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

[Camera One]

It shows how they think about each episode in isolation.  They consciously decided to show Belle when Gideon was around 10 and Belle when Gideon was around 18.  Was it necessary to show so much white hair the first time we saw her again?  

Which reminds me... did we ever find out how long the characters had been in Hyperion Heights when Lucy knocked on Henry's door?  How long had Zelena known that fiancé?  If it had been that long, why wouldn't Henry know where his wife and daughter's cemetery was?

[KingOfHearts]

5 minutes ago, Camera One said:

It would have been so much more fun if he played an adult Wish Henry with all those anger issues.

Is it me, or are all the Wish characters so much more interesting? Wish Rumple was trapped for decades, and both Belle and Bae were dead/gone. Wish Regina lost her powers and went pirating with the Jolly Roger crew. Wish Henry had years of anger issues because he lost everyone he loved. Wish Hook had his own intricate backstory with Alice. I kind of wish (no pun intended) S7 was more about them. Of course, that'd make too much sense - the only wish characters left were portrayed by the remaining cast members. You wouldn't have to worry about Emma, Snow, Charming, or Belle.

It's pretty ironic that the Wish Realm, one of the worst executions in the show's history, had some of the most interesting offerings later down the road.

Edited September 24, 2019 by KingOfHearts

[daxx]

8 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

It's pretty ironic that the Wish Realm, one of the worst executions in the show's history, had some of the most interesting offerings later down the road.

It’s because they were all traumatized in one way or another. I was hoping season 7 would have been about the wish real folk.

[Camera One]

If Hyperion Heights had Wish Granny, Blue, Grumpy, etc., that would have instantly created a community we would care about a bit more.  Maybe we see in flashback that Wish Henry was so consumed with grief and revenge that he was a bad ruler until it was too late.  Maybe he was also overwhelmed with being King so young and meets Cinderella in the forest when she goes to talk to her mother's tree.  She doesn't know he's the king and they become friends.  We later find out that Cinderella's mother was a victim of Mother Gothel and Lady Tremaine working together.  

Meanwhile, Wish Regina feels like she's getting a new start in realms that don't know who she is.  She finds out about her long-lost sister, and goes to look for Wish Zelena in Oz.  We could find out the alternate history of Wish Regina.  

I mean, we would still be saddled with Jacinda, Victoria, Lucy, etc., so I don't know how successful the season could have been, but maybe with a more interesting story?

[tennisgurl]

Wish Henry is the most interesting idea they had in season 7 so of course they didn’t bother to really use him and had him instantly forgive Regina for murdering his family for no reason after a few crocodile tears. Really, I wish we had gotten more Wish realm in general instead of the new and lamer Enchanted Forest. 

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

Really, I wish we had gotten more Wish realm in general instead of the new and lamer Enchanted Forest. 

You know, if they wanted to essentially remake season 1, they could have just done it with the Wish Realm -- they missed the Regina curse, but history does tend to repeat itself and go in cycles, so it's likely another villain might have come along to cast a new curse that sent them to a different place in our world. How would things have gone differently? Would there have been another Savior? I guess they'd have needed a way to de-age Whook and Wregina, but on a show like this, that's not too hard. There could have been flashbacks about events in the Wish Realm and how different it was from the original Enchanted Forest.

I know there would have been some possible issues, since a lot of the fans might not have been keen on watching the show when there weren't any of the original characters, just other versions of them, and if they held the revelation that these were the Wish Realm characters, not the originals, as a big surprise twist, then a lot of fans would have been upset about Rumple and Hook being separated from their respective spouses. But as low as the ratings ended up being, it's not like they had that much to lose by making a clean break, and it might have been a tiny bit more accessible to new viewers because the history of the show would have been less relevant to the present plot.

[Shanna Marie]

Following up on the previous post about a season 7 involving the Wish Realm characters, I figured it out last night:

There's been no traveling to other realms from the Wish Realm, so their backstory events might have just happened in their memories or happened in a really sped up sense in the instant when the wish was made (but it's totally real to them). I guess there would have to have been a Wish Neverland for WHook to not be 200 years old and for Bae to have been around to father Henry, so maybe there could be a Wish Wonderland for Alice to have visited. Alice's tower is in another country, not another realm, and we can skip all the Cinderella-related stuff, so it's just Gothel (but with some backstory other than being mad at the prehistoric Victorian mean girls) involved in that story, and it happens a few years after the curse would have been cast, so that Alice is the right age without any kind of magical interference in the timeline. After getting her powers back from the flower that grows only in that remote country and after WHook gives up his ship to raise his daughter, WRegina goes off and has adventures as a pirate queen.

When Emma sends WHook back to the Jolly Roger in the Wishverse episode, she doesn't realize that she's sending him halfway around the world to a ship he hasn't seen in a couple of decades. Now energized to find a way back to his daughter, he joins WRegina's crew (maybe co-captaining -- he runs the ship part of the operation, she manages the business side of things). Somewhere along the way, they run through a strange storm that turns out to be some kind of fountain of youth, and they're all de-aged to the point they look like the actors really do. Meanwhile, WRumple approaches King Henry to help him on his vengeance quest, saying he'll help him find Regina to get vengeance for the murder of his grandparents, but WRumple doesn't tell him that the Regina they're chasing is a different person. WRumple is focused on his own vengeance for WRegina keeping Belle locked up so that she died alone in a prison. Somewhere along the way, Henry and WRumple catch up with WHook and WRegina, and while they're in the same vicinity (along with a bunch of new characters who are actually interesting people from other stories), a curse gets cast that sends them to an odd little neighborhood of a big city, where they know they're part of a larger metro area, but no one ever leaves this neighborhood or goes there. It's a poor place full of despair, with no real hope for getting out. (And, therefore, the curse doesn't have to alter the outside world.)

To get our season one echo, Cursed King Henry (still a teen, so I guess we're stuck with Jared Henry, but I'd gladly take him if it means we don't have to have Lucy), is in the library when he finds these strange old fairytale books. They're some of the books Author Henry wrote about the seasons 1-6 adventures, in multiple volumes, but not all the volumes are there, so the story isn't complete (and there's no mention of the Wish Realm). He flips through them out of curiosity and finds the whole thing very weird -- especially since one of the characters looks just like he did when he was younger. Later, he passes Cursed WRegina on the street and does a double take because she looks so much like the character who was his character's adoptive mother. He goes back to study the books in more detail and takes one away with him, then looks for WRegina again and follows her. Then he shows up with the book at her home/workplace (a bar?), tells her he thinks he's her son, and they're under a curse that's ripped everyone away from their loved ones. Thus we get our season one echo (and Regina gets yet another thing Emma got), but it's a different situation. Meanwhile, we're getting some flashbacks and the audience is starting to get the idea that these are the Wish Realm characters and Henry is wrong about who they all are, though he's right about the curse.

