A New Beginning: OUAT 2.0

[Kktjones]

Don't forget we had Rapunzel for a couple of episodes and then Zelena and Robin at the end of 7A (but the beginning of their arc). 7B looks like it will be even more crowded if they decide to flesh out some of the coat hangers, as well as adding

Spoiler

Facilier, Naveen, and Zelena's fiance for multiple episodes each

The shooting of 18 extra minutes for each episode just blows my mind. I could see 4 - 5 minutes because there's some variance in how long a scene will take, but 18 extra minutes is so incredibly wasteful. They could likely cut production time on each episode by a full day if they cut that down to 48 minutes. 

[superloislane]

10 hours ago, KAOS Agent said:

They've confirmed that they continue to film a full hour of tape for an episode that only airs 42 minutes

That still shocks me! I could be mistaken, but I have never heard of a show doing this. Other shows might go over in their first season and then later they might have a couple of extra minutes but they usually get it exact after a few seasons and the writers usually know exactly the number of pages they have to write. But, this show is 7 seasons in and STILL filming nearly 20 minutes of material that they know for a fact will have to get cut! It's ridiculous. This has to be (one of) the reasons why this show has so many plot holes and why fans are constantly asking questions about what happened on Twitter because the scenes explaining everything get cut for time. How much does filming all that actually cost?

[KingOfHearts]

Ironically, I dislike Adult!Henry for just how inoffensive he is. He's just a plot device, and his decisions don't actually change anything. Roni, Lucy, and Jacinda push him around with whatever they've got going on. The only choice he made that really mattered was forgoing time with is family for chasing after Murderella or finding his own story or whatever bs. Everything else has been purely a reaction. We have no idea why he even likes Jacinda other than the fact she's someone he can "save" heroically, whether by redeeming her in the past or helping her with her single mom woes in the present. It's all kind of weird because before the time jump, Henry spurred a lot of plots. (No matter how stupid they were.) Now he's more passive than he ever has been before.

Emma's motivations in S1: Wants to protect her son and others from Mayor Mills.

Henry's motivations in S7: Wants to make tacos with Jacinda in a drug-infested food truck.

Edited January 26, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[Rumsy4]

32 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

Henry's motivations in S7: Wants to make tacos with Jacinda in a drug-infested food truck.

I guess he takes after his dad.

[Shanna Marie]

5 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

Henry's motivations in S7: Wants to make tacos with Jacinda in a drug-infested food truck.

And I'm not even sure just how much he really wants that. He didn't seem to be all that interested in Jacinda until everyone shoved him at her and told him how he really should go for it. That's a big part of the problem with Henry, in both timelines. He doesn't seem to really want or care about anything. He just sort of drifts into things. After all the talk about stopping Victoria, did he do anything but whine when Rogers asked him to do research? We haven't seen him working on his book after he had that major creative breakthrough that led to him writing "Once upon a time ..." as an opening line. He worked on the food truck, and I guess it's nice that he wanted to help Sabine and Jacinda, but you could take him out of the story without changing the story at all. In the past, he just sort of fell into the resistance movement because Ella was in it. We haven't seen that he cares about the cause. He hasn't been doing anything in an attempt to be a hero who would be written into a book. Though I guess he's a little more essential in the past, since someone needed to father Lucy, and he needed to be poisoned to force Regina to cast the curse. His primary use for the plot is as a hostage.

So he left his family and has a younger sibling he's apparently never seen so he could drift around another world and not do much of anything, over a girl he'd met once, during which time she assaulted and robbed him so she could go murder someone. Maybe Emma encouraged him to stay because she thought he'd be a bad influence on the new baby.

Edited January 27, 2018 by Shanna Marie
sibling, not sister, since we don't know

[Camera One]

That reminds me... remember when it looked like there would be a Henry/Jacinda/Drizella triangle?

[KingOfHearts]

11 minutes ago, Camera One said:

That reminds me... remember when it looked like there would be a Henry/Jacinda/Drizella triangle?

What's truly disappointing is that it would have been far more gripping than anything else going on right now. At least we would have felt there were stakes, since Henry/Drizella was much more appealing. A crappy love triangle is preferred to the Coat Hangers and the Henry/Lucy curse dilemma. Heck, even Zelena's potential conflict with her totally-normal-we-promise fiance is more interesting.

Edited January 27, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

Was waking up Regina the stupidest idea ever or what.  Drizella couldn't keep Henry/Jacinda apart without Roni's help?  Why would Drizella care if Henry and Jacinda kissed and he died?  So what if the Curse breaks and everyone remembers?  The villains' brain processes are still as clear as mud even after that flashback. 

Did Gothel think it would be a hoot to be a prisoner for two years or however long they've been in Hyperion Heights?  What did she even gain from that?  Are these answers going to be clear with the Season 7 finale?

Edited January 27, 2018 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

9 hours ago, Camera One said:

Was waking up Regina the stupidest idea ever or what.  Drizella couldn't keep Henry/Jacinda apart without Roni's help?  Why would Drizella care if Henry and Jacinda kissed and he died?  So what if the Curse breaks and everyone remembers?  The villains' brain processes are still as clear as mud even after that flashback. 

Did Gothel think it would be a hoot to be a prisoner for two years or however long they've been in Hyperion Heights?  What did she even gain from that?  Are these answers going to be clear with the Season 7 finale?

The writers want you to think there will be more flashbacks and reveals that make sense of things. Spoiler alert: there won't be. If anything, things will get more confusing as we go along.

[Camera One]

Taking this discussion from the Spoiler thread (non-spoiler)

10 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

We'll be lucky if the writers even remember that Whook isn't the same guy we saw in the previous five seasons.

I think it was you who said it, but maybe it was someone else.  A viewer who tuned into 7A without watching the first two episodes would have zero idea that this isn't Original Recipe Hook we're seeing.  They might actually be wondering where Emma is and what happened with Captain Swan.

