S06.E13: Ill-Boding Patterns

[Shanna Marie]

Jane can be pretty inconsistent about things when it comes to fitting in her personal interests or trying to make a joke.

[RulerofallIsurvey]

3 hours ago, Noneofyourbusiness said:

Since they didn't, they're obviously not desperate enough.

Or they didn't think of it.  And yet, Robin was desperate enough to break into Regina's vault and steal some potions and go to The Wicked Witch for help.  

3 hours ago, Noneofyourbusiness said:

We could also ask why Zelena doesn't risk attempting to steal the Apprentice's wand back from Gold's shop, a tried-and-true method she's used before to cross realms.

Well, now that you mention it.  That's a good point.  She probably didn't think of that either.  

[Noneofyourbusiness]

20 hours ago, RulerofallIsurvey said:

Or they didn't think of it.  And yet, Robin was desperate enough to break into Regina's vault and steal some potions and go to The Wicked Witch for help. 

I guess we'll see if Zelena's desperate enough based on whether she thinks of it. Robin didn't know about the cobra being the Evil Queen until she turned back, so he may not even know enough about Gideon to consider him an option. He doesn't make a deal with Gold like most everyone does, either, for that matter.

Edited March 25, 2017 by Noneofyourbusiness

[AudienceofOne]

On 3/19/2017 at 8:03 PM, Sarcastica said:

What the hell did I just watch?

I'm going to pretend the entire episode consisted of the first 5 minutes and the last 5 minutes. 

Oh God, no. Then it would consist entirely of the Ogre Wars and The World According to Regina. 

On 3/19/2017 at 9:57 PM, mjgchick said:

They are clearly phasing Emma out. No wonder why this show is so dull now.

I thought that last season but Jennifer Morrison is still here. I hope they are and she can go on to do something more worthy of her talents.

My favourite (paraphrased) dialogue of the night

Rumple: Why do you think killing Emma will make you the saviour?

Gideon: Cause

Rumple: Seems valid

 

I kind of love (no I don't ,I hate it) that Rumple's idea of 'saving his son's soul' is letting him do all these terrible things by proxy. Because if Rumple does it for Gideon, then Gideon is blameless. Like, if I hire somebody to murder a person, I then can't be charged with murder because I didn't actually fire the shot. That is definitely the way culpability works.

[Shanna Marie]

I normally rewatch the previous week's episode before the new ones, fast forwarding through the parts I don't care about. For this one, I spent more time fast forwarding than watching.

Weird moment that makes you wonder if the writers even proofread their scripts: Belle asks Rumple why Gideon thinks that killing Emma will make him the Savior, and he responds "he's not the first to think wielding that sword will make him a hero." That wasn't what she asked. Savior isn't the same as hero, and using the sword to be a hero isn't the same thing as killing someone to get her powers. Argh.

The proposal is even worse upon rewatch. When he starts out talking about having something he needed to say to her and she started talking about finding the ring, he's utterly baffled at first, like he has no idea what she's talking about. That would generally be a sign that the thing he wanted to talk to her about wasn't the proposal. If he'd been building up to propose, he wouldn't have been like, "Huh?" Maybe she'd been working on getting rid of the home rum supply while he was out, and she was too drunk to notice him. Because any marginally awake and coherent person would have noticed that something was terribly wrong with him.

[Camera One]

If I ever rewatched this episode, the room must be free of glass and breakables, and the couch must not be soft enough for a nap.  Because everything in this either evokes rage or sleep.

Edited March 27, 2017 by Camera One

[Vader12]

Beowulf reminded me of King Arthur. They both try to be heroic but did bad things sometimes, and are not very fond of villains and dark forces. And they both have magical c swords: the sword gideon uses and the Excalibur.

[Writing Wrongs]

I'm finally in my Season 6 re-watch and as I pointed out during the airing: This retcon of Bae was bullshit.

In Season 1's  "The Return",  Rumple said he knew August wasn't Baelfire because Bae would never use the dagger to try to control him. So this episode fakeback just shit on that.

Ugh!

