S07.E19: Flower Child

[Camera One]

11 minutes ago, tennisgurl said:

Or did she just destroy the Seattle area, and assumed that was all there was of humanity?

 

Here are the lines from that section:

GOTHEL FRIEND: How many are dead?

GOTHEL: All of them. I wiped the land clean.

GOTHEL FRIEND: May the Gods forgive.

GOTHEL: There's nothing to forgive. It's not even permanent. Some slimy lump will flop ashore, crawl towards humanity again. And as is their way, it'll be worse. I shudder at the thought of what destructive civilization they'll create next. This time, they'll do it alone in a cold world because now they've created something that's never been before - A land without magic.

GOTHEL FRIEND: They'll be alone?  Where will we be?

GOTHEL: This will take us to another realm. We'll find others like us, and when the time is right and we're strong enough, we will return.

GOTHEL FRIEND: But you said the humans would come back, too.

GOTHEL: Then we'll cleanse the land once more and reclaim our homes. 

----------

I don't understand Gothel's reasoning.  She's going to wait until the humans re-grow into strength and come back "when we're strong enough".  Uh, why not stay and just keep stamping them out?  Or come back earlier to destroy them?  So that friend isn't human?  Then what is she?  LOL.  

Edited May 2, 2018 by Camera One

[Rumsy4]

35 minutes ago, Camera One said:

GOTHEL: There's nothing to forgive. It's not even permanent. Some slimy lump will flop ashore, crawl towards humanity again. 

A&E just added a Sci-Fi element to their series. Evolution happened twice, everyone!! 

[Camera One]

Hopefully, they don't still think the Earth is a few thousand years old.

Okay, I just figured it out and I don't know why I didn't get this earlier.  This is a thousand years by the TREE NYMPH calendar.  

[jhlipton]

2 hours ago, ParadoxLost said:

When did they say thousands of years ago? The beginning of the episode says "many years ago"

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

I'll have to rewatch (ha, not doing that), but I think after the Gothel flashback, near the end of the episode, it said "Thousands of years later", and then it showed the skyline of Seattle, if I remember correctly.

Humanity will be coming back, not from ancient man, but from lungfishes

 

Over "thousands of years"

 

OK, then!

[Camera One]

There have been worse episodes, but this one starting to rank up there with one of the dumbest, if only because of its laughable big reveal worldbuilding.  

It's interesting how "Flower Child" was the fourth last episode of the series, and on "Lost", the fourth last episode of the series was "Across the Sea", featuring "Mother", which also tried to go way back in time to explain something, but left me with a dubious "You've got to be kidding me" feeling.  

I wouldn't be surprised if A&E looked at the final season of "Lost" and decided it was time to go deep with their mythology for this one.  Except in this case, they pretty much went off the deep end in absurdity.

[Camera One]

Another thought that hit me when I watched this episode is that they could have replaced the tree nymph backstory with a mermaid backstory.  Mother Gothel was Ariel when she was young and she wanted to be with the humans but they rejected her so she killed them all.  What a twist on a beloved tale.  

Edited May 2, 2018 by Camera One

[Rumsy4]

9 hours ago, Camera One said:

It's interesting how "Flower Child" was the fourth last episode of the series, and on "Lost", the fourth last episode of the series was "Across the Sea", featuring "Mother", which also tried to go way back in time to explain something, but left me with a dubious "You've got to be kidding me" feeling.  

I wouldn't be surprised if A&E looked at the final season of "Lost" and decided it was time to go deep with their mythology for this one.  Except in this case, they pretty much went off the deep end in absurdity.

Oh my god. They literally repeated LOST's worst misstep. A bit much, even for them. 

8 hours ago, Camera One said:

Mother Gothel was Ariel when she was young and she wanted to be with the humans but they rejected her so she killed them all.  What a twist on a beloved tale.  

I think we should be forever grateful "Ariel" was a Season 3 episode. 

Edited May 2, 2018 by Rumsy4

[Shanna Marie]

17 hours ago, Camera One said:

I don't understand Gothel's reasoning.  She's going to wait until the humans re-grow into strength and come back "when we're strong enough".  Uh, why not stay and just keep stamping them out?  Or come back earlier to destroy them?  So that friend isn't human?  Then what is she?  LOL.  

