her).  Once she revealed her name, Miguel saw her, as well, and freaked out, rightfully pissed over it.  Sure enough, months later, she turned up pregnant with their daughter, Maria.

 

Sad thing is, Kay basically got rewarded for everything by ending up with Miguel in the end, with no acknowledgement of her deeds or comeuppance from her schemes.  The writer of that show was one of the worst on television and was hated and reviled by many soap fans.  And I think he went to his grave not grasping or understanding how truly hated he was.

[Arnella]

 

Yes, but if you've ever read a Ginny Goodwin interview from season 3, she is like one of the twelve people in the world who looooooooves Emma/Neal.

She was probably looking at Neal as the actor who played him who seems like a perfectly nice guy and he and Ginny were most likely friendly behind the scenes.  

 

The actors have a much different experience than we do so I try to remember that even if the Charmings see how their story line has become crazy, they may appreciate more screen time because of it.  

 

I still believe they all do the best they can with what they are given.  It's too bad that what they are given is big illogical mess.

[Dianthus]

I've been thinking lately about why Snow might've preferred Neal for Emma (as she obviously did) over Hook. Neal was never presented as a "villain" like Hook, regardless of how he dicked over Emma. Plus, he did express some regret for what he'd done. Also, too, I can imagine she found Hook too dark and intense for her liking. Neal came across as more laid-back and low-key.

[Camera One]

I'll reply in Relationships.

[Mathius]

Looking back on this thread, several people seemed very confused (thanks to the writing) about an alleged implication that Emma's life should have been good or better than Lily's, but rewatching the episode, that implication was NEVER made. That makes no sense since Emma and Lily have tough lives for TOTALLY different reasons: Emma's misfortune is all based on external factors she can't control, while Lily's is based on internal factors she can't control.

The only thing stated in the episode is that when Emma and Lily are together, the light and dark in them begin a sort of pull on each other, and as a result Lily's internal problems begin to improve, but Emma's external problems only get worse. When the two separated, Lily's problems got worse, while Emma's problems...also got worse, because Neal came along to effectively duplicate Lily's role in her life; again, an external thing.

Bottom line, the thought that "Emma's life should have been good before she met Lily" is a false one, as nothing about their conditions ever guaranteed a good life for Emma just because Lily wasn't around, the Apprentice already said as much back in 3x16 when he said that darkness could be born inside her again all on its own and give her a difficult life if she was to not be raised by her parents.

It's that Maleficient has never been called for HER bad deeds, which include killing an entire village (children included) for no good reason.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it just said that Maleficent attacked and burned down the village? And when we see her nesting in the ruins, there's just a bunch of stray armor and weapons around? That seems to clearly indicate that there was a fight involved, so most of the village peasants would have had ample time to flee while Maleficent was battling the defending knights. The only confirmed kills here are them and not the entirety of the village. Edited October 16, 2015 by Mathius

[Shanna Marie]

I wonder where the flashbacks for this episode were supposed to fit into Emma's timeline -- before or after Ingrid? It seemed like Ingrid's foster home came right after the first Lily incident, like that was where Emma was sent when she was put back into the system. The videotape goes straight from Lily to Ingrid's foster home. Would she really have recorded nothing else in between? But then it seemed like Emma did her final running away before she ran into Neal at the end of that. But then she's in the system in this episode and seems happy and well adjusted until Lily shows up, and at the end she's running away again. If she'd run away after Ingrid and got caught, wouldn't they have sent her back to Ingrid? If she'd tried to tell on Ingrid for pushing her into the street, Ingrid probably would have said something like, "Emma was having a bad day and is lashing out at me," in that soft-spoken, calm way she had. Or did they believe Emma, and that's why Ingrid headed to Storybrooke to wait out the rest of the curse?

I also wonder how much of this they had planned when they did the previous Lily episode. The star birthmark suggests they were setting something up, but I find it really hard to believe that adult Emma would still be having regrets about not reaching out to Lily after Lily lied to her yet again, used her, and got her kicked out of a good foster home. The end of that friendship had zero to do with Emma not reaching out. The idea that Emma was so starved for affection that she looked back on a friendship that lasted a few hours and that turned out to have been based on a lie doesn't work as well when you factor in this "friend" ruining a foster placement where she was loved. Would the "friendship" of a few hours that ended up destroying her chance at happiness have been more important to her than a family that she seemed to have had for some time so that she was still wistful about the "friend" but never mentioned the family?

Besides, how was Emma supposed to have reached out to Lily if Lily had run away and was living with her boyfriend? True, it seems Emma didn't even try, but how did Lily know if she hadn't even been where she could be reached?

