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

[Mabinogia]

Hmm, now that you lay out her life story, Emma kind of shoots their "Evil isn't born, it's made" concept to shit. If evil is made, Emma should have turned evil. Her life was a shit storm with occasional moments of crappiness.

I swear the writers have never actually seen the show they write for. None of it makes sense with the interviews they give about how clever they are and what their show is about. It's not about what they think it is, it's not nearly as clever as they think it is, and if they are writing a show where evil isn't born, it's made, then they need to pay back all the money they got writing this show because they failed MISERABLY. Their main freaking hero should, by their very definition, be the most evil person on the show.

[tennisgurl]

Thats what happens when you HAVE to have character focused flashbacks for the same people year after year. You have to add stuff just to have things to flash back too, even when they stop making any sense based around what has previously been established. 

You know, back to the topic of "Evil isnt born, its made", it really is too bad that the show ended up half assing that whole concept, because fantasy actually IS a really interesting genre to play with that idea. From the very start of making up stories about people with amazing powers and strange creatures, there have been certain creatures that were always evil, just because thats the way they are. The monsters from old mythology, the witches and vampires and such of folk stories, and even fantasy creatures like the Orcs from Lord of the Rings, and the DnD designation of Always Chaotic Evil, who basically were all pure evil and murderous, so the heroes could kill them and no one had to question the morality of it. Society often assumed that someone who was born out of wedlock, or was of mixed race or heritage, was "naturally" evil due to their tainted blood, or the people who were related to a person who was known to be evil were met with suspicion or even punishment purely because people assumed evil was just the way some families or people were.  However, as time went on and stories grew more complicated (and science and society progressed) and people started being interested in more complex stories. Monsters could be evil, but they could also be tragic, like Frankensteins Monster. Science proved that there was no genetic component to evil in a bloodline, and society started to judge less by the circumstances of a persons birth. Even Tolkien grappled with the whole concept of an Always Chaotic Evil species, as that conflicted with his religious beliefs that all beings could find redemption. For years now, fantasy writers have gotten tons of mileage out of wondering if any creature is evil by nature, and if its possible to fight your nature to become better. If someone has an evil destiny or an actual cursed bloodline, is that it? Are they done? Or is the fault not in their stars, but in themselves? In Once, you could have explored that quite a bit, especially with the combination of fantasy and the real world. But, none of that really happened. Were Regina and Rumple always destined to be evil? I dont know, maybe. Probably not. When it comes to them, its less about them being the kids of evil people, and more about them doing shitty things after having shitty things happen to them, and that just makes everything magically alright. We never really saw a struggle, we just saw a lot of excuses. There was (as always with this show) so much potential to explore these concepts, and maybe even make it a major theme of the show, contrasting Regina letting her dark past drive her to darkness, and Emma not letting her past hardships define her, or show more of how Rumple maybe tried to use his powers for good, and eventually succumbed to darkness. It could have made for a great theme. 

Really, I think the most interesting nature vs nurture thing they had in the background of the show was Charming and his evil twin brother. Both started out the same, with the same bio parents, but one David was raised by a kind mother, and became a good person, while his brother James was raised by a cruel father, and became cruel himself. We even saw in a flashback that little James was a sweet kid who never wanted to hurt anyone, and only became the asshole we met later presumably due to the teachings of his adopted father. Really, I think that to be a much more interesting instance of the whole theme than anything with Regina and Rumple. 

[Rumsy4]

20 minutes ago, Mabinogia said:

Hmm, now that you lay out her life story, Emma kind of shoots their "Evil isn't born, it's made" concept to shit. If evil is made, Emma should have turned evil. Her life was a shit storm with occasional moments of crappiness.

Emma was a good person only becasue her parents did an evil fetectomy on her. Emma gets no credit. But Regina was bad becasue other people made her so. It wasn't her fault. Regina is always the exception to every rule.

The show started off with the idea that people had choices. By the time the show ended, it was all about fate and destiny. Emma's season 1 declaration that "People are gonna tell you who you are your whole life. You just gotta punch back and say, "No, this is who I am". You want people to look at you differently? Make them! You want to change things, you're gonna have to go out there and change them yourself, because there are no fairy godmothers in this world ..." was completely overthrown by the end. Emma had to accept fate and fairy godmothers and her destiny and die and somebody else would save her. 

Belle was always correct about Rumple having a good heeeaaaart because he was destined to be the savior before her mother cut it off. So, not matter how many terrible things he has done, we're supposed to overlook everything because he made the right choice once or twice. 

If you are an evil villain, one good act is enough to redeem you. If you are an overall good person, or a reformed villain, one bad or misguided act is enough to prove you are a monster. 

Most of the love stories in the show also became focussed on destined soulmates, true love necklaces, and insta True Love kisses. We started with Snow and Charming fighting to be with each other, to having a True Love sapling born out of a random meeting in their past where they did not even see each other. We end the show with Henry and Murderella falling in love becasue a necklace told them so.

[Mabinogia]

1 hour ago, Rumsy4 said:

If you are an evil villain, one good act is enough to redeem you. If you are an overall good person, or a reformed villain, one bad or misguided act is enough to prove you are a monster. 

Well, it a twisted way that totally makes sense. In each case one act that is opposite to all the other acts you've ever committed is enough to either redeem you or condemn you. So, really, they are treating the villains and the heroes equally. hahahahaha

[Shanna Marie]

I'm going to preface this post by saying I'm not trying to start rumors or stir things up. This is purely real person mental fanfic, not based on any actual knowledge or even a serious suspicion.

But I found myself thinking about the huge gap in creativity between the premise and the execution of this show. I think that's why I like discussing it so much. I love the premise so much. It's one of those ideas that has me smacking myself in the head and saying "why didn't I think of that?" I love the characters. And yet I pretty much hate so much about the show. In fact, it's kind of hard to believe that the same people who came up with this premise are actually writing the show. There's this really clever concept and great characters, and yet they always seem to take the least interesting approach to every story, except when they do something that's only shocking because it's not set up at all and is completely out of the blue. It almost makes you surprised that no one has come forward claiming that they stole the idea.

Really, it's almost like a setup for a movie, where someone steals an idea or takes credit for something and then is revealed when they can't actually do the thing -- like Singin' in the Rain when the actress with the terrible voice is asked to sing on stage.

From the one TV series pitch I've been involved with, it seems like a series pitch generally goes into some detail about the situation and main characters, then outlines the first season in some detail. It then sets up what the second season would cover, but in less detail, and goes on to mention ideas that might get covered in future seasons.

Now, look at the way this series has gone -- really clever premise, great characters from the original batch, a good first season, a promising start to the second season, and then it fizzles out. It's almost like they took an idea someone else came up with, used up the ideas from the pitch, but then because it wasn't really their idea and they didn't have the chops to pull it off, it all starts to go off the rails, especially when they start inserting their own ideas into the story. In a book or movie, there would be the aspiring TV writer they're mentoring who gives them her pitch for a series. They're actually feeling kind of desperate because in spite of their Lost pedigree, they're having zero success in pitching series ideas, and their first look deal with ABC is about to expire. So they tell this aspiring writer that a new writer will never be able to sell this kind of series, but if they pitch it, it might stand a chance, and then they'll hire her as a staff writer, which will give her the clout to sell later ideas she comes up with. There's even a signed nondisclosure agreement, so she can't take credit for the ideas. But once the series goes into production and turns out to be a bit of a hit, the success goes to their heads and they start believing it was really their idea. They won't listen to the actual creator's input because they're the Master Storytellers. In a movie, the quality of the later seasons would end up exposing the fraud and the real creator would end up getting the credit, especially when she gave up on being allowed to have input and quit to get a job on another series that ended up being more successful and maybe sold her own series. That would explain a lot of the sudden reverses, like the idea that Regina was the real victim, and the way that everything after about midway through season two was so half-baked.

[Camera One]

If not for A&E saying they've had the premise for 10 years, that scenario would definitely explain the poor writing/planning we've seen from 2B onwards.  As we've speculated before, I think a lot of the first season's success had to do with Damon Lindelof providing them with a narrative structure and then ABC execs being really picky with which ideas got through the pitch process.  The highly publicized one is telling them they couldn't kill Prince Charming.  The fact that the second episode already focused on The Evil Queen and showed that she was capable of love, does point to how they were always about that character.  I wouldn't be surprised though if ABC or Damon suggested that Henry needed to be more combative towards Regina, which they completely reversed in Season 2.  Some of their writing problematic tendencies were already occurring in Season 1 (eg. Heroes are always harder to write than villains, and in the flashbacks, you could see they didn't know what to do with Snowing except constantly putting obstacles between them), but it had a strong purpose/endpoint and they had a cache of some ideas, so it wasn't as obvious.

There was also plain luck.  Whether someone is fan of Disney or not, a lot of the imagery we have in our minds come from their animated movies, and a lot of the magic from this show came from being able to use that iconography and then twist it in unexpected ways.  If this show had not been affiliated with Disney, the tie-in would have lessened some of the impact.  An example would be Shrek, where it looks like A&E took a lot of the ideas.

I think A&E also didn't have much of a plan beyond breaking the Curse and bringing magic back, except for bits and pieces like sending Emma to the Enchanted Forest or Baelfire being Henry's father.  Somehow, they managed to convince the execs they had ideas for many seasons but they really didn't.  Even these "plans" were sketchy.  Once Baelfire was face to face with Rumple and the initial confrontation was over, they had no idea what to do with them.  Ditto for a long-term plan after Snowing regained their memories and being able to interact with her daughter.  They didn't know how to make it interesting once the tension was gone, so they just ignored the pairing.  As we've seen, they have trouble planning an entire season, even with mostly new characters like in Season 7.  

