S07.E03: The Garden of Forking Paths

[Camera One]

8 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

Marvel at the intensity of gathering signatures to save a plot of dirt with a bunch of people we dont know! 

There were so many shortcuts in Season 7 that A&E forgot what they did in the Season 1 pilot which made things work.  As the seasons went by, it was obvious that A&E gave very little thought to the people in Storybrooke like Granny, Archie, Grumpy, Red, Gepetto, Blue, etc.  

But in Season 7, they didn't bother including characters who weren't part of main plots.  So we were supposed to root for these Hyperion Heights folks who are basically extras standing around who may or may not be fairy tale characters since it doesn't matter if they are or not.

I remember we thought one of the fresh aspects of Season 7 would be to see the fairy tale characters interact with regular people.  They might as well have done a Curse where everyone in Hyperion Heights were from the Unenchanted Forest.

Edited September 21, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

53 minutes ago, Camera One said:

They might as well have done a Curse where everyone in Hyperion Heights were from the Unenchanted Forest.

The problem is that we never knew whether or not they were. There was no difference between the cursed fairytale characters and the regular people, if there were regular people. We only saw the main characters in flashbacks. I don't think we ever even saw some of the background people in the background in flashbacks. They seem to have used entirely different sets of extras. Like, the good-hearted cobbler Murderella almost takes out doesn't appear in Hyperion Heights. In season one, the character featured in the backstory would generally be shown in the present in their cursed identity. In season 7, they don't bother.

[Camera One]

Just finished re-walking down the tediously predictable garden of forking paths.

The story just doesn't work.  LOL at Roni reading some law code that a petition can declare a piece of land essential to the community and that would stop the demolition immediately.

Victoria pretty much had the upper hand the entire episode.

Henry walks into a random cemetery and finds the tombstones for his wife and daughter?  Had he never visited before or something?  How did the cemetery show up out of the blue, anyway? 

Spoiler

I don't recall us ever finding out, and Henry never reacts to this strange occurrence in any normal way. In fact, he soon forgets he forgot where the cemetery was.

Lucy also seems to know things for no reason.  How did she know Henry went to look for the cemetery and couldn't find it?  How did Lucy suddenly decide that Victoria had something buried underneath?  

Last episode, we saw Henry arriving at the portal and only finding Cinderella's slipper.  But apparently, Murderella got there first on a fast steed, where Tiana suddenly appeared with no apparent mode of transportation and then they had a long conversation.  Where the heck was Henry all that time?  

Tiana told Murderella that her father died standing up to Lady Tremaine? 

Spoiler

Did he?  I don't remember him doing so.  Or was this one of those off-screen nuggets?

I don't think I noticed last time Sabine getting a text from her boss saying she was late for her shift at work.  So Jacinda almost got fired recently for the same reason and Sabine is all cavelier about being late?  She didn't even look like she was in a hurry when she sat down for a chat with Jacinda.

Edited September 21, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

22 hours ago, Camera One said:

LOL at Roni reading some law code that a petition can declare a piece of land essential to the community and that would stop the demolition immediately.

If they were going to show that the garden was essential to the community, maybe there should have been something other than concrete and a well there -- like maybe lots of vegetable plots, so that it's a source of fresh vegetables in an urban food desert, or something like that. But that still probably would only work if it was public land that had been used for that purpose and then was being sold by the city. If the land is privately owned and is zoned for what they're planning to build, there's not a lot a petition is going to do. It might have gone somewhere if Victoria was trying to change the zoning, or if the garden was a set of allotments that people were renting and she was trying to evict them.

22 hours ago, Camera One said:

Tiana told Murderella that her father died standing up to Lady Tremaine? 

Spoiler

I think his fate Happened Offscreen, as far as I recall. Didn't she have him murdered because he saved Ella instead of Anastasia? Though I figure he kind of had it coming because when his wife sacrificed herself to save her family, he immediately remarried, and then when his first wife showed up, instead of realizing that pretty much annulled the second marriage, he shoved his first wife off into a cottage and had her work as a servant.