I still have issues with how they seem to be defining "darkness" for Lily. They did the darkectomy on Emma because she had the potential to be a great villain, but Lily just seems to be a loser. She makes bad choices and has bad luck, but it seems to be more out of weakness to resist temptation, not because she's acting out of darkness. Someone with extra amounts of native darkness would be more like a sociopath or a sadist. Or I guess like Hook, where they talk about him always wrestling with darkness. With him, it was kind of an anger at the universe, with him lashing out and destroying either others or himself. Or, if we're looking at the opposite of Emma, she tends to do things for others and feels bad about hurting them, so Lily would hurt others and enjoy it or feel no guilt.

A couple of pages back, from back when the episode aired, the suggestion was made that it would have been far more interesting if Emma and the Charmings had taken the road trip together. Why aren't we allowed to have nice things?

[KAOS Agent]

8 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I still have issues with how they seem to be defining "darkness" for Lily. They did the darkectomy on Emma because she had the potential to be a great villain, but Lily just seems to be a loser. She makes bad choices and has bad luck, but it seems to be more out of weakness to resist temptation, not because she's acting out of darkness. Someone with extra amounts of native darkness would be more like a sociopath or a sadist.

It doesn't really make sense anyway because Emma's "darkness" never meant that she would be super evil. Snowing were told that she had the potential to be evil. If she was raised right, she could be a great hero. Lily was raised by a couple who loved her and cared about her. She seemed more spoiled than anything else. She ran away, but used her parents' credit card to live. She broke into her family's summer home knowing it gave her a safe place to stay. She played at being like Emma, but had no need to do so. She wasn't even a criminal during their first meet (although I wouldn't be surprised if she hadn't been a shoplifter because she thought it would be fun). None of this was a sign of great evil. She came off as more of an overindulged brat.

By the time we see Lily in this episode she seems to have pushed her parents too far. I guess armed robbery was their red line. She was simply reaping what she'd sowed. Cut off from her money sources, she's still a manipulative bitch who has no qualms about screwing over Emma. It's still more of a mean girls move than an evil one.  Lily is much more of a Regina George than a Regina Mills on the evil scale.

[Shanna Marie]

5 hours ago, KAOS Agent said:

Lily is much more of a Regina George than a Regina Mills on the evil scale.

I don't think she's even a Regina George. Regina George had a bit of a sadistic streak. She enjoyed having power over other people, and she really enjoyed using that power to destroy and manipulate people. True, it was in the relatively low-stakes world of high school popularity, but if she hadn't had a wake-up call as a teen and had continued being that way into adulthood, I could see her becoming truly awful. Maybe not Regina Mills awful, with a high body count, but destroying lives and enjoying it. Lily was just lame. She played at being a bad girl and made bad choices, and it seems like ever since the Apprentice told her what had happened, she used it as an excuse to do nothing with her life.

What she has in common with Regina Mills is that she was given every advantage and still whined about her life. Regina grew up as a princess and became a queen, but even while being a queen with magic powers, living in a palace while Snow was a fugitive living in a tree, she was miserable and thought of herself as Snow's victim. Later, she's mayor and living in a mansion, but is whining about not having her happy ending. Lily grew up in a family wealthy enough to have a lake house that's nicer than most people's regular homes, and it seems like her adopted parents really loved her, but then she became jealous of Emma, who was never adopted and grew up in a string of foster homes bad enough that she kept running away, and she later seems to have blamed everything that went wrong in her life on Emma.

And I hate that the show seemed to be seriously saying that Emma was in the wrong for pushing Lily away after Lily got her kicked out of a decent foster home.

Something I forgot about this episode: Rumple's big emotional scene struck me as so insincere, like he was fishing for reassurance from Belle. It was the equivalent of someone talking about how fat and ugly they are as a way of trying to get people to say that they're not really fat and ugly. I felt like all his talk about how terrible he was and how he'd betrayed Belle was really just an extended cue for Belle to say, "But you have a good heart and I believe in you!" I was cringing during that scene. And apparently the writers thought it was so romantic.

[Camera One]

Well, as A&E often says, Rumple is not an easy person to love, as if that means it's a special accomplishment when someone does get the privilege of loving him.

16 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

What she has in common with Regina Mills is that she was given every advantage and still whined about her life.

That is what annoyed me most about Lily - her whininess.  She disregarded how Emma was in a much worse situation and selfishly ruined it and through it all, it was "me, me, me".  But really, she was meant to be a Regina parallel all along, first appearing in 4A to explain why Emma was so desperate to have Regina's friendship since she didn't want to make the same mistake as she did with Lily.  I'm not sure A&E succeeded when I also thought Young Emma should have dropped the Loser Lily like a hot fire-breathing potato.