Edited April 2, 2018 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

6 minutes ago, Camera One said:

If not for A&E saying they've had the premise for 10 years, that scenario would definitely explain the poor writing/planning we've seen from 2B onwards. 

Ah, but "we've had the premise for 10 years" is exactly the sort of thing someone would say if they stole an idea. :-)

But in general, it doesn't seem like they thought through the scenarios they set up. The whole Bae/Rumple thing, for instance. If the premise of the series was that Rumple was trying to reunite with the son he lost when he wouldn't give up power. So you'd think that they'd have put some thought into what would happen when they were reunited.

[Camera One]

Just now, Shanna Marie said:

So you'd think that they'd have put some thought into what would happen when they were reunited.

Not if they didn't go beyond "Wouldn't it be cool if..."  It's like how geeky sci-fi obsessed teenagers sometimes talk... "Oh, what if X met Y and they fought", "Oh, but X had a secret spell that did Z" "And what if it backfired and they created a completely different parallel universe."  Nothing is fleshed out because they move directly to the next "great" idea.

[Rumsy4]

I always had an idea that the 2007 movie Enchanted might have given them the idea of a fairy-tale charatcers meet the Real World scenario. And they started building on it while working for LOST. They could've gotten input from a lot of the writers on that show, including Damon. Their own writing, without external help, sort of slowly fell apart.

I'm more curious as to why the quality went to crap between S5 and S6. The drop is pretty steep there.

Edited April 3, 2018 by Rumsy4

[Camera One]

25 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

I'm more curious as to why the quality went to crap between S5 and S6. The drop is pretty steep there.

 

I think the same reason many shows drop at that point.  They were out of ideas  Except they weren't good writers to begin with, so the result was even more pathetic. 

Underbrooke was basically their last "great" idea, which was actually a form of AU the characters went to.  5A they turned Emma into the "villain" which was another huge reversal which made it easier to write (rather than the "normal" Emma who they probably thought was boring by that point).

But Season 6 was a "normal" season so they were stuck creatively.  All they could think of were repeat storylines, so we got a bunch of those.  But they still wanted to do their shocking twists and there wasn't any way of doing that, except to do retcons that damaged characters.  So we got surprises like Baelfire was secretly evil, Snowing chose to not reunite with Emma, Hook killed David's father, etc.  That's what happens when they had to stretch to create new twists.

For CS fans, Season 6 was the first season where they were fully together (they were pretty much separated all of Season 5 in one way or another).  They don't know how to write happy couples except push them to the background, or generate artificial conflicts like they did in 6B.  Whereas Season 5 was gave a lot of rewards to a CS fan, Season 6 did not.  In fact, it damaged the coupling.

Edited April 3, 2018 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

1 hour ago, Rumsy4 said:

I'm more curious as to why the quality went to crap between S5 and S6. The drop is pretty steep there.

Panicked flailing. The ratings drop during season 5 was pretty steep, and I bet they were getting some stern talks from the network. There was a sense of "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks." But they'd try something for about 30 seconds before giving up and trying something else, and that meant nothing got developed. There also seemed to be a lot of rewrites -- like Josh and Colin were talking about the murdered father plotline at Comic Con when they'd only seen a couple of scripts, and that ended up not happening until more than halfway through the season. The coin was brought up early, but then that plot vanished for a long time. Given that they don't even tell actors future events that their characters are already aware of so the actors really need to know in order to play it properly, it's hard to imagine that they bothered telling Josh and Colin about a planned plot for the second half of the season when it was something neither of their characters was aware of earlier. That suggests that there was a pretty drastic script change in the first couple of episodes. I suspect some of the stuff that was drastically changed earlier in the season had a ripple effect and they had a hard time keeping up with what had happened in those first couple of episodes between all the rewrites and reshoots, and that's why some things seemed to come out of nowhere and why some things vanished or fizzled out. Then as the season came on the air and the ratings kept slipping, the panic increased, so they were throwing even more things out there at random and second guessing themselves. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the actors were getting scripts late or getting a lot of rewrites even while they were shooting. The writing strikes me that way, like it was done on deadline at the last second without a lot of revision, and there were a lot of versions even while they were shooting with notes coming from the network or the producers changing their minds, with trouble keeping the versions straight. Wasn't it during this season that one of the writers said something about entirely rewriting an episode in 48 hours? And then they ended up rewriting still more in the editing room, piecing together something else from the footage they had available, but the writing for the following episode was based on the script of the previous episode, not on what was pieced together in the editing room, and that meant still more rewriting in editing based on the footage they had, or else reshoots, since the shooting for the next episode would be happening before or during the editing process for the previous episode.

[KingOfHearts]

Ever since 3B, the Storybrooke side of the arcs has always been the weakest. Now, imagine an entire season focused solely on it. It's not because it's a bad setting, but rather the writers have no clue how to write "slice of life" pieces or slower character moments. Whenever they try, there's zero substance and it's as boring as tar. It's funny that for every other season, I can remember pretty much every single episode and the order. But S6? I have to resort to google. That's how forgettable it is. Nothing freaking happens, and that's why it's such a failure of a season.

[tennisgurl]

It doesn't help that a quirk of this shows writing is that its both very serialized, and very episodic, in ways that dont really mesh. It has tons of emphasis on long, drawn out plots and villains, and just about everything of purpose is in service to the plot. Its somewhat hysterical rushing towards some final battle with some arc based bad guy, with little room to breath. And yet, it also has its flashback/character centric format, so something will be important one week, and mean absolutely nothing for several more episodes until that character gets their episode again, or it has something to do with PLOT PLOT PLOT. We get an episode with a huge revaluation about a main character that should shake up relationships and what we know about them, and then we follow up the next episode with a totally different characters backstory, and we dont get any or very little follow up from the last episode because its right on to the next thing. They're in such a hurry that they never stop to let the story and characters just breath, but they also arent competent enough writers to create a tight story that moves the story along at a brisk pace. And when an arc ends, its basically like it never happened, and everyone just immediately heads towards the next big bad they need to jazz hands to death without a pause to reflect. Its onto to another plot. It just leaves everything a mess that has no idea what it wants to be. Does it want to be a heartfelt character based story? A fast paced action thriller? Its possible to do both, but its clear that A&E were just flailing about, unsure of what their show was supposed to be, or what story they wanted to tell. And it leads to a weird story where everything is based around keeping the plot moving, and yet the episodes themselves dont flow at all. 

[Shanna Marie]

16 minutes ago, tennisgurl said:

We get an episode with a huge revaluation about a main character that should shake up relationships and what we know about them, and then we follow up the next episode with a totally different characters backstory, and we dont get any or very little follow up from the last episode because its right on to the next thing.

It wouldn't be so bad to do the backstory centrics if they were capable of making the present-day stuff flow better with more of an ensemble approach. I feel like they did that well in season one, where the episode might focus a little more on the centric character in the present, but it still progressed the ongoing plot and the character threads. It might be a Ruby/Red centric, for instance, but we'd still deal with the Emma vs. Regina conflict, the relationship between Emma and Henry, Mary Margaret and David's relationship, and all the other stuff going on in town while Ruby tried to find a new job. Then in the next episode, we'd see the follow up of Ruby back at Granny's and looking a little more toned down and serious. If that had been done this season, we wouldn't have had a scene at Granny's showing how Ruby was doing for several weeks.

They could have had Rogers talking to Sabine while looking for an alibi for Tilly, and she could have asked him if he could look up Drew for her to see if he had something shady going on, or she could have asked if he could look into who called in the tip about her food truck paperwork.

I just don't feel like they plot for the big picture and then break the plot down into episodes. It's all about individual episodes and whose backstory they want to tell, then figuring out something that character can be doing in the present that somewhat relates to the ongoing plot arc.

And I still can't believe we spent an entire episode on the food truck plot. If setting up that Samdi was making Drew cozy up to Sabine was so important to the plot that it was worth focusing on episode on it, then it needed some follow up in the three subsequent episodes. If it wasn't important enough to address, then they shouldn't have focused an episode on it.

[Rumsy4]

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

Panicked flailing. The ratings drop during season 5 was pretty steep, and I bet they were getting some stern talks from the network. There was a sense of "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks." But they'd try something for about 30 seconds before giving up and trying something else, and that meant nothing got developed..... I suspect some of the stuff that was drastically changed earlier in the season had a ripple effect and they had a hard time keeping up with what had happened in those first couple of episodes between all the rewrites and reshoots, and that's why some things seemed to come out of nowhere and why some things vanished or fizzled out. 

I think that's a possible scenario. There was way too much going on without any of it being relevant or interesting or fun.

And A&E being A&E, because they love Regina/EQ so much, and because their Twitter focus group also loved Regina/EQ, decided that bringing back the Evil Queen would be the most effective way to retain viewers. Who cares about boring Emma? And as @Camera One said, they lost interest in Captain Swan once they were together. 

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

Wasn't it during this season that one of the writers said something about entirely rewriting an episode in 48 hours?

I remember something about that as well. Man, no wonder it was crap. 

[Camera One]

Even this season, one of the writers mentioned very short deadlines several times.  So I wonder if A&E just keeps changing their mind, or what the deal is.