[KingOfHearts]

2 hours ago, Writing Wrongs said:

I'm finally in my Season 6 re-watch and as I pointed out during the airing: This retcon of Bae was bullshit.

It's more of Rumple's whitewashing. Yeah, Rumple was just being a good dad by obsessing over the Dagger.

[Camera One]

The show started with bullies pushing Rumple towards darkness.  Then, with the Season 5 flashback, Milah (pushing him to kill the healer) was pushing Rumple towards darkness against his will.  By Season 6, what else was left?  Oh yes, Baelfire himself was secretly a vengeful child and pushed Rumple towards darkness against his will.  Poor Wumple!

Edited August 4, 2019 by Camera One

[andromeda331]

7 hours ago, Camera One said:

The show started with bullies pushing Rumple towards darkness.  Then, with the Season 5 flashback, Milah (pushing him to kill the healer) was pushing Rumple towards darkness against his will.  By Season 6, what else was left?  Oh yes, Baelfire himself was secretly a vengeful child and pushed Rumple towards darkness against his will.  Poor Wumple!

Yes, amazing how none of it ends up being Rumple's fault. Thank God Rumple killed Milah, see he had a reason to do so! Oh, here's Bae, that horrible son who forced Rumple to kill please ignore any and all times that Rumple clearly enjoyed killing or every scene of Bae showing how much he hated it. Whatever could the poor man to do? He certainly wasn't more powerful then Bae in every way. 

[Writing Wrongs]

I think once they came up with the "Rumple was The Savior" plot, they needed to backtrack on his previous deeds.

[tennisgurl]

God this fucking season. Is no character safe from your slobbering ret-cons everywhere?! This is why, while the Author is my least favorite plot, this is my least favorite season. Through a combination of wanting to continue to "shock" their jaded audience, a lack of creativity in their increasingly awful flashbacks as they desperately try to justify these ret-con filled flashbacks just because they cant do flashbacks to time periods we haven't seen 300 times before (no flashbacks to how Rumple left the spinner sisters? How he went from hovel to castle after Bae?) and their never ending desire to make their pet villains look good, they have just totally given up on giving us a decent story, or even making it consistent with the other five seasons.

Oh my God, Bae was actually bad the whole time, ohhhhhh pooooorrrr Woobie Wumple!!!! Never mind that this contradicts literally everything we have ever known about Bae as a kid, and basically takes the instigating incident of the whole freaking series and darkens it by  making pure good Bae actually evil and vengeful and it was now his fault that Rumple went evil. Its so stupid, so out of character, and its so in character for this season. After six seasons, lets totally change everything we know about everyone for these "shocking" twists, pointless drama, villain white washing, and really ham fisted parallels.

Them trying to tie all of this bullshit into Rumple trying to keep Gideon from "darkening his soul" is so obviously stupid, and its all just going to be even stupider later. 

Spoiler

And its all utterly pointless, because this isn't even really Gideon doing any of this, its the Black Fairy controlling his heart. Making all of this forced conflict about Rumple trying to save his soul and his horrible childhood messing him up totally pointless. Of course. 

 This is also where the shows "one character focus at a time" really shows how badly it can go, especially when you watch several episodes close to each other. We get this huge revelation about Hook and the Charmings, and then next week, we get two quick scenes following up on it, while we spend the whole episode on some other plot, with no real fallout to what we just saw.

I also hate how the Emma/Hook proposal went down so much. Fans like us waited a LONG time for that big proposal, saw them go through all kinds of trails and came around stronger, and they finally get to get engaged, a big moment for any shipper, and we cant even really enjoy it knowing that Hook is keeping this huge secret from her and that it will lead to a bunch of bullshit to pull them apart again. It ruins the whole big moment, and its a moment that we can never get back. Also, I think Emma's super power is on the fritz again, she couldn't tell right away that Hook was miserable and nervous?  

Oh right, Beowulf is in this episode, I honestly forgot until he popped up. He has literally nothing to do with the actual legendary character, just a Gaston variant but more obviously evil, but...he is a dude with a sword and they mentioned Grendal (who doesn't exist) so...its totally a great adaptation! Like, why even bother adding him  here? He could just be any random guy, why just toss in one of the most important epic poems of the western cannon and its hero and villain into this throw away episode and then toss them away?