And what about all those humans in the other worlds she's been living in all this time? Or are they not really humans? Are the people from the World Without Magic actually some other species that looks just like the people in other places but evolved differently? Does Gothel only have problems with people from the World Without Magic, but not with people in other places?

Edited May 2, 2018 by Shanna Marie

[KingOfHearts]

Gothel's village gets slaughtered and she's pissed off enough to destroy all of humanity. Regina torches numerous villages, and she's the best queen there ever was. Again, we're back to victim-blaming. I don't think the flashbacks explained how Gothel became evil. Bitter, but not ill-rape-a-guy-and-enjoy-it evil. She's had thousands of years to evolve, but we don't actually see it. Her backstory doesn't inform her actions at all. She's just so generic.

Edited May 2, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[Guest]

4 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

Gothel's village gets slaughtered and she's pissed off enough to destroy all of humanity. Regina torches numerous villages, and she's the best queen there ever was. Again, we're back to victim-blaming. I don't think the flashbacks explained how Gothel became evil. Bitter, but not ill-rape-a-guy-and-enjoy-it evil. She's had thousands of years to evolve, but we don't actually see it. Her backstory doesn't inform her actions at all. She's just so generic.

Even if we accept that the flashback events turned Gothel evil, it still doesn't make sense that she abandoned her daughter for most of her life.

Gothel's motivation is now finding her "sisters" who have magic.  It only now occurred to her that Alice is her child and half tree nymph and might have magic.

On a different topic, the make up artists on this show are also really terrible.  Their skill level with the tree nymphs reminded me of 60s Star Trek.

[Camera One]

On 5/2/2018 at 1:06 PM, Shanna Marie said:

And what about all those humans in the other worlds she's been living in all this time? Or are they not really humans? Are the people from the World Without Magic actually some other species that looks just like the people in other places but evolved differently? Does Gothel only have problems with people from the World Without Magic, but not with people in other places?

Why would she be sending invitations to people like Zelena.  Is there that much turnover in the Coven?  All they do is to wait and wait and wait (thousands of years) to strike?  Why would they join her anyway?  The Blind Witch seemed like a sole operator.  

[Shanna Marie]

I've been trying to figure out how these latest revelations fit in with Gothel testing people. Yeah, someone who's been betrayed by people who turned out to have violent anti-magic views would have trust issues, but she's been testing on general morality, not on "will you kill people just because they're different?" So where does that fit with locking Rapunzel in a tower to see if she'd sacrifice herself for her family, giving Rapunzel a poison and tempting her to use it, or seeing if WHook would delay freeing his daughter in order to fight a duel for his honor? She was trying to create a Guardian who would have magical powers because of her purity of heart, or something like that, but it turned out that she could have someone with magical powers just by having kids. I also don't see why she needed to poison WHook to keep him apart from Alice, since it turned out that she didn't seem to suffer any ill effects from Alice escaping the tower. Alice's birth allowed her to escape, and after that it didn't seem to matter if Alice got out of the tower. Gothel wasn't sucked back into it.

It really looks like they just had Gothel doing stuff that fit the plot of the episode in question all along, and they only came up with her backstory later in the season, with some handwaving to kind of explain how it ties together, except it doesn't really and it makes all of her actions make even less sense. She could have had what she needed to do her spell all along just by having her daughter with her. None of the other stuff was even remotely necessary.

[Rushmoras]

Pretty meh episode in my opinion. Mother Dredlock's story-line is, at least for me, not that interesting, or maybe I'm really getting pissed off by the previous... in magical world narrative. In addition to it, did this season establish in previous episodes that AU people like to hunt down magical beings, or was it just something cooked up for Mother Dreadlocks storyline? Also, how did the Nymphs got killed? Directly by axes and torches or non-directly by cutting down trees, which were linked to the Nymphs? Because even if the latter, couldn't they secure the nature with magic? Or if the former, why not use magic to defend yourself? I mean, it was pretty easy for the hippy Gothel in the flashback.

