Continuity, Nitpicks, Unanswered Questions and Timeline Headaches: When Did That Honeycrisp Apple Come From

[Curio]

I'd like to go through this entire series and count the number of times someone says "it doesn't matter."

[Camera One]

Yeah, KingofHearts mentioned two "____ doesn't matter anymore" from Season 5.  I didn't notice it until he pointed it out, and then realized Tinkerbelle said it too.

Edited April 2, 2017 by Camera One

[KAOS Agent]

Too much of this show doesn't matter anymore. If it doesn't matter, why should I care or bother to watch?

[KingOfHearts]

I just rewatched "Last Rites" today. The book stuff with Hook sending the pages to Emma didn't make any sense. They both knew what the other was doing, the pages flipped without explanation, etc. Yet, unexplained magic doesn't really bother me when the story is compelling. That's why plot holes are such a huge issue on this show - the narrative is not compelling enough to keep your eyes on what's important. The suspension of disbelief is held up by gum and paper clips.

[Rumsy4]

Why are there apparently still lost boys in Neverland?

[daxx]

The shadow got in the habit of catching boys and no one told it to stop?

[Rumsy4]

Tink destroyed the Shadow via coconut in S3, though. Btw, is Greg alive again (like Blue after the Shadow was destroyed), and the leader of the Lost Boys 2.0?

Edited April 3, 2017 by Rumsy4

[KingOfHearts]

1 hour ago, Rumsy4 said:

Tink destroyed the Shadow via coconut in S3, though. Btw, is Greg alive again (like Blue after the Shadow was destroyed), and the leader of the Lost Boys 2.0?

Tink said she got the watch off of "what was left of him", so I doubt it. He's just a rotting corpse.

[daxx]

There were other shadows though. Was it only the one that took lost boys?

[Rumsy4]

5 minutes ago, daxx said:

There were other shadows though. Was it only the one that took lost boys?

As far as I remember. I could be wrong...

[KingOfHearts]

So... Alice could have TLK'ed Cyrus or Ana could have TLK'ed Will to stop them from being genies?

[Shanna Marie]

10 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

So... Alice could have TLK'ed Cyrus or Ana could have TLK'ed Will to stop them from being genies?

As much as Alice and Cyrus were kissing, you'd think that would have happened at some point if that worked (and it was pretty obviously implied that they were living together in their little hidden house with its big, satin-draped bed and huge bathtub nearby). Maybe it only worked with Aladdin because he wished himself to be a genie in order to help her and wasn't made a genie by other means.

[KingOfHearts]

My headcanon for Tink in Page 23 is that she was actually Cora. Cora mentioned in 4x20 she had a run-in with Tink. Maybe she thought disguising herself would make Regina more receptive?

[koganei]

to think poor Rumple waited 300 years for it...

how the hell did he think Baelfire would still be alive still wonders me... 

[KingOfHearts]

Quote

how the hell did he think Baelfire would still be alive still wonders me... 

The seer prophecy said he would be reunited with his son.

[Olivia Y]

Question about the sleeping curse: wasn't it implied (in season 2, as a huge plot point) that people who've been under the sleeping curse can return to that firey room place and communicate with other people who are in the firey room? So...wouldn't Snow and Charming be able to speak to each other in person every time the non-cursed one went to sleep normally? Surely the curse doesn't mean that the non-cursed one has to be awake as long as the other one is asleep? I mean sure they're in a fire-filled room, but...they'd be together? And they could TLK and break the curse? 

(Am I thinking too much about this? Is applying logic from season 2 too much to ask? Did I misunderstand the rules of the curse? Do rules even matter? Does anything mean anything?)

Edited April 7, 2017 by Olivia Y

[Camera One]

Yes, "sleeping" under the Sleeping Curse should NOT be restful, so they would need to sleep normally too. 

3 hours ago, kili said:

good thing Pinocchio can carve a wardrobe in 1 day that his father took 8 months to carve

And now the Wardrobe can carry 3 people instead of 2.  They're chipping away at the core parts of their mythology.

Edited April 7, 2017 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

Quote

They're chipping away at the core parts of their mythology.

