A Thread for All Seasons: This Story Is Over, But Still Goes On.

[CheshireCat]

6 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

What curse? Dark Hook cast the Dark Curse as a transportation thing (which means it was entirely unnecessary and there were other ways to travel between worlds, but I guess they wanted an excuse to get rid of Merlin because otherwise things might have been too easy). The memory part of it was that Emma captured the memories in dreamcatchers so no one would remember what happened once they were back in Storybrooke. The memories had already been restored when everyone found the dreamcatchers before the great Dark One showdown. Or was there some other curse you were referring to?

No, that was the one. I assume(d) because a curse was cast it still needed to be broken.

 

10 hours ago, Mabinogia said:

The trouble is, the writers like Rumple as the villain, as they should, he was a good villain back in the day, but they also want him as their Beast, the poor gentle soul trapped inside a monster. They can't have both without this constant flip flopping that ruins both parts of the character. 

I agree. I just re-watched the S3a finale and I had completely forgotten how Rumple had done the right thing and even sacrificed himself for the Greater Good. And then Bae tells Regina to not let his father having died in vain and she doesn't and then Bae goes and raises his father from the dead because, in that moment, he is selfish and he basically ruins his father's heroism. It is afterwards that I started to dislike how they treated his character because whatever he did, he never seemed to learn. I would think that this was it, this was what would wake him up but it didn't. He was taking one step forward and two steps back (sometimes three) and then they had this one ridiculous "Her Handsome Hero" episode ... and after he returne to Storybrooke with the Queens of Darkness, Belle kept clinging to him and that annoyed me even more. 

I don't think I wouldn't have minded so much if it hadn't left the impression that they didn't know what they wanted to do with Rumple.

[KAOS Agent]

I was cleaning up my bookmarks and came across this link to the Official Once podcasts. These were after episode discussions with Adam and Eddy. I think they only did them in S2. If you want to listen to different episode discussions, just change the number after the chapter in the URL.

http://www.datgpodcast.abc.com/podcast/a_onceuponatime/OUT_CHAPTER1_S2.mp3

Their favorite moment in "Welcome to Storybrooke" (Chapter 20) was the montage of Regina winning, where she watches Snow suffering day after day not knowing David and Regina's "delicious" smile. Good times.

[daxx]

1 hour ago, KAOS Agent said:

I was cleaning up my bookmarks and came across this link to the Official Once podcasts. These were after episode discussions with Adam and Eddy. I think they only did them in S2. If you want to listen to different episode discussions, just change the number after the chapter in the URL.

http://www.datgpodcast.abc.com/podcast/a_onceuponatime/OUT_CHAPTER1_S2.mp3

Their favorite moment in "Welcome to Storybrooke" (Chapter 20) was the montage of Regina winning, where she watches Snow suffering day after day not knowing David and Regina's "delicious" smile. Good times.

I’ll pass it’ll make me ragey.

[Rumsy4]

1 hour ago, KAOS Agent said:

I was cleaning up my bookmarks and came across this link to the Official Once podcasts. These were after episode discussions with Adam and Eddy. I think they only did them in S2. If you want to listen to different episode discussions, just change the number after the chapter in the URL.

Hey--maybe I can listen to the one where Adam and Eddy joked that Graham and Regina were probably playing chess in her bedroom after she ripped-out his heart and ordered him there. 

[Camera One]

7 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

Or you know - basic journals. Do the curses erase their phone data too? I thought it was pretty ridiculous when Rumple deleted Hook's voicemail. Does magic know how technology works? It's not as simple as removing ink from a page. It would be interesting if technology could one-up magic from time to time, echoing the "science vs. magic" theme that S2 botched up.

They have consistently ignored this possibility.  It would actually make sense if these big bad villains like the Black Fairy, or the Queens of Darkness, or Cora, get snags in their plans, because the heroes could use the technology against them.  It would allow the villains not to look like utter dimwits and reactionary 99.99999% of the time.  But nope.  

[Mabinogia]

6 hours ago, Camera One said:

It would actually make sense if these big bad villains like the Black Fairy, or the Queens of Darkness, or Cora, get snags in their plans, because the heroes could use the technology against them.  It would allow the villains not to look like utter dimwits and reactionary 99.99999% of the time.  But nope.  