[Shanna Marie]

22 hours ago, Camera One said:

A viewer who tuned into 7A without watching the first two episodes would have zero idea that this isn't Original Recipe Hook we're seeing.  They might actually be wondering where Emma is and what happened with Captain Swan.

It may have gotten a bit better after the "Eloise Gardener" episode in which they revealed that Alice was Whook's daughter and showed Whook with Wregina and they talked about her not casting the curse. Since then, when we saw Whook in the past, there was something to do with Alice being his daughter, which was a good reminder that he's different from Original Recipe Hook. But if you missed that episode, then you'd have been very confused at any other episodes showing Alice as Whook's daughter. I do think that Colin is playing Whook/Rogers as a different character. We've commented on how he's got a vulnerability about him, but if you missed the episodes that explain that, you might just think he was bummed about being separated from Emma.

I've said it before, but this show really is the worst of both worlds between episode and serialized television. It's so serialized that if you miss an episode, you're really lost. There's no way you could be an occasional viewer and keep up. I can just imagine someone who'd seen some episodes of the first six seasons tuning into a random episode this season: "Wait, that's Henry? But how are they in the present day? Where's Emma? If Henry is grown up, how do Regina and Hook still look the same?" (we'd love to know, too) But at the same time, it's like the old days of episodic television, in which there were no lasting consequences to anything. Someone could go through some terrible trauma in one episode, and it would never be mentioned again. I guess they just change the story landscape without the characters being affected.

[Lady Calypso]

14 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I've said it before, but this show really is the worst of both worlds between episode and serialized television. It's so serialized that if you miss an episode, you're really lost. There's no way you could be an occasional viewer and keep up. I can just imagine someone who'd seen some episodes of the first six seasons tuning into a random episode this season: "Wait, that's Henry? But how are they in the present day? Where's Emma? If Henry is grown up, how do Regina and Hook still look the same?" (we'd love to know, too) But at the same time, it's like the old days of episodic television, in which there were no lasting consequences to anything. Someone could go through some terrible trauma in one episode, and it would never be mentioned again. I guess they just change the story landscape without the characters being affected.

True. I remember falling behind and missing a couple of episodes at the beginning of season 4, but that really affected my viewing of the show. I eventually just stopped watching at the end of 4A, once I missed a couple episodes too many and missed what was going on, but I also had no desire to find the episodes to watch them. 

On 1/27/2018 at 3:08 AM, Camera One said:

Was waking up Regina the stupidest idea ever or what.  Drizella couldn't keep Henry/Jacinda apart without Roni's help?  Why would Drizella care if Henry and Jacinda kissed and he died?  So what if the Curse breaks and everyone remembers?  The villains' brain processes are still as clear as mud even after that flashback. 

Also, that scene was very badly written, as well as directed and acted. Drizella puts the potion in Roni's drink. Cue weird shot of Drizella staring intently at Roni as she drinks it. Wait a few seconds until potion kicks in. Drizella waits until Roni asks a question and then tells her to wait until her memories come back. Cue shot of Roni immediately remembering everything and becoming Regina again. Cue Drizella telling Regina that she woke her up because of Henry/Jacinda. Cue Regina's wide eyes as she remembers the curse and nods. Cue other filler and vague sentences about the curse and Henry/Jacinda. 

I mean, what? It was a very bad way to get from point A to point B, all because the showrunners probably realized that having everyone under the curse was getting nowhere, so they sped things along. 

The show doesn't even know what it wants to do at this point. 

[KingOfHearts]

1 hour ago, Lady Calypso said:

The show doesn't even know what it wants to do at this point. 

It's moving quickly to nowhere.

[Free]

On ‎1‎/‎27‎/‎2018 at 2:08 AM, Camera One said:

Was waking up Regina the stupidest idea ever or what.  Drizella couldn't keep Henry/Jacinda apart without Roni's help?  Why would Drizella care if Henry and Jacinda kissed and he died?  So what if the Curse breaks and everyone remembers?  The villains' brain processes are still as clear as mud even after that flashback. 

Did Gothel think it would be a hoot to be a prisoner for two years or however long they've been in Hyperion Heights?  What did she even gain from that?  Are these answers going to be clear with the Season 7 finale?

Yes, well the curse was just a dumb idea to begin with.  They didn't have any patience with the original curse so trying to do that all over again was just a horrible idea to try and replicate again.

[Shanna Marie]

On 1/27/2018 at 2:08 AM, Camera One said:

Was waking up Regina the stupidest idea ever or what.  Drizella couldn't keep Henry/Jacinda apart without Roni's help?

I think the real question is, why give Regina a cursed identity in the first place? Wasn't the whole idea to use Henry as a hostage against her? How do you do that if she doesn't remember what happened and doesn't know Henry is her son? If Drizella was going to wake her so soon, there was no point in messing with her memories at all. Let her know from the start that if the curse breaks in any way, Henry is dead (though I still don't know how that's supposed to work). Drizella and Gothel seem to have retained their memories okay, so it should have been possible to have everyone who casts the curse stay as themselves, or at least maintain their memories while getting a curse download. And it would have been more torture for Regina to know Henry was her son, to be around him, and not be able to treat him like a son or do anything that might break the curse, since that would mean he'd die. Drizella seemed to want to torture Regina, and that would have been a lovely bit of cruelty. Regina seemed to get a cursed personality just so they could have the shocking!revelation of her as the bartender when Henry shows up at the bar. Wouldn't it have been more shocking to follow that with the revelation that she was actually still Regina and knew what was going on but was interfering for some reason we don't yet know?

[Camera One]

Giving Regina a cursed identity made sense to me.  If she knew what was going on, she could cause trouble, which is basically what's happening right now with Regina recruiting and waking up Zelena.  I don't see Drizella especially wanting to torture Regina, who was used solely because she had cast the Curse before so she could skip the heart-of-the-one-you-love-most ingredient.  From what we saw on the show, Drizella woke Regina to make sure Henry and Jacinda stayed apart.  That's the part that makes no sense to me since it caused unnecessary problems in her plan.