They started doing that in 1x20, where we learned that Gepetto - oops! - lied so his son could go with Emma. First the wardrobe could hold only one, then two, and now three. Oh, and the Blue Fairy is apparently a liar too.

[Rumsy4]

They said something about the Tree continuing to grow more magical or something, right? I can't remember the exact words. Maybe that's why it could transport three instead of two. 

[Camera One]

Here are the quotes I can find:

WISH AUGUST: "I know the enchanted grove where my father found the wood for the original wardrobe."

In "The Stranger" from Season 1, Blue told Geppetto about the tree.  His father didn't "find" it himself.  The Blue Fairy said "this is the last enchanted tree in the entire realm".  She never said it was an "enchanted grove".  She immediately concluded it has enough magic to protect two.

WISH AUGUST: "Here we are"
EMMA: "It's beautiful."
WISH AUGUST: "It survived the Evil Queen's reign. Its magic flourished"
EMMA: "And this will get us home?"
WISH AUGUST: "We'll see."  

First of all, if the Curse never happened, then the Evil Queen's reign would have been BEFORE this tree even grew.  I'm not sure if "its magic flourished" can justify the new wardrobe taking 3 people rather than 2.  

As usual, we've now spent more time talking about this than the Writers, LOL.

Edited April 7, 2017 by Camera One

[Rumsy4]

57 minutes ago, Camera One said:

As usual, we've now spent more time talking about this than the Writers, LOL.

Lol. Yup.

[Shanna Marie]

11 hours ago, Camera One said:

WISH AUGUST: "I know the enchanted grove where my father found the wood for the original wardrobe."

If there was never a curse, then how was there an original wardrobe? I guess it depends on when they stopped Regina. Had she threatened a curse but never got to carry it out, so the wardrobe was made but never used?

[Rumsy4]

Why exactly didn't Henry know that his book was running out of pages? Does he not know how books work? What does "final chapter" have to do with anything? Can't he just get a new book? What does this being the "final chapter" have to do with Henry's author powers taking over? I know, I know--it doesn't matter, and my questions are pointless. ;-)

Edited April 11, 2017 by Rumsy4

[Camera One]

3 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

Why exactly didn't Henry know that his book was running out of pages? Does he not know how books work? What does "final chapter" have to do with anything? Can't he just get a new book? What does this being the "final chapter" have to do with Henry's author powers taking over? I know, I know--it doesn't matter, and my questions are pointless. ;-)

Yeah, the entire C plot with Henry, the book and Isaac made no sense.  We might as well cut and paste every line they had in "Mother's Little Helper" in here.  They were trying to link "author's powers taking over"/Henry's trance, the book running out of pages, and the Savior's "final battle" (which came out of nowhere) together without explaining it.

[Tiger]

6 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

Why exactly didn't Henry know that his book was running out of pages? Does he not know how books work? What does "final chapter" have to do with anything? Can't he just get a new book? What does this being the "final chapter" have to do with Henry's author powers taking over? I know, I know--it doesn't matter, and my questions are pointless. ;-)

 

1 minute ago, Camera One said:

Yeah, the entire C plot with Henry, the book and Isaac made no sense.  We might as well cut and paste every line they had in "Mother's Little Helper" in here.  They were trying to link "author's powers taking over"/Henry's trance, the book running out of pages, and the Savior's "final battle" (which came out of nowhere) together without explaining it.

The entire Author thing has never made any sense.  At all.  

[Camera One]

Are we going to find out "Her Handsome Hero" is indestructible?  It keeps coming back in hell, and where did Belle get another copy anyway?  Did she take Gaston's?  Why didn't The Black Fairy just destroy that cursed book?  It's hard to take her seriously when she couldn't even do that.

Will we eventually get a centric about Her Handsome Hero and how the book got written in the first place?  (I'm joking, really).

Edited April 11, 2017 by Camera One

[Rumsy4]

Quote

And wasn't it mentioned how it took centuries to get it to work? So he waited hundreds of years to get to the 'land without magic', and then...yeah, apparently now it's as easy as going from one room to the next.