54 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

It wouldn't be so bad to do the backstory centrics if they were capable of making the present-day stuff flow better with more of an ensemble approach. I feel like they did that well in season one, where the episode might focus a little more on the centric character in the present, but it still progressed the ongoing plot and the character threads. It might be a Ruby/Red centric, for instance, but we'd still deal with the Emma vs. Regina conflict, the relationship between Emma and Henry, Mary Margaret and David's relationship, and all the other stuff going on in town while Ruby tried to find a new job. Then in the next episode, we'd see the follow up of Ruby back at Granny's and looking a little more toned down and serious. If that had been done this season, we wouldn't have had a scene at Granny's showing how Ruby was doing for several weeks.

They've definitely done a much worse job of that this year than in Season 1.  Even on "Lost", at least at the beginning, the A plot one week might still be the B or C plot the following week, so there was usually some continuity.  

The problem is even more noticeable when one dislikes most of the characters.  Since if you liked Tiana or Alice, you would have to wait many episodes for their next go.  In the last few years, the Rumbelle episodes tend to be the most stand-alones.  The other characters tended to be usually together so they would usually be seen every week.

[andromeda331]

23 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

I think that's a possible scenario. There was way too much going on without any of it being relevant or interesting or fun.

And A&E being A&E, because they love Regina/EQ so much, and because their Twitter focus group also loved Regina/EQ, decided that bringing back the Evil Queen would be the most effective way to retain viewers. Who cares about boring Emma? And as @Camera One said, they lost interest in Captain Swan once they were together. 

I remember something about that as well. Man, no wonder it was crap. 

True, they somehow have never manage to connect the rise in Regina storylines with the lowering of ratings.  Of course they would think ratings are down because they only have one Regina. Surely they'll go up by having Two!           

[tennisgurl]

Really, I might just be reading too much into everything about A&Es writing process. Really, after season 1, it all became about Regina, and they wrote the show around what would make Regina look like the put upon hero and woobie. Everything else existed to serve the goal of propping up their favorite character. 

[ParadoxLost]

5 minutes ago, tennisgurl said:

Really, I might just be reading too much into everything about A&Es writing process. Really, after season 1, it all became about Regina, and they wrote the show around what would make Regina look like the put upon hero and woobie. Everything else existed to serve the goal of propping up their favorite character. 

I'm not sure it was about favorite character Regina precisely.

I think they had more freedom after the success of the first season and started to revert to their original idea, which I suspect was an Enchanted Forest version of Wicked. 

Its really telling that in season 7, the main heroes are Rumpelstiltskin, Evil Queen, the Wicked Witch, and Captain Hook.  They dropped every classical hero from S1-S6.  Wicked Stepmother was also a tarnished heroine and died sacrificing herself for her daughter.  Wicked stepsister Drizella got a happy ending in the DEF.  Cinderella was introduced as a murderer. Even Gretel was doing Gothel's bidding before getting killed. Hansel is a serial killer.

[Shanna Marie]

Going back a few days to hit some points that have been stewing ...

On 3/31/2018 at 10:59 AM, tennisgurl said:

Like, there was a scene in Wonderland where heroes Cyrus and Alice end up in Storeybrooke for an episode to do some plot stuff, and while they dont go crazy with the modern day references, as they're in a pretty big hurry, it does take some time to have our heroes (from, respectively, a Arabian Nights style world and a Victorian England world) marvel at some modern day technology. Theres an especially fun scene where Cyrus gets distracted by a light switch and keeps switching it on and off, starring at it like its the most amazing thing he has ever seen. And he was an actual genie!

That was an example I was thinking of in terms of how they could have had fun with the premise. Hook would have been the ideal character to do that stuff with because he didn't get the memory download, and Colin played it beautifully when they remembered that Hook was a fish out of water. There was the Jello stuff at the hospital (both the outtake from season 2 and the mention when he visited Neal in 3B), the "Emma button" on his phone and him trying to explain a cell phone to Elsa when he barely understood it, and referring to the phone as a "talking phone." But there were too many opportunities that they just blew, like us not getting to see him trying to find things in New York, either in 2B or the 3B premiere. Or when they completely forgot that he didn't have the memory download, like when he was the one to quip about the irony of the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming thinking the Wicked Witch was fictional. He would have no reason to know that "Snow White" was anything other than the name of the princess. Then there was the way he snarked at Zelena about how they were in Storybrooke, so she could have used the phone to talk to him instead of having Rumple kidnap him -- but then in 4A they had fun with the "Emma button" stuff and him not seeming to truly understand a phone.

Even if Hook's a "never let 'em see you sweat" kind of guy who would pretend he knew more than he actually understood, it would have been fun to see him trying to figure things out when other characters weren't there. Even just a stack of magazines and newspapers in the cabin of the Jolly Roger would hint at how he's trying to catch up. I'd have loved to see the equivalent of Cyrus's light switch moment for him. Even if he wasn't marveling at the technology, wouldn't he be curious about it? I could imagine that a navigator would totally geek out over the GPS feature on his talking phone. He'd be calculating courses to walk across town, just because he could.

I would gripe about him not only knowing the concept of "dating" but also knowing what's common and expected for a date in our world without us seeing the stack of Cosmopolitan magazines he got from the library for research, but they had Belle talking about dating while living in the fairytale world, so whatever.

On 4/1/2018 at 6:10 PM, KingOfHearts said:

"Evil isn't born, it's made" gets conflated with the concept of free will, I think. In the show's universe, they're not the same thing because there are two distinct columns of "heroes" and "villains". Heroes can become villains and vice versa, but there's never anything in the middle.

At the very beginning of the series, it seemed like they were going for the concept that the fairy tale world functioned by black-and-white fairy tale rules, so in that world there were heroes and villains, and villains couldn't have happy endings. The whole idea behind the curse was to go to our world, which is a shades of gray kind of place with no hard-and-fast rules about outcomes for heroes and villains. It was a place where the Evil Queen might be able to have a happy ending. When they showed her casting the curse, wasn't that what she said to all the other villains gathered around? And I think there was voiceover narration saying something to that effect at the beginning of at least the first few episodes. That would have been an interesting idea to explore, that there was something about that world that made things come out like a fairy tale, but those restrictions were gone in our world, and there was therefore no guarantee that the good guys would win or that the villains couldn't win. It also made the curse make more sense if Regina wasn't just punishing her enemies by making them live mildly dissatisfying lives in a world with indoor plumbing but rather was taking her enemies to a place where she had a chance to defeat them (though then there wouldn't be much need for the freezing in time or the memory part of the spell, other I guess than Regina being lazy and not wanting to have to fight her enemies). But instead, they doubled down even more on that heroes vs. villains thing and were even more black and white than any fairy tale, even while making the villains worse than they ever were in the stories.

[Rumsy4]

15 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

But instead, they doubled down even more on that heroes vs. villains thing and were even more black and white than any fairy tale, even while making the villains worse than they ever were in the stories.

The writers didn't have any clear idea of their own Storyverse-its rules, morality, parameters, everything was vague and kept changing. 

16 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Then there was the way he snarked at Zelena about how they were in Storybrooke, so she could have used the phone to talk to him instead of having Rumple kidnap him -- but then in 4A they had fun with the "Emma button" stuff and him not seeming to truly understand a phone.

I thought that was actually something Hook would say to snark at someone who had "bested" him. He knew what a phone was and the basics of how to use, without necessarily understanding much beyond that.  

[Shanna Marie]

1 hour ago, Rumsy4 said:

I thought that was actually something Hook would say to snark at someone who had "bested" him. He knew what a phone was and the basics of how to use, without necessarily understanding much beyond that.  

Maybe, but how would she have called him? Did he have a phone at that time? And then there was him later calling it a "talking phone" and having to be told that it was just a "phone." I think I'd have been more inclined to give that one to them if not for the Snow White thing. The combination of the two suggests that it was more about them forgetting he didn't have the memory download than about them giving him in-character lines.

[companionenvy]

Okay, y'all, buckle in, because this is going to be a long one...

I am, believe it or not, a new watcher. I had some friends who loved the show, so I decided I would watch after it all ended (not counting the reboot-ish) and I could binge.

On one hand, I need to give Kitsis and Horowitz credit for an inventive idea that did, in the end, give me many hours of enjoyment. There were some real highs to this show, and I'll always appreciate that

But...I feel compelled to post because I have literally never watched anything with such absurd, out-of-whack morality. Look, I'm all about people being complicated and shades of grey. I've believed in redemption arcs for male and female characters in multiple shows, and have no trouble sympathizing with characters (redeemed or not) who have done truly appalling things. But if you're going to actually redeem someone -- not make them a villain with heart or a shades of grey magnificent bastard -- you have to make it believable. And in Regina's story, OuaT failed for me on every level.

First of all, some characters are better candidates for redemption than others. I'd say how redeemable someone is involves some calculation that weighs severity of crimes, motivation for/mindset behind crimes, and past trauma that would, not justify, but explain said crimes. On every level, Regina was a terrible choice. 

Severity of crimes - She straight up slaughtered at least a couple of villages, presumably including children. She plotted to kill an infant. She did things like randomly kill a groom on his wedding day because she was sad. Many of her crimes were deliberate and well-thought-out, giving her plenty of time to reconsider. She didn't. Even in 28 years under the curse, and after becoming Henry's mother, she was consistently raping Graham, left Belle in an insane asylum, and continued a charade in which, for instance, Jefferson was permanently separated from his beloved daughter. When Henry got old enough to realize something was wrong, she gaslighted him severely enough that S1 Henry legitimately believed his mother didn't love him, and she continued doing extremely psychologically scarring things to him once Emma came to town. In S1, she again attempted to kill Emma, knowing that Henry now loved her, framed Mary Margaret for murder, killed Graham,  put out a hit on Kathryn, and so on. And this is after 28 years in which a person with a modicum of insight and self-awareness just might take the time to reflect and take stock of her life and choices. What is more, she seemed to really, really enjoy, not just killing, but causing people emotional pain. That's a sadism I don't think we get in Hook's past, or even Rumple's, to the same degree. Hook might have casually killed someone who looked at him funny, but I don't think he would have been capable of sustained and systematic torture of anyone other than Rumple (not to mention, there's no evidence of him massacring total innocents - as we see in his murder of David's father, his "code" was flexible, but he does seem to have had some limits). Speaking of limits, it is telling that even Rumple could not have cast the Curse, because even if he had been able to rip out the heart of the thing he loved most, he wouldn't have been willing. Regina was, which says a lot about her.

