S07.E12: A Taste of the Heights

[Camera One]

I agree having Regina fall for someone in the Disenchanted Forest would have been more interesting.  It's not like she had anything to do once she joined Henry.  Her main storyline involved stupidly teaching an evil villainess how to do magic.   She played very little role in the "resistance", which was successful off-screen anyway.

Did the Writers even work out *when* in Regina's past Dr. Facilier could possibly have figured into Regina's love life?  Knowing them, they wrote the "shocking" reveal without thinking through any of it.  It's just bewildering that they thought it would be a good idea.  Regina was lying to her "friends" in flashback and jeopardizing her family in present-day by associating with that snake.

Spoiler

I seem to remember they never even bothered to flesh out the whole Regina/Facilier backstory.  Would they seriously have been saving that for a Season 8 when it was obvious the ratings for this season were horrible?

And then there was Zelena's still unseen "normal" boyfriend.  It might have been more interesting to give Roni a "normal" boyfriend in Hyperion Heights and explore that possibility.  Oh well, I'm sure they will do this justice when we eventually see Zelena's fiancé, right?

Edited November 13, 2019 by Camera One

[Speakeasy]

5 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Someone like Facilier might have seemed like a "safe" option. She's not going to lose her heart to a bad guy, and if something happens to him, then maybe that's not such a bad thing. But then does he end up getting under her skin?

I actually think this dynamic, if not the more sensible timeline, might have been what they were going for, just going by the way he appears and she seems kind of hesitant but that she still kisses him even though she knows it's wrong.

Spoiler

In later episodes when they're seeing each other in Seattle he seems to be laying it on really thick and talking about their future together, while she seems to be trying to keep her distance despite being drawn to him, then trying to manipulate him as if to justify the relationship to herself. 

I would have thought that in her Evil Queen days there was a reason she had a sex slave instead of a lover; she needed to be in control of everyone around her. She'd deal with Rumpelstiltskin on equal terms because she had no choice, and maybe she'd visit Maleficent from time to time, but I can't believe she'd let someone get intimate with her unless, at the very least, they were an ordinary mortal she could overpower and kill anytime she needed to. A powerful sorcerer who could actually fight her and use the relationship against her? Not likely.

Your solution works a lot better. Of course their Facilier would need to have been a lot more interesting to justify her  falling for him against her better judgement. 

[Melgaypet]

12 hours ago, Camera One said:

I agree having Regina fall for someone in the Disenchanted Forest would have been more interesting.

And again, I was either rewriting the show in my head or not paying attention, because I thought that Regina's relationship with Facilier DID happen in the Disenchanted Forest and the writers never actually showed it because...well, for the same reason they never showed the Resistance actually defeating Lady Tremaine and the (nameless?) King.

[Speakeasy]

On 11/13/2019 at 5:14 PM, Melgaypet said:

And again, I was either rewriting the show in my head or not paying attention, because I thought that Regina's relationship with Facilier DID happen in the Disenchanted Forest and the writers never actually showed it because...well, for the same reason they never showed the Resistance actually defeating Lady Tremaine and the (nameless?) King.

I don't believe the king was ever named or seen and I personally never quite understood why they were rebelling against him. I gathered Tiana was the rightful heir and her family had been deposed or abdicated. It's a fairytale so presumably most of the audience wouldn't want an episode dedicated to serving over precedents of succession in an imaginary kingdom, but I think that explaining something about it wouldn't have been amiss.

I've decided in my own head that the king was a foreigner who took over with the assistance of Lady Tremaine and some other shady rich people. Or that the kingdom was centred on the magic bayou and was a province of some other bigger kingdom and Tiana's parents led an uprising that established it's independence (her dad was a commoner and her mother was from some earlier native dynasty who were kings before the province got incorporated into the kingdom, or was from some noble household and the other rebels proclaimed them to be their new royalty) I mean it's as likely as anything else.

[Shanna Marie]

The bit from this episode in the previouslys from the next episode with Lucy stopping Henry and Jacinda from kissing, for fear their TLK would break the curse, is rather unintentionally hilarious. It's shaping up to be a bland, chemistry-free curse after such a tepid courtship that most of the time you couldn't even tell if they actually liked each other at all or if they were just in each other's orbit because people kept telling them they should date. There's no way a kiss between these two is going to be powerful enough to break a curse, and we haven't even seen enough of their past relationship in the flashbacks to feel like their real relationship could break through.

Then again, it's this show, and that bar for a TLK is set really, really low.