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

[Inquirer]

4 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Oh, I really laughed out loud at this one.  

Here it is, btw, the line in question is on Page 34 . 

Also, Graham was meant to be Sherlock Holmes in this draft, hence the emphasis on him as British, the love of pixie sticks, the "pounding on pavement" line, etc.

[Shanna Marie]

Some rewatch thoughts that span the series as a whole:

Regina might possibly be the most evil villain in the entire series. Some villains are willing to kill their enemies to achieve their goals. Worse villains are willing to kill random other people, people they neither love nor hate. But you've got to be pretty awful to be willing to kill or hurt the people you love to get what you want. If a villain kills a beloved family member in her second episode, you know you're dealing with a nasty piece of work. And it wasn't even a case of her being angry at him, him having been abusive, or anything like that. The fact that the curse worked was proof that her father was the person she loved most, and she was willing to murder him.

So, the most vicious villain in the series is the one who not only survived, but was "redeemed," and ended up being crowned queen of the universe.

I'm not sure the writers really understood what being a bail bondsperson is about. It seems like Emma is mostly a bounty hunter/skip tracer, since she talks about how her job is finding people, and she even mentions that she gets paid by the person rather than being on salary. But she also talks about how she put up the bail money, so is she a one-woman shop, providing the bail and tracking down the people who skipped out? Given the Cleo flashback, she's only been doing this for a couple of years. Where did she get the capital to be able to pay bail?

It seems like the hope speeches come from the Mary Margaret side of the we are both personality. That might actually make Snow make a lot more sense if you look at it that way. Snow was a cynical pessimist, while Mary Margaret was the optimist. When she has both personalities in her, that makes her all over the map.

[Inquirer]

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Regina might possibly be the most evil villain in the entire series. Some villains are willing to kill their enemies to achieve their goals. Worse villains are willing to kill random other people, people they neither love nor hate. But you've got to be pretty awful to be willing to kill or hurt the people you love to get what you want. If a villain kills a beloved family member in her second episode, you know you're dealing with a nasty piece of work. And it wasn't even a case of her being angry at him, him having been abusive, or anything like that. The fact that the curse worked was proof that her father was the person she loved most, and she was willing to murder him.

So, the most vicious villain in the series is the one who not only survived, but was "redeemed," and ended up being crowned queen of the universe.

I dunno, given the litany of horrible things Rumple did to both his wives and both his sons, plus his grandson and extended family, she's got some serious competition.

[Shanna Marie]

3 hours ago, Inquirer said:

I dunno, given the litany of horrible things Rumple did to both his wives and both his sons, plus his grandson and extended family, she's got some serious competition.

The thing with Rumple is that he acted out of anger or fear. He killed Milah because he was actually angry at her for her betrayal. He let Bae go out of fear and felt awful about it. He manipulated and lied to Belle, but he tried to protect her from harm by others. The chilling thing about Regina is that she killed her father just because that was necessary to get what she thought she wanted, not because she was mad at him or because he'd wronged her, and she continued to feel that what she did to him was entirely justified and necessary.

Not that either of them are real prizes. But with Regina, her mission statement really is "The only happy ending will be mine."

[companionenvy]

3 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

The thing with Rumple is that he acted out of anger or fear. He killed Milah because he was actually angry at her for her betrayal. He let Bae go out of fear and felt awful about it. He manipulated and lied to Belle, but he tried to protect her from harm by others. The chilling thing about Regina is that she killed her father just because that was necessary to get what she thought she wanted, not because she was mad at him or because he'd wronged her, and she continued to feel that what she did to him was entirely justified and necessary.

Not that either of them are real prizes. But with Regina, her mission statement really is "The only happy ending will be mine."

That's true of the incidents you mention, but Rumple committed plenty of crimes - and was the instigator behind plenty of Regina's -- in service of his goal of getting to the LWM to reunite with Bae. That's an inherently more sympathetic goal than "I want everyone to hurt as much as I'm hurting," but it is still pretty cold-blooded.

He also committed some murders that were neither goal-oriented or impulsive, but what I would categorize as sadistic, aka the least forgivable kind. When we see him, in his early DO years, terrorizing people just for looking at Bae funny, that's not out of blind rage or perceived necessity. He simply takes pleasure in exerting power over people. 

That being said, I still tend to agree with you that Regina  is worse, just for different reasons. First of all, while the DO curse is not a total excuse by any means - especially given that it was a curse he took willingly on himself, twice -- it is clear that it supernaturally amplifies your inherent darkness to the point where you do things you wouldn't have done otherwise. So while Rumple had free will and could have made better choices even as the DO (Emma was not on the same planet as he was in terms of evil, and Hook, after the initial jump off the deep end, was willing to kill himself to make up for what he had done and end the darkness within about a day of finding out he was the DO), I do think it has to be factored in. 

In addition, Rumple had, IMO, a psychologically complex and discernible reason to wind up as someone with a pathological need for power and minimal concern for others. That doesn't mean it is justifiable, of course, especially as Rumple is in part to blame for many of the things that have gone wrong in his life, but it is easier for me to see him as someone warped by experience than as a total sociopath. Whereas while Cora may have been abusive, Regina's early life does not seem to have been one marked by powerlessness and rejection by others. At the point at which she becomes evil, she's the freaking queen; once she kills Leopold and takes the throne, she's the sole ruling power in her realm. And unlike Rumple, who faces total social rejection for what was essentially an act of weakness, the only reason Regina is being rejected by everyone is BECAUSE she's doing evil things. "I have no empathy for other people because I'm hurting and also, they like Snow better, especially since I slaughtered a bunch of them" is different from "I have no empathy for other people because basically everyone I know has permanently and often cruelly withdrawn from me because of a one-time act of cowardice."