The Apprentice was just wildly out of line in this episode.

Edited March 23, 2019 by Camera One

[tennisgurl]

I hate these "Emma is close to being happy and gets screwed over" episodes, they're just so freaking depressing. You know, as much as this episode went on and on about how Lily was such a innocent victim of fate and her life was so awful, it seems like Lily got TONS of chances to have a decent life, and Emma was the one who fate decided mess with all of the time. And Lily was hardly "filled with darkness" she was just a feckless, self centered brat who grew up to be pretty much the same, just with less income. She didnt seem like a psychopath or anything, even at her worst. And Emma is somehow the bad guy for being pissed at Lily for getting her kicked out of her good foster home? Really? 

And I just dont buy this huge connection they were supposed to have, considering they knew each other for about two days tops, and Lily spent both of those days lying to and manipulating Emma. 

[KingOfHearts]

3 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

I hate these "Emma is close to being happy and gets screwed over" episodes, they're just so freaking depressing.

The problem was that there were waaaay too many of them. It's almost every single flashback Emma ever gets. It's the writers trying to over-sell that she had a hard life full of betrayal, and it's due in part to the "centric" format. Each character has a specific description and their centric needs to portray it. That's how you keep your characters two-dimensional archetypes and avoid creative risk at all cost.

3 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

And I just dont buy this huge connection they were supposed to have, considering they knew each other for about two days tops, and Lily spent both of those days lying to and manipulating Emma. 

The whole connection thing with Lily and Emma feels like a different show. I didn't get the whole wolf thing. Lily's character gets a lot of mysterious introduction...

Spoiler

... and the writers never come back to her. There's all this "whoa, she's just like Emma" stuff that doesn't need to exist. There's no explanation for it,  but apparently it was so important we had to make a callback to the pilot of the show.

[KAOS Agent]

14 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

And Emma is somehow the bad guy for being pissed at Lily for getting her kicked out of her good foster home? Really? 

I don't understand how it's wrong that Emma is angry and unwilling to run off with the girl who stole her foster family's vacation money. Lily is a selfish, spoiled bitch. That it was less about getting money and more about wanting Emma made it all the worse. Manipulating events to screw Emma over and ruin another potentially decent relationship with a foster family by setting up a situation where Emma is told exactly where she sits with the family (she's not a true member of the family) is a despicable move. Why would anyone consider Lily anything but toxic? Of course on this show, Emma is supposed to be the light that makes Lily's life better, so Emma is awful for not wanting to stick with a wanted criminal who deliberately destroyed Emma's relatively happy foster placement. There's never any evaluation that maybe Emma would have maintained a friendship with Lily if there had been no thievery and manipulation. It's shades of Rumpbelle only in a platonic relationship.

Again this show is requiring Emma to shoulder the burden of others' actions. Emma shouldn't be required to fix Lily, just as she shouldn't be stuck with the Saviour role and continuously sacrificing herself for the happiness of others. It gets tiresome seeing someone who was not even born during the events she is meant to atone for/fix suffer and be portrayed as wrong for not really being keen on any of it.

[KingOfHearts]

7 hours ago, KAOS Agent said:

Again this show is requiring Emma to shoulder the burden of others' actions

I think it would've been cool if Emma had been put into these kinds of situations where others think she's responsible for their happiness, only to push pack and call out the BS. Like, you see the flashbacks and think the show is framing it as Emma being a bad friend. But in the present, Emma confronts adult Lily and tells her that her choices are her own responsibility. I miss the "screw this" Emma who chopped down an apple tree or fired a gun at a dragon. Realistically, she should've kicked fate in the balls and disagreed vehemently with everyone else's insistence on following prophecies. That's supposed to be an integral part of her character. 

Edited March 24, 2019 by KingOfHearts

[Shanna Marie]

22 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

I hate these "Emma is close to being happy and gets screwed over" episodes, they're just so freaking depressing.

Standard Emma flashback: Emma is close to being happy but gets screwed over and ends up homeless or in prison.

Standard Regina flashback: Regina is deliciously evil, killing people at random (while living in a palace).

The writers: Regina is such an underdog. She always gets the wrong end of the stick. No one gets more screwed over than she does.

Did they even watch their own show?

[Camera One]

17 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Standard Emma flashback: Emma is close to being happy but gets screwed over and ends up homeless or in prison.

Standard Regina flashback: Regina is deliciously evil, killing people at random (while living in a palace).

Emma flashback: She tries to open up but outside forces always tear her back down.  It's so sad but it explains her WALLS™.  Emma may have made the right initial decision in the flashback and got burned so then she ultimately made a mistake of putting up WALLS, so let's hope she's willing to make the same mistake again and be willing to put down her WALLS.