Oh, wait, based on other comments here, so the Nymphs were in the real world thousands of years ago? Ok... what? So... why... then... the roywlty thousands of years ago looked sorta like... Victorian England esque types? And not... you know, like indigeneuous/aborigens half naked type of people? Did the Flash change the timeline again?

Edited May 16, 2018 by Rushmoras

[KingOfHearts]

19 minutes ago, Rushmoras said:

Oh, wait, based on other comments here, so the Nymphs were in the real world thousands of years ago? Ok... what? So... why... then... the roywlty thousands of years ago looked sorta like... Victorian England esque types? And not... you know, like indigeneuous/aborigens half naked type of people? Did the Flash change the timeline again?

Only a true Author could weave such a tale.

[Rumsy4]

22 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

Only a true Author could weave such a tale.

We have a new addition to our repertoire of non-sequiturs like “Your questions are pointless” and “I’m not here to discuss timelines”. 

[KingOfHearts]

17 minutes ago, Rumsy4 said:

We have a new addition to our repertoire of non-sequiturs like “Your questions are pointless” and “I’m not here to discuss timelines”. 

There's enough BS on this show to float an oil tanker.

Edited May 16, 2018 by KingOfHearts

[Mitch]

1 hour ago, Rushmoras said:

Pretty meh episode in my opinion. Mother Dredlock's story-line is, at least for me, not that interesting, or maybe I'm really getting pissed off by the previous... in magical world narrative. In addition to it, did this season establish in previous episodes that AU people like to hunt down magical beings, or was it just something cooked up for Mother Dreadlocks storyline? Also, how did the Nymphs got killed? Directly by axes and torches or non-directly by cutting down trees, which were linked to the Nymphs? Because even if the latter, couldn't they secure the nature with magic? Or if the former, why not use magic to defend yourself? I mean, it was pretty easy for the hippy Gothel in the flashback.

Oh, wait, based on other comments here, so the Nymphs were in the real world thousands of years ago? Ok... what? So... why... then... the roywlty thousands of years ago looked sorta like... Victorian England esque types? And not... you know, like indigeneuous/aborigens half naked type of people? Did the Flash change the timeline again?

I actually had that question answered by one of the brain trust over at FB...along the lines of "Well, its a show about fairy tales and they changed those, so they can change history on the show to fit their story.." And that, my friend, is why this piece of carp show has been around for 7 years.

[KingOfHearts]

This episode wins the award for "Most Bizarre Flashback". Like, you really can't make this up.

Mother Gothel is a wood nymph from prehistoric Earth who got teased by Victorian mean girls in 1980s prom dresses and killed the entire human population with her Carrie powers. Oh, and humans evolved from fishes over just "thousands of years".

Seriously, what were the writers smoking?

 

On 4/27/2018 at 11:35 PM, Camera One said:

And then the line that seemed written for promos: "There is a war brewing and no one in this city is safe."

LMAO.

[Shanna Marie]

I get the feeling that Gothel's backstory was made up for this episode, not something that was planned all along, mostly because there were zero clues set up -- and I don't think it was just them being afraid of spoiling their big twist.

They also don't seem to have realized the situation they wrote. If magic is at all genetic, why didn't Gothel realize that her daughter might also have magic? She was out recruiting members for her coven without even considering that she'd made a potential coven member. That would actually have explained and motivated the spell she cast on WHook to keep him away from Alice, to keep him away so she could start training and manipulating Alice. That would have been a lot more like the movie Mother Gothel, making Alice think that her father had abandoned or rejected her, but her mother's there for her.

I spent the whole season wondering what Desk Sergeant's fairytale identity was, and he even becomes part of the plot here, but still nothing.

Is this possibly the worst episode of the entire series? Or maybe it's just the most WTF. That flashback is so utterly ridiculous. The dresses remind me of my high school prom in the 80s (I even spotted some zippers), but this is apparently in prehistoric times before mankind will evolve again, but it's only a thousand or so years ago? And yet again we have people randomly hating magic and able to hurt powerful magical people who suddenly can't defend themselves.

They totally forgot that Henry's curse identity was married and had a daughter who would have been Lucy's age, when he suggests that maybe Lucy was conceived in a drunken fling they don't remember as a way of explaining the DNA test. He just says he would have remembered Jacinda as a way of dismissing that theory, but doesn't seem to consider that this would have meant he was cheating on either a pregnant wife or a wife who'd just had a baby.