[Camera One]

19 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

If they were going to show that the garden was essential to the community, maybe there should have been something other than concrete and a well there -- like maybe lots of vegetable plots, so that it's a source of fresh vegetables in an urban food desert, or something like that. But that still probably would only work if it was public land that had been used for that purpose and then was being sold by the city.

That certainly makes sense, but Roni seemed very confident, and who are we to argue against "a regular queen".  Roni's words, not mine, LOL.

I was just thinking about how in Season 1, I felt sad for Henry when he found out he was going to lose his castle playground.  Lucy's abandoned community garden, not so much.  

Plus how stupid was Jacinda to trust Victoria's offer to give her a condo.  It wasn't even in writing.  

Edited September 22, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

55 minutes ago, Camera One said:

I was just thinking about how in Season 1, I felt sad for Henry when he found out he was going to lose his castle playground.  Lucy's abandoned community garden, not so much.  

This is yet another case of "Let's make it just like season one, but with lower stakes!" With Henry, he was dealing with his mother -- the only one he'd known until he showed up at Emma's door. He had grown up as Regina's son, so it was a massive betrayal for her to destroy something that meant so much to him, and that was like an escalation in the war. It was also about all he had -- he didn't have friends, didn't have any kind of activities. Regina wasn't sending him to soccer practice, Boy Scouts, or even piano lessons (which does seem out of character for Regina, unless it was about her wanting total control over him, but then she let Snow be his teacher, so whatever. I guess she was too busy being mayor to home school Henry and really control him, plus have it not be obvious that he's aging and his classmates aren't). With Lucy, Victoria is her step-grandmother, and they don't seem to have any kind of relationship at all. Until a couple of episodes ago, Lucy was living with Jacinda, not Victoria. She didn't have much expectation of Victoria not wanting to hurt her. We also just saw Lucy at a ballet recital, so she has that activity. She just drops by the garden to hide letters to Jacinda. It's not the only place she has to go to have fun and get out from under her mother's eye.

[KingOfHearts]

I haven't been able to stream episodes, but I watched a clip from this episode on YouTube. The scene was the one between Regina and Jacinda. I think Jacinda is the only character (other than Lucy) that I never want to see on my screen again. Merida and Dorothy, as obnoxiously abrasive as they were, didn't dominate the story. Merida had her moments (I thought she was fine in The Bear King, oddly enough.) and Dorothy was only in one episode. Jacinda is the "hard-working single mother" who happens to be the love interest of the male lead, so we as the audience should feel sympathy for her. Yet, she's a murderer, a thief, an irresponsible day-drinking parent, and a hot-tempered employee willing to quit on a dime. She's just a trash person with zero redeeming qualities. It doesn't help that the acting is so bad that when she cries she looks like a dewy plank of wood.

While Regina was the most problematic character on the show by a wide margin, you can't say she was always horrible. Lana wasn't a bad actress, either. Yes, the writers warped the entire show around her, but as a character, she wasn't repulsive in every single scene. At least she had something to offer in terms of being a villain or hero. Jacinda just adds nothing. (In fact, she takes away.) Regina had some compelling moments, but with Jacinda, there was never a single point in all of S7 where I felt I could root for her. Never.

As much as I hate Jacinda, Regina worked well in the scene I watched. Lana did a good job of portraying someone who had been through a lot passing off advice to the next generation. For once, she finally seemed like a loving mother figure. Overall, I think both Lana and the writers did a good job this season in making Regina more likable and wise. It's a big improvement over the past several seasons.

[Camera One]

16 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

While Regina was the most problematic character on the show by a wide margin, you can't say she was always horrible. Lana wasn't a bad actress, either.