Edited August 8, 2019 by tennisgurl

[Camera One]

2 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

(no flashbacks to how Rumple left the spinner sisters? How he went from hovel to castle after Bae?)

Those would have been so much more interesting.  I mean, with the first one, thinking back to why he left the Spinner Sisters could have paralleled his fears for Gideon.  

This was yet another episode of Rumple doing something selfish and evil in the present, albeit for the sake of his son.  What sickens me is the ending, how Belle declares that Rumple made the "right" moral choice in "putting our son first" by draining the Blue Fairy so Gideon wouldn't have to.  And this is supposed to be a major step in Rumbelle's reconciliation.  It makes Belle seem as self-serving as Rumple.  So now Blue is in a coma and Emma can be killed any time since her pre-ordained murder weapon has been forged.  I sure hope they both thank Rumple when all is said and done, since he did them both such a favor!

The writing for this episode really indicated a deep representation of the themes of "Beowulf" and the pitfalls of someone who only fights wanting to be a hero but in fact is an evil fraud.

Snowing both slept through this episode and rate it two sheep over the fence.

Edited August 8, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

I could barely get through this episode. It was so boring. I liked the actor playing Beowulf. The Rumple story made no sense, past or present. So, where does him being so good but forced into evil darkness by evil Bae fit with the part where he was turning people into slugs and cackling about it? It doesn't help that the new Bae actor looks a lot younger than the original young Bae actor did when he was supposedly even younger than this, so it makes it hard to follow the timeline. And in the present, I don't see how doing the evil deed rather than letting someone else do the evil deed they want to do is any better. Them wanting to do it is already dark. Doing it for him isn't helping matters. And they still haven't told him that killing the Savior won't make him the Savior. No one suggests he ask Emma to help him.

Spoiler

Yeah, it turns out there's something else going on, with the Black Fairy controlling him, so he doesn't really want to drain Blue and he's never going to ask Emma for help, but they don't know this yet, so why don't they suggest it?

And then there's the proposal. It's stuff like this that fuels my paranoid conspiracy theory that the writers actually hated having to write the Emma and Hook relationship but the network forced them to keep it in the show and spotlight it, so they passive-aggressively sabotaged it every chance they got. Every big relationship moment is immediately followed by a major bout of Emma and Regina bonding, and most of their turning points or breakthroughs are undermined or cheapened somehow.

But to wreck things here, they had to throw Emma under the bus and not only make her act out of character, but make her act not like any real person might. Who would immediately demand a proposal upon finding an engagement ring when going through her boyfriend's stuff? There are three main possibilities when someone has a ring but hasn't yet proposed: He's holding it for someone else so their girlfriend won't find it when snooping, he's planning something big or significant for the proposal, or something came up between buying the ring and proposing and he can't in good conscience propose until he's worked it out. There is no upside to showing off the fact that you found the ring.

If it's option one, you're awfully embarrassed when you say you'll say yes and he says, "Well, actually, that's David's ring. It occurred to him that David Nolan and Mary Margaret were never officially married in this world, so he wanted to do it properly, and you know what a snoop your mother is, so he asked me to hold it for him." If it's option two, you're undermining him and ruining his possible plans, so it's like "Oh, I guess I'll cancel the skywriter and the string quartet. I hope I can get my deposit back." And if it's option three, you've put him on the spot and you're getting a proposal that's not entirely genuine. You find the ring, you put it back. If time goes by and there's no particular significant day coming up, you can maybe hint about it. You can make it clear in other ways that if he proposed you'd say yes. But you don't confront him with the ring. Especially not when he's obviously drunk and the pain is all over his face, and he's not usually shy about that sort of thing, so it's not like he'd have to get drunk to have the courage to propose. This is supposed to be a woman with a built-in lie detector. She figured out something was going on with him when he was just playing lookout while David raided the shed. Surely she'd have realized that this was not the time to talk about a proposal and instead asked him what was going on.