[Camera One]

I don't think I'll be able to rewatch this one until mid-next week.  It's a shame since the green beings could be related to The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

6 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I get the feeling that Gothel's backstory was made up for this episode, not something that was planned all along, mostly because there were zero clues set up -- and I don't think it was just them being afraid of spoiling their big twist.

That would be really uncharacteristic for A&E.  For all their lack of planning, they usually at the very least come up with a villain's backstory early on and use it as a major twist towards the end. 

Unless their initial big backstory for Gothel had to be scrapped because they had to insert a finale for the series?  But I don't see how they couldn't have used at least part of their original plan even with the change.  And didn't they know when they started 7B that they had been cancelled?  

One could say that they had grand ambitions in creating the origin story for The Land Without Magic.  This was a big question that hadn't been answered in 6 years, though I personally never needed it to be answered.

I am just really curious about the thinking that went behind Gothel's wild backstory.  And the script was an A&E Original.

So I was googling this episode, and these were some tweets from the costume designer about this episode:

Quote

Allisa Swanson‏ @allisa_s

719 is going to be a HUGE episode for costumes! Ideas have been flowing and the team is ready for, and up to, the challenge! #OUAT

EmilyWhitneck‏ @Ewhitneck 7 Feb 2018

Replying to @allisa_s  Can't wait to see the results of this tweet

Allisa Swanson‏ @allisa_s 7 Feb 2018

It is going to be awesome! #OUAT

EmilyWhitneck‏ @Ewhitneck 7 Feb 2018

Can you show us any pictures of your costumes you have created so far?

Allisa Swanson‏ @allisa_s 7 Feb 2018

Not at all! I signed my life away before I started, promising no spoilers. However, after things air, I will share some bts and concept art with you! #OUAT

So it sounds like they were really excited about the whole concept of prehistoric Victorian mean girls?

Edited December 28, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

8 hours ago, Camera One said:

So it sounds like they were really excited about the whole concept of prehistoric Victorian mean girls?

In 1980s prom dresses. Seriously, I was having flashbacks. Were those costumes designed, or did they find a stash at a Goodwill store?

They couldn't have at least tried to create a culture that was unique, maybe a bit primitive? Those were so obviously machine-made, synthetic fabrics in obviously machine-made costumes. They'd have been horribly anachronistic if this had actually been set in the Victorian Era, but in some kind of lost prehistoric society of mostly white people in the Pacific Northwest it was utterly ridiculous.

[Speakeasy]

'I have destroyed the entire human race, good riddance to the bastards... And yet it will all be for nothing, one day they will re evolve from lungfish and it will all be useless, USELESS!

Come Patsy! We must away to another world to plot our revenge on the vile humans once they have re evolved from lungfish!'

'...um... I have a few ques... Ok, ok, murder face... Yes. That sounds like a good plan...'

😉

[Camera One]

4 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

'I have destroyed the entire human race, good riddance to the bastards... 

Come Patsy! We must away to another world to plot our revenge on the vile humans once they have re evolved from lungfish!'

And in this other world, she shall choose to work only with humans who are just as evil and vicious.  Did Tree Nymphs not exist in any of the realms?

Edited December 29, 2019 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

4 hours ago, Camera One said:

And in this other world, she shall choose to work only with humans who are just as evil and vicious. 

Yes, the people she chooses to work with are exactly like the Mean Girls. They're humans who act curious about magic and who will betray and kill others to get what they want. Maybe if the spell is done right, it will kill them all, so she's choosing them that way for a reason?