When you compare Victoria/Lady Tremaine's very lame entrances in these three episodes to Regina/Evil Queen's in Season 1, there is a world of difference.  Lana was definitely one of the gems that contributed to the show's original success.  It was in Season 2 when they began to claim that Regina deserved unearned sympathy that the character began to falter.

So far in Season 7, I've found Regina incredibly bland.  I do blame the writing and not the acting because at the end of the day, Roni was basically Granny with a dash of Snow (the boring latter season version). 

Regina in Season 7 does seem like a changed person, but I think the biggest difference is that in Season 7, Regina isn't surrounded by her former victims.  It helps since we don't have to watch Snow and Emma go out of their way to apologize, or hear Regina's bold and audacious insults towards Snowing, Emma and their friends.  It makes it easier to accept that Regina is now a changed person.

I know A&E collaborated with Lana to create the Roni character, but I'm surprised Lana was satisfied, because Roni/Regina did not have a discernable character arc in Season 7 nor face any interesting conflict which would be interesting to explore.  Unlike Colin, who got to play a new character.  I suppose Weaver/Rumple also got nothing new to play, but he stayed on as well, so who knows.

Edited September 22, 2019 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

2 minutes ago, Camera One said:

It makes it easier to accept that Regina is now a changed person.

It also helps that a significant amount of time has passed. (Although only God knows how long that actually was.)

[Camera One]

2 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

It also helps that a significant amount of time has passed. (Although only God knows how long that actually was.)

Yes.  Regina's last major bad selfish decision was 4A, was it?  When she considered killing Marian?  

Despite the passage of time, I was never able to accept Rumple was a changed person since the last time he was willing to let everyone die was in the Season 6 finale.

[KingOfHearts]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

Despite the passage of time, I was never able to accept Rumple was a changed person since the last time he was willing to let everyone die was in the Season 6 finale.

He didn't seem to care much in S7 either. There wasn't much of a difference between his S6 or S7 selves, except a different objective. Regina, by contrast, completely dropped the self-pity and spent the entire season trying to help her son and his friends. She wasn't trying to get anything out of it, which is pretty huge for her.

[Camera One]

You have to wonder what A&E and the Writers were thinking in their "character development" of Jacinda/Murderella.  They made her weak-minded in both the flashbacks and the present-day.  Even the villains they try to reform sometimes make a different decision in the current storyline to show how they've learned. 

In some ways, this was reminiscent of how they had Cursed David be so weak-minded in Season 1 but at least this was contrasted with his Non-Cursed character in the flashback. 

The character who came out smelling like roses in the flashback was Regina, who "saved" Henry and Tiana from finding out what had happened between Murderella and Tremaine.  In the present-day, we were supposed to cheer Jacinda on as she gave that speech at the community garden.  Except I'm sure most of the people who were randomly walking by and signed the petition probably already went home, so the whole thing was idiotic.  I wonder if they thought she just misplaced the petition or something, not set it on fire, LOL. 

I guess it was a "win" since they saved the dismal community garden from demolition.

Spoiler

and Victoria never pursued her condo development ever again.  The End.

Edited September 22, 2019 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

4 hours ago, Camera One said:

I guess it was a "win" since they saved the dismal community garden from demolition.

Spoiler

At least we now have a place to put Gothel as a tree.

[Camera One]

There were several filming reports which described scenes that were ultimately cut from this episode (which weren't on the DVDs). 

The actress who played Sabine/Tiana described how Sabine had a date using an app.  There was a photo showing Rogers and Sabine having a conversation sitting at a bench.

It looks like they at least considered a Sabine/Rogers romantic connection this season.  I wonder why they cut it without even airing it and never pursued it again.

The actress who played Ivy was also surprised while watching that she wasn't even in this episode so presumably one of her scenes were cut.