That would be a very interesting story, so it won't ever happen. How would the villainiest villain to ever villain deal with being totally irrelevant due to tech. lol I would love to watch Rumple get thwarted by an app. haha

[andromeda331]

12 hours ago, Camera One said:

They have consistently ignored this possibility.  It would actually make sense if these big bad villains like the Black Fairy, or the Queens of Darkness, or Cora, get snags in their plans, because the heroes could use the technology against them.  It would allow the villains not to look like utter dimwits and reactionary 99.99999% of the time.  But nope.  

That would have been fun.   

[Camera One]

Oops, I just realized I wrote "villains" when I meant "heroes".  I'm turning into an Adam.

[andromeda331]

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

Oops, I just realized I wrote "villains" when I meant "heroes".  I'm turning into an Adam.

      Welcome to the Dark Right Side, Camera One. 

                                                               Love                                             

                                                                 Adam 

[KingOfHearts]

5 minutes ago, andromeda331 said:

      Welcome to the Dark Right Side, Camera One. 

                                                               Love                                             

                                                                 Adam 

Adam: *promptly deletes message*

[Shanna Marie]

21 hours ago, Camera One said:

It would actually make sense if these big bad villains like the Black Fairy, or the Queens of Darkness, or Cora, get snags in their plans, because the heroes could use the technology against them.  It would allow the villains not to look like utter dimwits and reactionary 99.99999% of the time. 

Oh, that could have been so much fun, kind of like Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies, but instead of frozen in time, they're from a fairytale world and don't know about technology. They'd have no concept of instantaneous communications at a distance, cars (does metal block magic?), photos, audio and video recording, surveillance cameras, drones, security systems, GPS trackers, etc. Imagine a scene in which the villain is monologuing about how Regina and Emma will never know what happened to them, but we see that the whole time, Henry has been texting, and Regina and Emma poof over, with the villain baffled about how they knew their friends were in danger.

And they've had multiple opportunities to do this -- they showed that Cora didn't understand the modern world, but that wasn't a factor with her. Zelena shouldn't have understood it. Couldn't they have set up a surveillance camera when they set their trap (the one she got through using blood magic) when they claimed they had a memory potion? The Queens of Darkness had lived in our world a long time, so they were up on technology, but it could have worked with anyone from the Land of Untold Stories.

And given the number of memory spells they've dealt with, these people are dumb not to keep a journal of any kind. And given the ease of impersonation, they're dumb not to have passwords or some way to verify their identity before someone trusts them with anything critical (didn't someone actually do that last season? Like someone wanted to make sure Regina was really Regina and she got offended when they questioned her identity?).

[Camera One]

Ah, yes.  I had forgotten that the Queens of Darkness had been in our world for quite some time.  I was trying to think of a specific example, but I still can't put my finger on it.  It could have been Hades, or Hyde, or Arthur.  Rumple's magical changing of surveillance tapes really bothered me, for some reason.

[Shanna Marie]

11 minutes ago, Camera One said:

It could have been Hades, or Hyde, or Arthur.

Hades seemed to have a way of observing what was going on in our world, and he was living in a version of Storybrooke. But Cora, Zelena, Arthur, Hyde, Lady Tremaine 1.0 and probably Gideon should have been completely out of their depth. The Black Fairy seemed capable of visiting briefly, so she may have learned something, but Gideon should have been too clueless to run a bar and pass as a bartender when all he'd known was the Black Fairy's Dark Realm.

[KAOS Agent]

Arthur killed his servant in the jail, which has surveillance cameras. Of course, they disappeared when Arthur was there. They really had no interest in actually requiring the villains to be smart and simply dumbed down the heroes - even going so far as to remove previously established cameras to keep the heroes in the dark. That would have been the perfect time to thwart Arthur's plans somewhat by using technology that Arthur wouldn't know existed or even understand.

[Camera One]

Yes, that was the example that was in my mind.  Arthur should have been caught right away.  Of course, his subplot turned out to be one of A&E's famous dead ends.  

[KingOfHearts]

3 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Yes, that was the example that was in my mind.  Arthur should have been caught right away.  Of course, his subplot turned out to be one of A&E's famous dead ends.  

At least they did something with his character. Poor Guinevere was permanently forgotten, but hey - at least we got to see Merida walk through a portal, right?

[Camera One]

10 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

At least they did something with his character. Poor Guinevere was permanently forgotten, but hey - at least we got to see Merida walk through a portal, right?

And Lancelot.  Who went to see his mom at the lake.  The end. 

