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

[Camera One]

6 hours ago, Writing Wrongs said:

I don't understand why Lizard died after making her 3rd wish. 

Was it because she wished Will would feel something for her, and he felt sad because she died?  Not sure, though.  I thought Lizard's death was unnecessarily cruel especially with what Jabberwocky did afterward.

Edited September 2, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

Was it because she wished Will would feel something for him, and he felt sad because she died? 

That was it. It was one of those "be careful what you wish for" backfiring wishes. She wished that he could feel something, anything for her, and she died, so he felt sad. I don't think it fell into the category of a genie not being able to kill someone because it wasn't a wish for the genie to kill someone. It was just a backfiring on another wish.

Another of the things they did the opposite way from on the mother show: There was an aborted marriage proposal (also involving the woman answering before he got a chance to actually propose), followed by a separation, but when they were reunited and he finally got to do a real proposal, it was a grand, romantic moment, with fireworks going off in the background, and he got to make the whole speech. It wasn't a perfunctory "let's get this over with" moment.

[Camera One]

On paper, a series of stand-alone spinoff series would have been awesome.  "OUAT in Wonderland" was during Season 3.  If there was one during Season 4, 5 and 6, we would have had 3 more spinoff series.  Of course, the ironic thing was if "Wonderland" had succeeded, we would have had a second season of "Wonderland" instead of a new spinoff series.

But at the end of the day, the shoddy world-building abilities of A&E and their Writing team would have meant very little consistency between multiple spinoffs.  They couldn't be bothered to fact-check stuff within the parent show (eg. contradiction between "White Out" and "Murder Most Foul" in terms of David's backstory, which was one of the simplest out of all the main characters due to neglect).  There's no way they could have kept consistency between multiple spinoff shows.  In Season 6, they didn't even bother cross-checking with "OUAT in Wonderland" and wishes worked completely differently.

Going back to spinoff concepts, if they had run out of "worlds" to explore in spinoff, another alternative would have been to build a spinoff around a different character.  Red might have been a candidate, since they had clearly planned on giving her a bigger role in Season 2.  The problem is her backstory is pretty simple, unless a lot more happened to her as a wolf.  They could also have told more of Granny's story if they did a Red spinoff, and maybe include The Three Little Pigs.    Mulan might have been a possibility - we never saw her backstory in Fictional Ancient China... there could have been a Mulan, Aurora and Philip show since we never found out how they freed Philip from the Wraith.   Red and Mulan worked pretty well together, so they could have combined the two.  We didn't know Red's parents, so that could have potential for another mash-up.

Edited September 2, 2019 by Camera One

[legaleagle53]

10 hours ago, Camera One said:

On paper, a series of stand-alone spinoff series would have been awesome.  "OUAT in Wonderland" was during Season 3.  If there was one during Season 4, 5 and 6, we would have had 3 more spinoff series.  Of course, the ironic thing was if "Wonderland" had succeeded, we would have had a second season of "Wonderland" instead of a new spinoff series.

That was never the plan, though.  "Wonderland" was only ever intended to be a one-and-done. The next season would have taken place in Oz or Neverland or some other unexplored realm. I even seem to recall that a season set in the Star Wars universe had been under discussion.

Edited September 2, 2019 by legaleagle53

[Camera One]

47 minutes ago, legaleagle53 said:

That was never the plan, though.  "Wonderland" was only ever intended to be a one-and-done. The next season would have taken place in Oz or Neverland or some other unexplored realm. I even seem to recall that a season set in the Star Wars universe had been under discussion.

They seemed to have changed their minds by November:

Quote

AX: How open-ended of closed-ended is this season of WONDERLAND?

HOROWITZ: What we would love to do is, if people really love the show and love it as much as we do, come back next season and tell another adventure with these amazing characters. But the idea is to tell one story in this first season over however many episodes we wind up doing, finish it, and then at the end of that story, if we want to say, next year Alice and Jafar are on another adventure.

https://www.assignmentx.com/2013/exclusive-interview-the-creators-of-once-upon-a-time-in-wonderland-talk-season-1/

Can you imagine a Season 2 with Alice and Jafar on an adventure?  No thanks.

I found another interesting quote about Wonderland:

Quote

There will never be a situation where Snow White comes in, and you’re just expected to have been caught up because you watched Once,” Kitsis adds. “I think the thing that we loved about this show is that Wonderland has its own mythology, and its own characters, so that you can watch it without ever seeing Once Upon A Time, but of course, we’re fanboys, so we’ve got things to reward the Once viewer.” As a matter of fact, there is a segment in the presentation pilot that includes a tie in to and footage from a past Once Upon A Time episode involving characters in Storybrooke, though that will change for the finished product.

“That was for the network,” Kitsis admits. “This presentation was really just going to be an internal document. As Adam and I say, it was just tinkering in a laboratory. We added on four days at the end with our crew. But then they were like ‘let’s show it [the presentation]!’ And we were like ‘okay.’ The Storybrooke stuff was really just our way of saying ‘we’re going to have a Storybrooke piece that we can’t film right now’,” he explains.

“It’s not canon, but it’s sort of meant to be a hint of how we are going to approach the opening of this show,” Adam adds. “There still is Storybrooke in the premiere, but it plays in a way that hopefully is welcoming to both fans of Once and newcomers.”

http://www.ksitetv.com/interviews-2/architects-of-wonderland-adam-horowitz-edward-kitsis-on-the-ouat-spin-off/23564/

That's interesting A&E never wanted to include Storybrooke in "Wonderland" at all and it was the network pushing them.  They did more of it in the backhalf of the series, though, interestingly.  Maybe an effort to draw in Once fans who didn't seem interested in the spinoff?

I had forgotten that the "Wonderland" spinoff idea probably came about initially because of a wish to have Sebastian Stan in a spinoff

Quote

The Mad Hatter may have a chance at a happily ever after, but not with Sebastian Stan in the role. According to Deadline, ABC is considering spinning off the popular “Once Upon a Time“ character into his own show, but Stan is reportedly unavailable for the potential series commitment, likely due to his roles in Broadway play “Picnic” and the “Captain America” franchise.

Instead, ABC is said to be considering recasting Stan’s role. Deadline reports that the network is looking at two possible options for the Hatter project: Filming a short presentation starring the character (with the potential for a 13-episode series commitment should execs like what they see), or reintroducing the recast character for another guest arc later this season on “Once Upon a Time,” with an episode filmed as a backdoor pilot.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/once-upon-a-time-mad-hatter-spinoff-recasting-sebastian-stan_n_2750964

It's interesting they ultimately decided to cut the Mad Hatter character and instead focus on Alice, the Red Queen, the Knave and Jafar (and Cyrus).

Edited September 2, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

That's interesting A&E never wanted to include Storybrooke in "Wonderland" at all and it was the network pushing them.  They did more of it in the backhalf of the series, though, interestingly.  Maybe an effort to draw in Once fans who didn't seem interested in the spinoff?