None of her plan makes any sense. When this first aired, I tried writing out her plan in chronological order, and it's just insane ( I was going to link, but the post contains spoilers for subsequent episodes, so I'm copying and pasting):

Gothel is a wood nymph in prehistoric Victorian Dynasty Seattle who is fascinated by humans. But when the prehistoric Victorian Heathers she thinks are her friends wipe out all the super-powerful magical wood nymphs, she goes Carrie on them with her superpowers, killing all humans and eradicating all magic, turning it into a World Without Magic. Vowing to come back for more revenge after they've evolved again, she uses a magic bean to jump to another world -- where apparently she spends thousands of years living among humans. She apparently doesn't think about breeding her own army of half-wood nymphs who'd have powers like hers and could rule over humans or help her invade the World Without Magic again. For Reasons, she needs to find the Guardian, a person who apparently gets magical powers for being super good. She locks Rapunzel in the tower when Rapunzel is willing to sacrifice for her family, then tempts her after she escapes. After Rapunzel fails the Guardian test, the next target is Anastasia, who dies trying to save her stepsister from falling through the ice. But Rapunzel doesn't want her daughter revived and stuck in a tower, so she makes Gothel's spell backfire on her so she's stuck in the tower. Gothel gets her chance to escape when WHook comes looking for the magical flower. Instead of seducing him right then, she sends him to get the flower, taking a chance that he'll come back like he promised. She conceives and gives birth to Alice, using her presence as someone in her bloodline to allow her to escape from the tower. It doesn't seem to occur to her that her daughter might have inherited her magic or might be the Guardian, and she makes no effort to win over her daughter. Instead, she lets WHook raise her and they develop a bond, until for Reasons Gothel decides to poison his heart to keep him away from Alice. Alice eventually escapes with no apparent ill effects to Gothel, so there's no reason she needed to keep Alice in the tower or keep her father away from her. Instead of cultivating and training her own daughter, she recruits and tests random girls with magical powers and cons Drizella into casting the dark curse Drizella got fixated upon after hearing about it from Regina (even though Regina ended up being the one to actually cast it, they seemed to have given the impression that Gothel was helping Drizella get the curse cast). Although Gothel engineered the whole thing, she makes her curse identity be as Rapunzel/Victoria's prisoner, and she gives Victoria information on how to revive Anastasia so that she'll have a Guardian (instead of, you know, dealing with her own daughter). Then she does a spell to revive Lucy after the spell to revive Anastasia nearly kills her. She spends some time messing with Rogers, demanding to see his artwork, etc., while a serial killer targets her coven. Finally, when it's time to cast her spell, she kidnaps Rogers and uses him as a hostage to force her daughter (the one she only just seems to have realized might have inherited her power) to participate in her spell that will allow her to wipe out humanity again in revenge for the pre-historic Heathers.

I'm not quite sure why I think they made up Gothel's backstory at the last minute other than that I don't think there are any clues leading up to it. I guess there's that one bit with the flower early in the season, but otherwise she doesn't behave like you'd think a nature spirit would. She doesn't have any particular affinity for plants or hatred for people. Heck, there's more evidence that I'm a wood nymph than there is for Gothel (I'm an introvert with a lot of house plants and a fondness for gardening. And I'm not a wood nymph). Her daughter is part wood nymph, one other person who is in any way like her, but she has nothing to do with her daughter and spends more time cultivating the humans she actually hates. Plus, none of her actions make any sense for what she's supposedly actually up to.

 

[Camera One]

4 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I'm not quite sure why I think they made up Gothel's backstory at the last minute other than that I don't think there are any clues leading up to it. I guess there's that one bit with the flower early in the season, but otherwise she doesn't behave like you'd think a nature spirit would. She doesn't have any particular affinity for plants or hatred for people. 

Her power did seem plant based, though I assumed it was an allusion to the witch in the Rapunzel story whose anger was induced when Rapunzel's father stole her vegetables (or the Disney Mother Gothel who sought the power of the flower).

I think she made a comment about Ivy's car freshener which was in the shape of a tree, which suggested she was fond of nature and disliked humans' treatment of it.

I agree there was nothing much that would suggest a nature spirit or an ancient being, in the present-day nor the flashbacks.  Her headquarters with Madame Leota was a building, not a natural glade or anything.

[Speakeasy]

9 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

 

I'm not quite sure why I think they made up Gothel's backstory at the last minute other than that I don't think there are any clues leading up to it. I guess there's that one bit with the flower early in the season, but otherwise she doesn't behave like you'd think a nature spirit would. She doesn't have any particular affinity for plants or hatred for people. Heck, there's more evidence that I'm a wood nymph than there is for Gothel (I'm an introvert with a lot of house plants and a fondness for gardening. And I'm not a wood nymph). Her daughter is part wood nymph, one other person who is in any way like her, but she has nothing to do with her daughter and spends more time cultivating the humans she actually hates. Plus, none of her actions make any sense for what she's supposedly actually up to.