A&E doesn't believe in a story having a beginning, a middle and an end.  Their stories jump right in to somewhere, then there's a piece, then there's another piece, and then it fizzles out to nothing.

Edited December 28, 2017 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

I started making a mental list of unanswered questions and plots that have been left hanging, and it turned out to be a good insomnia cure because it was so long I drifted off to sleep in the middle of it.

And while they're not answering those questions or resolving those plots, they keep repeating plots, but instead of upping the ante each time, they get weaker.

Take the Dark Curse. The first one was something to dread. It took about nine months for Regina to pull the ingredients together and get everything in place to cast the curse, and she had to sacrifice the life of her beloved father. It punched a hole through the boundaries between worlds, into a world without magic, and re-created the kingdom in that world's form, creating a town. It erased identities, giving people new identities and memories to go with them, which often tore apart families and couples. The memory part of the curse was only broken because Rumple double-crossed Regina and baked Emma's DNA into the curse so that she would be able to break it. But Emma still had to overcome all her knowledge and experiences to believe the truth that she was the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming. She had to believe before the book had any effect -- in fact, she'd touched it repeatedly before then -- and she had to drop her WALLS to let herself love the son she'd given up for her True Love's Kiss to break the memory curse.

Then with curse two, I guess Regina had already figured it all out, so it was quick and easy to cast, and they were able to split Snow's heart, so no one had to die. It even turns out that the one truly bad part of the so-called Dark Curse, the memories and new identities, wasn't even an essential part of the original curse, but rather something Regina added. It was Zelena's addition that altered memories, but all that did was make the past year a blank. They all still remembered their identities and relationships. (Wouldn't it have been interesting if when Hook brought Emma to Storybrooke, they all had new cursed identities and had no clue who she was?) The moment Henry touched the book, he got his memories and belief back, without having to believe on his own, and his kiss on Regina broke the memory spell on everyone, even though there was no provision for that in the curse.

Nimue's curse (via Hook) wasn't even necessary, given that Storybrooke already existed and the barrier between worlds was already down, so there were other ways to travel. It worked using the heart of someone the initial Dark One once loved (which makes you wonder why Rumple wasn't able to use the heart of someone Zoso loved to cast the curse himself). The memory spell wasn't even related to the curse. That came from Emma with the dreamcatchers. About the only possible downside effect of that curse was maybe the tree spell on the town line.

And now we've got them casting the curse using the fact that Regina already made a sacrifice. I guess they've kind of raised the stakes in poisoning Henry so he dies if the curse breaks, but they haven't explained how that works, since "breaking" the curse is generally just about restoring memories, not sending them back to their old land where magic works. People are getting their memories back left and right without the curse breaking. It seems to have been in effect only a short time, since Lucy doesn't seem to be any older than when it was cast, unless it's frozen time, along with Lucy, but how can it have frozen time if they're interacting with the rest of the Seattle and the outside world?

[daxx]

Honestly @Shanna Marie don’t you know by now. A&E have said many time the answer is “MAGIC” yes? 

Why we even try anymore I don’t even understand. smh. TSTW.

[KingOfHearts]

What if one of the Big Bads had a vague identity, and the audience spent most of the arc trying to figure which famous Disney villain they were, only for it to be revealed they were Peasant #42653 from Regina's kingdom, out for revenge against the one who torched his village and killed his family? Regina would struggle to remember who he was, thinking he had to be some evil sorcerer or something. It would be a fun play on the show's heavy use of iconography and a subversion of the viewer's expectations.

I was just thinking about Rumple's comment in 2B about tour buses running up and down Main Street. Wouldn't have been awesome if real people started discovering Storybrooke and the fairy tale characters had to deal with that? And by real people, I don't mean Pan's minions. As much as I hated the Greg/Tamara plot, I really liked the beginning of it when Greg was in the hospital and everyone frantically tried to conceal what was going on.

Edited December 31, 2017 by KingOfHearts

[Mabinogia]

17 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

As much as I hated the Greg/Tamara plot, I really liked the beginning of it when Greg was in the hospital and everyone frantically tried to conceal what was going on.

Greg, when he was just some average guy who stumbled upon this weird fairytale town had so much potential. I also enjoyed watching them all trying to act like they were just normal people in a nice, normal small town doing normal things. I wish they had gone with that instead of the Pan's Minions story we ended up getting. UGH. That's around the time the show began to die a long, slow and extremely painful death for me. It was right around the Pan era. 