Past trauma/Motivation/Mindset - Oh, boy.  I'm not going to minimize how awful Cora killing Daniel was. But - in the scheme of trauma that might plausibly explain things like serial murder - and in the context of a show in which most characters, hero and villain, have their share of trauma -- it frankly isn't enough. I'm sure growing up with Cora was no picnic, but prior to Daniel's death, Regina had been raised in a life of material comfort with a devoted father and a mother who, despite her limited capacity for love, wasn't outrageously abusive and was in fact concerned for Regina's welfare. It was  a self-interested and twisted concern, but until their goals collided, it was likely to manifest itself in at least superficial attempts at demonstrating care and affection. Certainly, as of "The Stable Boy," Regina had grown into an apparently reasonably psychologically healthy woman capable of forming loving relationships, which means that her turn to Evil Queen wasn't the end result of a hellish childhood, but a completely out of whack response to an individual tragedy. I also am less inclined to be forgiving because, even after Daniel's death, she was actually fairly well positioned to have a decent life, especially by EF standards. Leopold didn't love her, nor she him, but he was disposed to be a kind husband to her, and Snow, of course, was eager to shower her with love and adoration. And, you know, she was queen. If she's been a good one, she could have had the love of the people, too. She had a lot more good options and agency than most  of the other redeemed villains on the show.

Then, of course, there's the form her revenge took, which is so cuckoo that it destroys her as a psychologically interesting character. Blaming a ten year old for naively telling a secret for what she thought were good reasons is in fact a psychologically infantile response, let alone devoting years to trying to destroy that child's life -- and the lives of anyone who tried to aid her in the slightest way. So not only is she not a villain that thought she was acting for some greater good (often the most redeemable kind), she didn't even have a remotely sympathetic or logical goal. Bad as Rumple was, some of his worst crimes (pre-Curse) were done in the name of reuniting with Bae, while Hook's revenge quest was at least, in itself, directed against someone absolutely deserving of his hatred That doesn't justify what they did in pursuit of those goals, but it makes them a heck of a lot more potentially redeemable, for my money. And in both cases, I felt the show did a reasonable job of showing how they could have started as decent people and been brought by degrees gradually to become the men they were. In the case of Regina, I simply don't buy that any non-sociopath could take the path she took under the circumstances confronting her.

OK, so Regina wasn't a prime candidate for redemption. But I might have been able to overlook a not entirely credible transformation as part of suspension of disbelief if the writers had at least made her work for it. Instead, they (and, by extension, a lot of the characters) simply started acting like she was redeemed even as she was still showing a lack of remorse and coming very close to backsliding entirely into EQ-ville. The show was committing to a Regina redemption arc by early S-2, complete with sadface moments where we were supposed to feel bad for her that the gang was excluding her. But at the end of S2, she once again floated the idea of killing everyone in Storybrooke as long as she and Henry survived, and as late as early S4, she seriously considered killing Marian. These aren't somewhat gray actions, these are acts of downright evil that she was contemplating even as people were starting to accept her as one of the good guys.

Her attitude doesn't help, either. In Neverland, she admits to regretting nothing, a totally sociopathic comment presented as a kickass moment. After that, probably her worst moment is her rage at Emma for saving Marian, one of her potential victims, but even her moments of casual cruelty rankle. Plus, she develops an absurdly entitled belief that she "deserves" a happy ending - to the extent that she sees herself as a victim when obstacles to that emerge -- basically as soon as she's stopped actively murdering people. None of this speaks well for her redemption.

And here's the thing: I actually do think it is more realistic for "redeemed" Regina to be still capable of backsliding. The problem is the show tries to have it both ways: you can have Regina be somewhat realistic, in which case she winds up as someone who may be capable of acts of legitimate heroism, but is still often selfish and ruthless in achieving her goals, not to mention prone to more mundane nastiness,, or you can have her be a total white hat who is BFF with Snow and Emma and believes that "heroes don't kill," even in situations that would seem to justify it. You can't do both. The mass murderer doesn't get to make snarky jokes at and about her past victims and spend a lot of time whining about how she never gets her happy ending if we're to take her reformation remotely seriously. But not only are we supposed to take that reformation seriously, you get moments like Emma taking on the darkness, not because a dark-One Regina is terrifying to contemplate, but because "she's come too far" to have to cope with the darkness. And again, this is a scene that canonically takes place at most a few months after Regina has gone into a snit because Emma saved (we thought) an innocent mother who Regina was totally prepared to execute for her grand crime of not being on-board with the EQ's revenge on a child plot. Essentially, Regina becomes a kind of canon-Sue, where other characters behave in ridiculously unbelievable ways to serve her story. Snow has had much of her life ruined by this woman, but as long as she's willing to be good for five minutes, she's OK with prioritizing her wants and needs over things like, you know, spending time with the daughter whose childhood she totally missed because of her. 

To make matters worse, for all its vaunted commitment to seeing past black and white, the show is in other respects absurdly simplistic in its morality, often in ways that amount to a gaslighting of its good characters, especially Emma. It is fine for 11 year old Henry to be adamant that heroes don't kill, but the fact that a show written by adults seems actually to believe that, for instance, Emma killing a woman who was, to all appearances, quite possibly about to kill her son is a sign of darkness and potentially heart-corrupting is mind-boggling to me. Even in cases that may be somewhat more morally ambiguous, the show draws absurd moral equivalencies. Whether or not Snow should have killed Cora in the way that she did, there is no comparison between that and even the least of Regina's crimes. But this show actually seems to think that not only Snow's killing of Cora, but Ava telling Leopold the total and complete truth about Cora and then being nasty to her meaningfully complicates the Charming family's status as "the good guys" in this story.

I'm not going to go on, as this is long enough, but I think this warped morality winds up infecting a lot of plotlines on this show, because it makes the writers incapable of knowing when they're having a character crossing a moral event horizon or when they're having a character be appropriately flawed. Hence things like the eggnapping, which I don't believe Charming and Snow would ever have done, or even some of the problems with Rumple's story, in which they almost had a great shades of grey character, but in part ruined it by having him commit some of his worst acts  after what had been a pretty credible redemption arc in S3, and a less-credible but still-there one in S5. It is hard to watch the genuinely moving scene at Bae's grave when you consider that he's going to be willing to kill Bae's true love and the mother of his child the following season. 

Ultimately, the false equivalencies have trivialized real evil to the point where I don't think the show can even recognize what it is.

[KingOfHearts]

Holy crap, @companionenvy. That's probably the best description of Regina's redemption arc I've ever read on these boards.

[companionenvy]

6 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

Holy crap, @companionenvy. That's probably the best description of Regina's redemption arc I've ever read on these boards.

*Blushes*. I was hesitant to even post, because it was so long, but I really needed to vent! But I posted here in part because in my five minutes in this fandom, I've seen amazing posts on Regina by Shanna Marie and others, whereas most of the internet seems to buy Regina as a "complex" character simply on the basis of Lana Parilla's excellent acting. 

[tennisgurl]

Wow @companionenvy that was awesome and so comprehensive, and nails some of my biggest issues with Regina and her so called "redemption arc". *starts slow clap*

[daxx]

1 hour ago, companionenvy said:

I think this warped morality winds up infecting a lot of plotlines on this show, because it makes the writers incapable of knowing when they're having a character crossing a moral event horizon or when they're having a character be appropriately flawed

Exactly, I love your entire post and agree 100%.

[Rumsy4]

1 hour ago, companionenvy said:

Ultimately, the false equivalencies have trivialized real evil to the point where I don't think the show can even recognize what it is.

This is an excellent summation of the core problem with the show's morality. Seriously, welcome aboard @companionenvy. It's great to hear the thoughts of someone who has binged the show this late in the game. Sometime I wonder how much my perspective have been affected by watching and discussing the show in real time. We are planning to do a re-watch of the series on this board soon after the end of Season 7. You're welcome to join us!

1 hour ago, companionenvy said:

whereas most of the internet seems to buy Regina as a "complex" character simply on the basis of Lana Parilla's excellent acting. 

It really depends on which corner of fandom you stumbled across. It tends to be quite inflexible. 

[companionenvy]

25 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

We are planning to do a re-watch of the series on this board soon after the end of Season 7. You're welcome to join us!

Ooh - so glad to hear this! I'd love to take part. 

[KingOfHearts]

45 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

We are planning to do a re-watch of the series on this board soon after the end of Season 7.

There will be no mercy. Every episode will find itself under the microscope. 

[Rumsy4]

I'm looking forward to the rewatch. I'm wiring a 50 K fanfic for the Captain Swan Big Bang, and rewatching Season 1 stuff is going to be pretty helpful. 

[Souris]

2 hours ago, companionenvy said:

Her attitude doesn't help, either. In Neverland, she admits to regretting nothing, a totally sociopathic comment presented as a kickass moment. After that, probably her worst moment is her rage at Emma for saving Marian, one of her potential victims, but even her moments of casual cruelty rankle. Plus, she develops an absurdly entitled belief that she "deserves" a happy ending - to the extent that she sees herself as a victim when obstacles to that emerge -- basically as soon as she's stopped actively murdering people

...