In the present, we'd have Henry trying to bring them all together to try to get them to believe in the curse and find a way to break the curse. The flashbacks could follow the course of events that led from Emma and Regina Prime's visit to the Wish Realm to the casting of the curse, as well as the unique backstories of the Wish characters (like WHook and Alice, how WRegina lost her powers so she couldn't cast the curse and some of her adventures as a pirate queen), backstories for the new characters, and maybe filling in some of the history that would apply to both the Prime and Wish versions, like Hook's early days as a pirate or Regina's early days as queen (using the teen Snow actress). WHook and WRumple are maybe cops who become partners and later good friends. And then it's all really shocking when they get their memories back and realize that the books were never about any of them. The Regina Henry thought was his adoptive mother is actually the Evil Queen he thinks killed his grandparents (did Wish Henry ever know that Regina wasn't his world's Regina?). WHook and WRumple realize they're enemies, and WRumple still wants to kill WRegina. Will they be able to get over all their animosity to break the curse and defeat whoever cast it? Will the "we are both" fake memories plus the real memories of the relationships they developed under the curse balance out their history?

And then because the series gets cancelled, they end up traveling to Storybrooke for a grand finale so we can get one last glimpse at our original characters, except they don't bring all the realms of story together or crown any Regina queen of the universe. Maybe Emma gets to save the day as Savior, with WHenry finding a way to get in touch with her, and she comes to break the curse. If she had to be an all-purpose Savior, she should get to do some Savioring at the end of the series.

I'm not sure how well it would actually have gone over to have all the characters be Wish Realm versions, but this seems less convoluted than what we got. How good it would be would depend on the new characters. If I had time for fanfic, it would be kind of fun to try to write this.

[Camera One]

I actually liked seeing Angry Wish Henry as played by Jared in the finale, so I don't think I would have minded if he had been in Season 7.  It is tricky to find a way where Wish Henry would involve himself with Wish Regina.  Of course, we know if A&E were in charge, Wish Henry would have warmed to Wish Regina within an hour.  But logically speaking, he would have wanted nothing to do with her.  If Wish Regina had been older, then Wish Henry might have known it was a different Regina who killed Wish Snowing.  There would need to be a situation where Wish Henry reluctantly works with Wish Regina.  

The other problem is it highlights that Emma didn't think twice about Wish Henry when she came back.  In Season 6, the Writers said the people in the Wish Realm weren't real people, so Emma not caring about Wish Henry made sense.  Well, assuming that she didn't retain her false memories in the Wish Realm.  But even then, we were somehow supposed to think of Wish Robin Hood as real.  Maybe in Emma's return episode in Season 7, they could have stressed that she often thought about Wish Henry and was worried about him.

13 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

or happened in a really sped up sense in the instant when the wish was made (but it's totally real to them).

Alice's tower is in another country, not another realm

That is a possible work-around.  As you said, the key is that Wish Mother Gothel and the tower (and Wish Hook getting Wish Gothel pregnant) needed to be within the Wish Realm and not some completely autonomous always-existed realm with its own Enchanted Forest.

[Shanna Marie]

12 hours ago, Camera One said:

It is tricky to find a way where Wish Henry would involve himself with Wish Regina. 

In my scenario, Wish Rumple has conned him into thinking Wish Regina was who killed his grandparents, so he's hunting her down in the flashbacks, but in the present under the curse, once he finds the storybook he thinks he's Henry Prime and she's Regina Prime and his adoptive mother. Since he's a teen (if he's in the real-time present for season 7, he actually should be entering his junior year of high school, based on his age and the date for season one), maybe under the curse he's in foster care (his foster mother is the old woman who lived in a shoe), so he's eager to find a mother, and they end up teaming up to fight the curse. Then it's even more wrenching when he gets his memories back and realizes that the mother he thought he'd found was actually his enemy. And then he'd learn that although she is the same person who tormented his grandparents before his mother was born, she wasn't the one who killed them.

12 hours ago, Camera One said:

But even then, we were somehow supposed to think of Wish Robin Hood as real.  Maybe in Emma's return episode in Season 7, they could have stressed that she often thought about Wish Henry and was worried about him.

They could have handwaved that Wish Robin was different, since he hadn't aged the way the others did, like he came from a different source than the wish. But then Emma should have been shocked on meeting Wish Hook again to realize that him still existing and traveling to other places meant all the Wish Realm people were real. She could have asked Wish Hook if she'd seen that realm's Henry and knew how he was doing. I don't know that I blame her all that much for not thinking too deeply about Wish Henry, given that she spent all of about five minutes with him, all her other memories of him were fake (and we don't know how long they lasted or how deep they went), and in the five minutes she spent with him, he was late to her birthday party because he was off doing something to try to be a hero.

And, darn it, my brain decided to start writing some of this scenario, so I may have to end up actually writing it to get it out of my head. But there are those minor details to figure out, such as what the main plot really is, who cast the curse and why, etc. Then again, the show's writers didn't seem to have figured all that out until after they'd written half the season, so why should I bother until I get there?

[Camera One]

13 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

But then Emma should have been shocked on meeting Wish Hook again to realize that him still existing and traveling to other places meant all the Wish Realm people were real. She could have asked Wish Hook if she'd seen that realm's Henry and knew how he was doing.

This would have been the best way to "fix" their retcon.  

Quote

And, darn it, my brain decided to start writing some of this scenario, so I may have to end up actually writing it to get it out of my head. But there are those minor details to figure out, such as what the main plot really is, who cast the curse and why, etc. Then again, the show's writers didn't seem to have figured all that out until after they'd written half the season, so why should I bother until I get there?

That would be fun to read.  If stuck, you can employ A&E's techniques of random MacGuffins, timeline conflicts and retcons up the wazoo.

[Shanna Marie]

Henry didn't get a curse name (even though he had a curse fake identity), probably because they wanted the shocking moment in their season 7 teaser at the end of season 6 when Lucy calls him "Henry Mills." It might have lost some impact if Lucy had said, "Fred Smith? Your real name is Henry Mills and I'm your daughter."

But if Henry had been given a curse name, what would it have been? I was looking at the patterns, and there really are none. In curse 1, there were some that were subtle connections to their real identities, like Mary-Margaret Blanchard for Snow White. There were some that were less than subtle, like Ruby for Red. Granny kept her name (at least, what she was called). Archie was his real name from when he was human, combined with Hopper to refer to his cricket form. David was his real first name, combined with Nolan, probably to match sticking him with Kathryn, but it's also apt since he was a shepherd (and they didn't reveal that it was his real name until season 2, probably because they'd run out of creative energy by then). There doesn't seem to have been any connection for Abigail/Kathryn, Gepetto/Marco, or any of the dwarfs. Nova (exploding star)/Astrid (meaning "star") was a relatively clever connection. Gold referred to Rumple's hobby of spinning straw into gold (and putting a price on everything).

The curse 2 names are even less interesting. "Jacinda" seemed to be a way to give a Latin spin to "Cinderella." Otherwise, I think we just had Rogers (as in Jolly), Weaver (somewhat related to spinning), and Kelly (a shade of green) for apt references. I don't think anyone else's curse names had anything to do with who they really were.

Which makes it hard to figure out what Henry would have been named. If it's King Henry who's cursed, he could be "Rex." Or Henry's last name could be "Nelson," which is kind of like "Neal's son." Our Henry could be "Walt" as in "Disney" to hint about him being an Author (and bonus gratuitous Lost callback). So, Walt Nelson? Or there's Jake or Will, if we're going with a Brothers Grimm reference.

(This post brought to you by copyedits and procrastination.)