[KingOfHearts]

19 minutes ago, Mabinogia said:

I wish they had gone with that instead of the Pan's Minions story we ended up getting.

Remember when Greg had Tamara as a contact in his phone under the name, "Her"? LOL. That was as bad as Ingrid whispering into Rumple's ear or Tamara calling Hook "the package". 

[Mabinogia]

Ugh, Greg and Tamara. Those two were just so extra. 

I always crack up when shows try to be super mysterious and only end up looking stupid. Greg and Tamara are the poster children for that. They were the WORST. And that's saying something for this show, where every worst is that much worst than the last worst thing. I will give A&E credit for one thing. They do manage to underdo themselves each season. 

[KingOfHearts]

1 hour ago, Mabinogia said:

I always crack up when shows try to be super mysterious and only end up looking stupid. Greg and Tamara are the poster children for that. They were the WORST. And that's saying something for this show, where every worst is that much worst than the last worst thing. I will give A&E credit for one thing. They do manage to underdo themselves each season. 

I think Greg and Tamara were the one thing that even A&E didn't like. They made some joke about Tamara's taser being a mistake, and it's clear from the writing they wanted to get as far away from them as possible. (In the way of killing them off in the S3 premiere and making them nothing more than pawns in Pan's scheme.)

Edited December 31, 2017 by KingOfHearts

[tennisgurl]

The true tragedy of Greg and Tamara is that their story had some decent potential. Greg had a truly tragic backstory and a real reason to want to take down Regina and hate magic, and having "normal" people as bad guys is a good idea, forcing the gang to try to be "normal" again. Even the magic vs science idea had some potential. Granted, its a cliche idea, but its something. Of course, the whole thing ended up being one of the stupidest plots of the whole show, the worst characters, and was the beginning of the end for the quality of the show. Suddenly, Greg is just a mustache twirling villain who wants to blow up the whole town because...evil, and because he is so EVIL, we arent supposed to feel sympathy for a guy who`s life was ruined by Regina being a psychopath, and instead are supposed to feel bad when he tortures and wants to kill Regina. Granted, torturing someone is certainly villainous behavior, but its so clearly manipulating the audience into making us hate the victim, so we feel bad for the victimizer. And this will go on for THE ENTIRE SERIES. And I have no clue what Tamara's deal was, and I never cared. She just wanted to kill people because they lived in a magic village and magic is evil. Riveting stuff. And the whole magic vs science thing turned out to be a big pile of bullshit, and the idea of the magic of the EF people versus other genres was never revisited, because that might actually be interesting. 

There was just so much dumb in that story. The stupid fake magic bracelets, Greg and Tamara trying to be secretive and just coming off as ridiculous (everything they mentioned "the package", half the audience giggled "thats what she said" I assume), and the start of the "Regina is the ultimate victim and everyone feel bad for her and not her many victims because her victims will probably become evil anyway" theme that would run through the whole show. And while even the show would admit that they were a bad idea, later seasons would do the exact same things. 

Seriously, Greg and Tamara made Boris and Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle look like Philip and Elizabeth from The Americans. 

Edited December 31, 2017 by tennisgurl

[Shanna Marie]

53 minutes ago, tennisgurl said:

The true tragedy of Greg and Tamara is that their story had some decent potential. Greg had a truly tragic backstory and a real reason to want to take down Regina and hate magic, and having "normal" people as bad guys is a good idea, forcing the gang to try to be "normal" again.

Yes, one of the things that annoyed me about this plot was that it did have potential. It was something that should have been addressed, but because of the way they handled it, it kind of kills any possibility of ever delving into the subject again.

Part of the problem is that they never really developed a magical system or considered whether magic was good, evil, or neutral, and they never delved into what people thought about magic. Most magic users we've seen have been evil, especially in families that seem to have magic running in them (Cora's family, now apparently Lady Tremaine's family). Is that because magic itself tends to be evil, or is it because power corrupts? There's been very little good magic, just the fairies, Elsa (but there was a tendency toward evil in her family, so it seems to require a strong positive influence on the magic user to keep from tipping over into evil), and the Saviors (but there seems to be something self-destructive in the Savior magic). So, what do the common people think about magic? What about all the Storybrooke residents who found themselves forced to live lives they didn't want for 28 years and are now trapped in a strange world because of magic? It seems that the real threat of someone like Greg would be that he could easily win allies. He wouldn't need to blow up the town. He could just talk to the residents about the impact magic had on them, and they'd probably take down Regina for him, especially with the technology he had. Seeing a kind of civil war in Storybrooke and dealing with the fallout of the curse and the attitudes toward magic would have made for an amazing plot line. Just tossing it all out and having Greg try to destroy the town and then it all turning out to be a Pan plot was utterly ridiculous.