I will say that once we hit S4, I think the equation may change, because at that point, Rumple spills over into pure megalomania territory even though he has married Belle and, given his heroism in killing Pan, is in a position to find acceptance from the town, which includes his own grandson. Even without being welcomed into the family, he's not a pariah at this point. Even with the background of having been imprisoned and tortured by Zelena, Rumple is just too bad, and too gleeful about it, for me not to consider his plans in S4 a major line crossing moment. 

[andromeda331]

4 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

The thing with Rumple is that he acted out of anger or fear. He killed Milah because he was actually angry at her for her betrayal. He let Bae go out of fear and felt awful about it. He manipulated and lied to Belle, but he tried to protect her from harm by others. The chilling thing about Regina is that she killed her father just because that was necessary to get what she thought she wanted, not because she was mad at him or because he'd wronged her, and she continued to feel that what she did to him was entirely justified and necessary.

Not that either of them are real prizes. But with Regina, her mission statement really is "The only happy ending will be mine."

Also Rumple regretted what happened with Bae immediately. Regina has never regretted anything that she's done or murdering her father. Rumple wanted the Curse cast and broken so he could find his son. Regina wanted it cast for herself and for revenge. I was more sympathetic to Rumple because his regretted letting Bae go. Everything he did was to find Bae. Nothing Regina ever did was for anyone but herself. Hansel and Gretel? She sent them into the Blind Witch's like she had sent other children. After they got her the apple back she separated them from their father out of spite because they rejected living with her. Owen? Snow. The bride? Villages? Entire lands cursed most she probably never even met. There's a long list of horrible things she did to other people and all for the same reason. For herself.  

[Rumsy4]

6 hours ago, companionenvy said:

Rumple had, IMO, a psychologically complex and discernible reason to wind up as someone with a pathological need for power and minimal concern for others.

This is what made Rumple such a compelling character in earlier seasons. He was one of my favorite characters in earlier seasons. Too bad he lost all nuance since S4. 

[Shanna Marie]

One thing that really struck me from watching the first two episodes is that I wish we'd had the series that was promised by those episodes. They strayed pretty far from that premise. In those episodes, the idea is that these fairy tale characters are real people who aren't like the Disney icons. They're more complex than that. They have deep feelings and conflicts. In later seasons, they adhered to the Disney iconography, or else just the superficial presentation of the characters. They divided characters firmly into "hero" or "villain" camps, without a lot of nuance. The characters' feelings were pretty much ignored in order to carry out the plot.

I've found myself pondering what the later seasons would have been like if they'd kept on in the mold of these first two episodes. Like, what would Hook have ended up being like? His character was reasonably well-rounded, for this show, but they clung to his image for far too long. I kind of feel like if he'd been given the treatment the characters in the first few episodes got, he might have initially been very Captain Hook to establish him, but his external appearance would have changed more to go with his inward changes. He wouldn't have still been wearing the same pirate outfit at the end of season 7 because it would have no longer fit his character. We'd have seen a lot more of his struggle to fit into Emma's world, and not just in a humorous sense. It would have been interesting to see him as a man in a world he didn't really understand, out of both time and place, surrounded by people who would have been foreigners to him even in his own world. Essentially, Storybrooke would have been like another Neverland to him -- perhaps less hostile, but still strange, and for much of the story, he was just as trapped there as he had been in Neverland.

I almost can't even imagine the Frozen characters fitting into what was established in the first couple of episodes, not with Disney's blessing, since it was unlikely they'd have been allowed to show them as anything but straight out of the movie.

It would have totally changed the plots if Emma and Snow had been allowed to be angry at Regina for what she did to them, if the Emma who took a chainsaw to Regina's apple tree had been the character we got throughout the series. Or if they'd really followed on with Henry the way he was in season one and the way he'd have grown up after that based on the way Regina treated him.

I've been looking at ways the story would have changed if the characters had been allowed to react like real people over in the "should have been" thread, but rewatching the first two episodes reminded me that this was the premise of the series initially, that these were real people, and so we were seeing how people really would react to those fairy tale situations.

[Camera One]

11 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

In later seasons, they adhered to the Disney iconography, or else just the superficial presentation of the characters. They divided characters firmly into "hero" or "villain" camps, without a lot of nuance.

If they had stuck to Disney, the heroes would at least have been heroes and the villains would have been despised and defeated like they deserve.  If the show had devolved to that, it would still have been better than what it became.

I think they did continue to try to put their own spin or "nuance", from Rapunzel becoming a murdering Lady Tremaine or Maleficent losing her baby to the heroes.  It's just that their attempts became an epic fail. 

[Rumsy4]

I almost feel compelled to rewrite each episode as I do the rewatch. But I already have like three WIPs. Maybe that can be a group undertaking by the forum. ;-)

[Inquirer]

10 hours ago, andromeda331 said:

Regina has never regretted anything that she's done or murdering her father.

She did actually regret murdering her father by 5x12, crying and telling him she's sorry in the Underworld.  Which is more than ever she did for Snow.

Quote

Everything he did was to find Bae. Nothing Regina ever did was for anyone but herself. 

Technically, everything Rumple did was for himself too.  Bae did not benefit from Rumple finding him, in fact he was terrified of the prospect and didn't want it.  Finding Bae was so that Rumple could feel better about himself, it wasn't some grand goal to keep Bae safe from any form of danger (which is also what he positioned his becoming the DO as, but if that was the case he could've saved Bae through controlling Zoso. Killing Zoso and taking his power was simply because Rumple desired power, thinking it would make him not be a coward anymore, with the core tragedy of his character being that it didn't. If anything, it made him more of one. He even summed it up perfectly in 7x22.)