Edited January 30, 2018 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

Roni having undeniable evidence that she's someone else (as they did at the beginning of 7x06) was really interesting. I'd like to see Roni get to the bottom of things rather than get a get-out-of-jail-free card from Ivy. Shouldn't it be crazy to find out you're the Evil Queen, who murdered countless innocents? Just a day ago, you were some grungy bartender with passable life advice. 

We really missed out in S1 and 3B with one of the characters piecing things together with evidence. We got book-touching, memory potions, dreamcatchers, TLKs, memory rocks you keep in your Evil Cleavage, and Rumple's insta-murders. Holy deus ex machinas, batman!

Edited January 30, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[Shanna Marie]

39 minutes ago, Camera One said:

If she knew what was going on, she could cause trouble, which is basically what's happening right now with Regina recruiting and waking up Zelena.

Has that caused any trouble yet, though? I guess it's hard to tell so soon, but they can't break the curse, and I imagine their "trouble" won't amount to much. Even if they all get their memories back, they'll still probably be in Hyperion Heights (since I doubt they'd change the show format away from the present day America plus flashbacks), and that shouldn't affect Henry's life, unless it's something stupid like he's only not dying if he doesn't remember he's dying.

14 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

Shouldn't it be crazy to find out you're the Evil Queen, who murdered countless innocents? Just a day ago, you were some grungy bartender with passable life advice. 

Shhh, you're not supposed to remember that she was an Evil Queen who murdered countless innocents. She's totally redeemed! She's a different person now! She can't be held responsible for things the Evil Queen did. She's Regina now!

It would have been maybe more interesting if she'd had evidence of the Evil Queen stuff before she remembered -- seeing herself dressed like that and acting like that. But I don't know how that would have happened, unless maybe they had some security camera footage from during Shattered Sight or during the time the Evil Queen was in Storybrooke. Once she remembered, though, how much of a shock would it have been, since it would just be something she knew and had experienced.

18 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

We really missed out in S1 and 3B with one of the characters piecing things together with evidence. We got book-touching, memory potions, dreamcatchers, TLKs, memory rocks you keep in your Evil Cleavage, and Rumple's insta-murders. Holy deus ex machinas, batman!

Yeah, it was a real shame they did so little toward letting people figure things out. I liked how in season one, Emma realized it when Henry bit the apple turnover and passed out (they later had the magic book thing, but she already believed before she got the whiff of magic -- I kind of wish they'd left that out and had her just believe). I still wish that Henry hadn't got his memories back in 3B and had to figure it out for himself, or that it was more complicated than "here, touch this book." I felt like the book work because Emma believed. Henry didn't believe in 3B when he touched the book. In 5A, Hook pieced together a lot before the dreamcatcher gave him the rest, and that was nice. Potions have been way overused. And we still don't know why Lucy believed Henry's book was real or why she thought they were under a curse that didn't appear in his book and why she didn't figure out any of the people from the book who were in the neighborhood. They didn't even bother with a deus ex machina for her. It doesn't seem to have been a magical paperback.

[Camera One]

They sort of already had Roni looking at that photo and saying she'd never dress like that.  If there was a photo of her as the Evil Queen, she would have thought she dressed up for Halloween one night and got drunk.  Once her memories came pouring back, Roni would have been Regina again, so she wouldn't see herself as a mass murderer.  I think her first thought would be remembering the last thing that happened, which was Henry dying.  

Even if an Awake Regina hasn't done any actual damage so far, she *could* have caused a lot of problems.  Why would Drizella want to have someone else to keep an eye on.  It's a waste of time.  Another major mistake was not dealing with Weaver and getting him out of town.  Why didn't Tremaine just kidnap Alice and lock her up with Gothel?   

19 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I still wish that Henry hadn't got his memories back in 3B and had to figure it out for himself

Me too.  That's what I expected would happen.  It was a no brainer.  It would have been funny to see Henry stumbling onto weird things happening in Storybrooke.  But nope.

Edited January 30, 2018 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

It would have been maybe more interesting if she'd had evidence of the Evil Queen stuff before she remembered -- seeing herself dressed like that and acting like that. But I don't know how that would have happened, unless maybe they had some security camera footage from during Shattered Sight or during the time the Evil Queen was in Storybrooke. Once she remembered, though, how much of a shock would it have been, since it would just be something she knew and had experienced.

Someone magical (like Rumple) could have given her some magical evidence I guess? Maybe not footage of her as the Evil Queen, but something to prove they weren't making crazy claims.

What if Clone Queen showed up in EQ attire randomly at her bar one day? LOL. 

Edited January 30, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

I'm finding it a stretch to think of anything I would have been intrigued to see when it came to Regina and especially Rumple in 7A.  Both the Roni and Weaver personae were so incredibly boring (not that it matter given how quickly they awoke, I guess).  I remember in the summer when I thought Henry being an Uber driver would bring us cases of the week when he picked up fairy tale characters and then helped to awaken part of their true personalities.  LOL, I actually thought there was meaning behind Henry being an Uber driver.  Nope, that plot point was actually completely irrelevant to the show!

Edited January 30, 2018 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

22 hours ago, Camera One said:

Even if an Awake Regina hasn't done any actual damage so far, she *could* have caused a lot of problems.  Why would Drizella want to have someone else to keep an eye on.  It's a waste of time.

I think it's an either/or situation -- either leave Regina's memories so that she would know what the stakes were and have Henry as a hostage to force her to behave, or give her a cursed identity and keep her that way, just intervening to keep anything that would break the curse from happening (like Ivy pursuing Henry to keep him from Jacinda). But giving Regina a cursed identity and then deliberately waking her just a little while later (maybe -- we don't know how long the curse has been in effect) is pretty much the lamest way to go about it. Which is par for the course for this show.