[Camera One]

Related to that, I was wondering why it was so hard to find a true "believer" in the Disenchanted Forest.  Henry or Lucy might be rare in the World Without Magic, but wouldn't anyone who had seen magic at work in the fairytale realms be pretty much automatic believers?  Especially children.  So what was so special about Henry?  Was it because he was the grandchild of True Love?  Or because he was the child of a Savior?  Both of those are so undefined.  As we've discussed before, Snowing's relationship should be a dime a dozen in fairytale realms.  Saplings of True Love (utterly useless, BTW) should be springing up all over the place.  Why didn't one sprout where Henry and Jacinda met?   Wouldn't Tremaine or Gothel or Drizella have better luck of finding a believer's tear in the Disenchanted Forest than the World Without Magic?  

[Rumsy4]

52 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Or because he was the child of a Savior? 

He was the child of the Savior and the Dark One’s son, which apparently altered Rumple’s bloodline after he became the DO. For reasons. And we all know Baelfire was the root of Rumple’s evil. By some magical alchemy, that transformed Henry into the Truest Stupid.

[KingOfHearts]

That's a running problem with the show. Rare things become common, and it's never addressed why. There's not even some meta throwaway line like, "Remember when travel between realms was hard?" Suddenly, there's lots of world travel, multiple Saviors, True Love Kisses left and right, and random character resurrections. It's gotten so bad that the writers have to contrive reasoning that doesn't make sense. We can't bring back Robin because his soul was obliterated except it totally wasn't, we can't enter the Land Without Magic when the "barrier" is up except we totally can, etc. It wouldn't be such a big deal if there weren't obvious consequences. When you really look at it, S1 got completely dismantled: it turns out it wasn't so hard for Rumple to get to LWM, Snow and Charming were only one of many TL couples, Emma's Savior-ness had little to do with her parentage, Regina wasn't intended to be the evilest evil she was initially framed to be, Emma was just a pawn in the schemes of at least a dozen people, Snow and Charming had the opportunity to be with Emma in LWM, and Neal died quickly anyway, making the curse pretty pointless. (Rumple just moved on to Belle, so no consequences there.)

If you think about this show too long, the fabric unravels quickly. It's all so pointless.

Edited December 31, 2017 by KingOfHearts

[Mabinogia]

3 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

It seems that the real threat of someone like Greg would be that he could easily win allies. He wouldn't need to blow up the town. He could just talk to the residents about the impact magic had on them, and they'd probably take down Regina for him, especially with the technology he had. Seeing a kind of civil war in Storybrooke and dealing with the fallout of the curse and the attitudes toward magic would have made for an amazing plot line.

I would have LOVED this storyline. OMG to see the "angry villagers" rise up against magic in Storybrooke would have been fascinating. Would the "people" differentiate between "good" magic and "bad" or just find all magic bad? Would Snow and Charming side with the people if the people were against their magical daughter? I'm surprised they never went there. They love Lana/Regina and an uprising in Storybrooke would have given her a really strong storyline. How would Mayor Mills Keep the peace when the town tries to overthrow her? If it happened after she was all in on trying to be a good guy it could have been a great conflict for her. Go back to being evil and quickly squash this uprising with force, or remain good and try to handle the towns issues the right way. Would Snow and Charming side with the town? Obviously, but what if the non-magical folks lumped all magic as evil, including Emmas? Would they still be on the side of the town? That would cause a great conflict for Snow who is a natural leader of the people. This storyline could have gone on for at least a season. They could have mirrored it with the Evil Queens rise to power in the Enchanted Forest. They could have shown the Evil Queen squashing any uprisings with murder while the reformed Regina tries to make better choices. It would have actually shown some growth and shown her actually working on redemption rather than just one day waking up and being a good guy. 

The missed opportunities on this show make me so ragey. 