[Camera One]

24 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

So, where does him being so good but forced into evil darkness by evil Bae fit with the part where he was turning people into slugs and cackling about it?

And in the present, I don't see how doing the evil deed rather than letting someone else do the evil deed they want to do is any better. Them wanting to do it is already dark. Doing it for him isn't helping matters. 

Rumple saves Gideon from tainting his heart by doing the deed for him.  Rumple has to pay the "price" of doing something bad (heh), not dear Gideon.  

It's relevant to the flashback, because Rumple's son also "made" him become dark, and his first impulse was to protect Evil Bae by making him forget his vengeance.

This is Father of the Century material here, you know.

Quote

And then there's the proposal. It's stuff like this that fuels my paranoid conspiracy theory that the writers actually hated having to write the Emma and Hook relationship but the network forced them to keep it in the show and spotlight it, so they passive-aggressively sabotaged it every chance they got.

I think they were just bored by writing happy relationships.  They did build the entire Season 3 two-hour finale around Captain Swan and almost every storyline Emma got after Season 4 revolved around her love interest.  I don't know about how much they liked writing for Emma but they clearly did love writing for Hook and they believed giving a character angst was a great reward.  

Quote

There are three main possibilities when someone has a ring but hasn't yet proposed

Those 3 paths are well laid-out.  You'd think Writers would go through all the possibilities when discussing plot points.  But then again, these writers never think about NORMAL human reactions and go for quick, cheap soap opera-ish obstacles.

Edited August 9, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

7 minutes ago, Camera One said:

You'd think Writers would go through all the possibilities when discussing plot points.  But then again, these writers never think about NORMAL human reactions and go for quick, cheap soap opera-ish obstacles.

I think this plot would have worked better without the proposal. Show Emma finding the ring and reacting, then putting it back. Then we've got all kinds of tension every time she's around Hook and she's wondering why he hasn't proposed, and it gets worse as time goes on and he hasn't said anything but is acting miserable. Though I guess the idea is that he would have confessed if she hadn't confronted him with the ring and acted all happy. She could still have been all bubbly and happy to see him without saying why, and he wouldn't have wanted to ruin her mood, and if they're going for contrivance, there are all kinds of ways he could have been stopped from telling -- another crisis hits, one of her parents walks in, especially David, being all "my good buddy here," which is like salt in the wound.

Spoiler

And then if there's no engagement and therefore she doesn't give the ring back, Emma doesn't look so bad for wondering why Hook hasn't come home after they fight. He could be planning to hang with Nemo for a while to get his act together before he proposes when he gets sent away by Gideon, and Emma has reason to be concerned if she knows there's a ring and he hasn't proposed, and he was lying to her, and they have one fight and he bails.

[Camera One]

7 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I think this plot would have worked better without the proposal. Show Emma finding the ring and reacting, then putting it back. 

That would have been a good solution.  Though I wonder if A&E were so tone-deaf they thought fans would find the proposal romantic but sooo traagic and we would all be moved to tears.

[Shanna Marie]

Even if Emma was so excited about finding the ring (not that we got to see that) that she didn't clue in on the waves of abject misery radiating from Hook, she did notice that he reeked of rum. Who would want to be proposed to by someone who reeked of rum and was staggeringly drunk? So romantic! I think about 98 percent of the population would have kept their mouth shut about the ring in that moment and waited until he was sober before saying anything.

On 8/8/2019 at 10:40 PM, Camera One said:

Though I wonder if A&E were so tone-deaf they thought fans would find the proposal romantic but sooo traagic and we would all be moved to tears.

Based on the initial reaction in this thread, everyone was more angry about how anticlimactic it was. It was the exact opposite of romantic, and it would have been just as bad even if he hadn't had a deep, dark secret, if he'd just been out drinking with David and was planning a big proposal later. It's funny that in the next episode

Spoiler

they even hang a lampshade on how lame it was by having Snow excitedly speculate about what wonderfully romantic thing Hook did to propose, and Emma has to admit that she said yes before he could propose, so whatever he was planning to do, he didn't get to do.