22 hours ago, Camera One said:

Once her memories came pouring back, Roni would have been Regina again, so she wouldn't see herself as a mass murderer.  I think her first thought would be remembering the last thing that happened, which was Henry dying.  

If they had ever had any interest in truly and honestly dealing with the We Are Both thing, it could have been interesting if Regina still had Roni as a part of her and that part of her reacted the way you'd expect a 21st century Seattle bartender would to having memories of crushing hearts and slaughtering villagers. The part of her that was Regina would probably still feel justified, but the Roni part of her would give a different perspective on it all. But, yeah, TS;TW.

21 hours ago, Camera One said:

I remember in the summer when I thought Henry being an Uber driver would bring us cases of the week when he picked up fairy tale characters and then helped to awaken part of their true personalities.  LOL, I actually thought there was meaning behind Henry being an Uber driver.  Nope, that plot point was actually completely irrelevant to the show!

As was everything to do with Henry. About the only way he's affected the story is by getting poisoned. If Henry hadn't gone off to get himself written into a storybook (not that this has ended up being at all relevant), pretty much everyone would have been better off, except maybe Whook. Whook would still be old if he didn't get the spell done to allow him to become like Hook Prime, but you'd think he'd have still managed to find Alice, given that they just bumped into each other very close to the tower where she born. If you could remove your protagonist without changing the story much, you've got a problem.

[Camera One]

By having Henry in the Emma role with Lucy coming to his door, they gave the impression that Henry would play a Season 1 Emma-type role, bringing happy endings to Cursed people.  But he has done literally nothing for anybody, except repair the moving van/food truck.  

[KingOfHearts]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

By having Henry in the Emma role with Lucy coming to his door, they gave the impression that Henry would play a Season 1 Emma-type role, bringing happy endings to Cursed people.  But he has done literally nothing for anybody, except repair the moving van/food truck.  

And that was only because he wanted to make tacos with Jacinda.

Quote

I think it's an either/or situation -- either leave Regina's memories so that she would know what the stakes were and have Henry as a hostage to force her to behave, or give her a cursed identity and keep her that way, just intervening to keep anything that would break the curse from happening (like Ivy pursuing Henry to keep him from Jacinda). But giving Regina a cursed identity and then deliberately waking her just a little while later (maybe -- we don't know how long the curse has been in effect) is pretty much the lamest way to go about it. Which is par for the course for this show.

It doesn't help that Regina and Roni are pretty much the same person. There are few, if any, differences in their personalities. Note to A&E - wearing t-shirts is not a substitute for completed characterization. Did we really see Roni do anything on screen that made us go, "Oh, Regina would never do that!" other than own a bar and have separate tastes in fashion? 

Edited January 31, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[Shanna Marie]

15 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

It doesn't help that Regina and Roni are pretty much the same person. There are few, if any, differences in their personalities. Note to A&E - wearing t-shirts is not a substitute for completed characterization. Did we really see Roni do anything on screen that made us go, "Oh, Regina would never do that!" other than own a bar and have separate tastes in fashion? 

There's a pretty big gap between Roni and Mayor Mills, but not between Roni and the current Earth Mother St. Regina. Even the wardrobe isn't that different, when you consider that weird leather muscle shirt bodice type of thing Regina wore in one episode. In general, it doesn't seem like this curse has changed anyone's personalities. Henry is still Henry Mills, pretty much exactly the same person (though he'd have to have a personality in the first place). Ditto with Jacinda/Ella. I guess we're supposed to see how cowed Jacinda could be by Victoria to be a contrast to Ella being such a spunky would-be murderer, but there's not enough "there" there to really find a distinction. Weaver flip-flopped between shady and upright, which is basically Rumple. There are subtle differences between Hook Prime and Whook/Rogers, but Rogers is more or less Whook with a better prosthesis and a driver's license. Maybe the difference is that Drizella and Gothel weren't necessarily trying to destroy anyone's happiness. They just needed everyone to not remember who they were so they couldn't foil the scheme (but then Drizella woke Regina, so whatever).

17 hours ago, Camera One said:

By having Henry in the Emma role with Lucy coming to his door, they gave the impression that Henry would play a Season 1 Emma-type role, bringing happy endings to Cursed people.

I think that's the big problem with this season. They're coasting on season one without actually building anything all that new. We're supposed to be so excited about all the season one parallels that we map the way we felt about that season onto this season, and they don't have to bother creating anything. I guess we're supposed to imagine that Henry's just like Emma in season one, even though he's not doing anything. It doesn't help that he can't be both Emma and Charming (or Snow, whichever one he's supposed to be). He can't be the one going around breaking the curse and able to resist the curse because he's not part of it and also be part of the couple separated by the curse.

What might have worked better was to have had Henry go off to college and while he was away, something happened to Storybrooke, so he was cut off from his family. Then one day, after he's grown up, a girl shows up, claiming to be his sister, Alice, and his family needs his help. Then they go and find where everyone got caught in a different curse. I guess you'd have needed Emma to really do that without implying that Emma was separated from her second child, as well, but Alice could have turned out to be Whook's Alice, and she knew just enough about people's identities to know that Hook was her father and was Henry's stepfather, so she assumed it was the same Hook and Emma was her mother, and then later they realize the two Hooks thing, and we learn that Storybrooke has actually been okay all this time, just cut off from the outside world, and Regina got caught up in all this when she tried realm-hopping to find a way to reach Henry again -- like she could go from Storybrooke to some other world, then use a portal to get to our world.

[Camera One]

On 1/31/2018 at 1:31 PM, Shanna Marie said:

I guess we're supposed to imagine that Henry's just like Emma in season one, even though he's not doing anything. It doesn't help that he can't be both Emma and Charming (or Snow, whichever one he's supposed to be). He can't be the one going around breaking the curse and able to resist the curse because he's not part of it and also be part of the couple separated by the curse.