There wasn't that much of a Storybrooke piece, though. There was just the intro, where they established Will in Storybrooke when the Rabbit finds him, with him passing Emma's bug and interacting with a couple of the secondary characters, and then there's Alice and Cyrus coming to get Will's heart, where we barely see them walking through town before they spend the rest of the time in Will's apartment, and they don't interact with anyone. I guess if you'd never seen the original series, you might have been lost as to why Will, who's from a fairytale land, was in modern America. Otherwise, the crossovers are mostly to the fairytale worlds, with Robin Hood and his gang, Maleficent, and Cora showing up. Then there are the later reverse crossovers, with Will, the doctor from Alice's asylum, and Jafar showing up on the main show. Jafar's a sequel, since it picks up on him still in the bottle, and I'm sure they intended Will to be a sequel, too, but the story works better if you consider him leaving Storybrooke to have these adventures when he vanishes at the end of season 4. Maybe the town seems so deserted when Alice and Cyrus are there because they're all off in Camelot at that time (or do we see Granny's while they're in town?).

On another note, I was hesitant to pay full price for the season 7 DVDs, so I thought I'd check Half-Price Books, and I was surprised to not find any OUAT DVDs in either location I checked. Not just no season 7, but nothing from the series at all. I would have at least expected a few of the earlier seasons after people got so mad at season 7 that they sold them all off in a rage. I guess only the die-hard fans bought them, and they haven't sold them off. I'll have to order them off Amazon to continue the rewatch, but the price seems to have dropped and I have a gift card.

[Camera One]

There wasn't much Storybrooke but they did revisit once in the back-half when they didn't have to.  I'm glad they did, but it does suggest an attempt to draw in some "Once" fans, who were surprisingly disinterested in the spinoff considering it has a lot of the same qualities of fantasy and mash-ups.  Though "Wonderland" did lack the modern world aspect and took place pretty much completely within fictional worlds.

I'm surprised the Season 7 DVD is still so reasonably priced.... sometimes with low demand, it becomes very expensive.  I think when people quit after Season 6, they did so completely.  We lost a lot of our fellow discussion members even within this forum.  Only True Jacinda Club Members are left.

Edited September 2, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

41 minutes ago, Camera One said:

I'm surprised the Season 7 DVD is still so reasonably priced.... sometimes with low demand, it becomes very expensive.

I think it's more in the category of "it's been out for a while, so those willing to pay a higher price have already bought it." It usually drops about $10 after it's been out a year -- when the next season comes out.

[KingOfHearts]

OUATIW would've so much better in the ratings if it had aired between 3A and 3B. I still don't understand the decision to air it on the same weeks as the mother show. Everyone was so hyped for OUAT during that break because of 3A's cliffhanger. Because the break was long, anyone would've appreciated some kind of Once fix.

[Camera One]

On 9/3/2019 at 9:10 AM, KingOfHearts said:

OUATIW would've so much better in the ratings if it had aired between 3A and 3B. I still don't understand the decision to air it on the same weeks as the mother show. Everyone was so hyped for OUAT during that break because of 3A's cliffhanger. Because the break was long, anyone would've appreciated some kind of Once fix.

I agree the ratings would have had a better chance that way.  Two fantasy shows in a week was probably too much commitment for most people, and viewers seemed to have sampled the first episode or two and then gave up. 

It's just sad there are so few pure fantasy shows out there.  Although "Once" was flawed, it was very different from other shows, even other sci-fi shows or comic book shows or serialized "mystery" shows.  

Edited September 5, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

On 9/3/2019 at 11:10 AM, KingOfHearts said:

OUATIW would've so much better in the ratings if it had aired between 3A and 3B. I still don't understand the decision to air it on the same weeks as the mother show. Everyone was so hyped for OUAT during that break because of 3A's cliffhanger. Because the break was long, anyone would've appreciated some kind of Once fix.

And I think the Thursday slot was bad for their core audience, which tended to be families watching together (or at least mothers watching with daughters). Thursdays are a prime time for school activities. It's not really a time when families are sitting down to watch TV together, and it's not a time when people can commit to following a serialized show. That's been a troubled timeslot for ABC for a while, so I guess they thought that putting something there with some kind of brand recognition instead of it being all new would help.

I'm assuming they did the coda at the end of Wonderland, going years into the future with Alice mentioning Will and Ana becoming the White King and Queen and with Alice and Cyrus having a daughter after the cancellation decision, unless the glimpse of the Rabbit was meant to suggest that their daughter was about to have some adventures of her own. It's hard to imagine Alice and Cyrus running off to have adventures after they had a daughter, either taking a child that age into known danger or leaving her behind. And if further adventures were meant to have happened before they had a child, then we already know both of them survive.

And I still wonder what they thought was up with Will when he was brought to the main show. From the sounds of this, Will and Ana were still together and happy at least 7-8 years after the series (based on the age of Alice's daughter and depending on how long it took them to have a kid), and we know Will was in Storybrooke (before the Wonderland events) after Emma's arrival, so Will being separated from Ana and being back in Storybrooke didn't happen after the Wonderland coda. The only ways the timeline can fit are that season 4 happened between Alice and Cyrus's wedding and the coda, with Will finding his way back to Wonderland and ending up back with Ana after Belle dumped him, or that the Wonderland events happened after season 4, so that when we see him in season 4 it's after Ana ditched him but before the Rabbit came to get him. It would have been nice if they'd ever bothered to explain that. When you bring a character over from a spinoff in a way that looks like it blows up the ending of the spinoff, you need to let us know what's going on. That may have been their worst "new toy" casting thing in the series, bringing on a new character they were really excited about and claiming they had a whole story for him, and them promptly forgetting he was even on the show.

[Writing Wrongs]

I was watching this video, The Day Lost Died and some of what the guy says has similarities to Once in regards to the use of flashbacks after a certain point. 

Quote

Flashbacks were once an effective and engaging storytelling device, but by Season 3 they became repetitive and hindered forward momentum of the storyline......by Season 3 most characters had fully fleshed out there backstory and had nothing else to tell.

Saying it was used to further the mythology but not really the characters.

He cites the "Stranger in a Strange Land" (Jack's tattoo story) as possibly the worst of the series.

[KingOfHearts]

2 hours ago, Writing Wrongs said:

He cites the "Stranger in a Strange Land" (Jack's tattoo story) as possibly the worst of the series.

Wow! Kate was married once? Nobody cares!

Wow! Locke was in a convent once? Nobody cares!

Wow! Jack and Claire are half siblings! It never has an impact on anything, so nobody cares!

[Camera One]

5 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

It's hard to imagine Alice and Cyrus running off to have adventures after they had a daughter, either taking a child that age into known danger or leaving her behind.

It's A&E, who had Robin Hood and Snowing leave their babies as needed.  Though Snowing decided to take the baby to Camelot because that was such a safe place.  They could easily have destroyed all the Wonderland characters by simply writing a Season 2.

Quote

Flashbacks were once an effective and engaging storytelling device, but by Season 3 they became repetitive and hindered forward momentum of the storyline......by Season 3 most characters had fully fleshed out there backstory and had nothing else to tell.

The "Lost" writers learned from their mistakes by really minimizing traditional flashbacks from Season 4 onwards, using them mainly with new characters or to explore time periods previously unvisited.