Quote

Rumple had, IMO, a psychologically complex and discernible reason to wind up as someone with a pathological need for power and minimal concern for others.

Agreed with this comment completely. Regina's is REALLY weak by comparison, especially since she was born into power and only had one person who really hurt her (Cora). 

Edited June 4, 2018 by Inquirer

[companionenvy]

3 hours ago, Camera One said:

I think they did continue to try to put their own spin or "nuance", from Rapunzel becoming a murdering Lady Tremaine or Maleficent losing her baby to the heroes.  It's just that their attempts became an epic fail. 

ITA. The troubling thing, to me, was that I think the writers did still want to inject nuance into these situations. They just had a bizarrely out-of-whack moral sense that made them incapable of making the fine distinctions necessarily to do so credibly. There are, actually, certain lines that cannot be crossed if you want to keep your characters redeemable and/or sympathetic. Similarly, letting your heroes be flawed people shouldn't mean drawing a false equivalency between them and villains. You can't create a genuinely nuanced relationship between adult Snow and Regina if it is predicated on the idea that anything Snow (or Eva, or Leopold) did, from telling the initial lie to unspecified bratty behavior as a teen to killing Cora, actually complicates the relative moral status of the people involved. 

Even given some of the missteps in her backstory, which put her too far over the line for fully credible redemption, later seasons Regina could have developed some kind of complex, even positive relationship with Snow, Emma, and Henry. But that would have required the show acknowledging the gravity of what Regina had done, instead of engaging in a bizarre having their cake and eating in dynamic where we got more and more evidence of how horrific the EQ had been in flashbacks, but no one in the present day was permitted to have a normal emotional response to that history, and in fact continually minimize her past actions. 

Regina's the obvious example, but it comes up in smaller ways, too. Like, I think that we're supposed to see August as a "complex" character. But while ducking out on your responsibilities may make you flawed, convincing a guy to let his teenage girlfriend take the fall for his crime, and then stealing thousands of dollars of money intended for her makes you absolute trash. 

An example of a genuinely complex character, IMO, was Arthur - he did terrible things, but with some understandable motivation, and winds up making a major sacrifice (not moving on in the underworld) in order to undertake a redemption that is fitting given the nature of his crime. 

I'm not sure that any of the heroes who weren't redeemed villains achieved true complexity. Snowing's crime was so wildly OOC that it didn't actually add any texture to their personalities, and almost any time a good character did something questionable (whether a normal person would actually consider it questionable or not), they were forced to totally repudiate it as a slip into darkness/evil/whatever. Emma's time as the DO is the ultimate example of this. Genuine complexity would have been normal, non DO Emma deciding that, unlike Snow and Charming, she didn't have the luxury of being a storybook hero who always kept her hands clean - and owning the idea that sometimes she had to do something that wasn't 100% moral or comfortable in service of a larger goal. Take that concept too far, and you're a villain, but good people do sometimes have to make hard choices in situations without easy answers. Instead, Emma is a good person who has a period where she goes dark, and then once she is "back," she's unambiguously good again, and not allowed to tread in morally ambiguous waters.

Basically, in this show, nuance generally winds up meaning"I once did evil things, but now do good things" or "I generally do good things, but had a couple of lapses where I did evil things.  I'm now duly ashamed of those moments.." Whereas I think true ambiguity wouldn't require such a stark separation. An action that leads to a positive result but requires violence or deception to get there may be necessary and even heroic without being fully good or fully evil. And you can feel not-great about some of the things you had to do while still believing they were necessary and not apologizing for them. 

Oddly, the hero who maybe got closest to being allowed this kind of complexity - albeit only for one brief, shining moment -- was Belle, when Rumple basically forced her to admit that she wasn't in love with him in spite of the darkness, she was in love with him because of the darkness. But that idea never went anywhere, and at the end, Rumbelle was depicted as a positive endgame relationship in which Belle's faith in Rumple's inherent goodness was validated.

And ironically, the person who actually does get to learn a very special lesson about integrating the two sides of your personality rather than denying the "darker" parts of yourself entirely is Regina, the character who actually should be unequivocally rejecting the evil part of herself. 

Edited June 4, 2018 by companionenvy

[Inquirer]

1 hour ago, companionenvy said:

An example of a genuinely complex character, IMO, was Arthur - he did terrible things, but with some understandable motivation, and winds up making a major sacrifice (not moving on in the underworld) in order to undertake a redemption that is fitting given the nature of his crime. 

That's true. I always loved that about that last episode with him, btw....he starts off teaming up with Hook solely because Hook points out that he'll probably end up in Hell given what he has done unless he redeems himself, and Arthur wants to go to Heaven.  But as the quest goes on, Arthur starts getting really invested, to the point where he tells Hook to leave him to get dragged into the River of Lost Souls and go get the story book.  And at the end, there's a portal to Heaven right there, but he forsakes his whole original motive for this ordeal because he now realizes that he wants to KEEP redeeming himself and being a better man and king, and that the Underworld (particularly the lost souls in the river) need help from a just ruler, and so he stays behind rather than move on.  That's exactly the kind of redemption I can get behind (see also: Ingrid.)