[Melgaypet]

6 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

The curse 2 names are even less interesting. "Jacinda" seemed to be a way to give a Latin spin to "Cinderella." Otherwise, I think we just had Rogers (as in Jolly), Weaver (somewhat related to spinning), and Kelly (a shade of green) for apt references. I don't think anyone else's curse names had anything to do with who they really were.

"Jacinda" also refers to the hyacinth flower, so I suppose that's meaningful. If you squint.

Confession: I've always liked the name. I think I first heard it in relation to the actress Jacinda Barrett, and I thought it was very pretty, and also unusual without being weird. I'm mildly annoyed that this cool name was given to such an aggravating character.

[Camera One]

I thought Jacinda was a clever variant.  Her last name was Vidrio so glass.  Victoria and Ivy were meaningless though.  Belfry referring to the clock striking 12.  

Nelson Cobb might have worked.  A cob being an adult male swan.

[KingOfHearts]

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

Belfry referring to the clock striking 12

I always thought it was a reference to a belltower, because Rapunzel was stuck in a tower. That's a good interpretation, though.

[Shanna Marie]

40 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

I always thought it was a reference to a belltower, because Rapunzel was stuck in a tower.

Maybe both? The clock striking hadn't occurred to me, but probably because there were so few traces of the Cinderella story used here that it was easy to forget that's what they were doing.

And doing Victoria as Lady Tremaine so soon after the absolutely brilliant, pitch perfect rendition in season 6 might have been a mistake.

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

Her last name was Vidrio so glass. 

Was that ever actually used onscreen? I don't remember it coming up. Maybe it was printed on something. Or I just zoned out when the story was about her because she was so boring.

I wonder if Wish Henry was also destined to be an Author. Or did they even have Authors in the Wishverse? That would open a huge can of worms, since there doesn't seem to have been a Wish version of our world and all the Authors seem to have come from our world. Maybe the Authors are meant to cover the Wish realm, too? That extra page about Regina and Robin seemed to actually have been about the Wishverse, where Wish Robin and Evil Queen met up in Ye Olde Tavern. It's probably best to avoid the Author in the Wishverse because it would be adding one poorly developed idea that wasn't really thought through to another poorly developed idea that wasn't really thought through. And we won't even get into the speculation about whether there was another Savior since Emma didn't have to be one (or what happened to Wish Emma).

[KingOfHearts]

4 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Or did they even have Authors in the Wishverse?

Didn't the Wish Apprentice show up in the S7 finale, or did I just imagine that?

[Shanna Marie]

52 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

Didn't the Wish Apprentice show up in the S7 finale, or did I just imagine that?

I don't remember that, but that doesn't mean anything. I never rewatched the S7 finale. I just deleted it from my DVR, unwatched, after buying the DVDs (I was out of town when it aired and watched it at the hotel).

[Camera One]

5 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Was that ever actually used onscreen? I don't remember it coming up. Maybe it was printed on something. Or I just zoned out when the story was about her because she was so boring.

I don't think Jacinda's last name was ever mentioned onscreen.  

5 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

I always thought it was a reference to a belltower, because Rapunzel was stuck in a tower. 

I almost forgot Tremaine was also Rapunzel.  I guess that was another clever clue about Tremaine's secret identity.  

5 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I wonder if Wish Henry was also destined to be an Author. Or did they even have Authors in the Wishverse? That would open a huge can of worms, since there doesn't seem to have been a Wish version of our world and all the Authors seem to have come from our world. Maybe the Authors are meant to cover the Wish realm, too? That extra page about Regina and Robin seemed to actually have been about the Wishverse, where Wish Robin and Evil Queen met up in Ye Olde Tavern. It's probably best to avoid the Author in the Wishverse because it would be adding one poorly developed idea that wasn't really thought through to another poorly developed idea that wasn't really thought through. And we won't even get into the speculation about whether there was another Savior since Emma didn't have to be one (or what happened to Wish Emma).

It was a carbon copy of the Enchanted Forest, so I assume they would have an Author, and a Savior, too.  Wish Savior Aladdin would be walking around (though he'd already have used the Shears by then).  And Wish Rumple would have had the same backstory with his mother Wish Black Fairy, who would likely still be in the Dark Realm or whatever it was called.

[KingOfHearts]

12 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I don't remember that, but that doesn't mean anything.

I vaguely remember him giving Adult Henry some kind of warning about his author powers.

[Camera One]

What were your favorite father-child relationships on "Once Upon a Time"?  

I was thinking about Disney movies, and there were some strong relationships between father and child that could have been explored further in a live-action venue like "Once".

Belle and her father, for example, had quite a strong bond.  Mulan and her father as well, though they had different viewpoints.  Ariel and her father, and Pocahontas and her father were more at odds.  Simba's feeling about his father changed over time.  Cinderella and Snow, and their father would presumably have been close before the father died.  Aurora's father would have been heartbroken at being separated from his daughter for so many years.  

[KingOfHearts]

S7 suffers from the same issue as S2, S4, and S6, in that the writers kept throwing random crap at the wall and there wasn't a coherent storyline or character arc. As @Camera One mentioned in another thread, there were too many villains. First we had Victoria, then Ivy, then Mother Gothel and the Coat Hangers, then Jack, then Facilier, and finally Wish Rumple. Not counting the coven, that's 6 villains each featured in multiple episodes. If they were grouped up or working for one Big Bad, it wouldn't be so fragmented. Like, if it were just Ivy and the Coat Hangers working for Gothel, that would've been a unified threat. But we had Victoria, Jack, Facilier, and Wish Rumple, who all had completely different goals. 

Henry doesn't have any character development. He only believes because his past self talks to him on the phone. I remember in that episode going, "Oh yeah, I forgot he had WALLS and still mourns the lost of his family", because that had been dropped after the second or third episode of the season. You don't really get the impression that he's guarded or doesn't want to believe most of the time he's on screen. In fact, he's actually pretty open to new relationships and all the crazy shenanigans in Hyperion Heights. Like all the other characters, it's hard to keep track of whether or not he has his memories, because HH Henry isn't much different from Adult Henry.

The only characters that really go through any growth are Victoria (shockingly), Ivy, Robyn, Alice, and WHook. Regina, Zelena, Lucy, Jacinda, Sabine, and Weaver stay pretty much stagnant.

[Shanna Marie]

41 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

The only characters that really go through any growth are Victoria (shockingly), Ivy, Robyn, Alice, and WHook.

I'm not even sure that I'd say WHook has any growth. They skipped over everything between him needing to learn from Henry how to do the right thing to him being a total softie sweetie who was basically Rogers even before the curse. Then Rogers doesn't seem to have grown or changed. I guess Robyn reconciled with her mother, but did Alice change, aside from escaping and becoming more sane?

I think the real problem was that they were writing a serialized show episodically. This is where the fundamental structural flaws of the series became painfully obvious. It's supposed to be all one long story, but in execution it was "this is the episode about X," and that didn't flow into the next episode, which was about Y. So, we had the episode about Whook joining the team, but instead of building on that and showing how he fit in with Regina and Henry and showing how Regina and Henry's relationship worked now that he was an adult, the next episode was a Jacinda-centric, so Whook and Henry were out of the picture. All the development of Ivy/Drizella had to happen in her centric rather than being spread across the season. If they did plan all along for Ivy and not Victoria to have been the one who cast the curse, then they didn't execute it well because right up to the point she says, "Don't call me Ivy," it could have gone either way and actually would have made more sense for it to have been Victoria (like her texting Henry after seeing her mother go into the secret lair on the security camera, but if she knew all along, why would she have needed to see it on the security camera?). I guess they left themselves room to have a change of plans when one plot line wasn't working out, but then they got desperate and started throwing in everything.