He really is all over the place.  "Emma, Henry, Snow and Charming were the most boring characters on the show all along, so why not combine them all into a single person?" could have been a major breakthrough when brainstorming Season 7.  He's still Henry since he still has the heart of the truest believer and uses dorky 14-year-old courtship tactics with references from the 80's.  He's Emma because he has a previously unknown child trying to convince him fairytales are real and the Curse might hinge on his belief.  He's Charming since his true love hit him on the head, and he's Snow since their true love's Cursed identity has paired them with someone else.  

Edited February 3, 2018 by Camera One

[Camera One]

If they really wanted to make the twist that Lady Tremaine was an older Rapunzel, they could have made her a villain but not a cold-blooded murderer in the first few episodes.  In their attempt to trick the audience, they created a character shift which was completely unbelievable.  

I was thinking of an alternate story they could have done for Season 7.  Maybe they could have had Cinderella (or better yet, the Younger Rapunzel) trapped in the Tower.  Wish Rumple was using a different way to enact a World-Crossing/Time-Travelling Curse, so he convinces Cinderella or Rapunzel to enact a Curse which would transport everyone, including her enemies Lady Tremaine and Mother Gothel, to the Land Without Magic, where Cinders or Rapunzel could weaken the villains and get the materials she needs to defeat them, while they were under a Curse.  But Wish Rumple doesn't tell Cinderella/Rapunzel that the same power dynamics would still exist in Hyperion Heights and Tremaine and Gothel would be authority figures there.  The guy who plays Adult Henry could play Flynn Ryder or The Prince instead, who is Cursed (heck, Lucy could still be the daughter).  This time, the hero (Rapunzel or Cinderella, whichever) would be the one awake in Hyperion Heights and she would try to use real-world techniques to defeat Victoria and Gothel's Cursed identity and find the Magical Objects that are hidden in Hyperion Heights, with the help of Whook and a in-the-process-of-being-redeemed Wegina, who were both carried along for the ride.  The hero could still have allies like Tiana, since a real-world Rapunzel/Cinders would still need a source of income (since we can't lose the beignet subplot).  So the cast could be pretty much the same, and there would still be a Curse and flashbacks, but it would be twisted around, so there would still be a main hero but they're the one who is "awake" so we would actually have someone to root for.

Edited February 4, 2018 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

I was skimming through this season last night (since I have to give up my DVR this week), and wow, this season doesn't hold up to binge watching. It becomes even more obvious how incoherent it is when you watch episodes back to back. There's stuff that's brought up and dropped, like the "bad things happen when you involve yourself in someone else's story" thing, which seems now like a line written strictly for use in promos, since it's had nothing to do with the plot. Or there was all the angst about the gentrification, which got dropped. Then there are the things that keep shifting, like Eloise Gardener, who initially was "a little girl" who went missing ten years ago, and then she was an angsty teenager, and then when she was found, she's a mature woman who would have been an adult when she went missing. I get that they were trying to go for the fakeout and make us think that the girl Rogers was looking for was Whook's daughter, but you have to play fair with the audience. They should have cast someone much younger as Gothel if they were going to do that -- it would make sense, given that she hasn't aged at all since Alice was born anyway and looking young was Gothel's thing in Tangled. They could have done a Melisandre thing (from Game of Thrones) and revealed her inner crone every so often while having her played by a 25-year-old actress.

The age thing for all the characters is so weird. Assuming they're all more or less on the same timeline, Whook at the time of the curse should be in his mid-50s. Even if Whook's appearance got stuck at the point where he had himself made to look like Hook Prime, Hook Prime should have been in his mid-40s then. But Rogers is treated as though he's about Colin's age, possibly even younger. Ten years ago was early in his police career and Rumple's acting like a mentor when, really, Rogers should be about the same age (physically) as Rumple.

They also seem to take the least interesting option at every turn. Remember when we were saying that Lucy and Henry going into the tunnel under the well would end up being like that season one episode in which Henry went into the mine? We should have been so lucky. She went into the dangerous tunnel, with lots of references to the danger ... and nothing happened. They built up Henry's search for Cinderella as some kind of epic quest, with Regina and Whook needing to join him and Emma telling him not to come home until he'd found out if she was the one ... and in the next episode we see him just walk up to her with the shoe. Whook has been on an agonizing quest to find his missing daughter ... and she just walks up to him near the tower where he apparently brought her up. Ivy seemed complicated and conflicted, someone who was sympathetic even while being bitchy ... and then they abruptly made her pure evil with no nuance (and no good reason for being more than just a bit bitchy). There was all the drama about the custody of Lucy ... and it was resolved offscreen with a convenient lawyer.

I'm normally a completist, but I can't imagine buying this season on DVD because I can't imagine rewatching it. Only if there's a really spectacular episode later in the season that makes the whole season worthwhile, but even then, I might just get that episode on Amazon instant video.

[Camera One]

Don't forget Henry forgetting about his grief for his fake family an hour after finding their gravestones,, Regina deciding after two episodes that she's not going to bother trying to separate Henry and Jacinda in the same episode where we find out he could be dead if the Curse broke, and Tremaine easily walking out of prison for no apparent reason.  There was that all-important blog Henry was writing and Roni/Henry/Rogers' alliance which lasted all of 3-4 episodes?  I don't remember.  There is no build-up or follow-through to much of the season.

Edited February 4, 2018 by Camera One

[daxx]

18 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I'm normally a completist, but I can't imagine buying this season on DVD because I can't imagine rewatching it. Only if there's a really spectacular episode later in the season that makes the whole season worthwhile, but even then, I might just get that episode on Amazon instant video.

Same, I didn’t even buy season 6. I’ve watched some on Netflix but no interest in buying it.

[Camera One]

I'm actually waiting to buy the full-series DVD set in a giant apple.

[daxx]

4 minutes ago, Camera One said:

I'm actually waiting to buy the full-series DVD set in a giant apple.

? and you know it’s coming.