Edited June 4, 2018 by Inquirer

[Shanna Marie]

7 hours ago, companionenvy said:

The troubling thing, to me, was that I think the writers did still want to inject nuance into these situations. They just had a bizarrely out-of-whack moral sense that made them incapable of making the fine distinctions necessarily to do so credibly.

I think a lot of it comes back to the emotional authenticity. You can't really have nuance if the characters are acting like cartoons instead of like people. For instance, the eggnapping situation. If this is a world where nuance exists, then you're probably not going to have a tree that judges people as either villains or heroes (and especially not judging a woman for the villain/hero potential of the fetus she's carrying), or if you do, then the characters are going to react very differently to it. It would be seen as a thing of wrongness. If there's nuance, then most people aren't going to freak out that their child is going to fall into either the hero or villain category. They'll realize that all people are going to fall somewhere in between, and the parents can have a lot to do with how the kid turns out. That's the reasonable emotional response, not deciding to steal a dragon egg so they can magically inject their child's darkness into it.

A big part of the problem is that they don't seem to have ever figured out how their world really worked or what they were trying to say. For the most part, in the first few episodes they seemed to be going with the idea that the fairytale characters are real people in a real world, that our tales are their history, but their history goes differently from the tales we know because they're real people who are reacting to things like real people. Later, they seem to be verging toward the Enchanted model, where the fairytale world really works like fairy tales, with instant true love, villains or heroes and nothing in between, with the villains thoroughly evil and not allowed to win while the heroes are sappy idiots who always prevail without even trying because of the force of their goodness. Really, they were already contradicting themselves in the second episode, with Regina talking to the assembled villains about going to the place where they can win and get a happy ending, which puts them in the Enchanted mode, except we never really saw what those villains did or how they lost and we didn't see them being happy in Storybrooke and didn't see how Storybrooke was a place where they could have happy endings.

So, it's really neither. It's not treating the fairy tales like they're about real people in a real place, but it's also not a goofy cartoon Enchanted world where the villains just can't win, no matter what they do. The villains actually do pretty well, from what we've seen. Rumple got ultimate power and lived in a castle for more than a century, where he was able to manipulate and profit off people. Cora got to marry a prince and got her wish of her daughter marrying a queen (and then she became a queen after she was exiled). Regina ruled the kingdom for years, living in luxury with great power and control over her enemies. Her "losing" was not being able to kill Snow. There was no reason why any villain other than Rumple and Regina would have wanted the curse cast.

Or take the concept of the True Love's Kiss. Starting later in season one, it's treated like a known trope in their world, like the first thing you try for any ailment. Later in the series, it's something very easy to come by. You can have a magical True Love's Kiss with someone you've never actually met or with someone who's using the other person. But in the pilot, in a scene that chronologically comes after later flashbacks in which a TLK is considered the obvious thing to try, Charming isn't even trying to save Snow from the sleeping curse. He just wants to say good-bye, and the dwarfs are reluctant to raise the lid of the glass coffin. But if they all know that a TLK can fix anything, you'd think Grumpy would be demanding, "Pucker up, Prince. You've got work to do here." They're all surprised when the kiss breaks the curse, and Regina is furious that her curse was broken with a kiss. So, is it a realistic world where a kiss breaking a spell is a surprise miracle, or is it a cartoon fairy tale world where the obvious first thing anyone would try is a kiss?

[Camera One]

Yeah, those examples show how inconsistent everything is in the "universe" of this show.  I didn't even think about how Charming wasn't even trying to TLK Snow in the pilot.  It's weird how Regina was surprised the Sleeping Curse broke with a kiss, because wouldn't the First Sleeping Beauty have woken up from a kiss with the exact same Curse?  

[Shanna Marie]

6 minutes ago, Camera One said:

It's weird how Regina was surprised the Sleeping Curse broke with a kiss, because wouldn't the First Sleeping Beauty have woken up from a kiss with the exact same Curse? 

We wouldn't know because they didn't bother showing that story. It's not a kiss in the original versions of the fairy tale, so maybe the curse was modified after it was broken a different way the first time. I sincerely hope that the original Sleeping Beauty wasn't awakened when the baby she gave birth to after the prince raped her unconscious body sucked the splinter from the spindle out of her finger, the way it went in the fairy tale. Then again, these writers do love their rape.

[Camera One]

Maleficent used another simple Sleeping Curse with the Younger Aurora, so maybe it was the same one?

[Shanna Marie]

8 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Maleficent used another simple Sleeping Curse with the Younger Aurora, so maybe it was the same one?

I think the one she used on Younger Aurora was the one Regina used, since Regina got it from Maleficent. At the time Regina cursed Snow, Younger Aurora was still in her coma, since she was cursed before Regina killed Leopold and she didn't wake up until after the Dark Curse. If it was the same curse, then Regina wouldn't have known that it could be broken. I wonder if Philip learned somehow about how Snow was saved, and that's how he knew about the kiss.

But they were inconsistent with the sleeping curse, given that Regina talked about the spindle being the traditional delivery method, and yet Regina gave it in an apple. I'd think that an injected poison and an oral poison would be different. And it must have been something really hard to come by, if Regina had to give up the Dark Curse to get it (but later she was able to brew sleeping curses easily), but a century earlier, apparently someone knew how to make one, since that's what happened to Brennan Jones. So it was a super-rare curse that had been used for more than a century and that was easy to whip up. I guess kind of like the Dark Curse, which was so difficult it took nine months to put together, but then Regina could just whip it up later, and then Dark Hook/Nimue was able to turn whatever Merlin was brewing into the Dark Curse by throwing in Merlin's heart (what was Merlin brewing, anyway? Would he have been brewing the Dark Curse? Why?), and still later, Regina's earlier sacrifice is enough for casting a new curse (I bet the Charmings wish they'd known that in season 3). They also changed from Regina just hurling the heart into the flames to the heart being crushed and sprinkled into the brew.