Essentially, Regina becomes a kind of canon-Sue, where other characters behave in ridiculously unbelievable ways to serve her story. Snow has had much of her life ruined by this woman, but as long as she's willing to be good for five minutes, she's OK with prioritizing her wants and needs over things like, you know, spending time with the daughter whose childhood she totally missed because of her. 

...

I'm not going to go on, as this is long enough, but I think this warped morality winds up infecting a lot of plotlines on this show, because it makes the writers incapable of knowing when they're having a character crossing a moral event horizon or when they're having a character be appropriately flawed. Hence things like the eggnapping, which I don't believe Charming and Snow would ever have done....

Ultimately, the false equivalencies have trivialized real evil to the point where I don't think the show can even recognize what it is.

Applause!! I want to high-five your post. You have keyed in on SO many issues with Regina's "redemption" and the godawful horrible morality of the show. There are so many problematic issues. What kept you watching in spite of this?

Edited April 5, 2018 by Souris

[Camera One]

2 hours ago, companionenvy said:

I am, believe it or not, a new watcher. I had some friends who loved the show, so I decided I would watch after it all ended (not counting the reboot-ish) and I could binge.

It's really interesting to hear the perspective from someone who marathoned the first six seasons.  I don't know if that magnifies its flaws or minimizes it... probably both.  I agree that there are definite highs to the series (even if some of them are fleeting moments).

Don't worry about essays.  We love them here in the Wretched Forest of Unfulfilled Hopes.

[Rumsy4]

A big reason for Regina's popularity is that the writing is extremely biased in her favor, and gives her PoV the most screen-time and importance. To be a fan of Emma, you have to go against the grain of the show. The writing is actually slanted against her, and makes her seem incompetent or selfish quite a lot of the time. I think in this rewatch, I'm going to focus on this particular aspect of the writing. 

Edited April 5, 2018 by Rumsy4

[tennisgurl]

I am really excited about the idea of a re-watch, I think I am going to focus on ideas that seemed to be going somewhere, and either did or did not, and how that affected the story. I might also pay attention to arcs of the supporting characters, and see if I can find anything beyond "people get their memories back" or something. 

Dont worry @companionenvy there are other parts of fandom that hasn't drank the Regina Kool Aid, it just depends on where you look. As @Rumsy4 said, a lot of people love her just because the show loves her, and they love the show. At least, thats the vibe I've gotten from a lot of people. And welcome to Wretched Forest of Unfulfilled Hopes*, glad to have you with us! 

*copyright @Camera One

[andromeda331]

5 hours ago, companionenvy said:

Okay, y'all, buckle in, because this is going to be a long one...

I am, believe it or not, a new watcher. I had some friends who loved the show, so I decided I would watch after it all ended (not counting the reboot-ish) and I could binge.

On one hand, I need to give Kitsis and Horowitz credit for an inventive idea that did, in the end, give me many hours of enjoyment. There were some real highs to this show, and I'll always appreciate that

But...I feel compelled to post because I have literally never watched anything with such absurd, out-of-whack morality. Look, I'm all about people being complicated and shades of grey. I've believed in redemption arcs for male and female characters in multiple shows, and have no trouble sympathizing with characters (redeemed or not) who have done truly appalling things. But if you're going to actually redeem someone -- not make them a villain with heart or a shades of grey magnificent bastard -- you have to make it believable. And in Regina's story, OuaT failed for me on every level.

First of all, some characters are better candidates for redemption than others. I'd say how redeemable someone is involves some calculation that weighs severity of crimes, motivation for/mindset behind crimes, and past trauma that would, not justify, but explain said crimes. On every level, Regina was a terrible choice. 

Severity of crimes - She straight up slaughtered at least a couple of villages, presumably including children. She plotted to kill an infant. She did things like randomly kill a groom on his wedding day because she was sad. Many of her crimes were deliberate and well-thought-out, giving her plenty of time to reconsider. She didn't. Even in 28 years under the curse, and after becoming Henry's mother, she was consistently raping Graham, left Belle in an insane asylum, and continued a charade in which, for instance, Jefferson was permanently separated from his beloved daughter. When Henry got old enough to realize something was wrong, she gaslighted him severely enough that S1 Henry legitimately believed his mother didn't love him, and she continued doing extremely psychologically scarring things to him once Emma came to town. In S1, she again attempted to kill Emma, knowing that Henry now loved her, framed Mary Margaret for murder, killed Graham,  put out a hit on Kathryn, and so on. And this is after 28 years in which a person with a modicum of insight and self-awareness just might take the time to reflect and take stock of her life and choices. What is more, she seemed to really, really enjoy, not just killing, but causing people emotional pain. That's a sadism I don't think we get in Hook's past, or even Rumple's, to the same degree. Hook might have casually killed someone who looked at him funny, but I don't think he would have been capable of sustained and systematic torture of anyone other than Rumple (not to mention, there's no evidence of him massacring total innocents - as we see in his murder of David's father, his "code" was flexible, but he does seem to have had some limits). Speaking of limits, it is telling that even Rumple could not have cast the Curse, because even if he had been able to rip out the heart of the thing he loved most, he wouldn't have been willing. Regina was, which says a lot about her.

Past trauma/Motivation/Mindset - Oh, boy.  I'm not going to minimize how awful Cora killing Daniel was. But - in the scheme of trauma that might plausibly explain things like serial murder - and in the context of a show in which most characters, hero and villain, have their share of trauma -- it frankly isn't enough. I'm sure growing up with Cora was no picnic, but prior to Daniel's death, Regina had been raised in a life of material comfort with a devoted father and a mother who, despite her limited capacity for love, wasn't outrageously abusive and was in fact concerned for Regina's welfare. It was  a self-interested and twisted concern, but until their goals collided, it was likely to manifest itself in at least superficial attempts at demonstrating care and affection. Certainly, as of "The Stable Boy," Regina had grown into an apparently reasonably psychologically healthy woman capable of forming loving relationships, which means that her turn to Evil Queen wasn't the end result of a hellish childhood, but a completely out of whack response to an individual tragedy. I also am less inclined to be forgiving because, even after Daniel's death, she was actually fairly well positioned to have a decent life, especially by EF standards. Leopold didn't love her, nor she him, but he was disposed to be a kind husband to her, and Snow, of course, was eager to shower her with love and adoration. And, you know, she was queen. If she's been a good one, she could have had the love of the people, too. She had a lot more good options and agency than most  of the other redeemed villains on the show.

Then, of course, there's the form her revenge took, which is so cuckoo that it destroys her as a psychologically interesting character. Blaming a ten year old for naively telling a secret for what she thought were good reasons is in fact a psychologically infantile response, let alone devoting years to trying to destroy that child's life -- and the lives of anyone who tried to aid her in the slightest way. So not only is she not a villain that thought she was acting for some greater good (often the most redeemable kind), she didn't even have a remotely sympathetic or logical goal. Bad as Rumple was, some of his worst crimes (pre-Curse) were done in the name of reuniting with Bae, while Hook's revenge quest was at least, in itself, directed against someone absolutely deserving of his hatred That doesn't justify what they did in pursuit of those goals, but it makes them a heck of a lot more potentially redeemable, for my money. And in both cases, I felt the show did a reasonable job of showing how they could have started as decent people and been brought by degrees gradually to become the men they were. In the case of Regina, I simply don't buy that any non-sociopath could take the path she took under the circumstances confronting her.

OK, so Regina wasn't a prime candidate for redemption. But I might have been able to overlook a not entirely credible transformation as part of suspension of disbelief if the writers had at least made her work for it. Instead, they (and, by extension, a lot of the characters) simply started acting like she was redeemed even as she was still showing a lack of remorse and coming very close to backsliding entirely into EQ-ville. The show was committing to a Regina redemption arc by early S-2, complete with sadface moments where we were supposed to feel bad for her that the gang was excluding her. But at the end of S2, she once again floated the idea of killing everyone in Storybrooke as long as she and Henry survived, and as late as early S4, she seriously considered killing Marian. These aren't somewhat gray actions, these are acts of downright evil that she was contemplating even as people were starting to accept her as one of the good guys.

Her attitude doesn't help, either. In Neverland, she admits to regretting nothing, a totally sociopathic comment presented as a kickass moment. After that, probably her worst moment is her rage at Emma for saving Marian, one of her potential victims, but even her moments of casual cruelty rankle. Plus, she develops an absurdly entitled belief that she "deserves" a happy ending - to the extent that she sees herself as a victim when obstacles to that emerge -- basically as soon as she's stopped actively murdering people. None of this speaks well for her redemption.

And here's the thing: I actually do think it is more realistic for "redeemed" Regina to be still capable of backsliding. The problem is the show tries to have it both ways: you can have Regina be somewhat realistic, in which case she winds up as someone who may be capable of acts of legitimate heroism, but is still often selfish and ruthless in achieving her goals, not to mention prone to more mundane nastiness,, or you can have her be a total white hat who is BFF with Snow and Emma and believes that "heroes don't kill," even in situations that would seem to justify it. You can't do both. The mass murderer doesn't get to make snarky jokes at and about her past victims and spend a lot of time whining about how she never gets her happy ending if we're to take her reformation remotely seriously. But not only are we supposed to take that reformation seriously, you get moments like Emma taking on the darkness, not because a dark-One Regina is terrifying to contemplate, but because "she's come too far" to have to cope with the darkness. And again, this is a scene that canonically takes place at most a few months after Regina has gone into a snit because Emma saved (we thought) an innocent mother who Regina was totally prepared to execute for her grand crime of not being on-board with the EQ's revenge on a child plot. Essentially, Regina becomes a kind of canon-Sue, where other characters behave in ridiculously unbelievable ways to serve her story. Snow has had much of her life ruined by this woman, but as long as she's willing to be good for five minutes, she's OK with prioritizing her wants and needs over things like, you know, spending time with the daughter whose childhood she totally missed because of her. 