A&E SAW that lesson being learned in the "Lost" writing room, and insisted on continuing flashbacks - not only that, but INTENTIONALLY revisiting the same time periods over and over again and not caring that they threw in a retcon each time for a cheap "twist".

Edited September 5, 2019 by Camera One

[tennisgurl]

6 hours ago, Writing Wrongs said:

He cites the "Stranger in a Strange Land" (Jack's tattoo story) as possibly the worst of the series.

"What do Jacks tattoos mean?" was truly the Lost equivalent of "Where did Emma get her jacket?"

[Shanna Marie]

On 9/4/2019 at 7:10 PM, Camera One said:

A&E SAW that lesson being learned in the "Lost" writing room, and insisted on continuing flashbacks - not only that, but INTENTIONALLY revisiting the same time periods over and over again and not caring that they threw in a retcon each time for a cheap "twist".

That's another thing I liked about Wonderland (and that makes me wonder how much A&E were really involved with it). They actually had episodes without flashbacks when there was a lot of stuff going on and when flashbacks weren't necessary -- and that was only a half-season series, so they hadn't yet run out of backstory to tell.

But I think one of the reasons for the flashbacks in the main series was to provide the fairytale aspect, since the present-day action usually happened in Storybrooke. That wasn't as much an issue for Wonderland, since the present day was almost entirely in Wonderland. Generally (though not absolutely always), when we got "real world" flashbacks with no magical element, the present-day part of the story took place at least partially in one of the story worlds. Come to think of it, the exceptions, in which there was no magical element in the flashback, were mostly the Lily episodes, which were terrible, so maybe they were right to use the flashbacks to balance things.

They did sort of change things up for 3B and 5A, with the flashbacks filling in the missing time instead of doing backstory, but in both cases, midway through the arc they stalled out on that and went back to their usual routine of telling the villain backstories before doing the "here's the important part of the missing time that explains how they got back to Storybrooke" flashback. (And, wow, it just struck me how much 3B and 5A parallel, structurally. The real differences are the one-off episode about Merida, which doesn't really match, and the two-hour finale after the arc was wrapped up from 3B, which isn't in an A arc.)

The flashbacks were actually one of the reasons I quit watching Lost. I felt like they'd lost track of the difference between backstory and characterization, like if they showed us all the history of the characters, we'd know those people, but it didn't seem like they were very well-developed characters in the present. I knew their history, but I didn't feel like I really knew them, not well enough to actually care all that much.

Speaking of Wonderland, I finished watching it last week, and now I'm kind of bereft because that's just the sort of thing I'm in the mood for, but there's not a lot like that available. It had the sense of romantic fantasy adventure that I'm looking for and that was, oddly enough, mostly missing in the main series, aside from the season 3 finale. I do have season 7 DVDs coming Thursday (Amazon went from delivery after Sept. 23 to delivery Sept. 15 to guaranteed delivery Sept. 12.). I doubt that will scratch that particular itch for fantasy adventure. Maybe I need to rewatch Stardust.

[Camera One]

10 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

We never got a futuristic or sci-fi world. Less of that is public domain of course, but it's funny how the writers of Tron: Legacy didn't display any interest in weird sci-fi.

That's why it was a shame we didn't get a Season 10 since I'm pretty sure we would have gotten there at some point.  Even if they weren't allowed to do Star Wars, they could have done a mash-up of "Treasure Planet", "Lilo & Stitch" and "WALL-E" to create a futuristic space-age world.  They just need to apply their formula aka they all go to outer space to rescue someone but they wake up in Granny's diner with amnesia as an evil alien from multiple characters' pasts works on his/her dastardly plan to take over Storybrooke.

Edited September 10, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

8 hours ago, Camera One said:

They just need to apply their formula aka they all go to outer space to rescue someone but they wake up in Granny's diner with amnesia as an evil alien from multiple characters' pasts works on his/her dastardly plan to take over Storybrooke.

That may be another reason they never did a science-fiction world. Since all the main characters were from past-based worlds, it would have been hard for the futuristic characters to have some kind of history with the regular characters -- for them to be the long-lost parents, siblings, cousins, lovers, etc., and they couldn't seem to write stories with non-connected villains.

It could kind of have worked with a retrofuturistic type thing, where it was what the future looked like to people in the past, so that it would have been a long enough established "world of story" for it to have been around in the history of the Enchanted Forest, so maybe an HG Wells sort of thing, which would have been public domain. They could have done The Time Machine and had the time traveler visit the other worlds (or would he have been in Victorian Literature World?).

[Camera One]

Maybe by the later seasons, they also didn't have the budget for too much CGI.  Underbrooke was a really brilliant way of using Storybrooke as another "world".  

With space stories, they could still have done connections with existing characters by saying the space travellers had been visiting the Enchanted Forest.  "Treasure Planet" was loosely based on "Treasure Island" with pirate ships sailing out in space, so they could have made the Jolly Rogers visiting that realm out in space.  The space colony could have been started by people in the Enchanted Forest, and time passes faster there.  Or an alien could have shape-shifted and interacted with Regina or Zelena in the past.  

[Shanna Marie]

Rewatching the beginning of season 7, I was thinking about how we never learned how Lucy made the logical leap that the events in her book were true, that the author of the book was her father, and that they were under a curse.

And that made me realize -- did we ever learn how Henry made the leap from realizing that the people in town were the people in his book to knowing that the Savior was his biological mother? I don't recall anything that would have been in the book to give him a reason to make that connection. Or was it something that happened in parallel and he connected the dots later -- when he realized that his mother was actually the Evil Queen and she put him in therapy to try to convince him that all the stuff about the town being under a curse was his imagination, he decided he wanted out of there and looked up his biological mother. But then when he saw that her name was Emma, like the Savior, and, depending on how much information on her he was able to get, she'd been found in Maine, near Storybrooke, and she was about to have her 28th birthday, he put it all together and realized that it was all connected. But did they ever make that explicit on the show?

Though at least Henry had good reasons for connecting his book to people around him, since just about everyone in town matched up to a character in the book, with them looking like the illustrations, and it was an odd, unique book that seemed like it could be magical. Plus he had proof that Emma was his mother. Lucy had a mass-produced paperback, never seemed to connect any of the characters in her book to the people who were around her (other than herself, her mother, and Henry), and there was no proof that Henry was her father. Lucy just kept over-emoting "It's true!" without giving any reason why she thought so. In the earlier episodes, it seemed like she might still have her memories and was going around trying to wake everyone else up, but it later became clear that she didn't actually remember anything, so why did she decide that this book was true and about her family?

[daxx]

Just watched Tiny on my rewatch. At the end Charming naturally comments if he’d have been bad if raised by King George like James was. This is a normal response and yes the likely outcome.

Mary Margaret states, no, never. (WTF?) that he could never be bad because of his heart.

So what these writers are saying is that James, a baby was born with a bad heart and his twin David with a good heart. What kind of nonsense is this?

What kind of world view gives us this dialogue? I mean what even?

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, daxx said:

So what these writers are saying is that James, a baby was born with a bad heart and his twin David with a good heart. What kind of nonsense is this?