[tennisgurl]

Its nice to see that Hyperion Heights Henry is just as whiny about wanting to do swashbuckling heroics as Regular Henry (I guess giving him a curse name would have been too much work) is. Even here he is getting all pissy that he cant join Rogers on a steak out, and even though I think its dumb that he wont just let Henry come, it is probably against procedure to allow random civilians onto any kind of police investigation, even one thats not on the books, and Rogers is supposedly a stickler for rules, so I get it. But despite being both The Author in his real life as well as an author in his day job, he apparently he thinks thats super lame and wants to do the flashy stuff, despite his lack of qualifications and it probably being just as useful as research.

Spoiler

I dont blame Hook for making up a whole fake adventure for Henry to have later on, probably anything to get him to shut up and stop whining about "wanting to be a hero" as if he hasn't already done enough crap, and  just run around looking for monsters to fight and stuff to prove how awesome he is. What a loser.

[Shanna Marie]

On 9/22/2019 at 12:05 PM, Camera One said:

I know A&E collaborated with Lana to create the Roni character, but I'm surprised Lana was satisfied, because Roni/Regina did not have a discernable character arc in Season 7 nor face any interesting conflict which would be interesting to explore. 

She did have a tendency to treat Regina like a real person she loved and wanted all the good things for, which is unlike most actors. Most actors want their characters to go through all kinds of bad things because it gives them interesting things to play, but Lana talked about wanting Regina to have a good relationship with Henry and campaigning for that, so she got it, and she wanted a love interest, so she got a pixie dust soulmate. For Roni, she wanted a character who was just like her, who was motherly (and she talked in interviews about just how motherly she was) and who was cool and hip and a little rock-and-roll. That seemed to be what she wanted, more than having an actual character arc or conflict.

20 hours ago, Camera One said:

It looks like they at least considered a Sabine/Rogers romantic connection this season.  I wonder why they cut it without even airing it and never pursued it again.

Wasn't there a huge fuss from fans when those filming pictures surfaced? I think there were a lot of people upset about Tiana not being with her canon love, which also meant that her ending up with Whook would mean a potential person of color character was being replaced by a white man. And then there were the fans who didn't like the idea of any version of Hook ending up with someone other than Emma -- even if we knew he wasn't Emma's Hook, it was too disconcerting seeing him with someone else. They did seem to try to give them a moment when they met in this episode.

19 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

Even here he is getting all pissy that he cant join Rogers on a steak out, and even though I think its dumb that he wont just let Henry come, it is probably against procedure to allow random civilians onto any kind of police investigation, even one thats not on the books, and Rogers is supposedly a stickler for rules, so I get it.

Considering that Rogers did end up making an arrest, I don't think the stakeout was off the books. It is a bit odd for a grown man in his mid-late 30s to get all whiny about not being allowed, as a civilian, to take part in a police operation.

[Camera One]

On 9/22/2019 at 6:55 PM, tennisgurl said:

Even here he is getting all pissy that he cant join Rogers on a steak out, and even though I think its dumb that he wont just let Henry come, it is probably against procedure to allow random civilians onto any kind of police investigation, even one thats not on the books, and Rogers is supposedly a stickler for rules, so I get it.

I actually thought that was practically the only time Adult Henry seemed to have a personality.  So I sort of liked him wanting to tag along with Rogers, LOL.  But you're right, he definitely was still very immature.

[KingOfHearts]

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

But you're right, he definitely was still very immature.

The writers know if Henry wasn't immature, we wouldn't recognize him.

[Camera One]

9 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

The writers know if Henry wasn't immature, we wouldn't recognize him.

Though ironically, one season later, and I still don't really see him as a grown-up version of Henry.  

It would have been so much more fun if we got an adult Wish Henry with all those anger issues.  His WALLS™ would have been much more believable.  This adult Henry feels pointless.  He was the main character but had no depth or potential for development of any kind.

Edited September 24, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

On 9/24/2019 at 12:29 AM, Camera One said:

This adult Henry feels pointless.  He was the main character but had no depth or potential for development of any kind.