Regina flashback: She's her own worst enemy and sabotages her own happiness.  It's so sad since it's avoidable if only Regina saw the gem that she is.  Regina makes the wrong decision in the flashback but she might make the right one in the present-day.

Edited March 24, 2019 by Camera One

[andromeda331]

3 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

I think it would've been cool if Emma had been put into these kinds of situations where others think she's responsible for their happiness, only to push pack and call out the BS. Like, you see the flashbacks and think the show is framing it as Emma being a bad friend. But in the present, Emma confronts adult Lily and tells her that her choices are her own responsibility. I miss the "screw this" Emma who chopped down an apple tree or fired a gun at a dragon. Realistically, she should've kicked fate in the balls and disagreed vehemently with everyone else's insistence on following prophecies. That's supposed to be an integral part of her character. 

I missed that Emma too. She was so cool. Watching her cut down that apple tree was awesome. Or telling Ashley that people were going to tell you who you are your entire life and you've got to punch back and that there weren't any fairy godmothers. That Emma would have called Lily on BS that everything she did was her own fault. 

[andromeda331]

11 hours ago, KAOS Agent said:

I don't understand how it's wrong that Emma is angry and unwilling to run off with the girl who stole her foster family's vacation money. Lily is a selfish, spoiled bitch. That it was less about getting money and more about wanting Emma made it all the worse. Manipulating events to screw Emma over and ruin another potentially decent relationship with a foster family by setting up a situation where Emma is told exactly where she sits with the family (she's not a true member of the family) is a despicable move. Why would anyone consider Lily anything but toxic? Of course on this show, Emma is supposed to be the light that makes Lily's life better, so Emma is awful for not wanting to stick with a wanted criminal who deliberately destroyed Emma's relatively happy foster placement. There's never any evaluation that maybe Emma would have maintained a friendship with Lily if there had been no thievery and manipulation. It's shades of Rumpbelle only in a platonic relationship.

Again this show is requiring Emma to shoulder the burden of others' actions. Emma shouldn't be required to fix Lily, just as she shouldn't be stuck with the Saviour role and continuously sacrificing herself for the happiness of others. It gets tiresome seeing someone who was not even born during the events she is meant to atone for/fix suffer and be portrayed as wrong for not really being keen on any of it.

I don't either. Its A&E's amazing talent to want you think one way like Emma was a horrible bitch and rotten friend to Lily while instead showing you Lily was a horrible bitch, and rotten friend to Emma who had every reason to be ticked off at costing a good foster home. I really don't and never will understand why they think someone like Lily who had adoptive family who loved her and had money some how had it worse then someone like Emma who went from one bad foster home to another. Or why they think someone like Regina who was a princess, became Queen and had everything she could ever want is more sympathetic then Snow who was targeted at ten, any of the villagers she killed, more sympathetic then Emma who's ended up alone going from crappy foster home to crappy foster home because of Regina. With the exception of Daniel. Everything that went wrong in Lily's and Regina's lives were of their own decisions and their own fault. All of it. Where as almost anyone else who's life went wrong wasn't their own fault. 

[KingOfHearts]

5 minutes ago, andromeda331 said:

I really don't and never will understand why they think someone like Lily who had adoptive family who loved her and had money some how had it worse then someone like Emma who went from one bad foster home to another.

Funny how Lily got adopted quickly as a baby while no one wanted Emma for years. There's no explanation for that.

[Camera One]

8 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

Funny how Lily got adopted quickly as a baby while no one wanted Emma for years. There's no explanation for that.

It's because Lily had a great personality.

[andromeda331]

30 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

Funny how Lily got adopted quickly as a baby while no one wanted Emma for years. There's no explanation for that.

Very funny. And yet Lily still somehow had it "worse". There's nothing worse in the world then parents who love you.

[KingOfHearts]

4 hours ago, andromeda331 said:

Very funny. And yet Lily still somehow had it "worse". There's nothing worse in the world then parents who love you.

No one knows that better than Regina.

[Camera One]

4 hours ago, andromeda331 said:

And yet Lily still somehow had it "worse". There's nothing worse in the world then parents who love you.

Hi fan,

It's A&E here again.  Lily, much like Regina, did have it worse.  They were both stifled by their parents or guardians, much like birds trapped in cages.  Contrast that with the freedom that Emma and Snow had.  

Hope that helps,

A&E

[Jynnan tonnix]

I've been binge-watching this partly on sort of auto-pilot, not paying a whole lot of attention sometimes, so reading these pages helps me put some of the plot together in my mind (or affirm that there are, indeed, gaping holes which no amount of paying attention would have filled in).