And this is on the show whose mantra is "evil isn't born, it's made." So, James was just born evil and would have been evil even if he'd been raised by his real parents while good-hearted David would have been good even if he'd been raised by George. But Regina, Zelena and the like were made evil because bad things happened to them and they were raised in part by horrible people.

Then they later retconned the whole thing and we learned that little James was a good kid who didn't want to be a knight. So whatever.

I guess you could see it as Snow trying to give David a pep talk without having any clue what the situation really was. It was more about her believing in the goodness of David than about anything she knew or believed about James -- "Yeah, babe, you're totally different from your evil twin."

[Camera One]

14 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

In the earlier episodes, it seemed like she might still have her memories and was going around trying to wake everyone else up, but it later became clear that she didn't actually remember anything, so why did she decide that this book was true and about her family?

Season 7 would have made a lot more sense if Lucy did have her memories.  Though even that was less poignant than the original premise in Season 1 where Henry's life with Regina was so bad that he was desperate to believe in a Curse, plus, as you said, he actually had a number of logical reasons to back up his hypothesis.  

A&E learned nothing from Season 1, where it was frustrating that Emma didn't believe Henry until the end of Season 1, made more frustrating with no linear progression of greater and greater belief.  And how long did they drag out Henry and Jacinda not believing Lucy with no linear progression of greater and greater belief?

[andromeda331]

16 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Rewatching the beginning of season 7, I was thinking about how we never learned how Lucy made the logical leap that the events in her book were true, that the author of the book was her father, and that they were under a curse.

And that made me realize -- did we ever learn how Henry made the leap from realizing that the people in town were the people in his book to knowing that the Savior was his biological mother? I don't recall anything that would have been in the book to give him a reason to make that connection. Or was it something that happened in parallel and he connected the dots later -- when he realized that his mother was actually the Evil Queen and she put him in therapy to try to convince him that all the stuff about the town being under a curse was his imagination, he decided he wanted out of there and looked up his biological mother. But then when he saw that her name was Emma, like the Savior, and, depending on how much information on her he was able to get, she'd been found in Maine, near Storybrooke, and she was about to have her 28th birthday, he put it all together and realized that it was all connected. But did they ever make that explicit on the show?

Though at least Henry had good reasons for connecting his book to people around him, since just about everyone in town matched up to a character in the book, with them looking like the illustrations, and it was an odd, unique book that seemed like it could be magical. Plus he had proof that Emma was his mother. Lucy had a mass-produced paperback, never seemed to connect any of the characters in her book to the people who were around her (other than herself, her mother, and Henry), and there was no proof that Henry was her father. Lucy just kept over-emoting "It's true!" without giving any reason why she thought so. In the earlier episodes, it seemed like she might still have her memories and was going around trying to wake everyone else up, but it later became clear that she didn't actually remember anything, so why did she decide that this book was true and about her family?

Yes, there was so much for Henry to connect the dots. Henry knew something was up before the book. He was the only one getting older. Everyone else was basically repeating some form of the same day. Henry was the only one who really wasn't. He knew as he explained to Emma in the second episode that any time you asked people anything their memories were hazy. He noticed no one ever seem to come to town or leave. I am curious on how he knew bad things happened any time anyone left town but its possible he saw something or noticed accidents happening at the town line. Why Regina never realized Henry would realize that I don't know. 

[scarynikki12]

9 hours ago, andromeda331 said:

Why Regina never realized Henry would realize that I don't know. 

She didn't want a child she wanted a dog. A child will have thoughts, feelings, and desires that differ from the parent's while a dog will just love you and want to follow you around so that you know it loves you. Regina just didn't realize what she wanted was the dog so she got the child and then made his life hell because he didn't behave like a dog.

[Shanna Marie]

9 hours ago, andromeda331 said:

I am curious on how he knew bad things happened any time anyone left town but its possible he saw something or noticed accidents happening at the town line.

Didn't they say something about Granny having a heart attack when Ruby tried to leave town? It wasn't just that accidents happened around the town line, it was that when people tried to leave, things (usually bad things) happened to keep them from going. Henry could have noticed that pattern.

12 minutes ago, scarynikki12 said:

She didn't want a child she wanted a dog. A child will have thoughts, feelings, and desires that differ from the parent's while a dog will just love you and want to follow you around so that you know it loves you.

And that came up with Owen -- she glommed onto Kurt and Owen because she got bored with everyone else in town being cursed into respecting her. She wanted people who could like her of their own free will, but then the moment they acted on their free will and wanted to leave, she flipped out and did everything in her power to force them to stay. I guess she thought adopting an infant would be different because she could raise it to love her and she'd have more control, but she didn't think past early childhood and consider what would happen when he learned to think for himself. Just imagine if the curse hadn't broken and she'd had a teenager who rebelled just to rebel, whether or not he figured out she was the Evil Queen.

You're right, a dog would have been a better solution. It would love her of its own free will as long as she fed it and was kind to it, it wouldn't do a lot of thinking for itself, and she could keep it on a leash and have near-total control over it, and it would generally be okay with that.

[Camera One]

Season 1 Reason for a Child Being Similar in Age to Parents (Emma & Snowing):  Curse froze time for parents for 28 years

Season 7 Reason for a Child Being Similar in Age to Parents (Henry & Emma/Regina): Emma and Regina (and Hook and Zelena) aged really well... 33 year olds look no different from 48 year olds, right?

Edited September 17, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

Season 1 Reason for a Child Being Similar in Age to Parents (Emma & Snowing):  Curse froze time for parents for 28 years

Season 7 Reason for a Child Being Similar in Age to Parents (Henry & Emma/Regina): Emma and Regina (and Hook and Zelena) aged really well... 33 year olds look no different from 48 year olds, right?

That's what's so annoying about it. When it's been an actual plot point that Emma and her parents end up being the same age because her parents were frozen in time, when there are realms where time doesn't move so that a 200-year-old pirate looks maybe 35, and when there are realms where time moves faster, so a newborn infant comes back days later as a 28-year-old, you need to explain any age discrepancies. When maybe 8 or so years have passed, you may not need makeup or explanations. Some people just have good genes or good habits (I think Colin actually somehow looked younger in season 7 than he did in season 2). But we're dealing with at least a 24-year age gap between the end of season 6 and the start of the Hyperion Heights curse (based on Lucy's age plus the age Robyn was when she was born). And then there's an episode in which they do give WHook a slight aging treatment in a flashback, but he would have been younger then than he should be in the present when he isn't aged.

I've wondered if they did originally plan for time to have passed faster for Henry, so very little time has passed for Regina, Emma and Hook while Henry grew up, since they did talk about time moving differently in different realms in interviews, but that still leaves them with about ten years (or more) between WHook and Regina joining Henry and the present, and the "time moved faster away from Storybrooke" thing was blown up when they brought in teenage Robyn in Storybrooke. Wasn't bringing in Zelena announced later (possibly after the early ratings were terrible)? They may have forgotten their original plan because they wanted Robyn to be adult in the present.