To make matters worse, for all its vaunted commitment to seeing past black and white, the show is in other respects absurdly simplistic in its morality, often in ways that amount to a gaslighting of its good characters, especially Emma. It is fine for 11 year old Henry to be adamant that heroes don't kill, but the fact that a show written by adults seems actually to believe that, for instance, Emma killing a woman who was, to all appearances, quite possibly about to kill her son is a sign of darkness and potentially heart-corrupting is mind-boggling to me. Even in cases that may be somewhat more morally ambiguous, the show draws absurd moral equivalencies. Whether or not Snow should have killed Cora in the way that she did, there is no comparison between that and even the least of Regina's crimes. But this show actually seems to think that not only Snow's killing of Cora, but Ava telling Leopold the total and complete truth about Cora and then being nasty to her meaningfully complicates the Charming family's status as "the good guys" in this story.

I'm not going to go on, as this is long enough, but I think this warped morality winds up infecting a lot of plotlines on this show, because it makes the writers incapable of knowing when they're having a character crossing a moral event horizon or when they're having a character be appropriately flawed. Hence things like the eggnapping, which I don't believe Charming and Snow would ever have done, or even some of the problems with Rumple's story, in which they almost had a great shades of grey character, but in part ruined it by having him commit some of his worst acts  after what had been a pretty credible redemption arc in S3, and a less-credible but still-there one in S5. It is hard to watch the genuinely moving scene at Bae's grave when you consider that he's going to be willing to kill Bae's true love and the mother of his child the following season. 

Ultimately, the false equivalencies have trivialized real evil to the point where I don't think the show can even recognize what it is.

Welcome! Very well said!

[andromeda331]

7 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Going back a few days to hit some points that have been stewing ...

That was an example I was thinking of in terms of how they could have had fun with the premise. Hook would have been the ideal character to do that stuff with because he didn't get the memory download, and Colin played it beautifully when they remembered that Hook was a fish out of water. There was the Jello stuff at the hospital (both the outtake from season 2 and the mention when he visited Neal in 3B), the "Emma button" on his phone and him trying to explain a cell phone to Elsa when he barely understood it, and referring to the phone as a "talking phone." But there were too many opportunities that they just blew, like us not getting to see him trying to find things in New York, either in 2B or the 3B premiere. Or when they completely forgot that he didn't have the memory download, like when he was the one to quip about the irony of the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming thinking the Wicked Witch was fictional. He would have no reason to know that "Snow White" was anything other than the name of the princess. Then there was the way he snarked at Zelena about how they were in Storybrooke, so she could have used the phone to talk to him instead of having Rumple kidnap him -- but then in 4A they had fun with the "Emma button" stuff and him not seeming to truly understand a phone.

Even if Hook's a "never let 'em see you sweat" kind of guy who would pretend he knew more than he actually understood, it would have been fun to see him trying to figure things out when other characters weren't there. Even just a stack of magazines and newspapers in the cabin of the Jolly Roger would hint at how he's trying to catch up. I'd have loved to see the equivalent of Cyrus's light switch moment for him. Even if he wasn't marveling at the technology, wouldn't he be curious about it? I could imagine that a navigator would totally geek out over the GPS feature on his talking phone. He'd be calculating courses to walk across town, just because he could.

I would gripe about him not only knowing the concept of "dating" but also knowing what's common and expected for a date in our world without us seeing the stack of Cosmopolitan magazines he got from the library for research, but they had Belle talking about dating while living in the fairytale world, so whatever.

At the very beginning of the series, it seemed like they were going for the concept that the fairy tale world functioned by black-and-white fairy tale rules, so in that world there were heroes and villains, and villains couldn't have happy endings. The whole idea behind the curse was to go to our world, which is a shades of gray kind of place with no hard-and-fast rules about outcomes for heroes and villains. It was a place where the Evil Queen might be able to have a happy ending. When they showed her casting the curse, wasn't that what she said to all the other villains gathered around? And I think there was voiceover narration saying something to that effect at the beginning of at least the first few episodes. That would have been an interesting idea to explore, that there was something about that world that made things come out like a fairy tale, but those restrictions were gone in our world, and there was therefore no guarantee that the good guys would win or that the villains couldn't win. It also made the curse make more sense if Regina wasn't just punishing her enemies by making them live mildly dissatisfying lives in a world with indoor plumbing but rather was taking her enemies to a place where she had a chance to defeat them (though then there wouldn't be much need for the freezing in time or the memory part of the spell, other I guess than Regina being lazy and not wanting to have to fight her enemies). But instead, they doubled down even more on that heroes vs. villains thing and were even more black and white than any fairy tale, even while making the villains worse than they ever were in the stories.

I loved those moments and they were always so fun. Hearing Hook's opinion of jello and explanation for a cellphone were fun. That's kind of one of the big points to have fairytale characters in our world. To see them experience it.  Rumple's fish out of water scenes at the airport. That's what also made Emma fun watch her reactions to everything fairytale. Her reactions to being in Storybrooke and different places, her skeptical at Henry's stories, her confusion when David waking up when Mary Margaret read to him, seeing the dragon, all of her reactions in the Enchanted Forest. That's the fun part of landing in a different world or time. I wish they had done so much more with it. They could have used technology to get the upper hand with villains. What would they think of Disneyland and Disney World? Watching them watch movie versions of themselves Hook to see his reaction to the movie Hook.  

[KingOfHearts]

1 hour ago, tennisgurl said:

I am really excited about the idea of a re-watch, I think I am going to focus on ideas that seemed to be going somewhere, and either did or did not, and how that affected the story. I might also pay attention to arcs of the supporting characters, and see if I can find anything beyond "people get their memories back" or something. 

Especially in S1 and some of the better arcs, I'll be critiquing what may have been romanticized through rose-colored glasses. We all tend to put some of the arcs on a pedestal, but do they hold up? Are there nitpicks worth mentioning? Did the downfall of the show begin sooner than we realized? Were the cracks already in place? Stay tuned.

Unanswered questions are not always bad, as much as they cripple the show's writing. Sometimes leaving loose ends or ambiguities can create depth. It can make your viewers speculate or render theories long after the show's final episode. But in order for that to work, you need to keep the *right* mysteries. (Never something that needs to be explained in order to understand the plot.) Like everything else, the writers tend to give the worth of both worlds. They've given us flashbacks to spoon-feed past events like we're four, but there's no instruction manual for how it all even works. We need to see every time Regina went to the bathroom, but how are Thomas, Philip, and Lancelot alive? Are Greg and Whale's brother rotting to death somewhere? But then there's stuff we don't need to know and it's fine that we don't. We didn't need to expand on the Savior mythology. It was already a given that Emma was special because she was the Product of True Love (patent pending), built into the Curse, and got fetus-lobotomized. Page 23 wouldn't even bother me if it wasn't the only instance in the show where fate randomly did something with no explanation.

Yet, as it stands, we live in a world where even character motivations are too much to ask for. How did Lucy learn about the Curse years after it had been cast? Why is such in a hurry to break it?

[Rumsy4]

7 hours ago, andromeda331 said:

Watching them watch movie versions of themselves Hook to see his reaction to the movie Hook.  

Man, this was huuuuuuge missed opportunity! Emma or Henry ought to have sat him down and made him watch Peter Pan and Pirates of the Caribbean.  

7 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

Especially in S1 and some of the better arcs, I'll be critiquing what may have been romanticized through rose-colored glasses. We all tend to put some of the arcs on a pedestal, but do they hold up? Are there nitpicks worth mentioning? Did the downfall of the show begin sooner than we realized? Were the cracks already in place? Stay tuned.

I have made a ratings chart for all the seasons/half-seasons on a 10-point scale. I'm going to see how they hold up after the rewatch. It's been ages since I did a full rewatch of the show. I'm looking forward to it. 

[daxx]

I used to do a full rewatch every hiatus. I stopped after season 5, it was just too much to get through at that point. I remember struggling to get it watched the season 5 mid season hiatus. Now I just watch sporadically. Although I do still watch season 3 completely at least annually.

[Shanna Marie]

Welcome, @companionenvy! You have found your kindred spirits.

19 hours ago, companionenvy said:

I think this warped morality winds up infecting a lot of plotlines on this show, because it makes the writers incapable of knowing when they're having a character crossing a moral event horizon or when they're having a character be appropriately flawed.

And so we get the bizarre situation in which the most evil villain on the show is given the biggest pass, while others get far more punishment for lesser deeds. If you're grading villainy on the basis of body count, effect on society, validity of motivation, and sadism, it's hard to see how Regina isn't the worst villain they've faced, including the Dark One. I don't think anyone else has slaughtered villages (aside from Cora's heart-ripping fest in 2A) and destroyed a civilization in order to get back at someone who wasn't even the person who wronged her, all while cackling evilly and enjoying killing people at random. I'm not sure where Cora's vault of hearts fits into the timeline because she seems to have lived reasonably normally between the time she married Henry Sr. and the time she murdered Eva. She did seem to do a fair amount of heart ripping and beheading as Queen of Hearts, and then there was the slaughter in Haven post-curse. That probably adds up to second-worst villain. Rumple manipulated things to impact a society and occasionally indulged in small acts of cruelty that he seemed to enjoy, but he mostly tilted into full villainhood in season 4, when his scheming had nothing to do with finding his son again and everything to do with increasing his own power. And yet these are the villains who mostly seemed to get a free pass. Regina's treated like an honest-to-goodness hero, Cora got to go to heaven (with it being shown that her worst sin was keeping her daughters apart), and they're now working on helping Rumple go to the good place in the afterlife.