[Camera One]

And even when a character underwent "growth", it was sometimes a 180 flip-flop within a single episode.  I couldn't really buy Ivy's growth in 7B.  Victoria had the "final sacrifice" variety of growth that had been done before with other characters.

49 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I'm not even sure that I'd say WHook has any growth. They skipped over everything between him needing to learn from Henry how to do the right thing to him being a total softie sweetie who was basically Rogers even before the curse. Then Rogers doesn't seem to have grown or changed. I guess Robyn reconciled with her mother, but did Alice change, aside from escaping and becoming more sane?

Whook's case is interesting because Whook in the Rapunzel flashback seemed even softer than Hook in Season 2.  Yet he had horrible intentions in Episode 2 of Season 7, and then promptly reverted back to his former self by the end of the Episode.  I suppose a near-death experience could have done that, but the show never explored how Whook became that drunk creep who abandoned his daughter, even though she might have still needed protection from afar.  

I can't say I remember much of Robyn's arc, but she was rather forgettable compared to Alice. 

I suppose Alice learned to trust?  At least that was her arc in the flashback.  She didn't change much in the present-day.

1 hour ago, KingOfHearts said:

S7 suffers from the same issue as S2, S4, and S6, in that the writers kept throwing random crap at the wall and there wasn't a coherent storyline or character arc.  First we had Victoria, then Ivy, then Mother Gothel and the Coat Hangers, then Jack, then Facilier, and finally Wish Rumple. Not counting the coven, that's 6 villains each featured in multiple episodes. If they were grouped up or working for one Big Bad, it wouldn't be so fragmented.

It seems like that was the strategy A&E used for plotting.  When they ran out of ideas for one villain, they pulled out the next one and called it a twist, which would fill 1-2 episodes of material.  So they always had a place to go in the next episode.  There was always an easy cliffhanger to lead down another rabbit hole.  I think for the average viewer, it does distract them from the inconsistencies and retcons because you're always looking ahead at the next corner and distracted by the all the shiny toys trampled along the way.  I find I'm seeing more holes as I'm rewatching this season.

Quote

Henry doesn't have any character development. He only believes because his past self talks to him on the phone. I remember in that episode going, "Oh yeah, I forgot he had WALLS and still mourns the lost of his family", because that had been dropped after the second or third episode of the season. You don't really get the impression that he's guarded or doesn't want to believe most of the time he's on screen.

I totally agree.  Henry seemed to have no WALLS™ especially when it came to Roni.  He attached to her as a surrogate son in record time (or he was a closet alcoholic).  He only rejected Lucy's ideas because he thought she was acting crazy and there was zero proof.  It was also hard to feel sad for Lucy when Adult Henry didn't believe because she didn't seem all that affected.  Child Henry in Season 1 always acted so desperate and dejected so you wanted Emma to believe.  

Edited September 28, 2019 by Camera One

[Camera One]

On 9/23/2019 at 10:34 PM, KingOfHearts said:

Is it me, or are all the Wish characters so much more interesting?

That made me think.  What were the main goals of the characters in Season 7 in the present-day?  How/when was it resolved?  And after that was resolved, what was their next goal?

Adult Henry
- He wanted to write another book - goal never revisited but he wrote a blog post
- He wanted to get together with Jacinda

Roni
- She wanted to keep her bar - and then she did, by the end of Episode 1
- Then her memories returned by Episode 6, so then it was the usual goal of playing cat and mouse with the villains

Weaver
- He didn't really have a goal as Weaver
- Then his memories returned by Episode 4, so then it was to find The Guardian

Whook
- To find lost girl Eloise Gardiner - and then he did, by the end of Episode 7 and then?

Alice
- To ???

Jacinda
- To live with Lucy and be financially stable

Lucy
- To have her father and mother remember their true selves but I'm even sure why she believes this - she has to wait all season for this

Sabine
- To have a successful food truck and be financially stable

Victoria 
- To find a way to resurrect Anastasia and to drive people out of Hyperion Heights so they would be separated forever... but why?

Drizella
- To get revenge on her mother and multitudes of other innocent people who she hates because...

Gothel
- To get revenge on all of humanity... by partnering with humans who are elitist just like the Prehistoric Victorian Mean Girls....

Edited October 8, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

13 hours ago, Camera One said:

Adult Henry
- He wanted to write another book - goal never revisited but he wrote a blog post
- He wanted to get together with Jacinda

Don't forget, he started a podcast! And a podcast about a neighborhood in Seattle apparently got enough national attention after a few months that he got job offers because of it. And did he really want to get together with Jacinda? He didn't seem all that interested until Roni started pushing him. Then he seemed reluctant about approaching her. He seemed like the classic case of the guy who only asks a girl out because all his friends are saying stuff like "you'd make such a cute couple!"

13 hours ago, Camera One said:

Roni
- She wanted to keep her bar - and then she did, by the end of Episode 1
- Then her memories returned by Episode 6, so then it was the usual goal of playing cat and mouse with the villains

I think after her memories returned, she wanted to find a way to break the curse without Henry dying, and until she found the curse, she was trying to stop anyone from breaking the curse.

13 hours ago, Camera One said:

Victoria 
- To find a way to resurrect Anastasia and to drive people out of Hyperion Heights so they would be separated forever... but why?

I don't think we ever get a good explanation for why she thought she cast the curse. Was there something in our world -- a world without magic -- that she needed in order to resurrect Anastasia that she couldn't get in her world? I guess maybe it was that she needed Lucy to not believe in order to use that to wake Anastasia, and she couldn't do that in their world because it was pretty obvious there. This may also be what all the separating people was about, to crush Lucy's faith. But I don't see why Drizella would have wanted the curse that would give her mother what she wanted. And it sounds like there were so many other things Victoria was trying in their world. She needed the heart of a true believer rather than a lack of belief. But then she needed a pure heart.

The whole season falls apart if you look at the characters' action in relation to what they supposedly want.

[KingOfHearts]

How old is Adult Henry meant to be? Emma's age? If so, was he like 20 when Lucy was born? Were only two to four years enough to justify a recast? When Emma et al visited him, they seemed surprised by how much he'd changed and grown. 

How did he get to the Disenchanted Forest? The first episode flows like it wasn't very long after he left Storybrooke. 

[Shanna Marie]

19 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

How old is Adult Henry meant to be? Emma's age? If so, was he like 20 when Lucy was born? Were only two to four years enough to justify a recast? When Emma et al visited him, they seemed surprised by how much he'd changed and grown. 

I think he's a lot older. Robyn, who was born when he was 12-13, is 18 around the time Lucy's born. Depending on how long it was between Henry and Ella meeting and Lucy's birth, that puts him at around 30 when Emma and Hook Prime visited him. And it puts him around 40 in Hyperion Heights.

[KingOfHearts]

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

I think he's a lot older. Robyn, who was born when he was 12-13, is 18 around the time Lucy's born. Depending on how long it was between Henry and Ella meeting and Lucy's birth, that puts him at around 30 when Emma and Hook Prime visited him. And it puts him around 40 in Hyperion Heights.