I don't read everything, though, as there is so much commentary that I'd probably spend more time reading than watching if I went through every page. 

So many really good insights that I haven't had much to add, but I did notice one little detail. Not sure if this is the first episode, or not, but it just occurred to me that Hook actually has a small stud earring in his ear, where in the past, the earrings he wore were all these old-school clip-ons like my mother used to have back in the day, with the little screws to tighten them on your earlobe. Ever since I first noticed them, I couldn't un-see it, but now it definitely looks as though he finally got it pierced. Maybe I just look at his face too carefully 🙂

 

[Shanna Marie]

14 hours ago, Jynnan tonnix said:

Ever since I first noticed them, I couldn't un-see it, but now it definitely looks as though he finally got it pierced.

I don't think it's a real piercing. At least, I don't recall seeing him ever wear an earring when he's not in character, and in season 7

Spoiler

Rogers doesn't wear an earring and I don't recall seeing a piercing hole

My guess is they stuck the stud on with spirit gum. Those screw-back earrings hurt like hell to wear for more than an hour or so, so they may have shifted to a stud they could stick on in a less-painful way when they did the big costume change in early season 4. He'd still be stuck with the screw-on dangling earring for flashbacks (since anything that dangles or is heavier would be harder to keep on), but at least for the present-day stuff that was the bulk of the show, it wouldn't be quite so painful.

[tennisgurl]

I always found the nature of Lily's darkness to be really confusing. The idea seems to be that she cant stop herself from making bad choices (like she has magic induced bad impulse control) or that she always has bad things happen to her, but thats just not something that we really see. Her "darkness" is more of her being, at worst, a minor delinquent and trouble maker who lies about stuff a lot, and as far as her horrible life, its certainly not as bad as little Emma's terrible life of being betrayed and ditched by every person she spends more than three seconds with. She just seems bored with her rich family and rebellious, not tortured and miserable. 

Really, Lily probably grew up to be less dark than she would have growing up with actual supervillain Mal as a mom raising her.  

[andromeda331]

11 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

I always found the nature of Lily's darkness to be really confusing. The idea seems to be that she cant stop herself from making bad choices (like she has magic induced bad impulse control) or that she always has bad things happen to her, but thats just not something that we really see. Her "darkness" is more of her being, at worst, a minor delinquent and trouble maker who lies about stuff a lot, and as far as her horrible life, its certainly not as bad as little Emma's terrible life of being betrayed and ditched by every person she spends more than three seconds with. She just seems bored with her rich family and rebellious, not tortured and miserable. 

Really, Lily probably grew up to be less dark than she would have growing up with actual supervillain Mal as a mom raising her.  

That's how she seemed to me or a brat. They want us to think that poor Lily has it so bad but don't bother to show us any of that. In fact she even had an adoptive father who cared enough about her to track her down.  

[Camera One]

8 minutes ago, andromeda331 said:

That's how she seemed to me or a brat. They want us to think that poor Lily has it so bad but don't bother to show us any of that. 

Or we're just an extremely unsympathetic group of people, LOL! 

Sorry, I must go and weep for Lily now.  

Edited July 10, 2020 by Camera One

[Jynnan tonnix]

On 7/9/2020 at 10:52 AM, Shanna Marie said:

I don't think it's a real piercing. At least, I don't recall seeing him ever wear an earring when he's not in character, and in season 7

  Reveal spoiler

Rogers doesn't wear an earring and I don't recall seeing a piercing hole

My guess is they stuck the stud on with spirit gum. Those screw-back earrings hurt like hell to wear for more than an hour or so, so they may have shifted to a stud they could stick on in a less-painful way when they did the big costume change in early season 4. He'd still be stuck with the screw-on dangling earring for flashbacks (since anything that dangles or is heavier would be harder to keep on), but at least for the present-day stuff that was the bulk of the show, it wouldn't be quite so painful.

Makes sense...he did seem to be back to the screw-on type for the most recent flashback that I noticed. Frankly, if I was him, I'd likely just have my ear pierced during the hiatus and wear real earrings for the duration of the role, then let it close up if he no longer wanted it. Unless he was just dead set against wearing a small stud when not in character. He might not even have to worry about keeping it open all that much - I got second piercings in my ears about 25 years ago, and very rarely bothered with keeping studs in them after the first few months (I was forever losing them), and even now, when often go years without using them, an earring goes right in if I decide to wear one.

Sorry if this was a bit off topic for the episode of the show itself, but these episode threads are the only ones I read since I'm not sure where spoilers might show up otherwise.