To get to the Land Without Magic, the ways shown are through a magic bean (Baelfire to England, Hook in S3), the Dark Curse (x3), the apprentice's wand (Ingrid), Silver Slippers (implied), and shadow apparently (Baelfire from Neverland). That's already five different ways, dang! All the rest of the portals are between magical lands. Still doesn't excuse the utter failure of Rumple to get someone to cast the Dark Curse for him centuries before. And why Blackbeard has a bunch of magic beans on his hat when Anton's brothers apparently destroyed all the crops. Or why Rumple didn't force the apprentice into making a portal for him. Or why he never attempted to get the silver slippers from Zelena after she went back to Oz. Etc, etc..

Edited April 11, 2017 by Rumsy4

[KingOfHearts]

Quote

Or why he never attempted to get the silver slippers from Zelena after she went back to Oz.

He actually did via Jefferson. But Jefferson said they had already "been moved to another land". Apparently, he was scared to face Zelena again himself for some reason. He had to send Robin to get the Elixir of the Wounded Heart.

Edited April 11, 2017 by KingOfHearts

[ParadoxLost]

I don't get what the rules are in the OUAT book.

Just now they can flip to the end and see that the pages are blank?  No one read ahead before?

The final chapter is the final chapter because pages are blank?  Not because its out of pages or because it says 'the end.'?

And since when does the book have anything but the past in it?  And the past from the Enchanted Forest at that?

And because I have too much freaking time on my hands.  I can read the book on from my laptop and it ends mid sentence on The Golden Bird" a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.  That signals the impending end of Storybrooke how?

And because I really have too much time on my hands, the story before that was The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby

I'm getting irritated with the amount of times everyone believes something is true because someone completely unreliable told them so.

Edited April 12, 2017 by ParadoxLost

[Camera One]

48 minutes ago, ParadoxLost said:

And because I really have too much time on my hands, the story before that was The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby

Water Babies was in the other book for the Land of Untold Stories.  Why is it in Henry's current book?  Clearly they decided to cheap out and use some old graphics.

[Rumsy4]

4 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

He actually did via Jefferson. But Jefferson said they had already "been moved to another land". Apparently, he was scared to face Zelena again himself for some reason. He had to send Robin to get the Elixir of the Wounded Heart.

I did remember those instances, and my point still stands. If he could send Robin to Oz to steal the elixir, he could've done the same fot the slippers. Heck--he could've gone himself. He was definitely more powerful than Zelena. He could've gone after Dorothy to fictional Kansas and got it from her!

[Camera One]

I guess this retcon isn't too bad, but not all the Lost Boys wanted to leave?  And "the worst of them" wanted to stay?  Really?

[Camera One]

So now, the Town Line is open again.  Could Snow and Charming go out into the World Without Magic, and both be awake at the same time?  Is that a possible solution?  

Did Rumple not know that Beowulf's Sword can open a portal?  He knew The Black Fairy wanted to get out of her realm, but didn't know the role of the sword and why Gideon might want Emma's powers?

[Shanna Marie]

Aside from the Hamilton gaffe, which required them to declare that even the "real world" parts of the story take place in an alternate universe, since they couldn't be bothered to keep track of their own show's timeline, there's some other timeline stuff that's been bugging me with the way the Hook stuff and the Emma stuff match. There's a point of connection with the shellphone call, so we know that they're supposedly in sync. Except ...

When Hook boarded the Nautilus and was sent away and when Emma came home and turned on the porch light, it was night.

The next thing we see is Emma at the loft talking to David about Hook leaving, and there's daylight coming through the windows. David has been taking the night shift in the sleeping curse (except when he stayed awake for more than a day because of his obsession), so I guess that's the next morning, and she's catching him before he goes to sleep.

But then when we see Hook next, it's picking up where we left off, with the Nautilus being sent through a portal. Are we out of sync here, seeing things that happened the night before, or did they spend hours being tossed around in the ocean before a portal opened?

When we see Emma again, she's at the sheriff's office. It's still daylight, and David is with her, but he says he just woke up. So, I'm guessing this is late afternoon the same day, and David joined her at the office when he woke up. I don't think he and Snow switched shifts and this is soon after the earlier scene, because that would make it too early to be going out for a girls' night out. It's dark outside when Emma's at home going through Hook's stuff (so I guess she did wait around 24 hours before giving up on him) and when she gets the call to go to the bar. When she comes home, either she left at closing time or Gideon shut the bar down as soon as she left, since he pops by in his Aesop disguise soon after she gets home. I hope it's the latter because we've got some questionable parenting if Henry is still lying on the couch, glued to his phone, at 2 a.m. What day of the week is it? Doesn't he have school? Anyway, this is where we have our point of connection, with Hook's shellphone call reaching Emma after he's had a day of adventures and she's had a day of moping/drinking.