They don't do a very good job at presenting ages. He seems a bit too naive in HH to be someone pushing 40. That would've been around Regina's age during the first curse. Like, even in the flashbacks and when he has his memories, he doesn't seem like someone who's been a father for 8 years. Maybe its just me? 

[Shanna Marie]

28 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

They don't do a very good job at presenting ages. He seems a bit too naive in HH to be someone pushing 40. That would've been around Regina's age during the first curse. Like, even in the flashbacks and when he has his memories, he doesn't seem like someone who's been a father for 8 years. Maybe its just me? 

No, it's not just you. Henry is written as though he's in his late 20s/early 30s. As is Rogers, when WHook should be at least in his 60s even with the age reset, closer to 90 without it (and not counting the Neverland years). If you look at the timeline, Alice should be the same age as Emma because they were born at about the same time, and if Henry's in his early 30s, Emma's in her late 40s (and she's much older if Henry's the age he really should be, based on other clues in the timeline). To make matters crazier, Ella was in her teens before Alice was born, so she should be around 60, but she's written as though she's about 21, even though she's got a daughter who's at least 8 (and I think she's older by the time of the present in HH).

I don't think the writers have a good handle on the characters' ages or on how people of these ages should be acting.

[Camera One]

6 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

He seems a bit too naive in HH to be someone pushing 40. That would've been around Regina's age during the first curse. Like, even in the flashbacks and when he has his memories, he doesn't seem like someone who's been a father for 8 years. Maybe its just me? 

It probably didn't help that the actor who played Adult Henry looked younger than his real age.  He could probably pass for someone in his late 20s.  We didn't see many flashbacks of him being a dad to Lucy.  I don't recall him doing any actual parenting in present-day Hyperion Heights either.  He spent more time drinking beer at Roni's.

[Shanna Marie]

14 hours ago, Camera One said:

It probably didn't help that the actor who played Adult Henry looked younger than his real age.  He could probably pass for someone in his late 20s. 

Yeah, it just complicated matters that some of the actors' appearances were out of whack with their ages. Henry looked a lot younger than his age and definitely younger than the age he should have been, along with Rogers/WHook. Meanwhile, Jacinda's actress was older than Henry's actor, and while he looked younger than his age, she looked a bit older. And then there was Gothel/Eloise, who was supposedly a "little girl" or possibly an angsty teen ten years ago, but who was in her 30s and looked it in the present. And since they didn't age the "adult" characters while the kid character grew up, we end up with Henry being a peer with his mom and his stepfather's alter ego, both of whom look the same as they did when Henry was about 12 years old. And they made no effort to show any change in Henry between the time he met Ella and the time Lucy was at least eight.

As bad as the age/timeline stuff is in season 7, it's always been an issue with them. They've always been inconsistent. There was Emma, aged down with hair, makeup, glasses, and wardrobe to show her as a teenager, but Neal, whose actor looked a lot older than he was, not aged down or changed at all when he was supposed to have been at least 12 years younger. They changed Hook's hair and wardrobe to show him in his navy and enslaved deckhand days, but they didn't change anything about him (other than the hook) in the 8-10 years between him first meeting Milah and his Captain Hook days. There's no real change in Rumple between the time Bae was born and the time Bae was 14 (before Rumple becomes immortal). They probably should have used a younger actor for Rumple when Bae was born.

14 hours ago, Camera One said:

We didn't see many flashbacks of him being a dad to Lucy.  I don't recall him doing any actual parenting in present-day Hyperion Heights either.  He spent more time drinking beer at Roni's.

I can't really blame Henry for not doing any parenting in Hyperion Heights, given that there was no evidence until he got his memories back that he was Lucy's father. The problem is that they barely showed him being Lucy's father in the past. We never really got a sense of Henry, Ella, and Lucy being a family in the past, so why would we care whether they got reunited in the present? That's where season one had the right approach of starting with the Charmings as a family being ripped apart, then going back to their meeting. Doing things they way they did in season 7 meant that we didn't see Henry's family together until near the end, and that's a lot of time to spend not caring about them in the present.

[KingOfHearts]

It also doesn't help that Henry was supposed to be Emma in the beginning of the season where Lucy shows up at his door. One would assume he was meant to be around Emma's age in S1. (Around 28.) 

[Camera One]

To continue comparing Adult Henry with Emma...

In Season 1, Emma had a number of quite heavy talks with Kid Henry.  The thing with Emma is that she didn't talk down to him.  They really opened up to one another.

Meanwhile in Season 7, I don't remember too many heart-felt talks between Henry and Lucy.  I think Henry mentioned his dead family once, but it was never mentioned again.  Nor did it affect Henry's mood or mindset beyond one episode.   Lucy had practically nothing deep to share with Henry either.  

In Season 1, Emma became friends with Mary Margaret.  This was a big thing for Emma because it seemed like she didn't have friends before.  They spoke truths to one another and it helped Emma open up a little bit, and it helped Mary Margaret to gain some confidence.  None of Adult Henry's friendships in Season 7 was that character-changing, in either direction.  Roni would have been fine without Henry, and vice versa.  

The cases that Emma had in Season 1 often forced her to lower her walls or confront a demon in her past.  Adult Henry didn't even have cases, nor anything to confront from his past.  He hardly interacted with people other than Roni or Jacinda and maybe Rogers (who was more like a casual acquaintance).

So as a protagonist, Adult Henry did not work in so many ways.  Unlike Emma, Adult Henry had a fake past.  But it was almost like the fake past didn't matter.  Whereas Mary Margaret was defined by her fake past of loneliness, even if it was hazy.  Kid Henry was in Storybrooke, but he lived a real life there, a life of loneliness.  Whereas it was unclear how long Lucy had even been in Hyperion Heights.  

Edited October 10, 2019 by Camera One

[tennisgurl]

Another big difference is that Emma did know right away that Henry was her son that she  gave up when she was a teenager, and that meant they did have a connection right away. Yeah biology isnt the end all be all of relationships, but Emma clearly had regrets about Henry, and having to give him up, even if she did think it was for the best at the time, and Henry was horribly lonely and desperate for love (before Regina was ret-conned into being the best mom ever) so they had reasons to want to have a relationship beyond Henry wanting to break the curse and Emma getting dragged into things. With Lucy and Adult Henry, he really has no memory of having a daughter, so he had no conflicted feeling about fatherhood or regrets about giving up a child, and Lucy has a loving, if struggling, parent as well as Aunt Tiana, and never really comes off as particularly sad or lonely, more like she is impatient to get the plot moving. Henry was precocious, but he was also sympathetic in his loneliness and desire to get to know this new mom who might give him the love he wants, but Lucy is just precocious without any of the desperation or sadness. She seems like a pretty happy kid, who at worst is snarky and a bit sneaky, she never seems that sad about being separated from her father, and we never see much real bonding between her and Henry. It also helped that Emma was really focused on Henry in season one, and her other relationships kind of spring boarded off of that. Henry is mostly kind of dating Jacinda, with Lucy kind of on the side to create drama.

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

Another big difference is that Emma did know right away that Henry was her son that she  gave up when she was a teenager, and that meant they did have a connection right away.