[andromeda331]

I thought Maleficent used it on Aurora's mother first but your right all Aurora said was first Maleficent went after her mother and then Aurora. She didn't say what she did to Aurora's mother. I suppose we should be happy that we didn't get to see what was Aurora's mother's "crime". I'm sure it would be right up there with Eva's crime or Snow's.  

[Camera One]

How long was Aurora The Younger asleep for?  It seems like it was early on in Regina's marriage?  

[andromeda331]

39 minutes ago, Camera One said:

How long was Aurora The Younger asleep for?  It seems like it was early on in Regina's marriage?  

Sometime before Curse started so Aurora slept for at least 28 years Philip searched for her but had to stop when the Curse hit. After it broke he started searching for her again and found her with Mulan. Come to think of it where were Aurora's parents? Were they dead? Philip doesn't mention them when he wakes her up. Aurora's confused by her castle being destroyed but doesn't ask about her parents.  

[Camera One]

5 minutes ago, andromeda331 said:

Aurora's confused by her castle being destroyed but doesn't ask about her parents.  

At its root, this show is about family.

Thanks for watching,

A&E

[Rumsy4]

2 hours ago, andromeda331 said:

After it broke he started searching for her

Actually he started searching for her once time started moving again, thanks to Emma deciding to stay in Storybrooke in the Pilot.

[KingOfHearts]

I thought Regina was surprised by Charming TLKing Snow because she had purposefully separated them by capturing him. Even when he escaped, she sent him to the Infinite-but-not-really Forest. She didn't know Rumple would be there to help him.

[Shanna Marie]

28 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

I thought Regina was surprised by Charming TLKing Snow because she had purposefully separated them by capturing him.

I thought the issue was that the sleeping curse was supposed to be unbreakable and she thought Maleficent had given her a defective curse when it could be broken. No one anticipated a TLK working. Though I think part of it was supposed to be that the kind of True Love that could break a curse was so rare that a curse that could only be broken by a TLK was essentially unbreakable. It seemed like Rumple had intervened to juice things up for Snow and Charming so that they would have that kind of magical love that would work into his plans. That was how he created the True Love potion to bring back magic.

Charming was definitely not trying to TLK Snow from the curse. There was no "I can save her!" when he asked for the coffin to be opened, and he was surprised when it worked. The dwarfs didn't expect it to work and were reluctant to open the coffin.

And yet he'd already tried to use a TLK to break the dark heart curse, and his first advice to Abigail about saving Frederick was "have you tried a True Love's Kiss?"

That's where their own lack of worldbuilding hurts them. Is this a "real" world where it's a huge shock when a kiss does break a curse, or is it a "fairytale" world where everyone knows that a TLK cures everything? If you establish that a kiss breaking a curse is unexpected, then you can't have scenes taking place before that kiss in which everyone knows that the first thing to try is a True Love's Kiss. And if you establish that the magical kind of True Love is incredibly rare and might even need a nudge or two to make it be that powerful, you can't later have random people having magical true love after one conversation. On the basis of what we saw in later seasons, Rumple didn't need to do anything. Snowing's first adventure was more than most of the later TLK couples had.

[Inquirer]

15 hours ago, Camera One said:

I didn't even think about how Charming wasn't even trying to TLK Snow in the pilot.

Even in Season 1, this ends up making no sense since Charming asks Abigail "did you try TLK" on Fredrick, so he IS aware of it.

EDIT: Ninja'd by Shanna Marie on that point. XD

Edited June 5, 2018 by Inquirer

[KingOfHearts]

Maybe Charming thought a TLK wouldn't work because Snow looked dead? I know that's stretching it.

[Camera One]

8 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

Maybe Charming thought a TLK wouldn't work because Snow looked dead? I know that's stretching it.

Maybe he didn't know Snow was Cursed?  Or did he watch her bite the apple?  He could have thought it was injected with snake venom or something?

Edited June 6, 2018 by Camera One

[Camera One]

So when all the realms were merged and brought to Storybrooke, did animals (eg. Wish Gus, Wish Jiminy Cricket) turn human?  

[ParadoxLost]

15 minutes ago, Camera One said:

So when all the realms were merged and brought to Storybrooke, did animals (eg. Wish Gus, Wish Jiminy Cricket) turn human?  

I'm assuming yes because the curse was cast again and it made them human last time.

[Camera One]

Quote

Quote

Watching Jared Gilmore as dark Henry was awesome but also super disturbing. Why did you guys decide to go so dark with him, but then still redeem him in the end?

Wow, so the interviewer seems to imply that Sir Henry, who was "so dark" because he wanted justice for his grandparents and his own ruined life, maybe should NOT have been redeemed in the end and just gotten killed off.  As opposed, of course, to said murderer of his grandparents and ruiner of his life. 

Sometimes, it seems like the reporters enable A&E's ridiculous concepts.  Wish Henry was practically a lamb compared to many of the villains on this show, and as you said, he actually had a legitimate reason for seeking revenge on Regina.  It made no sense that he would be okay with the other evil stuff Wish Rumple were doing, though, and A&E didn't even try to explain it.  And then once Regina hugged him, he instantly did a 180 and all "evil" thoughts were erased immediately.  If there was a character journey there, it was basically just whiplash.

12 hours ago, Inquirer said:

Quote

once we learned the news that we would be ending this year, we geared the end of the season to reach this point.