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

Don't forget Henry forgetting about his grief for his fake family an hour after finding their gravestones,, Regina deciding after two episodes that she's not going to bother trying to separate Henry and Jacinda in the same episode where we find out he could be dead if the Curse broke, and Tremaine easily walking out of prison for no apparent reason.  There was that all-important blog Henry was writing and Roni/Henry/Rogers' alliance which lasted all of 3-4 episodes?  I don't remember.  There is no build-up or follow-through to much of the season.

Tremaine got out of prison because Weaver helped her after she promised to help him find the Guardian if he did, so that one makes some sense (well, for this show, where judges and cops can do whatever they want with no repercussions, in spite of them supposedly being in the real world).

But to add to the list, now that I've made it through the rest of the half season: That resistance movement that never did anything that looked like resisting, and that Lady Tremaine seemed to have joined while they were still living in tents, before they were in a palace with Tiana as queen.

As for contradictions, we had the social worker saying Lucy couldn't go home with Jacinda because Jacinda lost custody for a reason, making it sound like Lucy was taken from her, immediately followed by the episode in which we learned that Jacinda voluntarily signed over custody. We also had the episode with the story of the circumstances of Alice's birth, with events that made it clear when that took place, followed by an episode in which Alice describes events in Wonderland that she witnessed, followed by an episode that makes it very clear that those events happened before the events that led to Alice's birth. Rapunzel and Marcus didn't get back together until Marcus gave up on Ella's mother because of the necklace, and that happened before Gothel got locked in the tower, which happened before Alice was born.

Looking at the unanswered questions, it looks like the flashbacks we can expect to see in the second half would be:

• How Rumple got his sparkle back and what that had to do with Alice
• Alice and Robin's relationship (probably with the present-day story involving Robin's cursed identity self coming back to town)
• How Alice and Hook were cursed and how Alice got out of the tower
• What happened with the resistance movement and how they ended up winning but with Tremaine as an ally
• Possibly a "real world" flashback to San Francisco and "Kelly's" relationship with her fiance (unless he turns out to be a fairytale person, after all, and we get the flashback about him)
• Maybe something about Henry and Ella's relationship between the first kiss and the birth of their daughter
• Maybe Zelena's backstory of how she came to have a farm
• Gothel's inevitable sad backstory of why she needs a Guardian

But it's this show, so we probably won't get most of those, and instead we'll get random other stuff.

[Camera One]

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Tremaine got out of prison because Weaver helped her after she promised to help him find the Guardian if he did, so that one makes some sense (well, for this show, where judges and cops can do whatever they want with no repercussions, in spite of them supposedly being in the real world).

It was the lack of the real-world reasoning that got me.  Little things, fine.  But a cop being able to spring someone who was caught taking someone hostage for 10 years?  That needed more of an explanation.

Quote

 We also had the episode with the story of the circumstances of Alice's birth, with events that made it clear when that took place, followed by an episode in which Alice describes events in Wonderland that she witnessed, followed by an episode that makes it very clear that those events happened before the events that led to Alice's birth. Rapunzel and Marcus didn't get back together until Marcus gave up on Ella's mother because of the necklace, and that happened before Gothel got locked in the tower, which happened before Alice was born.

I don't know why this one is so hard for me to get my head around.  I think this show really does screw with your mind to the point where you don't know which way is up.  Because, as you said, this is a huge hole, but why is it so easy to overlook?  It really does make no sense that a grown-up Alice met Ella's mother in Wonderland, if she "died" before Marcus got back with Trepunzel and before Gothel conceived Alice with Whook.  I mean, someone should have asked A&E about that in the Hot Seat or on Twitter.

Edited February 5, 2018 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

A&E's excuse for the Alice birth issue would be, "Worlds move through time differently. Alice just arrived in the past because reasons."

[daxx]

The answer for them is always “Magic” 

As if magical worlds don’t also need logic and world building.

[Shanna Marie]

If Marcus was as fickle with Cecilia as he was with Rapunzel, maybe he just gave up on Cecelia and got back with Rapunzel right after Cecelia left, and then he didn't go off to Wonderland looking for her until Rapunzel went psycho after Anastasia's death and he decided he liked the other wife better, after all. The necklace didn't work between worlds, so it wasn't until he was in Wonderland that he saw that the light had gone out for sure. Then, like a good dad, he came home and told his stepdaughter that her mother didn't love them anymore (actually, that applies no matter what the scenario was. Why on earth would he have told Ella that? Did he have the necklace, or did Ella have the necklace? Was it her love for her husband or her love for her daughter that was being tested?) But that would still have had to be years later. Do we know if Alice was grown up at that time, or was she a child like in the original stories?

12 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

A&E's excuse for the Alice birth issue would be, "Worlds move through time differently. Alice just arrived in the past because reasons."

More like: "It will all be clear later." That's all they've said all year to every question. The season finale is going to be a doozie -- we'll have to learn how Henry's getting fuel for his motorcycle, why no one is aging, why the curse took them to 2017, why they can't contact Storybrooke, how Alice was present at events that happened before she was born, why we can't see or learn what's been going on in Storybrooke, and how time is working in the various realms. I don't anticipate these questions being answered before then, in spite of all the "it will all be clear later" because I don't think the writers realize these are even questions until they're asked and they don't have any interest in answering them. Take the motorcycle fuel thing -- they may have already filmed the pilot before Colin asked the question at Comic Con, but even if that hadn't occurred to them until then, they could have answered that with one line in the scene in which Henry shows that he's carrying his tools in the Tron lunchbox Regina gave him. When talking about that, he could have said something like, "And I'm lucky you did that fuel spell on the bike before I left because, you know, there aren't a lot of gas stations around here." But no, that bike is still going possibly close to 20 years later, without a gas station in sight (or spare parts, or oil, or headlamp bulbs).