How much Hook fit into one day is semi-questionable, since they ended up landing on Hangman's Island, and wasn't that where Blackbeard was holding Eric hostage? I guess Ariel has moved in there. I suppose it may not have been that remote, with the problem being that Ariel just didn't know where it was, but if they were able to get there in a few hours in a crippled submarine, that makes Ariel's demand that Hook give up his ship to get the info even more ridiculous because she didn't have to go far to search. But we'll handwave that it was close and/or the Nautilus is fast even when damaged.

But then things get really tricky. We end the episode with the shellphone call. Hook is in Agrabah and doesn't know how he's going to get back. Emma is being confronted by Gidiot. We pick up in the next episode with a continuation of Emma's confrontation with Gidiot, and the entire episode seems to take place that next day. But when we next see Hook, in maybe twelve hours he's somehow tracked down Blackbeard, who was in jail in Arendelle the last time Hook heard, and made it to him. Blackbeard makes a crack about him passing out on the beach because of the sand on his clothes, so you get the impression they're not in a coastal city in Agrabah. They seem to be in the Enchanted Forest. We know the travel ban is still in place because the magic bean doesn't work, so unless it takes a lot longer for Emma to deal with Gidiot, it doesn't seem like this part of the story is meant to be taking place weeks later.

So, how did Hook manage to find Blackbeard and get to him from Agrabah in less than a day? Also, where did Blackbeard scare up a crew? Didn't most of Blackbeard's crew end up staying with Hook, and that was the crew Hook ditched to go after Emma -- who were all in Storybrooke (per the scene with Smee asking where the Jolly Roger was)? Or did the pirates take the door back to their world when the Camelot and Sherwood Forest people left?

The time might have worked better if we'd seen the Hook scene of going through the portal first, and then maybe if the shellphone call had happened early in the next episode and Hook was already back in the Enchanted Forest when Hook made it. Then we could have said that the girls' night out was a week after Hook left and Hook has spent at least a week looking for Blackbeard and getting to him. That way, Emma waits at least a week before talking about moving on, Gidiot doesn't create a bar in a day just to get Emma's tears, and Hook has reasonable travel time. But that call really messes up the timeline. Just call me #timelinepolice.

[KingOfHearts]

In the last episode, they used "During the Time of the Dark Curse", for the flashbacks. That's the same wording they used for when Hook met Liam 2.0 on the Nautilus. How exactly does that work? I get that Liam 2.0 could have escaped the Dark Curse with Nemo, but how did Hook stop being frozen? If it were the full 28 years, and it was while Emma was in Storybrooke, Liam 2.0 would be much older.

Edited April 19, 2017 by KingOfHearts

[Shanna Marie]

On 4/18/2017 at 8:54 PM, KingOfHearts said:

In the last episode, they used "During the Time of the Dark Curse", for the flashbacks. That's the same wording they used for when Hook met Liam 2.0 on the Nautilus. How exactly does that work? I get that Liam 2.0 could have escaped the Dark Curse with Nemo, but how did Hook stop being frozen?

That question has nagged at me. In season 2, they made it sound like they were frozen through the whole curse and were only able to start moving and acting after Emma arrived in Storybrooke -- Philip and Mulan were just heading out to look for Aurora, and you'd think if they hadn't been frozen, they'd have already been doing that. Even unconscious, wouldn't Aurora have been taken by the curse if she wasn't in the Coradome? She'd have been in a coma in the hospital, not back in their world, so it's not that Philip and Mulan were trapped in the Coradome while Aurora was outside it, and they were able to move around and act but weren't able to get to her. So let's just chalk that up to more lax worldbuilding and poor continuity.