Meanwhile, Pan had to die, then got killed again in the afterlife. Ingrid didn't have that high an intentional body count before she sacrificed herself in order to reverse her own spell. Greg and Tamara were killed horribly (in spite of the fact that Greg was actually one of Regina's victims). Cruella had to die. Arthur was put in jail and then got killed. The Black Fairy got killed. Jekyll and Hyde got killed. There were so many lesser villains who had to die for their crimes while the worst villain on the show gets to hang out with the heroes and have the heroes cater to her every whim.

Or, as the title of the old "Morality in Storybrooke" thread went, Telling a Secret is Worse than Murder.

I came up with that Karma Kalculator formula for villain redemption a while ago (and I keep adjusting it). The current version is something like:

Outcome=(good deeds+suffering+remorse)-bad deeds

If the evil a character does is outweighed by good deeds, suffering (general suffering in life that somewhat explains (but not excuses) the evil, suffering consequences of evil deeds, and other suffering), and the remorse the character feels for the bad deeds, then we can accept a positive outcome. With Regina, her evil deeds are so great that it's hard to imagine anything balancing them out, especially given that she doesn't really show remorse other than regret that being a villain might keep her from having a happy ending, and her "suffering" is usually other people's drama that she makes about her. Her number has to be negative, but her outcome is overwhelmingly positive

On the other hand, Hook's redemption seems to work because karma follows him around. For each bad deed we saw him do, there was almost immediately some kind of karmic smackdown -- he menaced Belle and got beaten by Rumple, he shot Belle and was immediately hit by a car, he tried to kill Rumple and was immediately taken prisoner by Greg and Tamara. He had to give up his ship. He got cursed by Zelena. When he didn't tell Emma right away, he was nearly drowned. And then there were all the deaths. That made the father murder plot fall flat because what can David say when he's already killed the guy (in the AU) and Hook has already been killed defending David's wife?

But, yeah, telling someone about a conversation you overheard that involves him being taken advantage of by someone you've never met is a sign of true darkness.

[Rumsy4]

18 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Outcome=(good deeds+suffering+remorse)-bad deeds

If the evil a character does is outweighed by good deeds, suffering (general suffering in life that somewhat explains (but not excuses) the evil, suffering consequences of evil deeds, and other suffering), and the remorse the character feels for the bad deeds, then we can accept a positive outcome.

If we ignore this formula and go by Christian morality, all one needs to do to be redeemed is repent of one's sins and accept Christ as the savior. And then, start living a new life. We cannot apply this religious philosophy to OUAT because the concept of the savior is different in the Show from Christianity. The problem, we still don't actually know what being a savior means. Does the magical world have religious systems? Where does Greek mythology fit in? Do people pray? Other than Merlin, we haven't seen anyone do so.

Going by the Underworld arc, there is a sort of limbo for dead people, and then people move on to either the good place or the bad place (thanks, The Good Place). Some people fall into the River of Lost Souls, and their fate is unknown. The only criterion on whether a person goes to the good or bad place seems to be a vague rule about resolving "unfinished business". 

So, why bother being "good"? What does being "good" or "bad" even mean in this Universe? Henry keeps claiming that "Heroes don't kill", but who says so? This is not some kind of nordic morality where heroes get to a special place after death. The Afterlife seems an equal opportunity venue. Why bother to not commit murder, if it is meaningless in the determining your ultimate fate?

Edited April 5, 2018 by Rumsy4

[KingOfHearts]

21 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

If we ignore this formula and go by Christian morality, all one needs to do to be redeemed is repent of one's sins and accept Christ as the savior. And then, start living a new life. We cannot apply this religious philosophy to OUAT because the concept of the savior is different in the Show from Christianity. The problem, we still don't actually know what being a savior means. Does the magical world have religious systems? Where does Greek mythology fit in? Do people pray? Other than Merlin, we haven't seen anyone do so.

The show's universe lacks religion or any standard for morality. There's a bunch of rules like "heroes don't kill", "heroes always help those in need", etc. but where do they come from? There's Greek gods in this world, and even temples for them in the Enchanted Forest, but we've never actually seen it affect anyone's beliefs. The most we get is "oh my gods" and a random bishop in Snowing's wedding. It's obvious religion exists, but it never affects anyone's motivations or principles. That's just poor worldbuilding.

Quote

If the evil a character does is outweighed by good deeds, suffering (general suffering in life that somewhat explains (but not excuses) the evil, suffering consequences of evil deeds, and other suffering), and the remorse the character feels for the bad deeds, then we can accept a positive outcome. With Regina, her evil deeds are so great that it's hard to imagine anything balancing them out, especially given that she doesn't really show remorse other than regret that being a villain might keep her from having a happy ending, and her "suffering" is usually other people's drama that she makes about her. Her number has to be negative, but her outcome is overwhelmingly positive

What it all comes down to is whether or not is feels good. Regina wouldn't have a chance in hell to redeem herself in real life, but on TV, she could have gotten away with it if she showed true remorse, had at least *some* consequences, and didn't flip-flop. Most audience members could turn the other way if she showed any sign in her heart of truly wanting to change, and not just for the reward. You know why Regina sucks? Because she doesn't care about anyone unless it affects herself in some way. We can forget the mass murder, since this is fantasy, if she displayed any real repentance.

Edited April 5, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[Shanna Marie]

19 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

If we ignore this formula and go by Christian morality, all one needs to do to be redeemed is repent of one's sins and accept Christ as the savior. And then, start living a new life. We cannot apply this religious philosophy to OUAT because the concept of the savior is different in the Show from Christianity. The problem, we still don't actually know what being a savior means. Does the magical world have religious systems? Where does Greek mythology fit in? Do people pray? Other than Merlin, we haven't seen anyone do so.

Hook once referred to needing to prepare his soul for the afterlife, which, to me, sounds like something that would involve prayer. Since he said he'd need a lot of time, I guess that prayer would involve confession. Weirdly, his redemption arc does seem to skew most closely to the Christian morality, in that he recognized that he'd sinned and repented of his sins, then began living a new life. There wasn't a Christ figure for him to accept, but he did get literally born again when Zeus brought him back to life. Regina changed her behavior, but she never really seemed to acknowledge and repent of her sins. Even when she was warning Drizella against casting the curse, it was more because it wouldn't make her happy than because it was the wrong thing to do.

They certainly believe in an afterlife -- especially since they've now actually visited it. Rumple is looking to die so he can be reunited with Belle, and Hook once goaded Rumple to kill him so he would be reunited with Milah. But their version of the afterlife is as screwy as the rest of their morality, since it seems like the deciding factor of whether you're stuck in something like Purgatory or whether you get to go to "heaven" is whether or not you have unfinished business. That would mean that a murderer who'd completed all the kills he wanted to make might go directly to his final destination, while his victim, who got cut down with no time to prepare, might get stuck in the Underworld. There was no clear sign about who got to go on to which place. It didn't seem like it was a heaven or hell, in spite of the imagery of an upward slope to a shining light place or a drop to a place full of flames. The "test" seemed to be that if you tried to move on but hadn't really resolved things, that was what would send you to "hell," while resolving things would send you to "heaven." Cora may have been a mass murderer, but once she resolved her business of dealing with her daughters, she got to go to "heaven." Meanwhile, Aunt Em and Milah had their souls obliterated.

With good and bad not meaning anything for their afterlife, it's no wonder their morality is so screwy. There's no reward or punishment for being good or bad. It all comes down to a person's internal moral compass and what society will accept, and what society will accept seems to be based on who you're related to.

[companionenvy]

37 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

And so we get the bizarre situation in which the most evil villain on the show is given the biggest pass, while others get far more punishment for lesser deeds.

You know, I wouldn't actually mind if it was just a matter of people not getting their just desserts. Frankly, while I love Hook, there's nothing just about the fact that he gets his happy ending and David's father never gets a chance to return home and become a better man. People often don't get what they deserve out of life, and I'm fine with  television shows reflecting that.

The issue, for me, is whether or not the characters and/or writers give appropriate moral weight to various actions. One of the differences between Hook and Regina is that Hook doesn't really think he deserves a happy ending. Post-Underworld, he's (rightfully) willing to fight for one; that's the whole point of what he learns in The Brothers Jones. At a certain point, if you're going to continue existing, you have to forgive yourself at least enough to move on. If fate, or grace, or whatever has given you a second chance, you thank Zeus for it and take it, and atone insofar as it is possible for your past by being that better self. And, as I said before, Hook's crimes, while serious enough to merit at least a life sentence many times over, don't hold a candle to Regina's.

Plus, Killian's redemption is more consistent, and it is more believable that it would be accepted by our core characters given their experiences with him. Basically, once he turns in S3, Hook remains pretty much a clear white hat - all of the sketchy things he does are when he is under the influence of something or someone else, but his default mode has been firmly switched to "save Emma and her loved ones." Arguably, this makes him a less interesting character than he might have been had he stayed more ambiguous, but it is necessary if we're going to accept him and Emma winding up together: Emma is not going to and should not accept a killer with layers. For their relationship to work, he has to be well and truly repentant and reformed. And, of course, Killian hadn't spent decades on a mission against Emma and her family. He was Cora's henchman in S2, but after that, he repeatedly risked everything to save the various members of the Charming Clan, up to and including losing his own life. Once David found out that Killian had killed his father, it was only after he had built up tons of credibility, to the extent that it actually wasn't believable to think that David and/or Emma would reject him over this. 