You did a HORRIBLE job building to this, both long-term (due to Regina's terrible quasi-redemption) and short term (HOW was the end of the season geared to reach this point? It literally comes out of nowhere.)

Agreed.  They found out in December and they could not adjust Regina's arc so the stuff in Hyperion Heights had any semblance of connectedness to their pre-determined endpoint of having her crowed Queen of All Realms?  Or give any actual reason why anyone would have wanted all the realms combined together and brought to Maine?  Was she supposedly doing a favour to everybody?  

[andromeda331]

37 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Sometimes, it seems like the reporters enable A&E's ridiculous concepts.  Wish Henry was practically a lamb compared to many of the villains on this show, and as you said, he actually had a legitimate reason for seeking revenge on Regina.  It made no sense that he would be okay with the other evil stuff Wish Rumple were doing, though, and A&E didn't even try to explain it.  And then once Regina hugged him, he instantly did a 180 and all "evil" thoughts were erased immediately.  If there was a character journey there, it was basically just whiplash.

Agreed.  They found out in December and they could not adjust Regina's arc so the stuff in Hyperion Heights had any semblance of connectedness to their pre-determined endpoint of having her crowed Queen of All Realms?  Or give any actual reason why anyone would have wanted all the realms combined together and brought to Maine?  Was she supposedly doing a favour to everybody?  

In their minds probably she did them the great favor of becoming Queen of the Realms and everyone can now be happy and feel blessed to have Regina as their Queen. In reality and ONCE reality it still makes no sense. Why would all the Realms want to be combined? Who in their right mind would vote for the Evil Queen to be their ruler after everything she did to her own people and anyone else to ticked her off? Why would Regina want to be Queen? She has zero interest in actually governing anything. I'd ask what would happen when Regina dies but A&E probably would have her being rewarded by all the Gods to be immortal because she's just that great and deserves it. At that point she'll be the Grand Supreme Goddess and every person, animal and deities will bow down to her. 

[Camera One]

Adam Horowitz liked the following tweet.  LOL.

Quote

Adam Horowitz Liked

Bitter Script Reader‏ @BittrScrptReadr 7 hours ago

Was talking pilots and failed TV series with one of the assistants and we hit on a point that needs to be drilled in more to young writers. You can have a GREAT hook for a show, but that hook cannot be the reason people stay with the show in the long run

[profdanglais]

6 hours ago, Camera One said:

Adam Horowitz liked the following tweet.  LOL.

Well, to be fair, OUAT's Hook was the reason I stayed with the show in the long run...

[Shanna Marie]

18 hours ago, daxx said:

Season 3 actually did have an overarching theme. It was about finding Home. Not just for Emma either. They had to find Henry and bring him home. Henry and Emma found a fake home in NY. After wanting to go back home to the EF in season 2 MM and David were forced back and then cast a curse to return to their new home in Storybrooke. Hook realized his home was Emma and Emma realized her Home was Storybrooke in the finale. I know they didn’t really touch on Oz properly but the original story was about a girl trying to get home.

Bringing this over from the Other Fairy Tales thread because this is no longer really about Other Fairy Tales (though the discussion stemmed from an article about Lost).

I was talking more in terms about how the series as a whole lost any kind of organizing theme after season one, not so much about individual season themes. The series needs an organizing concept, something the series is showing us about the world or people. "Home" does work pretty well as a unifying theme for season three, but there the problem is that "home" is as big, broad, and vague a theme as "hope," and I can't really tell what they're trying to say about home, just as I can't tell what they're trying to say about hope. They're not questioning the concept of hope or home, not redefining it, not reinforcing it. So, just as having characters make a lot of speeches about having hope doesn't really make hope the series theme, having a lot of storylines about home doesn't make home a real theme unless they know what they're saying about home.

This may be fodder for the "what they should have done" thread, but home would have made a good starting point for a theme, given that it's about a group of people who've been ripped away from their home world. How do you define "home"? Is it the place? Is it the people? Are they home, no matter where their world is, if they're with the people they love? Was it being ripped away from loved ones that made Curse Storybrooke not home, and it became home again once the memory curse broke and they found each other again? Can they rebuild a home in a strange world? Then it applies to the individual characters in so many ways, with Emma never having had a home and finding one, Henry trying to build his perfect home/family. Was Regina's rage really about losing the potential home she hoped to build with Daniel? Snow's real superpower seemed to be that she could create home wherever she went with the people around her. Hook's issue was that he kept finding homes, only to have them ripped away from him, until he finally snapped. He thought he wanted revenge, but what he really needed was that sense of home that he had with Milah. Rumple allowed his own home to be destroyed, and the curse was his attempt to get it back, but without realizing he could never have it if he didn't fix the things that caused his failure in the first place.

As usual, the material is there, but they never dealt with it.

[Camera One]

4 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

I'm honestly surprised they didn't push Regina even harder in the S6 finale. Other than Clone Queen and the "QUEEN" sign on the door, she was very irrelevant for the entirety of it. Since A&E thought that could've been the series finale, and they've been planning "Good Queen" for long, it's weird they waited until the end of S7 to go all horrific fanfic on everybody.

I think they found out about the Season 7 renewal early enough.  If the series had been cancelled, A&E could have done a variation of the finale from Season 7, since Wish Henry, Wish Rumple, etc. were all set up and they just needed to tack on 5-10 minutes at the end where Regina becomes the "Good Queen" of everyone.

Heck, they could still have done The Black Fairy with Amnesia Emma in Storybrooke, and The Black Fairy could have sent everyone else to the Wish Realm, where Wish Henry wanted revenge on Regina and everyone else tries to save her.  