[Shanna Marie]

5 hours ago, Mabinogia said:

Would the "people" differentiate between "good" magic and "bad" or just find all magic bad? Would Snow and Charming side with the people if the people were against their magical daughter? I'm surprised they never went there.

It seemed like they might be going there in season 2. Snow seemed quite alarmed when they discovered that Emma had magic, and then there was Neal's reaction. If magic was always an evil thing unless someone was an actual magical being (like a fairy), then it might have been a real shock for Emma to turn out to have magical powers. A good magical person might have been new and different, and there might have been a worry that the magic could turn her evil. But that was back when they didn't seem to have decided that a Savior was a general thing that had been going on a long time rather than being something created for this one curse that was unprecedented.

6 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

That's a running problem with the show. Rare things become common, and it's never addressed why. There's not even some meta throwaway line like, "Remember when travel between realms was hard?" Suddenly, there's lots of world travel, multiple Saviors, True Love Kisses left and right, and random character resurrections.

They were already undermining the TLK thing in season one. At first, Regina was surprised to find out that a TLK broke the sleeping curse when that was supposed to be an unbreakable curse, and it was a shock to find that there was a true love strong enough to work. It wasn't even like Charming was trying to save Snow, just saying farewell. Then a few episodes later, he's trying a TLK to save her from the anti-love potion, like it's a known cure, and later in the season, they treat a TLK like taking an aspirin: "Have you tried a True Love's Kiss?" like it's the obvious first thing to try. We won't even get into the season 6 finale, in which a TLK could also cure physical injuries.

Then there's the watering down of True Love, going from a couple that had to fight against every obstacle and have absolute faith in order to be together before they were True Love to one conversation being enough, or even not having had to actually meet. Meet someone and kind of hit it off? True love! At that rate, why would Regina have even thought that the sleeping curse would work on a couple that actually knew each other? Brennan and Alice's replacement would have had their TLK to wake him from a sleeping curse before then, when wife #2 would never have even met him and he'd only heard her talk.

[Mabinogia]

12 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

like it's a known cure, and later in the season, they treat a TLK like taking an aspirin: "Have you tried a True Love's Kiss?" like it's the obvious first thing to try.

Haha, I love that. I wouldn't be surprised if Rumple tried to make synthetic True Love's Kiss. Not quite as good as the real thing, but it will cure all minor aliments and mild curses. Act  now and we will throw in a bag of magic beans. The days of enacting 28 year long curses to travel from realm to realm are over with Rumple's Magic Beans. 

[Camera One]

I've been thinking and I think Mother Gothel as Rumple's mother would have been more interesting than the random Black Fairy, which was based on nothing.  On this show, most of the characters based on nothing are even more lame.  Gideon could have been a male version of Rapunzel.  

Edited January 2, 2018 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

I've been thinking and I think Mother Gothel as Rumple's mother would have been more interesting than the random Black Fairy, which was based on nothing.  On this show, most of the characters based on nothing are even more lame.  Gideon could have been a male version of Rapunzel.  

I am still far too bitter that Rumple's mother wasn't Mary Poppins.

[Rumsy4]

Pan as Rumple’s father was one of the dumbest ideas in retrospect. Malcolm was a loser and he kindof takes away a bit of Pan’s glamor. With the addition of the Black Fairy, it messed it up even more. Nothing made sense.

I think Pan would’ve worked better as Rumple’s older brother. An anti-Liam if you will. A brother who decided to abandon Rumple and chose eternal youth instead. 

Edited January 3, 2018 by Rumsy4

[Camera One]

7 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

Malcolm was a loser and he kind of takes away a bit of Pan’s glamor.

That made me think about the guys on this show... quite a lot of them were losers.

[jhlipton]

I was excited to see Tamara -- there are EXTREMELY few black women in regular roles in fantasy -- but she went downhill FAST.  "Behold! I am The Dragon, the mightiest magician on the planet!"  "Ooof, The Dragon is dead!"  That was ago nowhere - do nothing plot.  As a Real World rival for Neal's love, she could have been a fun counter-part to Emma,  But, nope, she was just using Neal.

Blergh!

[KingOfHearts]

28 minutes ago, jhlipton said:

I was excited to see Tamara -- there are EXTREMELY few black women in regular roles in fantasy -- but she went downhill FAST.  "Behold! I am The Dragon, the mightiest magician on the planet!"  "Ooof, The Dragon is dead!"  That was ago nowhere - do nothing plot.  As a Real World rival for Neal's love, she could have been a fun counter-part to Emma,  But, nope, she was just using Neal.