By contrast, Regina remains relentlessly self-pitying, and then, having done more evil deeds, most of it targeted directly against the Charmings, and sacrificed far less in atonement, and with much more backsliding in the process,  is not only welcomed into the fold, characters pay excruciating attention to her feelings, wants and needs. Like, I can live with circumstances turning out in such a way that The Snow Queen has to die and Regina gets to live; I can't get behind Regina being deemed a fit co-parent of Henry's within months of her trying to kill his entire biological family. The show could have built a complex dynamic between Henry and Regina that acknowledged their past as both mother and son AND as abuser and victim; instead, they jettisoned that for "Henry has Two Mommies." 

In the case of Rumplestiltskin, who is, I think, a much more convincingly complex character than Regina, we again run into this problem in his relationship with Belle. One of the things that works for me about Rumple is that he knows he's a villain. He doesn't feel entitled to anyone's love except for Bae's - he's willing to do anything to convince Belle to stay with him, but I don't think he believes he fundamentally deserves her love. The problem is that the writers apparently see RumBelle as a great love story. I watched the clips from Season 7 where we see the end of their story, and it was genuinely touching, but the fact that Belle wound up with baby-stealing Rumplestiltskin in the first place, let alone kept going back to him after everything he had done over the course of the show, and that this wasn't presented as Stockholm Syndrome but as a screwed up but loving endgame relationship is a real problem. See above re: killer with layers. It is fine to have one on your show, but then you can't also present him as a credible romantic partner for an emotionally healthy person. 

[KingOfHearts]

You could fix about twenty problems if the characters reacted to each other believably. A lot of points would be scored in Regina and Rumple's favor if the other characters could be mistrusting and disgusted by their behavior consistently. Hook and Zelena worked as redeemed villains not just because they want to change, but because they weren't insta-accepted with open arms straight out of the gate. You could sympathize with their efforts to prove themselves because there were obstacles. They had agency. When a (good or trying to become good) character encounters hurdles, they should be actively trying to overcome them with their own choices. They shouldn't be trying to cheat the system by walking around it. When Regina is faced with an inconvenience, she's always quick to blame someone else. She's that person who always demands to speak with the manager, no matter how trivial the issue is. Rumple, on the other hand, continues his dirty work while deceiving others into thinking he's doing the right thing. Meanwhile, Hook always does something proactive to make amends with whatever skeleton has jumped out of his closet. Zelena has been known to take action as well, such as sacrificing her magic or putting a foot forward to befriend her sister. 

To put it simply, when Regina or Rumple get kicked in the face, they're prone to rip the other person's heart out. But when Hook or Zelena do, they're more keen to turn the other cheek. That's why I prefer to root for them, because they're closer to the person I would like to be. R&R are that part of my brain that whines about how life is unfair. From my own personal experience, I've learned that nobody likes that kind of attitude. They may give you a pat on the shoulder initially, but eventually they'll get tired of it.

Edited April 5, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[CCTC]

32 minutes ago, companionenvy said:

 the fact that he gets his happy ending and David's father never gets a chance to return home and become a better man. 

While they did not have the Hook murders David's father story developed at the point of the underworld arc, you think they would have had one of the four dead parents of Chamring/Snow make an appearance.  They could have skipped the episode of Regina's horse.  I guess David did have the episode with his brother.  Although I felt they largely did that to have the Cruella scenes and to do cute Patty Duke twin faking identity type scenes, and any issues were resolved in a rushed fashion. 

On a superficial note, I kind of wish they would have gone all out on James and Cruella causing havoc in Story Brooke Hell.  They probably would have been more interesting as the main antagonists than Hades and would have had some more history with the characters.  Of course then we would have missed the epic love of Zelina and Hades (who might have forever tainted any specialness the true love's kiss had left)

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, companionenvy said:

You know, I wouldn't actually mind if it was just a matter of people not getting their just desserts. Frankly, while I love Hook, there's nothing just about the fact that he gets his happy ending and David's father never gets a chance to return home and become a better man. People often don't get what they deserve out of life, and I'm fine with  television shows reflecting that.

The Karma Kalculator is an imperfect tool that's more about how audiences feel about the outcome for a character, and it really only works for major characters we have reason to care about. We're less likely to have strong feelings either way over whether this one-shot character got justice. In the real world, the best-case scenario for even a reformed Hook would be that he becomes a model inmate in the maximum-security prison, the kind who devotes his life sentence to getting a law or counseling degree and helping other prisoners get their acts together. In fiction in a fairy tale type society, we don't feel quite so bad about him having a decent outcome in spite of his crimes because we've seen him do some pretty incredible good deeds, we know he feels bad about his bad deeds and knows he was wrong to do them, and he's gone through enough bad stuff to feel like maybe there's a bit of justice in him having a decent outcome with love, a wife, a baby on the way, and some degree of acceptance from the community. The problem with Regina is that her life has never been all that bad. The really awful things that have happened to her actually happened to other people and she felt bad about them. All the time, she's lived in a mansion or castle with jewels and fine clothes. She didn't really give anything up or lose anything. She's never said she was wrong to target Snow the way she did and acts offended if anyone mentions her past bad deeds. We've never had a sense of her feeling guilt, and she acts like she's entitled to have a positive outcome. All that means there's not a lot to counter her bad deeds, so it's hard to feel like her outcome is at all right -- especially when the other characters act like her outcome is perfectly okay.

The David's father's murder plot is a perfect example of them not seeming to pay attention to what they've already created for their characters. If they absolutely had to go there to generate drama, they did it wrong. We've had at least two episodes about Hook being overly invested in his reputation as a pirate, in which he made the wrong choice because he wanted to save face and ensure that other people saw him as a terrible pirate. This is not a person who's going to murder a witness so that no one will know who was responsible for a crime (especially when he lives in Neverland most of the time and is out of reach of the king). But they did have a father who had sold his son, something we know is a hot-button trigger for Hook. It would have been totally in character for Hook to be all ready to let the king's men's prisoner go until the man happened to let slip about his mission to get back the son he sold, and then Hook snaps and kills him. And that would have made things even more complex between him and David, if the killing wasn't just a random murder, but was done, in a way, on behalf of the sons this father had failed.

2 hours ago, companionenvy said:

I can't get behind Regina being deemed a fit co-parent of Henry's within months of her trying to kill his entire biological family.

Not to mention Henry almost dying because he ate a poisoned tart baked by Regina in an effort to kill Emma. Almost poisoning your kid (even if the poison was meant for someone else) is pretty much a clear-cut case of losing all custody.

2 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

You could fix about twenty problems if the characters reacted to each other believably. A lot of scores would be scored in Regina and Rumple's favor if the other characters could be mistrusting and disgusted by their behavior consistently. Hook and Zelena worked as redeemed villains not just because they want to change, but because they weren't insta-accepted with open arms straight out of the gate.

I think that's the main thing. They went so quickly from Regina trying to murder the whole town to hailing her help, specifically, in saving Henry and her moving into the palace with the Charmings (I think they were in Neverland about a week). Not to mention Emma inviting her to the potluck right after being in the Enchanted Forest and seeing the havoc she caused, which happened right after Henry nearly died because Regina tried to poison Emma. Or Emma returning from the time travel and seeing Regina at her worst, torturing Marian and executing Snow, and being instantly not only okay with Regina, but forcing Marian to meet her and talking about how much she's changed. I'd think most people would have been a bit uncomfortable with Regina after seeing all that and certainly wouldn't have forced her victim to chat with her. David's treatment of Hook is only irksome because he keeps reverting after changing his mind and because he doesn't seem to have similar problems with people who've caused even more harm. It makes sense for David to not be keen on Hook. It doesn't make sense for David to be harder on Hook than he is on Regina, Rumple, or Neal.

[tennisgurl]

3 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

There's a bunch of rules like "heroes don't kill", "heroes always help those in need", etc. but where do they come from? There's Greek gods in this world, and even temples for them in the Enchanted Forest, but we've never actually seen it affect anyone's beliefs. The most we get is "oh my gods" and a random bishop in Snowing's wedding.

I always thought this was a missed opportunity to do some interesting world building with the EF, or with any of the other lands nearby. There seems to be some kind of religious system, and people have churches and concepts like an afterlife and a soul, but it never gets fleshed out at all, and we have no idea if any of that affects anyone. I thought originally (like a fool!) that it would be an interesting thing for the fairies in Storeybrooke to have to deal with, being nuns with their cursed memories, and magical creatures in their actual lives. Do they still remember their Catholic beliefs as nuns, or does that conflict with them having magic? Or if that all just in their memories, and is abandoned as soon as they know who they really are? Because they at least have Bishops in the EF, and temples to the Greek Gods at least, so its not like religion is a new concept for them. But, alas, that was not meant to be. I guess thats another instance of "who wants to watch people to dishes?" or something. 

[companionenvy]

6 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

But they did have a father who had sold his son, something we know is a hot-button trigger for Hook. It would have been totally in character for Hook to be all ready to let the king's men's prisoner go until the man happened to let slip about his mission to get back the son he sold, and then Hook snaps and kills him. And that would have made things even more complex between him and David, if the killing wasn't just a random murder, but was done, in a way, on behalf of the sons this father had failed.

Wow, that's a fantastic idea! Goes to show how much thought went into the writing of what actually happened on screen...