As for the season 7 vs. season 1 comparisons, we could probably keep this up for months. Here's another one:

In season one, Snow and Charming have to fight to be together, overcoming all of George and Regina's efforts to keep them apart, including imprisonment and a sleeping curse. In the present, they're kept apart at first by a coma, then by Regina suddenly giving him a "wife" and fake curse memories of his marriage, followed by Regina framing Snow for his wife's murder.

In season seven, Henry has to get his mom to do a locator spell to find Cinderella, and then they just get together (mostly offscreen). In the present, they have a few minor misunderstandings, she briefly considers dating someone else and he briefly considers taking a job elsewhere.

[Camera One]

31 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

They may have forgotten their original plan because they wanted Robyn to be adult in the present.

It's almost funny that writers could actually forget their original plan but I would totally believe it for This Show, These Writers.

Quote

I've wondered if they did originally plan for time to have passed faster for Henry, so very little time has passed for Regina, Emma and Hook while Henry grew up, since they did talk about time moving differently in different realms in interviews, but that still leaves them with about ten years (or more) between WHook and Regina joining Henry and the present

That would really have been an easy way to explain it away, but you would think they would have added a line in "A Pirate's Life" about this, but they didn't.  Either A&E's ability to think through issues of time and worldbuilding was that pathetic, or they thought they could just delay their decision and make it a "mystery" and a "twist" (which seemed to be the case, since they were teasing in every interview all season that everything would be explained by the end and not to judge prematurely).

I was thinking that Regina and Emma could have been shocked how much older Henry was when he summoned them for help, and that would have been very moving and poignant since they would have realized how much time they lost with Henry.  But on the flip side, that would have made Henry so much more callous for never bothering to go home. Which they could have solved by saying Henry really wanted to go home, but he couldn't.  I didn't get the sense in Episode 1 that a portal was all that rare to Henry.  And if it was rare, Henry definitely chose a pretty girl over his entire family.  Since family is the truest form of love on this show, right?  

Edited September 17, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

11 hours ago, Camera One said:

It's almost funny that writers could actually forget their original plan but I would totally believe it for This Show, These Writers.

At the beginning of the season, Henry has been gone at least ten years and has aged into a new actor when Emma and Hook announce their pregnancy (with them talking about it being their first time to go through the infancy stage, so this isn't a second kid), with Emma not even showing yet. At the end of the season, they have a newborn before Henry leaves home, when Henry is still played by the teen actor. So, yeah, continuity isn't their strong suit.

11 hours ago, Camera One said:

Either A&E's ability to think through issues of time and worldbuilding was that pathetic, or they thought they could just delay their decision and make it a "mystery" and a "twist" (which seemed to be the case, since they were teasing in every interview all season that everything would be explained by the end and not to judge prematurely).

I think their big twist they kept teasing that would "explain everything" but that they couldn't say anything about because it was such a huge spoiler was the fact that the curse sent them back in time, but it doesn't explain the aging, and I think most of us had already figured that out. It still doesn't explain the age issues. They can't even say that the curse de-aged them to the age they were at the time they're being sent to, since they all looked the same at the time the curse was cast, and Henry, Lucy, and the new characters weren't likewise de-aged. They just never explained the aging, in spite of spending the whole season telling people that it would be explained.

11 hours ago, Camera One said:

I was thinking that Regina and Emma could have been shocked how much older Henry was when he summoned them for help, and that would have been very moving and poignant since they would have realized how much time they lost with Henry.  But on the flip side, that would have made Henry so much more callous for never bothering to go home. Which they could have solved by saying Henry really wanted to go home, but he couldn't.  I didn't get the sense in Episode 1 that a portal was all that rare to Henry.  And if it was rare, Henry definitely chose a pretty girl over his entire family.  Since family is the truest form of love on this show, right?  

They also said repeatedly in interviews when fans complained about Henry just ditching his family that he was keeping in touch with magical Skype sessions, but there wasn't so much as a mention of that on screen. They didn't need to even show it, just have Henry entering a scene saying something like, "Sorry I'm late, I was doing a mirror chat back home. Emma says hi, and you wouldn't believe how much Hope (or Neal, if they thought the baby name was such a huge spoiler they were saving for the finale) has grown." But we didn't get that, and it's implied that Henry got married and had a kid without his biological mother, his stepfather, his sibling, and his entire maternal side of his family having any part of it -- and that family has a sad history of being separated so that they've missed big chunks of their loved ones' lives.

That makes the perfunctory True Love's Kiss from Henry to Emma in the season 6 finale even more galling. They made such a deal out of familial true love being so important that they couldn't give a TLK to Emma's new husband in that situation, and then in the next episode Henry leaves home, has no contact (that we have evidence of) with his family for about ten years until he needs their help, then stays away to chase a girl he's met once (and who hit him and robbed him) in spite of knowing Emma is pregnant, and there's no sign of him having any contact with her for the next ten or so years. Such true familial love!

[tennisgurl]

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Henry leaves home, has no contact (that we have evidence of) with his family for about ten years until he needs their help, then stays away to chase a girl he's met once (and who hit him and robbed him) in spite of knowing Emma is pregnant, and there's no sign of him having any contact with her for the next ten or so years. Such true familial love!

Henry: "I guess I could come home after having been gone for so long I aged into a different person to be with my mother who is pregnant as well as the rest of my family who has a long history of being tragically and forcibly separated so that they have missed several major milestones of their lives, and be there for the birth of my new sibling...or I could run off right away I find out about the baby after I only got in touch when I needed bailing out, to chase after a woman who punched me in the face and robbed me after I tried to help her, and almost assassinated a major local political figure, and then ran away from me after I knew her for half an hour. I think my choice is obvious!" 

I mean, he also apparently never invited his family to his wedding either or to meet his daughter, so I think we can see how much they mean to him.

[Shanna Marie]

1 hour ago, tennisgurl said:

Henry: "I guess I could come home after having been gone for so long I aged into a different person to be with my mother who is pregnant as well as the rest of my family who has a long history of being tragically and forcibly separated so that they have missed several major milestones of their lives, and be there for the birth of my new sibling...or I could run off right away I find out about the baby after I only got in touch when I needed bailing out, to chase after a woman who punched me in the face and robbed me after I tried to help her, and almost assassinated a major local political figure, and then ran away from me after I knew her for half an hour. I think my choice is obvious!" 

It's even worse if you read between the (perhaps unintentional) lines involving the very long time between marriage and pregnancy, Emma's mention of worrying about not getting a second chance at parenthood, Regina and Hook's worry about whether Henry will feel obligated to come home, and Hook's worry about wanting Emma to rest and infer that it's a high-risk pregnancy, possibly coming after trouble getting pregnant or miscarriages. I don't know if that's what they meant to imply, but there was so much drama and concern about this pregnancy that I can't help but read it that way.

Not that an adult is expected to stick close to home just because his mother is pregnant with a late-in-life baby, but there's a difference between being on the other side of the country and being in another universe. He could be Facetiming or calling from, say, Seattle to Maine and making it home for major holidays, and they could visit him. There was never anything on screen even suggesting that there was any contact whatsoever between that world and Storybrooke.