Blergh!

Tamara was that evil fiance in every Hallmark movie ever.

[Camera One]

Tamara made zero sense.  They wanted to destroy magic.  Using magic.  And then use a magic bean to kidnap a child.  We still don't know what Tamara had against magic in the first place.  Or maybe I wasn't paying attention to the stuff about her grandma.  

I thought we'd walk down memory lane and look at a quote from "Selfless, Brave and True":

Quote

August: I know what you did to the Dragon. A few days after you left, I went back to beg him to fix me, and we both know what I found. At the time, I was too wrapped up in myself to wonder what had happened, to question who could have done such a thing. But then I found this photo in your car, and it hit me. You and your grandmother... you went back there. You killed him.

"We both know what I found"  LOL.   The Dragon asleep?

Edited January 3, 2018 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

It's sad that even though Mulan is probably the Dragon's daughter, the canon points more to it being Lily. We're going to be stuck with that forever because those plots were dropped.

[jhlipton]

On 1/2/2018 at 10:20 PM, KingOfHearts said:

Tamara was that evil fiance in every Hallmark movie ever.

Hallmark or Lifetime?

On 1/3/2018 at 0:18 AM, KingOfHearts said:

the canon points more to it being Lily.

Wouldn't we prefer that the can[n]on points to Murderella?

[Lady Calypso]

Yeah, I didn't really like Tamara....like, at all. I don't think she was necessary. At the very least, I don't think she needed to be connected to Neal. Mostly because Neal had a prospective storyline with Emma and Rumple, but that got tossed away in favour of the "Is Tamara Evil?" arc. 

If they wanted Tamara to be a plot point, they needed to find a better way to do it. Neal's entrance was solid and the reveal of him being Baelfire was interesting enough, though predictable once we found out August was not Baelfire in season 1, but it went downhill once they brought in Tamara, because suddenly, his entire plot seemed to revolve around Tamara and Emma being suspicious of her. Neal's screen time with Rumple was basically erased, like Rumple's screen time was shared with the random Belle is now Lacey arc. An actually interesting father-son plot was erased for two stupid love triangle-esque plots. 

I was one of the few Neal fans back around that time, up until his death. 

[andromeda331]

2 hours ago, Lady Calypso said:

Yeah, I didn't really like Tamara....like, at all. I don't think she was necessary. At the very least, I don't think she needed to be connected to Neal. Mostly because Neal had a prospective storyline with Emma and Rumple, but that got tossed away in favour of the "Is Tamara Evil?" arc. 

If they wanted Tamara to be a plot point, they needed to find a better way to do it. Neal's entrance was solid and the reveal of him being Baelfire was interesting enough, though predictable once we found out August was not Baelfire in season 1, but it went downhill once they brought in Tamara, because suddenly, his entire plot seemed to revolve around Tamara and Emma being suspicious of her. Neal's screen time with Rumple was basically erased, like Rumple's screen time was shared with the random Belle is now Lacey arc. An actually interesting father-son plot was erased for two stupid love triangle-esque plots. 

I was one of the few Neal fans back around that time, up until his death. 

I wanted to see what happened between Neal and Rumple. Surely, Rumple was going to keep trying right? I wanted Neal to question Rumple about Milah. I wanted him to get mad at Rumple manipulating everyone and casting a Curse to find him. I wanted Emma to throw in Neal's face that he sent her to jail for his crimes. How because she was in jail she gave up Henry. There was so much stuff they could have done with Neal. They had so much to work with. His issues with his father and Emma's issues with him. Don't forget Hook. His mother's boyfriend who he was close to briefly before Hook handed him over to Pan. Nope, who cares about that when we can watch stupid Tamara and be feel sad when Regina's tortured by the man who's father she murdered.      

[KingOfHearts]

Tamara's flashbacks in Hong Kong with August were not enough to justify her existence as a character. They showed her as bona fide evil, but without any reason why. While I'm not against characters who are just plain evil (such as Cruella or Hades), for someone to be so desperately bent on destroying magic in a magicless world, you have to have a good motivation. Greg had a very strong motivation, which made Tamara pale in comparison. The thing is that we could hate easily Tamara as a villain. But Greg? The execution really failed because he was framed as hateable yet was more tragic than anything.