On another note, I've been thinking about the conversation from last week in the All Seasons thread about whether or not Neal was supposed to be significantly older than Emma, and it occurred to me that there are even more tangled issues with ages that aren't spelled out and that get confused by the casting in the whole Jones and Stiltskin family soap opera. First, there are the brothers Jones. They cast an actor who looks like he could be 3-5 years older than Colin/present Hook to play Hook's older brother. But he only appeared in flashback (or frozen in age in the Underworld), and in the flashback, Killian is supposed to be at least a decade or so younger than he is now physically (minus Neverland and curse time). They did a reasonable job aging Colin down by cutting out the guyliner and changing his hair, and then he changed his acting, so you could believe him as being in his early to mid-20s. But we have no present vs. past comparison for Liam, so we don't know if he's meant to just be in the relative ages of the actors, about 3-5 years older than Killian, or the apparent age difference based on Killian being about a decade younger, so that Liam is more than ten years older than Killian. That changes how things look -- It's one thing if Liam ignores the input of his baby brother who's more than ten years younger, another if he ignores a brother who's basically a peer, only 3-5 years younger. And it changes how you view an older brother who let his younger brother put him on a pedestal while hiding anything negative and let his younger brother feel down on himself because he couldn't measure up -- is it an older teen who gets stuck having to raise his brother and who is in his late 20s while still maintaining the act, or is he still a tween himself and doing the best he knows how to do to try to bring up his little brother, and still pretty young and immature while he keeps up the act?

And then there's Killian and Rumple's family -- Killian was probably in his mid-20s, about 24-25, when he met Milah. At that time, she had a son who was probably around 6, so either she was married and had her child as a teen or she was older than he was. Meanwhile, present Rumple/Gold seems to be in his mid-50s, the age he would have been frozen at when Bae was 14, so he'd have been about 40 when Bae was born. It's hard to tell because they didn't seem to do anything to try to age him down or to indicate his age. Even if Milah was about 30 when Bae was born, her husband is still significantly older than she is, and that makes her about that much older than Killian. If she was supposed to be younger than that, closer to Killian's age, then she has a much bigger gap between her and Rumple, which is the kind of thing that very likely could have affected their marriage.

But we aren't given any age stamps on most of the characters. I think Emma's the only adult character whose age we know. We can kind of judge how much time is passing based on Bae's age, but otherwise it gets tricky when the same actors are playing the characters over a span of decades, sometimes without anything to indicate that they're supposed to be a different age.

[Camera One]

20 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

is it an older teen who gets stuck having to raise his brother and who is in his late 20s while still maintaining the act, or is he still a tween himself and doing the best he knows how to do to try to bring up his little brother, and still pretty young and immature while he keeps up the act?

In the "Swan Song" Killian child flashback, Liam Sr. only looked 3-5 years older.

Edited April 27, 2017 by Camera One

[daxx]

I'm quite sure Milah was supposed to be about 8-10 years older than Killian and Rumple older than her.

[Amerilla]

For the main characters, I've always felt that the actors' ages are supposed to roughly approximate their characters' age in the present moment. Taking that as a starting point, you can sort of backtrack to where they would have been without curses and portal jumps and various acts of immortality.

Take the whole Rumpel/Milah/Hook grouping. In real life, Carlyle just turned 56, Rachel Shelley is 47 and Colin is 36. Roll those ages back to when the characters are introduced in 2011-2012, Carlyle is about 50, Rachel is about 40, and Colin is about 30.

So, if we go back to the Early EF, we can sort of use Bae's fixed age to make some guesses. If we assume Rumpel is 49-50 when Bae is 14/15, that makes him about 34-35 when Bae is born, and Milah 27-28. From the backstory in 'Manhattan,' it seems like they'd already been married for a time. 

Hook and Milah don't meet until Bae is about 6, so Milah would be about 34 and Hook about 25.

How long were they together? It seems like Rumpel runs into them after Bae's been gone for just a couple years beyond his last fixed age of 14-15 -- Rumpel hasn't quite hit Peak Imp yet, he's still looking for the straightforward path of a magic bean, etc -- so we can assume they've been together about 9-10 years, putting them at mid-40s and mid-30s when Milah dies and Hook goes to Neverland.

While it doesn't work perfectly, it easily puts Gold's visual age in his early to mid-50s and Hook's in his early to mid-30s during the Storybrooke part of the story. Plus or minus 200-300 years.