1 hour ago, tennisgurl said:

I mean, he also apparently never invited his family to his wedding either or to meet his daughter, so I think we can see how much they mean to him.

He has Regina, and that's his real family and true love. Plus his grandfather Rumple. It's really just Emma's family who gets shut out.

[Camera One]

11 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Hook's worry about wanting Emma to rest and infer that it's a high-risk pregnancy, possibly coming after trouble getting pregnant or miscarriages. I don't know if that's what they meant to imply, but there was so much drama and concern about this pregnancy that I can't help but read it that way.

Emma was around 48 years old at this point, so it's no wonder it's high-risk.  Though all the drama implying the dangers of pregnancy evaporated once Emma arrived and talked to Henry.  Because by that point in the episode, the Writers didn't want the audience to wish Henry back to Storybrooke.

Oh well, at least Emma didn't get so old that she died and we were supposed to find it romantic (see Belle's "Up"-lifting denouement).

[Shanna Marie]

I realized that season 7 is basically Henry's 3A finale wish that he'd never brought Emma to Storybrooke come true -- he's grown up while Regina has stayed the same age (as would have happened if the curse hadn't been broken), and he's getting to have adventures with fairytale characters who don't see Regina as the Evil Queen. Emma and all the people connected to her are off in another world where he doesn't have to see them. He even has a version of Captain Hook who's not married to Emma to pal around with.

[Camera One]

53 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

If Henry's "novel" is basically seasons one through six, with the scene of him meeting Cinderella as the coda, then Lucy would know that the previous curses were all broken by Henry having a TLK with one of his mothers. And yet she's trying to introduce him to Jacinda to break this curse. Wouldn't it make more sense for her to try to get him to have fatherly true love with her, to match the way the first curse was broken? 

And, speaking as a novelist, I find it odd that Henry's not doing double takes at meeting these people who are characters in his book.  Why is he not astonished when he meets Roni, since she's exactly the way he imagined Regina, or when he meets Rogers, who looks just like Hook and even has a missing hand? 

In Season 7, they set up this premise, but it's not used as much as it was in Season 1.  Adult Henry doesn't have much astonishment at anything.  At least in Season 1, Emma entertains Henry sometimes with the book, and there are a few moments when she seems to sense there is something odd, and she takes a step towards being open to belief.  In Season 7, doesn't Adult Henry stonewall Lucy's theory until the very end?   Waiting for Emma to believe was dragged out for much too long, but the way it was handled in Season 7 was even worse.

[Camera One]

I was thinking about Henry as a Lyft/Swyft/Uber driver.  Beyond the premiere, did that figure into any of the storylines in Season 7?  Before the season aired, I figured that driving strangers around on Lyft/Swyft/Uber would be a vehicle for Adult Henry to meet Cursed fairy tale characters.  I wonder why they bothered giving Henry that job if it became a moot point so quickly.  

Edited September 19, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

12 hours ago, Camera One said:

In Season 7, doesn't Adult Henry stonewall Lucy's theory until the very end?   Waiting for Emma to believe was dragged out for much too long, but the way it was handled in Season 7 was even worse.

They're really bad about all-or-nothing. I guess they wanted the belief to come in a burst of magic rather than in a gradual progression of uncovering evidence they couldn't deny, possibly with a little backsliding when something came up to make them doubt the evidence. They did the same thing in 3B when Henry got his memories back and believed because he touched the book, not because he got curious and investigated stuff like why his mom's friend dressed like a pirate, why the mayor of the town was weirdly invested in him, was that a flying monkey? I'm not sure why they think touching a book and suddenly getting a burst of belief is more interesting than a skeptic gradually coming to accept the existence of magic after seeing too many things they couldn't explain. Really, in season one the touching the book and getting the burst of magic was unnecessary for Emma, since I'd have thought seeing Henry pass out immediately after eating the apple turnover he warned her about was proof enough (in fact, I didn't notice the magical burst thing then until it was referred to later and thought she had figured it out on her own).

10 hours ago, Camera One said:

I was thinking about Henry as a Lyft/Swyft/Uber driver.  Beyond the premiere, did that figure into any of the storylines in Season 7?

I don't remember -- did it have something to do with the serial killer kidnapping him, or was he just giving him a lift as a friend? But I think the not!Uber thing was part of them treating both Henry and Jacinda like they were young twenty-somethings with their fast food and gig economy lives even though by that time they would have been in their late 30s and had a 10-year-old kid.

Something wacky about the timeline that I realized when I started thinking about it: When Emma first met fat, old Wish Hook in season six, he was 28 years older than Hook Prime because he aged during the curse and Hook Prime didn't. Then Wish Hook deages himself to the same age as Hook Prime. But then time passes (and time has already passed), and by the time Wish Hook/Rogers is living through the Hyperion Heights curse, it's about 25 years after season six, based on Robyn/Margot's age, given that she's an infant in season six. So, Rogers is only about three years younger (physically) in season seven than Old, Fat Wish Hook was in season six. I guess giving up rum made all the difference in how he aged the second time around.

Meanwhile, the cops are acting like he's such a go-getter to be promoted to detective, when he's actually around retirement age. He should be older than Weaver (since Rumple is immortal and stuck in his 50s forever). And yet they didn't think this was something that required any kind of onscreen explanation.

[tennisgurl]

On 9/17/2019 at 2:54 PM, Shanna Marie said:

He has Regina, and that's his real family and true love. Plus his grandfather Rumple. It's really just Emma's family who gets shut out.

A boys best friend is his mother...

[Camera One]

7 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

They did the same thing in 3B when Henry got his memories back and believed because he touched the book, not because he got curious and investigated stuff like why his mom's friend dressed like a pirate, why the mayor of the town was weirdly invested in him, was that a flying monkey? 

That would have been such a more interesting, not to mention potentially funny use of Henry in 3B instead of boring dreck they came up with and the totally unrewarding insta-remembering.  

Quote

Something wacky about the timeline that I realized when I started thinking about it: When Emma first met fat, old Wish Hook in season six, he was 28 years older than Hook Prime because he aged during the curse and Hook Prime didn't. Then Wish Hook deages himself to the same age as Hook Prime. But then time passes (and time has already passed), and by the time Wish Hook/Rogers is living through the Hyperion Heights curse, it's about 25 years after season six, based on Robyn/Margot's age, given that she's an infant in season six. So, Rogers is only about three years younger (physically) in season seven than Old, Fat Wish Hook was in season six. I guess giving up rum made all the difference in how he aged the second time around.

The timeline gives me such a headache that I don't think I fully comprehend.  So Whook was de-aged when Hook himself would have been around 48 years old (even though he looked exactly the same age).  10-11 years would have passed by the time of the Curse based on Lucy's age, so Whook would have been 58-59 years old (even though he didn't look at day over 40).  We don't know how long the Hyperion Heights Curse lasted before Lucy went to Adult Henry's door, right?  I don't remember the circumstances surround Robyn enough.

Quote

Meanwhile, the cops are acting like he's such a go-getter to be promoted to detective, when he's actually around retirement age. 

That is just hilarious.  What a rookie.