One other thing I thought of while rewatching: How long has the curse been going on? If Kelly/Zelena is engaged to a "real-world" person, then it can't just be a fake memory of a relationship, unless the curse is also giving fake memories to real-world people. They have to have been cursed long enough for Kelly to have met someone, fallen in love, got engaged, and bought a wedding dress. Which then brings us back to the question of what made Lucy decide they were cursed? What happened to change things for her so that she went looking for Henry at that time? On the other hand, I guess there has to have been some effect on real-world people's memories for Weaver and Rogers to have jobs that would require references, background checks, peace officer licenses, etc., or for Victoria to have built up the reputation she has. Really, the only way this curse works is if they're not actually in real 2017 Seattle, but rather in 21st Century America World (like 1920s London World, Victorian Literature World, and Depression-Era Kansas World) and that's why they can't contact Storybrooke.

[Camera One]

8 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

One other thing I thought of while rewatching: How long has the curse been going on? If Kelly/Zelena is engaged to a "real-world" person, then it can't just be a fake memory of a relationship, unless the curse is also giving fake memories to real-world people. They have to have been cursed long enough for Kelly to have met someone, fallen in love, got engaged, and bought a wedding dress. 

Actually, it could have happened in one week or less.  All one needs to fall in love are to take a bike ride together and fall, or call someone a really bad nickname, or oh yeah, look after someone in a coma.

It has been half a season and we STILL don't know how long the Curse has gone on for.  We felt for Henry because he spent a lifetime alone in Storybrooke.  We felt for Snowing and Emma because they were without their family for 28 years.  How long has Lucy and Henry been separated?  Who knows... for all we know, it could have been a five minutes.  After all, she looked exactly the same age.  Yet Roni/Regina said Victoria pushed Zelena out of Hyperion Heights "a long time ago".  

Edited February 6, 2018 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

Is it ever going to be explained why Henry and Lucy don't have cursed names?

[Camera One]

Can't Say.

[Shanna Marie]

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

Actually, it could have happened in one week or less.  All one needs to fall in love are to take a bike ride together and fall, or call someone a really bad nickname, or oh yeah, look after someone in a coma.

True. I forgot which show I'm watching. I guess I just figured that someone from our world would need a bit more relationship build-up. Plus, if she had the wedding dress with her at work, that might have meant she was picking it up after alterations, and ordering a dress and getting it altered would take more than a week.

1 hour ago, KingOfHearts said:

Is it ever going to be explained why Henry and Lucy don't have cursed names?

I'm guessing it was because they needed Henry to be Henry Mills in that last scene of season six to get that aha moment of having the child come to the door and say he's her father, so Henry had to keep his name. It wouldn't have had the same impact if a kid had asked for "John Doe" and said he was her father. As for Lucy, by the time they were writing the part where Lucy was born, so we got to see her in the Disenchanted Forest, they forgot about that whole cursed identity vs. real name thing and just called her Lucy.

I still wonder if the main character in Henry's book is also Henry Mills and why no one finds that weird.

[Camera One]

12 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

If Marcus was as fickle with Cecilia as he was with Rapunzel, maybe he just gave up on Cecelia and got back with Rapunzel right after Cecelia left, and then he didn't go off to Wonderland looking for her until Rapunzel went psycho after Anastasia's death and he decided he liked the other wife better, after all. The necklace didn't work between worlds, so it wasn't until he was in Wonderland that he saw that the light had gone out for sure. Then, like a good dad, he came home and told his stepdaughter that her mother didn't love them anymore (actually, that applies no matter what the scenario was. Why on earth would he have told Ella that? Did he have the necklace, or did Ella have the necklace? Was it her love for her husband or her love for her daughter that was being tested?) But that would still have had to be years later. Do we know if Alice was grown up at that time, or was she a child like in the original stories?

If it helps, these are the lines:

JACINDA: It's about my mother. The day she married my father Well, he was my stepfather, but he's the only father I ever knew. On their wedding day, she gave him a set of matching lockets. They were enchanted to glow so they would always find each other, just as their hearts would.

HENRY: I know this kind of magic. That's a powerful promise.

JACINDA: Yeah, one that she broke. When I was a girl, my mother abandoned us. My father searched for an entire year, and followed her all the way here to Wonderland. She went into the Infinite Maze. Yeah, he was trying to figure out how to get through when his locket stopped working. She had stopped loving him. He came back home a broken man. He was never the same again.

---

And then later, with Alice:

JACINDA: My mother is dead?

ALICE: I'm so sorry.

JACINDA: You don't have to be sorry. That woman left her family for a tea party. She doesn't deserve any tears.

ALICE: ...Look familiar?

JACINDA: Yeah, my father had a mark like that. What is it?

ALICE: It's part of the Curse of the Poisoned Heart. It appears when you're touched by the one you can't be with.

JACINDA: But if my father had the same mark, my mother's heart was poisoned, too. She never stopped loving us. She left to protect us.

-----------

I guess the locket not working was more about the love of Marcus/The Mother, and Jacinda just assumed that her mother leaving them meant she stopped loving her entire family. 

It still doesn't make sense to me.  Wasn't it obvious that the Mother dying could be another explanation why the locket stopped working?  And if the father had that same mark, wouldn't he have figured out a Curse was involved?  

Plus the Mother could have stayed but lived in another house and walked around a tree (like Alice and Whook) when she was talking to Marcus.  It's not like she needed to leave Jacinda too.   How was disappearing without a trace "protecting" them?  Why would the Mother know what the Curse meant but Marcus didn't?  

And what does Henry mean he knew "that kind of magic"?  Was there something similar in Season 1-6 I forgot about?  I know, it was just a way for Jacinda to claim that Snowing had it easy and not everyone finds one another.

Edited February 6, 2018 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I'm guessing it was because they needed Henry to be Henry Mills in that last scene of season six to get that aha moment of having the child come to the door and say he's her father, so Henry had to keep his name. It wouldn't have had the same impact if a kid had asked for "John Doe" and said he was her father.