Edited June 9, 2018 by Camera One

[andromeda331]

6 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Bringing this over from the Other Fairy Tales thread because this is no longer really about Other Fairy Tales (though the discussion stemmed from an article about Lost).

I was talking more in terms about how the series as a whole lost any kind of organizing theme after season one, not so much about individual season themes. The series needs an organizing concept, something the series is showing us about the world or people. "Home" does work pretty well as a unifying theme for season three, but there the problem is that "home" is as big, broad, and vague a theme as "hope," and I can't really tell what they're trying to say about home, just as I can't tell what they're trying to say about hope. They're not questioning the concept of hope or home, not redefining it, not reinforcing it. So, just as having characters make a lot of speeches about having hope doesn't really make hope the series theme, having a lot of storylines about home doesn't make home a real theme unless they know what they're saying about home.

This may be fodder for the "what they should have done" thread, but home would have made a good starting point for a theme, given that it's about a group of people who've been ripped away from their home world. How do you define "home"? Is it the place? Is it the people? Are they home, no matter where their world is, if they're with the people they love? Was it being ripped away from loved ones that made Curse Storybrooke not home, and it became home again once the memory curse broke and they found each other again? Can they rebuild a home in a strange world? Then it applies to the individual characters in so many ways, with Emma never having had a home and finding one, Henry trying to build his perfect home/family. Was Regina's rage really about losing the potential home she hoped to build with Daniel? Snow's real superpower seemed to be that she could create home wherever she went with the people around her. Hook's issue was that he kept finding homes, only to have them ripped away from him, until he finally snapped. He thought he wanted revenge, but what he really needed was that sense of home that he had with Milah. Rumple allowed his own home to be destroyed, and the curse was his attempt to get it back, but without realizing he could never have it if he didn't fix the things that caused his failure in the first place.

As usual, the material is there, but they never dealt with it.

This would have been so much better then what they did. 

[Camera One]

6 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I can't really tell what they're trying to say about home, just as I can't tell what they're trying to say about hope. 

That's an excellent point.  It's hard to tell what they're saying about ANYTHING, because it's often completely contradictory with double standards up the wazoo.

[Camera One]

28 minutes ago, KAOS Agent said:

I believe this episode was written by Liz Tigelaar, who was not at all interested in writing for a fantasy series but was under contract with ABC to contribute writing for whatever they wanted. I wonder if that is why the modern day stuff relationship-wise with Emma and Mary Margaret and Henry works so well. She was very comfortable writing modern dramas. Interestingly, she was the showrunner for Life Unexpected, a show about a kid who grew up in the foster system and ended up at 16 living with her birth parents. That certainly gives her a better insight into the life Emma would have lived as a child.

She also co-wrote "True North" which is also very good in the modern storyline with regards to the Emma/Snow relationship and just Emma's feelings in general about the foster system and the reality of seeing siblings potentially split up and forced into the system. I would bet that her experience writing Life Unexpected explains why things were much more serious and realistic about Emma's childhood in that episode.

I didn't know this, but losing writers like that from Season 1 definitely might explain why "kitchen sink conversations" in later seasons were so unsatisfying (when they actually existed).  The Storybrooke scenes in these early episodes do feel like an actual drama, not like a cartoony supernatural show where the characters madly run around trying to put out the latest fire.  

[Camera One]

I was listening to the Broadway Cast Recording of "Frozen" on DisneyMusic's official VEVO page on Youtube (I'm surprised they put all the tracks up there).  

Anyway, I was thinking that if they focused on Emma figuring out how to deal with her new magic, then the scene with two people on either side of a door should have been Emma (paralleling Elsa) and Henry (paralleling Anna, if Emma was afraid of hurting Henry with the magic), not Regina as Elsa and Emma as Anna.  There was a deleted scene with Snow and Elsa, so it seems like they recognized there was the possibility (which they ultimately felt was unimportant), but they could have properly explored Snowing dealing with Emma's new magic and trying to support her, but feeling helpless.  Regina being reluctant to teach Emma magic because of what she herself went through with Rumple could have been a better way to incorporate her into the narrative, instead of Emma "all I want to be is your friend".  

Edited June 9, 2018 by Camera One

[Rumsy4]

10 minutes ago, Camera One said:

instead of Emma "all I want to be is your friend".  

*I know you treat me like a piece of crap, but I want to be your doormat.

[KingOfHearts]

14 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

*I know you treat me like a piece of crap, but I want to be your doormat.

Welcome to abusive relationships. My name is Belle and I will be your tour guide today!

Edited June 9, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

22 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

*I know you treat me like a piece of crap, but I want to be your doormat.

One of my favorite new songs from Frozen Broadway Musical:

Regina?
Do you want me to be your doormat?
Come on, we should eat lasagna.
I never see you anymore
Come out the door
It's like you've gone away
I want to be best buddies
And now we're not
I wish you would tell me why!
Do you want me to be your doormat?
I'll be any type of doormat...
Go away, Emma.
Okay, bye

Regina, please... I know you're in there
People are asking where you've been
We want to be treated like crap by you
I'm right out here for you
Just let me in.
We only have each other
It's just you and me
What are we gonna do?
Do you want me to be your doormat?
We owe you for ruining our livvvvvvvvvessssssss