I think that's the key, along with the fact that neither Emma nor Henry had cursed identities. They were interacting as themselves, so their relationship was true, regardless of the curse. If it had turned out that Henry was just an imaginative kid with flights of fancy and there was no curse and the people in town weren't really fairy tale characters, Emma and Henry's relationship would have been true. From Emma's perspective, not believing in the curse at first, she still knew that Henry was her son and she still had reason to care about his well being, to worry that in giving him up for adoption, she'd put him in a difficult environment. She'd wanted the best for him, but she had reason to worry that Regina wasn't giving him the kind of life she'd hoped he would have.

In season 7, neither Henry nor Lucy were their real selves. From Henry's point of view, not believing they were cursed, he had no reason to interact with Lucy at all. In fact, it's a little creepy that he's trying to date Jacinda, considering that they met because her daughter decided that he was her father. When you think about it from Henry's perspective (and Jacinda's), it's one of those cases of the characters not acting like real people. If a random kid shows up at your door and claims you're her father, then steals your computer and you meet her mother when you go to reclaim it -- and you've never seen that woman before in your life, so you know you can't be the father -- are you really going to start dating that woman? If you meet a guy because your kid decided that he was her father, and you know someone else is the father, are you going to want to date that guy, or are you going to want to keep him far away from your kid?

Meanwhile, it's weird that no one is bothered by the fact that Lucy has decided that this total stranger is her father. If Henry got put in therapy as a kid for believing there was a curse and the people around him were fairytale characters, why is no one worried about Lucy, who not only has decided that a paperback novel is actual history and that she and everyone around her is under a curse, but who is also going to a stranger's home and declaring that he's her father and wanting to hang around with this guy? Why isn't Victoria putting her in therapy and gaslighting her the way Regina did to Henry?

Thinking about it more from adult Henry's perspective ... Emma knew it was very likely true that Henry was her son because she knew she'd given birth to a boy about the right age, and she knew she'd given him up for adoption. For a man, it's possible that he might have a child he doesn't know about -- unless he was celibate or monogamous during the critical time period. Depending on the age of his dead child and the length of his marriage, Lucy's basically accusing him of cheating on his wife, of fathering her while he was married. Wouldn't that be really upsetting? But they treat it as a cute quirk.

19 hours ago, Camera One said:

The cases that Emma had in Season 1 often forced her to lower her walls or confront a demon in her past.  Adult Henry didn't even have cases, nor anything to confront from his past. 

I think a related thing in season one was that Henry's arrival in Emma's life and his proposition that she had a family she could be reunited with offered to give her something she'd always longed for and lacked: a family and a home. It gave a reason she was abandoned and people to have in her life who cared about her. If he was right, it explained things and gave her a family, but even if it was just a childish fantasy, she still had Henry and she made friends that filled a family-like role in her life. She had bonds that she'd never had.

In season seven, even though they gave cursed Henry essentially Emma's backstory, there didn't seem to be any sense of him looking for anything or needing anything. Lucy didn't try to give him what he was lacking through the curse explanation. She didn't even know that Roni was Regina, didn't try to set up him up to meet her so he'd have a mother in his life (which is weird, since she arranged for him to get the laptop at Roni's, but she didn't seem to realize that Roni was Regina).

She didn't seem to figure out that Rogers was Hook, and they didn't even have fun with the possible confusion of Whook for Hook, like seeing the Hook in the book and figuring out that Rogers must be Hook, and therefore was Henry's stepfather. They barely developed that friendship, though it could have easily been an Emma/Mary Margaret kind of relationship.

With season 7, it's like they were ticking off all the boxes to make parallels but without any of the depth or emotion behind them. I guess we were supposed to port over our emotions from season 1.

[KAOS Agent]

S7 was meant to be a reboot of sorts though and bring in new viewers who didn't need to have seen the previous six seasons in order to understand what's going on. How can they expect these people to bring over the strong emotional connections that were built in S1 and apply them to S7 if they'd never seen anything else? The writers were obviously phoning it in, but it makes me wonder if it's just because they were too lazy to bother or whether they really had no concept of why S1 connected so well with the audience.

[Camera One]

I think the concept that a new viewer could jump into S7 and understand everything was a pipe dream and wishful thinking that new audiences would help give new life to the show.  As usual, they wanted to have their cake and eat it too, by including their favorites Regina, Rumple and Hook into the new show while rebooting at the same time.  They couldn't see that it can't work both ways.  They needed to use Episode 2 and 4 to explain why Regina and Rumple became caught up in Hyperion Heights and they needed to use the ultra-confusing concept of the Wish World to introduce Whook.  Any newer viewer who Lucy, Jacinda and Victoria didn't send running would have been frustrated at this required convoluted backstory.

1 hour ago, KAOS Agent said:

The writers were obviously phoning it in, but it makes me wonder if it's just because they were too lazy to bother or whether they really had no concept of why S1 connected so well with the audience.

I think it's both.  They think they're brilliant.  And self-awareness has never been their strong suit.  They love Regina so who wouldn't love Roni?  They're the first people to put Cinderella on a motorcycle so how can that fail?

[Shanna Marie]

54 minutes ago, Camera One said:

I think the concept that a new viewer could jump into S7 and understand everything was a pipe dream and wishful thinking that new audiences would help give new life to the show.

The premise is pretty complicated. Just explaining who Henry is would require an extensive recap. Explaining the concept of the curse and why fairytale people would be living in modern America but not know who they were is also pretty complicated. So much of Henry's role in season 7 is tied to his history. He's not established well enough as a "new" character to be interesting if you don't know who he is, and what they do give of his history would just be confusing if you hadn't seen the first six seasons, like why he has two mothers but one of them is married to the pirate and is having a baby with him, and both his mothers and his stepfather are all the same age as he is.

I think it was a good move in season one to spend much of the pilot talking about the coming curse in the flashbacks and show the curse hitting in that episode.

2 hours ago, KAOS Agent said:

The writers were obviously phoning it in, but it makes me wonder if it's just because they were too lazy to bother or whether they really had no concept of why S1 connected so well with the audience.

I think there was a lot of laziness. They seemed to know what connected, since they kept hitting those beats again in season seven, mirroring all the major moments from before. But instead of actually developing those elements among the new cast, they were stuck on "Look, it's just like in season one! Doesn't that give you all the season one feels?" They don't seem to have figured out that there's a difference between a clever, meaningful callback and a lazy shortcut.

[Kktjones]

I also think their egos cost them big time in S7. They thought the rebooted show could go on for several more seasons. If they had been realistic about it, they would have made S7 more of a self-contained, short-lived curse with the goal of reuniting Henry, Regina, Hook and Rumple with their loved ones left behind in Storybrook. Instead they brought the wish realm back, added 100 new characters, made everything super convoluted, and lost chance for any real emotional attachments. For me, once I saw 702 and knew that the real Hook was happy back in Storybrook with Emma, I had no desire to watch the rest of the season.

If it had been the real Hook, who had actual connections to Henry & Rumple, separated from Emma and trying to get back to her (and maybe looking for his and Emma's daughter), that would have kept me watching. But they knew they couldn't drag that out for multiple seasons, so they had to bait and switch with a new version of Hook and a daughter that not only wasn't Emma's, but was the product of a rape by deception. So even though they kept Colin (who played my favorite character in S2-6), they removed anything that would have made me want to watch.