I think even our adult Henry could have worked if they'd remembered that the main character is supposed to actually want something and needs to face some kind of conflict or obstacle toward getting that thing. But this Henry doesn't really have true conflict with anyone and he's offscreen most of the time. In the present, he doesn't seem to have a great deal of interest in Jacinda, in spite of what they tell us, and the only thing that seems to be getting in his way is himself. He's the one who wimped out on saying anything, and it doesn't even seem like Ivy got him to help her look for Lucy as a way of keeping him away from Jacinda. He volunteered. I think he slept through most of the flashback.

There's not even any conflict in his relationship with Regina. You'd think a grown man who's used to being totally on his own in strange worlds would have some kind of issues with the mother who hasn't seen him since he was a teenager suddenly showing up in his life, no matter how good a relationship they have. But there's no follow-up from the previous episode to show how things are working out.

With the cursed identity, there were all kinds of things they could have done to give him depth, conflict, and interest, since the cursed identity could have been anything. Have him not like Jacinda at all. Have him like her but have there be some kind of other conflict (she's involved with someone else. He's involved with someone else). Have him be working for Victoria and in conflict with everyone else. Have him do something other than write blog posts to fight against Victoria. But he's mostly just an observer.

In the past, actually show something of the rebel movement. Victoria's supposedly out to get him, but we don't see all that much of it other than her sending Murderella after him. Have him trying to reform Murderella and break her of her murdering ways. Have him trying to live his own life in spite of Regina. Have him getting weirded out by having WHook around rather than the Hook he knows. He's supposedly doing all this because he wants to be a hero in storybooks, but he's not actually trying to do much of anything.

[KingOfHearts]

3 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

He's supposedly doing all this because he wants to be a hero in storybooks, but he's not actually trying to do much of anything.

Henry's motivations are just too vague and generic. He wants his own life, to be the hero, and get the girl. But there's nothing really driving that or conflict to motivate him. He left an idyllic life in Storybrooke to be in his own "story", but that's not very compelling. Maybe if Regina were insufferably overbearing or we saw Henry not fitting in at Storybrooke, we'd sympathize with his desire to get away and blaze his own trail. But instead, he just angsts in the typical Henry fashion. He wants to be a "hero" without the sacrificial consequences.

Spoiler

Wish Henry had a much more compelling motivation. We saw how much his life sucked after losing his grandparents. He too tried to be the protagonist who slew the dragon and saved the princess, but he failed. He was a loser, even when it wasn't his fault. He lost his family and was expected to rule. We actually got to see his struggle, despite his limited screen time. 

Henry's just like his mother. He's surrounded by people who love him, yet it's never enough. Before leaving on his motorcycle, he was just being a pouty teenager. I can't feel sorry for him or wish for him to become the hero he wants to be because he has no idea what that actually looks like. He's just some guy out to make a name for himself. Where's the drama?

Emma from S1 was entire galaxies better than Adult Henry as a protagonist. 

Edited September 28, 2019 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

I was also thinking back to how I thought after Episode 2 that we would get to see Adult Henry, Regina and Wish Hook try to work together as they searched for Jacinda.  Would they be able to get along?  What would each of them bring to the table when faced with a threat?

But it turned out we didn't even get a single episode of the three of them together.  Once they walk into the camp, Wish Hook and Henry promptly went off-camera.  

So the new characters weren't interesting and neither were the old ones.  No wonder viewers left in droves.

[Camera One]

I guess on this rewatch, I'm not as bothered by Victoria's acting.  Lucy was still really annoying, though.  How would she be so confident that Henry went to the cemetery and couldn't find it?  

My friend commented that Murderella seemed really ungrateful to Tiana after she saved her life... and I have not revealed my feelings about any of the characters.  She noticed the somewhat flirting between Rogers and Tiana each time they interacted in the flashback scenes, so I'm guessing that was deliberate on Colin's part.

Murderella being "responsible" for Anastasia's death is such a copy of the whole Snow White/Regina/Daniel scenario.  

Spoiler

The whole corruption angle with the hush money was never explored again.