[Shanna Marie]

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

So Whook was de-aged when Hook himself would have been around 48 years old (even though he looked exactly the same age).  10-11 years would have passed by the time of the Curse based on Lucy's age, so Whook would have been 58-59 years old (even though he didn't look at day over 40).  We don't know how long the Hyperion Heights Curse lasted before Lucy went to Adult Henry's door, right?  I don't remember the circumstances surround Robyn enough.

I may have to fine-tune the estimate as we go through the rewatch (or I could find my attempt at a season 7 timeline that should be in this thread), but as I recall, Zelena and Robyn show up in the Disenchanted Forest when Robyn is 16, and it's right around the time Lucy is born. Then the curse is threatened on Lucy's 8th birthday, and I think Regina says something around that time about Robyn being 24. Then they spend about a year trying to avoid the curse. So, roughly 25 years, depending on how long they were cursed before the season starts. If Hook is, say, 35 (physically, not counting Neverland or curse time) in season six, that makes WHook 63 in season six when Emma meets him. Once WHook is de-aged and equal with Hook Prime, then both of them would be about 60 when the curse is cast.

I'm not sure exactly when the de-aging fits in -- it should be about 5 years from the end of season 6 to Henry leaving home, and then 8-10 years after that before "A Pirate's Life" (depending on how long it is between Henry and Murderella meeting and them having Lucy), so that makes Hook 48-50 or so when WHook is de-aged.

As I recall, the first time we see Zelena this season, Regina makes some kind of remark asking how old Robyn is now, which makes it sound like they live in a different realm where time passes differently, and that's how Robyn is an adult without the adults having aged at all, but then that got blown up when we later saw Robyn in Storybrooke as a teenager, then coming to the Disenchanted Forest around the time Lucy was born and aging at the same pace as Lucy.

My sense is that the original plan was that Henry was in a place where time moved differently, but then things got complicated and they couldn't make it all work, so they gave up and just didn't bother at all. And that's not even getting into Alice's timeline, which is utterly impossible to reconcile. She was born soon after the curse would have happened, so she should be barely younger than Emma, not significantly younger than Henry. To be the age she is, she should have been born around the time Emma met WHook in season 6.

ETA: I was looking for my timeline (haven't found it yet), and came across some old posts, and it seems my estimate about Robyn is off because she's 18 when she leaves Storybrooke and 26 on Lucy's 8th birthday. Depending on how long they've been in Hyperion Heights after the curse, that means that Rogers is basically the same age as Old Fat Wish Hook was when Emma met him in season 6.

Edited September 20, 2019 by Shanna Marie

[Camera One]

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

My sense is that the original plan was that Henry was in a place where time moved differently, but then things got complicated and they couldn't make it all work, so they gave up and just didn't bother at all.

I suppose in their original plan if they needed Emma/Hook/Regina/Zelena to look the same, while Henry looked 15 years older, they would have said time moved *faster* in the Unenchanted Forest. 

But once Regina joined Adult Henry, she would also start aging faster, unless they compressed the timeline in Season 7 and had the Curse enacted within a year of Regina joining Adult Henry.

Yet they chose to have Regina join Adult Henry before Henry and Jacinda were even a real couple.  It might have worked if Regina joined Adult Henry when Lucy was 8 or 9 years old, right before the new Curse.  

I suppose Robyn could have somehow ended up in the Unenchanted Forest earlier, maybe kidnapped by Mother Gothel, which would allow Zelena to still appear young when they showed up and Zelena would find that Robyn had grown up in the meantime.

Edited September 20, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

51 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Yet they chose to have Regina join Adult Henry before Henry and Jacinda were even a real couple.  It might have worked if Regina joined Adult Henry when Lucy was 8 or 9 years old, right before the new Curse.  

Yeah, there's no real way to make it work, and that's from early in the season, so I have no idea what they were thinking. The new realm moving faster makes the most sense, and there are ways they could have dealt with that. With Rumple, he's immortal, so that takes care of that. They could have done some kind of handwave with WHook, like the age reset actually permanently set him at that age, so he didn't age after that. They could have had fun with that, with WHook right before the curse acting like a 60-year-old while looking young, then Rogers wouldn't have known he was in his 60s and the curse would have made him think he was the age he looked. Or maybe the spell just made him look young, but he's still old inside, so while he looks young and dashing his rheumatism keeps acting up, and Rogers is mystified by how out-of-shape he feels. I guess Zelena and Regina could have found a dragon egg shell, or something. Or Regina realized that her son was an adult who didn't need his mother hovering, and she got over her co-dependent relationship with him and went back home after a few months and had just popped over for a visit when the curse hit, and Zelena was living in a different realm. But whatever it is, they needed to address something that glaring onscreen. You can't have some characters grow up while the other characters around them remain unchanged, and they weren't even pretending that the older characters had aged but still happened to look fabulous. They were acting like they were the age they looked -- like Rogers being treated like a rookie when he's retirement age.

[Camera One]

13 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Yeah, there's no real way to make it work, and that's from early in the season, so I have no idea what they were thinking. 

I think they assumed that the average audience member wouldn't bother asking, or they would wonder briefly and then forget about it because the show is so convoluted and confusing to the point where thinking about the timeline makes one's brain go blank. 

It didn't even dawn on me how old Whook/Rogers would actually be by the time of Hyperion Heights, because they parse out the backstory out of order and in little pieces, so you don't think about how the pieces fit together unless you really try. 

Edited September 20, 2019 by Camera One

[KAOS Agent]

4 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

And that's not even getting into Alice's timeline, which is utterly impossible to reconcile. She was born soon after the curse would have happened, so she should be barely younger than Emma, not significantly younger than Henry. To be the age she is, she should have been born around the time Emma met WHook in season 6.

I saw exactly two episodes of S7. They completely screwed Alice's timeline in a single episode. Based on what happened in the episode I watched, Alice should have been older than Jacinda, except that she was born years after Rapunzel escaped from the tower and Jacinda was born while Rapunzel was locked up. Unless somehow a two year old was able to slay a jabberwocky after it had killed a bunch of fully capable adults, and this was clearly not what they were implying, then Alice's whole timeline (and that of Wish!Hook) are completely impossible.

[Camera One]

The Alice timeline example showed how incompetent A&E were as headwriters.  Weren't the nonsensically chronicled events revealed within three consecutive episodes in 7A?  "Eloise Gardener", "Pretty in Blue" and "One Little Tear"?  How the heck do you garble up a timeline that badly?

A&E would probably still refuse to admit they messed up and would come up with some BS about how it was all intentional and made sense if we would only open up our minds and have a lobotomy.  They were channeling Wonderland logic where up is down and down is up and talentless hacks are considered master storytellers.

Edited September 20, 2019 by Camera One

[scarynikki12]

On 9/19/2019 at 12:58 PM, tennisgurl said:

A boys best friend is his mother...

[Shanna Marie]

18 hours ago, KAOS Agent said:

Based on what happened in the episode I watched, Alice should have been older than Jacinda, except that she was born years after Rapunzel escaped from the tower and Jacinda was born while Rapunzel was locked up. 