[Camera One]

In retrospect, it is quite laughable that they thought they could possibly get a Season 8 with the likes of Adult Henry, Jacinda, Lucy, Victoria, etc.  I wonder why they didn't bother developing Hyperion Heights as a community.  If they were going to repeat Season 1, they would probably have broken the Curse by the end of Season 7 regardless, with magic coming to Hyperion Heights. 

I wonder when in Season 7 they started to self-correct.  It could have been the end of Episode 5 ("Greenbacks"), with Ivy revealed to have her memories.  Did they really originally intend on Roni remembering she was Regina by Episode 6 ("Wake Up Call")?

[KAOS Agent]

I don't think they gave a whole lot of thought to their existing characters (well any of them really, but the bridge characters especially). Without a real idea of how Regina, Rumpel and Hook fit into their story, they just seemed shoved in there. Wish Hook worked the best because he was in essence a new character, but Roni and Weaver were pointless. They were just there to provide continuity and encourage fans of those characters/actors to stick around. Given that they had nothing for them to do, they gave the actors' input perhaps more influence than they should have. Cursed personalities used to mean something. They were a punishment of some kind. Why not give Regina and Rumpel meaningful cursed personas? Why let Lana decide how she wants Roni to be? I don't see S1-S6 Regina being at all impressed with Bartender Roni, but it meant nothing. At the very least, shouldn't there be some sort of change once she gets her memories back?

Giving an actor a say has never been good for this show. I don't think that a lot of the choices Jen Morrison made with regards to Emma's wardrobe were particularly good. I thought it was often too Jen and not Emma. But at least with her it seemed to be limited to costuming. Once it started to affect the story, it got messy. Regina and Henry's suddenly perfect mother/son relationship is a good example of doing it wrong. It's nice to get input, but it needs to fit the character and the story or it goes really wrong.

It's not like asking for actor input is unique to this show. Plenty of showrunners do it. I was reading an interview with the Lucifer showrunners about their upcoming final season and they discussed sitting down with all of the actors and asking them what they wanted for their characters (as they've done every season). They made it clear that they are accommodating only so long as it makes sense to the story they are telling. That's how the process is supposed to work. Make your actors happy and maybe add something new and fun to the show, but remember that they aren't writers and aren't thinking about whether it works in the overall scheme.

[tennisgurl]

The hubris of A&E really was their undoing by season seven, you could really see how they thought they were these brilliant writers doing this re-boot and that they were so good that they could keep this show going and that they didnt even need most of the original cast/location, that they were so great that they could keep things going for multiple seasons. They thought they could easily recapture the magic of season one but focusing on their favorite characters (Henry, Regina, Rumple) without those lame boring Charming family and that stupid supporting cast and that it would be season 1 but BETTER. Instead, they removed all of the best aspects of the show, like the Charming family dynamic, the atmosphere of Storeybrooke, and the twists on fairy tale characters. They took away all of the stuff that A&E got bored with and focused on the things that they ended up liking most, and assumed that everyone else would like it too, but instead everyone else missed the other elements and tuned out. A&E thought they were giving us a best of Once, but really they just indulged in their worst impulses. The new characters are just sad replacements of the better original characters, but they seemed to really think that it would work. 

I mean, its pretty telling that when the show was doing its big series finale, the new characters got shoved far into the background, even Jacinda and Lucy, the supposed new main characters. Meanwhile, Rumple gets a big dramatic death and reunion with his wife in the afterlife, and Regina becomes queen of the universe. The new characters never really clicked, so A&E just went back to their pets again. 

[Shanna Marie]

14 hours ago, Camera One said:

I wonder when in Season 7 they started to self-correct.  It could have been the end of Episode 5 ("Greenbacks"), with Ivy revealed to have her memories.  Did they really originally intend on Roni remembering she was Regina by Episode 6 ("Wake Up Call")?

That's about when it started to feel like flailing, like their plans were changing and they started just flinging stuff out there. It seemed like the revelation that Drizella was really behind the curse was a change of plans, and then things got wacky from there, with Rogers' missing "little girl" suddenly being Gothel, bringing in Jack/Nick and from there the serial killer plot (and I didn't get the impression they were actually planning the serial killer plot when Jack/Nick was first introduced), adding Zelena and Robyn, the quick wrap-up and forgetting of the entire Victoria/Anastasia/Drizella storyline, the shift to Gothel being the real villain and her nonsensical backstory. The direction of the show got to the point it seemed like they were changing their minds with every episode. Rewatching it gets weirdly entertaining once you know what's supposedly really going on because the earlier things were later contradicted.

13 hours ago, KAOS Agent said:

I don't think they gave a whole lot of thought to their existing characters (well any of them really, but the bridge characters especially). Without a real idea of how Regina, Rumpel and Hook fit into their story, they just seemed shoved in there. Wish Hook worked the best because he was in essence a new character, but Roni and Weaver were pointless. They were just there to provide continuity and encourage fans of those characters/actors to stick around. Given that they had nothing for them to do, they gave the actors' input perhaps more influence than they should have.

Basically, the returning characters were set decorations. The only thing Regina did that mattered was telling Drizella about the curse (and since Gothel ended up pulling the strings there, I suspect she already knew). Well, I guess she was there to be part of a TLK, but there were other candidates. Rumple's only real role was in saving WHook's life at the end. Otherwise, you could remove him from the story without changing much. WHook would be harder to remove, since he was a big part of Alice's story and Alice was instrumental in defeating Gothel, but who Alice's father was ended up not being that important, so I guess you could have eliminated him and had any random person be the father.

It's interesting that the season 7 versions of these characters were basically the actors in real life. We know Lana had input into what Roni would be, and Regina was written the same way. But I got the impression that Carlyle preferred playing against type (though he might have enjoyed getting to wear jeans to work instead of a suit), and season 7 Rumple was watered down to being basically a boring good guy when Carlyle had said he didn't want to play Rumple as a good guy. Rogers was basically Colin, and after the first episode when WHook was hilariously trying to imitate Hook Prime, even WHook was a more mellow, gentle person without his usual sass, but Colin's on record saying he prefers to play characters who are nothing like himself, and his favorite Hook to play was old, drunk Hook, so I'm pretty sure he didn't ask to have season 7 Hook be basically himself. It's like the writers couldn't be bothered making up characters (or else they took Lana's request to make Regina/Roni more like her and extrapolated that to the rest of the cast).

Then again, the rest of the cast didn't seem to extend much beyond the character description in the casting notices. They didn't develop the characters beyond a one or two-line description.

[KingOfHearts]

32 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Then again, the rest of the cast didn't seem to extend much beyond the character description in the casting notices. They didn't develop the characters beyond a one or two-line description.

Most of the characters in S7 are boring as hell. They don't make any interesting decisions, they don't act like fairy tale characters in the flashbacks or in the present, and there's very little conflict. The majority of the characters were "redeemed" villains or nasty people that only got more lifeless as they became more redeemed. None of the drama is particularly juicy. I would've taken the Kathryn Nolan soap opera from S1 over anything in S7.

The characters in S7 seemed too comfortable with themselves and each other. The stakes felt really low. There wasn't much room for growth. It's been said already, but maybe only one or two of the characters actually have any development over the course of the season. (And that mainly happened right before they left, like in the cases of Victoria and Ivy.)