A less extreme example: Jennifer, Ginny and Josh are all about the same age in real-life. In the S3 opener, Emma tells her parents they can't pull the life experience crap since they're the same age she is. 

It's also plausible that Belle matches Emile's real age of 35...making her about 30 when the Curse breaks, and, assuming she was in Regina's prison for a couple of years and with Rumpel at the Dark Castle for a year or so, would have made her mid-20s in 'Skin Deep.' 

This is why, in my Thread for All Seasons post, I posited that, no matter how old and decrepit one thinks MRJ looked in 'Tallahassee,' Emma and Neal were about the same age. Jen is 38, he's 39

The ONLY character this doesn't work for -- and you're going to find this SHOCKING -- is Regina. Lana is about the same age as Jen and Gosh...but in the EF, she was, what, 8-10 years older than Snow?

We'll just chalk it up to good genes and monthly juice fasts.

[oncebluethrone]

16 minutes ago, Amerilla said:

We'll just chalk it up to good genes and monthly juice fasts.

She also probably drinks wrinkle-reducing/preventing potions.

[Amerilla]

4 minutes ago, oncebluethrone said:

She also probably drinks wrinkle-reducing/preventing potions.

Personally, I'd take that over a kale smoothie ANY DAY. :-)

[Camera One]

Did The Dragon decide to stay in Storybrooke or go back to NYC?  

[RulerofallIsurvey]

Since we haven't seen him, I prefer to think he was smart enough to high tail it away from the EQ...er...Regina as fast as possible while the barrier around the town is down.  

And he obviously took his long lost love Maleficent and daughter Lily with him.  :)

Edited April 28, 2017 by RulerofallIsurvey
Long lost not long long love. Lol!

[Mitch]

1 hour ago, RulerofallIsurvey said:

Since we haven't seen him, I prefer to think he was smart enough to high tail it away from the EQ...er...Regina as fast as possible while the barrier around the town is down.  

And he obviously took his long long love Maleficent and daughter Lily with him.  :)

Can we have that spin off please??? With Zelena as their wacky neighbor???

Edited April 28, 2017 by Mitch

[KingOfHearts]

Quote

Can we have that spin off please??? With Zelena as their wacky neighbor???

Replying in Wishes thread.

[KingOfHearts]

Okay, this is starting to drive me nuts. Why did Zelena never go to meet Regina in the Enchanted Forest after training with Rumple? She was so jealous of her sister that she attempted to murder her in cold blood, yet she restrained herself for an entire decade. We saw in 3B that Zelena would muahaha in your face at every opportunity. It wasn't as if she were afraid of Rumple. When she returned in the Missing Year, she thought he was still alive. I don't understand why she waited until after the curse to raid Regina's castle. It's just so random.

[Camera One]

2 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

Okay, this is starting to drive me nuts. Why did Zelena never go to meet Regina in the Enchanted Forest after training with Rumple? She was so jealous of her sister that she attempted to murder her in cold blood, yet she restrained herself for an entire decade. We saw in 3B that Zelena would muahaha in your face at every opportunity. It wasn't as if she were afraid of Rumple. When she returned in the Missing Year, she thought he was still alive. I don't understand why she waited until after the curse to raid Regina's castle. It's just so random.

She drank Memory Tea and forgot about Regina for a period of time.  Hope that helps!

[KingOfHearts]

30 minutes ago, Camera One said:

She drank Memory Tea and forgot about Regina for a period of time.  Hope that helps!

Okay, now I want to see Zelena drink memory tea to forget who she is, then be mortified that she's actually the Wicked Witch of the West.

I could imagine Snow slipping some memory tea into Regina to reset her.

Edited May 5, 2017 by KingOfHearts

[Camera One]

I remember when "Lost" ended, fans were saying it would be fun to put the flashbacks in chronological order and watch the whole story unfold.

With this show, no thanks.  Yikes!   It would be a show about people with multiple personality disorder.

Edited May 5, 2017 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

Why did Regina wait nine whole months between threatening the curse and then casting it? She obtained the curse on either same day as the wedding, or the day after. Did it really take her that long to get all the ingredients? At least with Zelena's time travel spell, she needed the baby as an ingredient.

Edited May 5, 2017 by KingOfHearts