[Shanna Marie]

Tamara, like the anti-magic thing, was a potentially interesting idea that was horribly executed. If she, like Greg, had been someone with legitimate issues with magic, she might have made for a good counterpoint for the magical world, representing the two worlds Neal was supposedly torn between. He'd fled the magical world and his father's power, but then he learns that Emma, someone he supposedly had loved and the mother of his son, is magical, and then there's his father. But on the other hand, there's Tamara, who, like him, has anti-magic leanings. Even if she had deliberately targeted him, he might have still sympathized with her point of view if they'd both been harmed by magic.

But the way they did it was terrible. The timing was bad, for one thing, and that meant that all the plots in that timeframe were barely dealt with. That's one of those cases where the characters did what the plot required, not what real people would do. If Neal had just been reunited with his father and his past love and discovered that he had a son, and that they were all living in an enclave of fairy tale characters, would any rational human being have chosen that time to tell his fiancee that he's from a magical world where fairy tales are real, and his father is Rumpelstiltskin? Or would he maybe wait to figure some things out before bringing her to the town and telling her everything?

It's even crazier when you bring in the season 5 finale revelations that Neal, in his week or so with Henry, told Henry about his research and plans for destroying magic.

[andromeda331]

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

Tamara, like the anti-magic thing, was a potentially interesting idea that was horribly executed. If she, like Greg, had been someone with legitimate issues with magic, she might have made for a good counterpoint for the magical world, representing the two worlds Neal was supposedly torn between. He'd fled the magical world and his father's power, but then he learns that Emma, someone he supposedly had loved and the mother of his son, is magical, and then there's his father. But on the other hand, there's Tamara, who, like him, has anti-magic leanings. Even if she had deliberately targeted him, he might have still sympathized with her point of view if they'd both been harmed by magic.

But the way they did it was terrible. The timing was bad, for one thing, and that meant that all the plots in that timeframe were barely dealt with. That's one of those cases where the characters did what the plot required, not what real people would do. If Neal had just been reunited with his father and his past love and discovered that he had a son, and that they were all living in an enclave of fairy tale characters, would any rational human being have chosen that time to tell his fiancee that he's from a magical world where fairy tales are real, and his father is Rumpelstiltskin? Or would he maybe wait to figure some things out before bringing her to the town and telling her everything?

It's even crazier when you bring in the season 5 finale revelations that Neal, in his week or so with Henry, told Henry about his research and plans for destroying magic.

Neal being sympathetic to Tamara and Greg's cause would make a lot of sense. It would make more sense that he'd be part of their cause. 

[Free]

2 hours ago, andromeda331 said:

Neal being sympathetic to Tamara and Greg's cause would make a lot of sense. It would make more sense that he'd be part of their cause. 

A&E completely botched Neal/Baelfire up so badly, because it seemed like they were setting his character up for something (Rumple's son/Henry's dad being a driving force of the series) only to have it completely fall apart in S2.

[Camera One]

Getting rid of magic was one thing.  Killing everyone in town was just psychotic.  But I guess a village massacre is just another day in this magical world of hope.

Edited January 5, 2018 by Camera One

[jhlipton]

7 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

made Tamara pale

I see what you did there... or not.  LOL

42 minutes ago, Free said:

... it seemed like they were setting [something] up only to have it completely fall apart ...

TS,TW

[Camera One]

1 hour ago, Free said:

A&E completely botched Neal/Baelfire up so badly, because it seemed like they were setting his character up for something (Rumple's son/Henry's dad being a driving force of the series) only to have it completely fall apart in S2.

A lot of times, it seems like they are setting things up but after seven seasons of this, I think most of the time, they're actually just playing with their jumbled ideas and going for twists they consider surprising.  And then they get bored.  With Neal, they got bored at record speed.  He was already half gone from the rear-view mirror after the "Manhattan" script was written.  Nothing else can explain why they had Neal babysitting Henry off-screen once everyone got back to town.  They weren't truly interested in his relationship with Rumple, nor with Emma coming to terms with their past, nor with Neal himself adjusting to learning he was a father, or dealing with his regrets, or even how he turned from Bae to Neal, much less what he thought of Belle, or his past with Hook, or conflict with Henry's evil stepmother Regina.

We can discuss this initial-promising-start-fizzling-to-nothing with so many characters, from Hyde to Guinevere to Ursula the Second.

Edited January 5, 2018 by Camera One