Edited June 9, 2018 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

Rewatching the early episodes makes it even more glaring that the super-close relationship Regina and Henry have starting in mid-season 3 is a total whitewash. Not that they couldn't have eventually developed a good relationship (though, I would hope, one that's a bit less quasi-incestuous than what we saw in season 7), but it would have taken a lot of growth and work to get to that point from where they were. There was the gaslighting and emotional abuse, when she forced his therapist to tell him he was crazy about the stories and the curse (when he was right) or when she set things up for him to hear Emma say she didn't believe him, willingly hurting him so she could win against Emma. But there was also that situation when she already felt threatened by Emma and believed she was battling Emma over who got to "win" Henry, and yet she left him alone at home on a Saturday from breakfast to 5 p.m. while she went off to rape Graham. When she said goodbye to Henry, there was no trace of affection. She was ice cold. She didn't even start to show some kind of affection to him -- starting to reach out to touch him, moving to kiss him -- and then sadly pull back after remembering that he was unhappy with her and thought she was evil. There's no indication that they ever had any kind of truly loving, close relationship. She talked about meeting his physical needs -- changing his diaper, soothing his fever -- but did she play with him? Even when she came home from an afternoon of rape, she just brought Henry's shoe to him and then left him alone in his room. There was no effort to engage him, no suggestion of doing something together that evening.

So, we had a kid she knew had no friends, and she knew he couldn't have friends because her curse froze the town in time, and he kept growing while any friends he might have stayed the same, but she also didn't try to spend time with him, not even when she was afraid of losing him. They did go through the phase of him coaching her not to be evil after the curse broke, but he didn't live with her throughout season two. He didn't interact at all with her in 3A until they rescued him from Pan, and then there was a sweet, affectionate scene with just the two of them that was utterly out of the blue because they'd never interacted like that before, at all, and then he's saying he wished he'd never brought Emma. That doesn't ring at all true when you look at his season one life. And then after he gets his memories back in 3B, he and Regina are casually talking about his homework and her boyfriend, like they've ever had that kind of relationship. This is a mother who carried on a secret rape affair while leaving her son alone at home all Saturday, forbidden to even watch TV, a mother who didn't talk to her son other than to tell him what to do. That makes everything that come afterward ring false since they didn't bother with the in-between stages that you'd expect to be needed. She would have had to learn to talk to him and listen to him and care about what he wanted or needed. She would have had to make an effort to involve herself in his life and spend time with him. We never saw that. They were just instant buddies (until she kicked him out because her boyfriend broke up with her -- but then all was back to close buddies soon afterward).

And it's interesting that the kid she could easily ditch all day later became such a center of her life that she couldn't be happy without him.

[Camera One]

19 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Rewatching the early episodes makes it even more glaring that the super-close relationship Regina and Henry have starting in mid-season 3 is a total whitewash.

I was thinking the same thing.  For a kid, Henry was also quite cold and contemptuous of Regina.  There was no inkling of any affection.  He was extremely quick to think the worst of her, in every circumstance.  I guess some might see him as an ungrateful little brat, but within the context of this story, I was more inclined to cheer on his defiance.  

As you said, the Regina/Henry relationship later in the series could have been satisfying if it had been earned.  But the way it was written (which was simply telling us so-and-so are BFFs or have the deepest mother-child bond ever), 156 hours later, I was still not convinced by any of the affection between the two characters, just like I never felt anything in scenes between Regina/Snow or Regina/Emma, since I never bought in.   So how could there be any satisfaction of everyone sitting together happily eating dinner, or everyone celebrating Regina being crowned Queen of Everything?

Edited June 10, 2018 by Camera One

[Camera One]

I was listening to part of the video commentary from "Skin Deep" with Robert Carlyle and Jane Espenson.  She was saying how it's rare to have a show with two villains and it's great and how Gold is so likeable and you want to like him.  I'm not sure that's how I personally would describe my feelings about Gold.

There was a scene with Regina and Gold in Storybrooke and Espenson said when there are two villains, you kinda think that one of them has got to be the hero.  Huh?  

I guess in the end, they're both heroes.

[companionenvy]

Yeah, no. Gold is compelling, and through some of the flashbacks Rumple arguably becomes sympathetic, but I would never call him "likeable." 

[Rumsy4]

Jane Espenson had definitely drunk the kool aid when it came to Rumple. Even in the earlier seasons, I never liked Rumple, but I did find him compelling, as @companionenvy puts it. Everytime any of the writers talk about Regina or Rumple there is a huge disconnect as to how they seem to perceive these two charatcers, and what they actually put on the screen. Did they only read twitter feedback on the characters? Positive or negative, that always tends to be extreme.

[KingOfHearts]

I haven't been very motivated to discuss or rewatch the show lately. The series finale really brought down any expectations I had. Whenever I analyze the show, I don't think of anything new any more. It all goes in circles. Maybe the rewatch will unearth some hidden nuggets of insight, but I don't feel nearly as compelled to sit myself through each episode as I did before the finale aired. I used to be engrossed in it, whether I was satisfied or angry about it, but now it's just "meh". In a way, the finale was a relief because now I can stop hoping in futility that it'll get better. I've made my peace with just how awful it is.

As a side note, it's becoming clear to me that I was never invested in Emma or the Charmings. (Unlike most on this board.) I was on the Regina train for a while, then Zelena, but I don't like what the writers did for either of those characters. I almost feel bad for how much I dislike Emma because she was once a well-written character and a lot of people really like her.

Edited June 13, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[KAOS Agent]

By the end of the show (and I consider that to be S6), I pretty much disliked all of the characters. My favorites were no longer acting like humans with real emotions and those I wasn't a fan of to begin with had become so massively disliked by me that I had a hard time watching the episodes. I certainly didn't ask for two Reginas on my screen.