Wouldn't it have been more interesting if Henry wasn't cursed, and simply wanted to avoid magical shenanigans after years of separation from his family? He could have acted like his father and pretended none of it existed because he was so traumatized. I don't get the point of him having a cursed personality or anyone for that matter. It's a big waste of time. All S7 has been doing is kicking the can down the road until we get to the lame finale. It's like all the S1 and S6 problems had a baby.

Edited February 6, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

Bringing this from Spoiler Thread

11 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

If this is an infinite multiverse, why is the Land Without Magic (not calling it our world, since we all know that's not what it is) the only hotspot for curses? Wouldn't there be an infinite number of curses? Even if you argued the Jefferson's Hat Realms had some special connection to it, this new curse comes from the Disenchanted Forest, which is somehow connected to the Wish Realm. Why Seattle? Why not, as you put it, another Storybrooke-type town? Drizella's curse makes no freaking sense! Why does it involve real world people? What does gentrifying the neighborhood have to do with anything? Was Gothel's brew so half-baked she couldn't even make a protected town? What's the purpose of seamlessly transitioning with the real world? What all existed in the real world prior to the curse? How many "real world" people did it need to affect?

Back when A&E were plugging Season 7 before the premiere, they explained that Tremaine had learned from the previous Curse, and having it in the "real world" allowed her to separate loved ones (that was the point of gentrifying the neighborhood), so the Curse couldn't be broken.  But Tremaine wasn't even the mastermind and it was ultimately a moot point.  Would "regular" fairytale people be able to break the Curse anyway?  

Edited February 6, 2018 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

17 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Would "regular" fairytale people be able to break the Curse anyway?  

Can switching to Geico save you 15% or more on car insurance? Is water wet? Does Regina forget to consider consequences?

Edited February 6, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[andromeda331]

5 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

Can switching to Geico save you 15% or more on car insurance? Is water wet? Does Regina forget to consider consequences?

Ha! Regina...consequences! That's a good one.

[Rumsy4]

8 hours ago, Camera One said:

How was disappearing without a trace "protecting" them? 

Because she is an idiot. It's a time-honored trope when people lie to protect their loved ones, even if it's usually for a stupid reason. And none of the characters in OUAT are exactly bright...

[jhlipton]

On 2/4/2018 at 11:09 AM, Camera One said:

This time, the hero (Rapunzel or Cinderella, whichever) would be the one awake in Hyperion Heights and she would try to use real-world techniques find the Magical Objects that are hidden in Hyperion Heights

The Magical Scavenger Hunt!  Maybe she has to visit specific locations in Hyperion Heights and do various tasks at each one -- The Noit-So-Amazing Race

22 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

How long has the curse been going on? If Kelly/Zelena is engaged to a "real-world" person, then it can't just be a fake memory of a relationship, unless the curse is also giving fake memories to real-world people. They have to have been cursed long enough for Kelly to have met someone, fallen in love, got engaged, and bought a wedding dress.

Although the denizens of Storybooke only had fake memories and interacted very little with the Real World, when they did interact, it seemed they had Real World identities.  Also, too, "magic!"

[Shanna Marie]

5 hours ago, jhlipton said:

Although the denizens of Storybooke only had fake memories and interacted very little with the Real World, when they did interact, it seemed they had Real World identities.

But did anyone in Storybrooke who interacted with the outside world as their cursed identity have anything in their identity that would have needed to be backed up by something from the real world? They were utterly isolated from the outside world. For instance, I doubt there's a medical school in Storybrooke, so Archie probably had fake memories of going to medical school somewhere and doing a residency in psychiatry, but were his fake memories of classmates of real people who were going to school there at the right time (which would have been hard to determine, given the static 28 years), and were any of those people given fake memories of going to school with Archie? He probably has his diploma on his office wall and a certificate showing he has a medical license, and that's good enough in Storybrooke, but did the curse reach out into the outside world so that the school has a record of Archie graduating, and does the state of Maine have a medical license on file for him? If he decided to leave Storybrooke, would he be able to open a medical practice anywhere else? The fake history seemed to only work one way, and that was fine within the bubble of Storybrooke because nothing could contradict it. Archie might have had fuzzy memories of his medical school years, but since there was no leaving Storybrooke, there was no chance of him running into someone who would have had to remember being in school with him. Nobody had to check his references, or anything like that.

But what we have with the Hyperion Heights curse is people in jobs that require background checks, who are far enough along in their careers that they would have references. So, that would mean the curse had to reach out into the real world and alter things so that "Rogers," who can't have been with the Seattle police department for ten years, has a ten-year-old cold case, and apparently everyone else in the precinct remembers him having been around all that time. Ditto with Weaver, who's apparently a fairly senior detective, and everyone in the precinct seems to remember him having been around. He's got contacts with judges he can get to do things for him. Are all those people from the curse, or is the curse altering people?

On another note, something occurred to me: In "Eloise Gardener," I think it's the first time we had the Standard Issue Hook Episode in which he has the chance at his revenge, or he could choose to help someone, and instead of choosing his revenge and screwing over the person he could have helped, he makes the right choice and helps the person before he gets his revenge -- and as a reward for doing the right thing he gets raped and used. But this is a show about hope!

[jhlipton]

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

But did anyone in Storybrooke who interacted with the outside world as their cursed identity have anything in their identity that would have needed to be backed up by something from the real world? They were utterly isolated from the outside world.

There are two theoretical instances.  When Robin and Marian (or was that Zerian?), and when Rumple were cast into the Real World, there was no mention of them needing to get "real" identities.  Of course, we never saw what happened to Robin or Rumple, and how they coped in The World Truly Without Magic, For Real This Time, We're Not Kidding, OK Just This Once.  So we don't know if they had TWTWMFRTTWNKOJTO identities or not, but  Rumple seemed to get along A-OK when we next saw him in Manhattan.

And when Regina applied to adopt, I don't recall there being a problem with her TWTWMFRTTWNKOJTO identity.