I think Jacinda would have already been born before Rapunzel was locked up, since she was older than Rapunzel's daughters. She looked like she was a teenager, at least 13, when we first saw her. Rapunzel escaped, came back home to find her husband remarried and Jacinda living there with her daughters, was a servant for a while, then killed her husband's new wife, had her happy family plus Jacinda back, then Anastasia died, and Rapunzel put Gothel in the tower when Gothel wouldn't bring Anastasia back to life, then however long after that, Alice was born. But Alice was born not long after the curse would have been cast, which was at least 40 years before Henry met Jacinda. So, Alice should be pushing 50 in Hyperion Heights, and Jacinda should be around 65. One way to reconcile Alice's age is if time doesn't move in Wonderland (like in Neverland), so she was born all that time ago but was still young because of spending years in a place where she didn't age (she takes after her dad), but Jacinda (and Drizella) throws a monkey wrench into that. They can't have all been frozen during Regina's curse (like just about every other realm seems to have been when the writers forget about the curse in the timeline) because WHook did age and Alice, born during the curse, grew up. I guess there's time for Alice to have been born after time started moving again, but then she'd have been only a couple of years old when Emma met old, fat WHook.

There is absolutely no way to reconcile the timeline.

I was thinking more last night about the idea of time moving faster in the Disenchanted Forest as a way to explain Regina not aging, and I realized that they skipped around so much and skipped over so much that it wouldn't have changed the plot at all if instead of Regina deciding that her life was empty and meaningless without Henry, she had just joined him to help him find Cinderella before she went back home to do the important job of mayor/queen in Storybrooke (maybe after they found a convenient source of magic beans). She could pop over for visits, spend a few days whenever she was needed for a flashback and only have been gone hours, but then if she was there when the curse was about to be cast, she might have been stuck and got caught up in the curse. Address WHook's lack of aging with a snarky line from Regina about him never aging, and him saying he seems to be stuck at that age. The only problem is Zelena and Robyn, since Robyn aging while Zelena doesn't would generally mean them being separated. But Zelena's age has always been a bit of a problem because she's supposed to be several years older than Regina while she comes across as much younger. We don't know if Oz was frozen during Regina's curse, but Zelena looked the same when Dorothy was a child as she did when Dorothy was in her 30s, so maybe she's been doing some kind of anti-aging magic all along. If WHook could be de-aged magically, it stands to reason that magic could be used to hold off aging.

And with a steady supply of beans (which they seemed to have anyway), they could have implied that Emma, the Charmings, and the rest of that side of the family paid visits during the big gaps between flashback scenes, like during Lucy's early years. With the time discrepancy, that gives a reason for Henry not to go back to Storybrooke to visit -- they can visit him, spend days, and get back soon after they left, but if he goes to Storybrooke, just spending a few hours there might mean he's lost days.

[Camera One]

36 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

So, Alice should be pushing 50 in Hyperion Heights, and Jacinda should be around 65.

Hello fan,

This is A&E here.  We would be disappointed if we couldn't get past our society's tendency to lump together age and appearance.  How do we know Alice isn't 50 and Jacinda isn't 65 in Hyperion Heights?   Maybe they are.  And maybe they're not.

Hope that helps,

A&E

Edited September 21, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

On 9/21/2019 at 10:38 PM, Camera One said:

The other thing that struck me this episode was that Belle had that giant streak of white hair 10 years after the Season 6 finale, and even more grey hair 18 years after the Season 6 finale.  Yet Emma, Hook and Regina in Episode 2 had zero grey hair around 15 years after the Season 6 finale.  These Writers are appallingly inconsistent and completely blind to it.

I know I carp a lot about the aging thing, but this is such an issue because they bungled it so badly. I might have just rolled my eyes if the only aging issue in a show was that all the adult characters stayed more or less the same (just aging naturally as the actors did) while there was a massive epidemic of SORAS among the child characters, who all "grew up" and got recast with adult actors. But this is a show in which people aging at different rates has been a plot point, in which there have been multiple reasons given why people aged at different rates, and the aging that's been shown has been inconsistent.

So, we've got Belle with a giant streak of white in her hair, visibly aging, when not as much time has passed for her as passed for Emma, Hook and Regina in "A Pirate's Live," when they show no age at all. Likewise, there's Wish Hook shown to be graying when less time has passed for him since the curse would have been cast as passed for Hook Prime between when time started moving after the curse and "A Pirate's Life," so it's not just that Belle got bad genes when two versions of the same person age differently (and that was during a time period when Wish Hook had given up hard living to raise his daughter, while Hook Prime still spent a few years going after revenge and then got killed a few times and went through all kinds of trauma). Wish Hook and the Wish Charmings had visibly aged in 28 years, while Wish Hook, Regina, and Zelena don't change at all in about the same timeframe.

And aging differently or not at all has come up multiple times on the show:
No aging due to immortality: Rumple, the fairies, Merlin
No aging due to Regina's curse: almost everyone, contrasted with Emma, Henry, and August, who grew up outside the curse (and Liam 2.0, who did grow up some but who didn't age as much as he should have if he'd aged the full 28 years)
No aging due to being literally frozen in ice for about 30 years: Anna and Kristoff
No aging due to being in an urn for about 30 years: Elsa
No aging due to being under a sleeping curse: Brennan Jones, Aurora
No aging due to being in a realm where time doesn't pass: Hook and his crew, Bae
No aging due to the magic from a dragon's egg shell: Cruella and Ursula
No aging due to being turned into some kind of creature: Archie and Philip
Aging rapidly due to being in a realm where time passes more quickly: Round One Gideon
Magically de-aging: Pan, Wish Hook, August/Pinocchio (and then re-aged)
Very slow aging with an extra-long life: the Apprentice

So, with all that, when there are characters' whose appearance is totally out of whack with the number of years that have passed, as seen by the aging of other characters who are growing up, there really needs to be some sort of explanation given. Is it a plot point that Henry seems to be very close in age to his adoptive mother, his birth mother, and his stepfather (and his stepfather's doppelganger)? When Henry introduced Regina to Murderella as his mother, she kind of did a double take and then made a snarky remark about Whook being his father, like she saw it as unlikely, but there was no explanation given. Were we supposed to think that Regina was too young to have been Henry's mother because her age was frozen during the curse? Because even if she was only 18 when Daniel was killed and Snow was ten, if Snow is the same age as Emma at the end of the curse when time starts moving again, that makes Regina 36 with a ten-year-old, so if she'd given birth to him under normal circumstances, she'd have been 26 when she had him, which is perfectly reasonable. No curse or teen pregnancy required.

[KingOfHearts]

6 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

So, we've got Belle with a giant streak of white in her hair, visibly aging, when not as much time has passed for her as passed for Emma, Hook and Regina in "A Pirate's Live," when they show no age at all.

It's even worse because I'm pretty sure Belle is meant to be younger than Emma and Regina. I could buy Regina and Zelena "juicing" or using anti-aging magic, but not Emma or Hook. 

I feel like they could've fixed the whole aging thing by either putting Henry in rapid-speed realm like what they did with Gideon, or put everybody else in a Curse. What A&E went for made the least amount of sense.

Edited September 23, 2019 by KingOfHearts