About the only engagement less romantic that I can think of is how my brother got engaged to wife #1: She showed up to her family Thanksgiving dinner wearing the ring she inherited from her recently deceased grandmother and announced that they were engaged, so my brother was on the spot while surrounded by her extended family and either had to deny that he'd proposed, calling his girlfriend a liar in front of her family, or go along with it. He went along with it (and was too dumb to discuss it later in private so they could "call off" the "engagement"). The marriage, not surprisingly, only lasted a couple of years.

[profdanglais]

@Shanna Marie As usual you lay out clearly and cogently everything that bothers me about the way CS was written in later seasons. I buy your crack theory honestly, everything  about the proposal and the wedding and all their relationship milestones felt so halfhearted and tacked on especially considering the popularity of the ship, that it almost has to be deliberate. Pretty much everything Emma does, from the way she reacts to finding the ring to giving it back, to the kind of wedding dress and ceremony she chooses are so generic and OOC. The ring's not great either. I just feel like there was NO thought given to the characters or how they would realistically behave in those situations. It really goes all the way back to S4 and their generic date which Hook would definitely NOT have planned for the first opportunity he had to spend some romantic time alone with Emma. 

[Shanna Marie]

13 minutes ago, profdanglais said:

I buy your crack theory honestly, everything  about the proposal and the wedding and all their relationship milestones felt so halfhearted and tacked on especially considering the popularity of the ship, that it almost has to be deliberate.

It's like when you make a kid do a chore they don't want to do, and they do it grudgingly, with a half-assed effort that might actually make things worse than they were before they did it, and they kind of hope you'll see what a bad job they did and not make them do it anymore. In this case, it's like they were trying to make the relationship as lame as they could get away with, and they were hoping that would make it so much less popular that the network would stop making them emphasize it. I'm not up for rewatching season 4 again anytime soon, but it would be interesting to see how tacked-on the Captain Swan moments were and how it would alter the episodes if you removed those moments. They really do come across like that was something in the network notes -- we need a scene between Emma and Hook in this episode -- rather than something that was organic to the episode. And some of the better moments even look like acting choices in the moment in a scene that wasn't really written to be about their relationship rather than like something in the script. The actors played the relationship all-out whether or not the script was about their relationship.

The proposal really comes across like a passive-aggressive "You want a proposal? Okay, here's a proposal. How do you like that?"

[profdanglais]

And the thing is, I really think they could have easily written CS as not the focus of the show while still including those nice organic moments. Show us them eating together, having a drink together, showing up at Granny's in a way that suggests they've spent the night together. Give them some scenes where they work together, give them an adventure here and there. It wouldn't have taken much. 

[daxx]

On 8/10/2019 at 10:14 AM, Shanna Marie said:

The proposal really comes across like a passive-aggressive "You want a proposal? Okay, here's a proposal. How do you like that?"

This exactly how it felt to me. Like a slap in the face to fans.

[KingOfHearts]

2 hours ago, daxx said:

This exactly how it felt to me. Like a slap in the face to fans.

A&E's mission in S6 was, "How many shippers can we piss off this season?"

There are no winners when it comes to shipping characters on this show.

[Camera One]

I have a feeling they actually tried to "cater" to all the shippers not recognizing that every single move was a total mis-fire and they probably *still* don't recognize any of their mistakes today.  From the angsty "so tragic anyone would swoon" Captain Swan relationship drama, to introducing an alt-Robin Hood thinking that would placate Outlaw Queen, to more requisite adventures with Swan Queen in Boring Mirror Land and Wish Realm, to Year of Sleeping Snowing with 50% More Retcons!, to Rumple-treats-Belle-like-crap but isn't it an epic love story because it's about their love child!  If we don't even think about shippers, I don't think any *character* came out of Season 6 looking good.

Edited August 31, 2019 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

20 hours ago, Camera One said:

I don't think any *character* came out of Season 6 looking good.

I guess Zelena turned out okay?

Spoiler

She got a small retcon, but it didn't assassinate her character by any means.