Edited October 11, 2019 by KingOfHearts

[KingOfHearts]

It just occurred to me Henry is Snow's adopted step-brother, making Snowflake both his uncle and his nephew.

My brain hurts.

Edited October 12, 2019 by KingOfHearts

[Shanna Marie]

Speaking of lazy writing, it isn't just that they copied over all the big moments from season one. Just about everything in season 7 is ripped off from some other source. There are all the references to earlier seasons. There's the big Up "homage." They took all the Rapunzel imagery from Tangled (while making Rapunzel a murderer). They did the Pretty in Pink romantic triangle, and Henry had his Say Anything boombox moment. Gothel's backstory was basically Carrie. It seems like every major emotional moment in season seven was directly lifted from elsewhere and dropped into this story with no real development, so whatever feelings we had from the original thing were supposed to be ported over. It's not even like the way they used fairytales in the past, where they used the characters and situations as a springboard to a new story. Though I guess they did this some before, like the "sisters" moment through the door taken directly from Frozen.

I wonder if making the returning cast be basically like the actors rather than like past versions of the characters was because they figured that the fans would follow them to the "requel" more because they were fans of the actors than because they liked the characters, so the fans would like the characters more if they were like the actors.

Speaking of the Up ripoff, it just occurred to me that Belle's plan didn't make a lot of sense. Didn't she know from the start that she had to die, so she moved them to the End of the Universe (or Time, the World, or whatever it was) so she could speed up her dying and that would give Rumple his chance? But since he was with her in that place, it didn't speed anything up. From his perspective, it took her just as long to die there as it would have in Storybrooke or any other magical place (never mind that they could have just left town and he would have aged naturally). The only difference was that she died faster in comparison to her son's life. So she got to grow old and die alone with Rumple, with no friends or family around, not getting to see her son grow up and have a family. The only reason for doing it that way was because of Plot, so that they could get Belle's natural death of old age out of the way without aging the other characters (never mind that they still should have aged, based on how the kids had grown up).

[Camera One]

24 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Speaking of the Up ripoff, it just occurred to me that Belle's plan didn't make a lot of sense. Didn't she know from the start that she had to die, so she moved them to the End of the Universe (or Time, the World, or whatever it was) so she could speed up her dying and that would give Rumple his chance? But since he was with her in that place, it didn't speed anything up. From his perspective, it took her just as long to die there as it would have in Storybrooke or any other magical place (never mind that they could have just left town and he would have aged naturally). The only difference was that she died faster in comparison to her son's life. 

She sure acted like she knew she would be dying from the start. 

"When the Dark One finds Eternal Love at the Sun's brightest set where time stops, the path will appear to where the darkness shall rest."

Maybe Belle was afraid she would die by accident elsewhere so she went early.  Since according to the prophesy, she would need to die at the Edge of Realms for Rumple to see the "path... where the darkness shall rest."

And the path was basically The Guardian, right?  Wasn't the revealed path that Rumple needs to saddle some innocent pure person with the Darkness?  I guess Belle didn't know that part.  But it basically led to Rumple considering destroying other people's lives again.  But of course, by not following through (even though he came super close to doing so, twice) means that he was a REAL hero.  It's like they doubled down on the "Thank you for not killing me like you intended; I owe you a great debt, Rumple".

Thinking about her sacrifice brought another tear to my eye.

Edited October 12, 2019 by Camera One

[tennisgurl]

You know whats really annoying? They go on so much about how in the Enchanted Forrest everyone gets a happy ending and true love always wins and good always defeats evil and how everything ended so happily in Storeybrooke and everyone is happy and blah blahblah and I am just like "are you guys thinking of a different forest?" because I remember lots of people things went bad for. Love didnt save that groom who was murdered by Regina and his poor widow, it didnt help Gepettos parents who no one bothered to save, even after Regina and Rumple supposedly turned so good and pure, Nova and Grumpy apparently never found each other (outside of some possibly cannon stuff), Graham was murdered and forgotten, as was Marian, which doesent strike me as a very happy ending, its all just so infuriating. 

I think what set me off was Ella saying in the most recent episode of the re-watch how in Henry's world "People find each other and everyone gets happy endings" or whatever. I wanted to say "Well, people who are in the main credits get happy endings, everyone else is lucky to get to the ending alive." Thats really a big problem with a show that brags so much about it all being about hope and happiness and love, its really filled with these horribly tragic stories with depressing endings, but no one cares because the main characters are happy. None of these other characters matter and we just arent supposed to think about them. Everything is great because Regina is queen of the universe and the mains are paired off.

[Camera One]

11 minutes ago, tennisgurl said:

I think what set me off was Ella saying in the most recent episode of the re-watch how in Henry's world "People find each other and everyone gets happy endings" or whatever. 

That really annoyed me when "Pretty in Blue" aired for the first time.  Murderella calling Henry "naive" and lectured him on how not everyone was as fortunate as his grandparents.  Well, his grandparents had their new baby ripped away from them and missed her entire childhood.  Each of them had their parents murdered.  A sicko forced them both to commit adultery.  Meanwhile, Henry experienced a lonely childhood without his mother and was gaslighted.  He lived in a town where innocent people were murdered (Graham, Gus, Johanna just to name a few).  

A&E and the Writers downplayed all that because Murderella apparently had it way worse.  Well, at the end of the day, she got her "happy ending" too so she was so fortunate too, wasn't she?

Edited October 12, 2019 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Speaking of lazy writing, it isn't just that they copied over all the big moments from season one. Just about everything in season 7 is ripped off from some other source. There are all the references to earlier seasons. There's the big Up "homage." They took all the Rapunzel imagery from Tangled (while making Rapunzel a murderer). They did the Pretty in Pink romantic triangle, and Henry had his Say Anything boombox moment. Gothel's backstory was basically Carrie. It seems like every major emotional moment in season seven was directly lifted from elsewhere and dropped into this story with no real development, so whatever feelings we had from the original thing were supposed to be ported over.

I don't really mind them alluding or adapting established material, but they do it so poorly. The Frozen stuff was probably the most note-for-note rehash, but it worked because the emotional connections were still there. It made sense within both the context of the show and the source material. Ingrid added a new spin to it to keep it fresh, but the unifying theme was still there. Seeing pre-established franchises on screen is a major part of Once Upon a Time's appeal, and that's not a bad thing. It's the way the writers "utilize it" in later seasons that sucks.

The Up homage is cheap and makes no sense because the Rumpbelle relationship was nothing like Carl and Ellie's. The S1 parallels in S7 are forced and there's no logic behind them. (For example, Lucy shows up at Henry's door, but we have no idea why she believes and Henry's cursed personality doesn't fit with how the Curse works.) I didn't find the Carrie rendition particularly horrible per se, but everything else about Gothel is dumb. Prehistorical Victorian 1980s prom mean girls? It wasn't ripping off Carrie that bothered me, but the ridiculous setup.

I think the writers were using the previous works of theirs and others as a crutch because they had lost all creativity. It takes some originality to fit the pieces together in a sensical way, even if some of them are cut out for you. You can't just throw a bunch of movies into a blender and see what comes out. It's like a writing a research paper using sources you got from a random generator instead of picking ones that actually logically support whatever your thesis is.