It's just such a huge backstory with such massive ramifications for the rest of the setting that it's hard to believe the season wouldn't have been tied into it if it had been planned from the start. The main villain's backstory taking place thousands* of years in the past and having wiped out some antediluvian civilisation and created the current world is the sort of thing you build the whole season, if not the series, around. The fact that there was NOTHING suggesting she was a nature spirit rather than a human witch, that she was thousands of years old or that she had destroyed the world before just leads to the conclusion that it CAN'T have been planned.

I mean the alternative is that they had this plan all along and this was there on a big writers storyboard during all the months of writing that went into making season 7 and they just looked at that note about the main villain being Fairytale Cthulhu and said 'hmmm, should we throw in a hint about her being Fairytale Cthulhu? No, no I think we need a scene with Jacinda and Sabine buying a food truck/Henry making his kinda-girlfriend a mix tape/something about Victoria (man, what are we going to do with Victoria? Can we just kill her? I don't know what we were thinking with her...) I'm sure we can fit in Gothel's backstory before the finale'

Which is just baffling.

Spoiler

And just to make it more baffling Agents if S.H.I.E.L.D, which is on the same network, had an antideluvian world ending villain whose actions had created the modern world a couple of years ago in their third season.

Anyone remember Hive? He was kind of a big deal and got quite a lot of setup.

The more I think about it the more it iris he as well that this episode uses genocide and environmental devastation in such a throwaway manner-ok it's the genocide of an imaginary race if dryads in bad sparkly makeup but still... It's just so cursory, I can't believe many people were more sympathetic to Gothel after this episode, it just seems like the writers decided bad guys need to have some reason to be evil, losing a loved one makes you evil, so losing your whole culture would make you Super Evil. But it's not as if anyone particularly gives a shit about either the dryads or the Antideluvian 80s Victorians, not the writers and not the viewers, and the whole rest of the season seems to be very clear on saying Gothel doesn't deserve a shred of sympathy.

And it's... Urrgghh.... It's going through the motions because they built up this pathos for they're villains in the first few seasons where personal tragedy or hardship DID at least partly explain they're motivation and they're taking that idea of the moment, like Rumple losing his son or Regina losing her boyfriend or Hook losing his hand, and just making a bigger and more horrible version but without any of the stuff around it that makes it work. Those other characters all had a villainous mask but you could see behind it to see their sadness, their guilt, their fear, their rage, their isolation, their humanity. Gothel shows none of that in the whole season, she's intimidating in the right lighting but she's hollow. So invoking violent racism and making her backstory a bloody, genocidal massacre seems a bit tasteless for such a disposable character.

*That's assuming the thing about lungfish is poetic license otherwise it was millions-no-hundreds of millions, of years ago and those are Pre-Cambrian Victorian 80s Mean Girls.

[Shanna Marie]

Another thing that doesn't fit with Gothel's behavior vs. her backstory: She's supposedly the last remnant of her race, then she has a daughter, who would be half wood nymph. But this being who's been on her own for thousands (millions?) of years just ditches the only other being she's encountered who's even part wood nymph and who is the only family she's been near in all that time. She shows zero interest in Alice until the last second, when she needs someone to fill out her coven of human witches.

And that's part of the reason she comes across as hollow. True, she's not human, but she's not treated as some kind of alien being whose behavior we can't understand. This isn't a dragon or ogre just doing what they do, which means someone gets hurt. She's a reasoning, feeling being, but she never shows any "humanity." When she's cruel, it's pointless and doesn't seem to give her pleasure. There's never any softness. She doesn't really seem to hate the way Regina did. It's so detached. She doesn't love anyone, not even her daughter. She creeps all over WHook/Rogers, but there's no sign that she was really attracted to him or that she despises him. Really, there's no reason behind her actions. There's no reason why she would have been toying with Rogers. She didn't need to have cozied up to him to use him as a hostage. She only got in the way of his investigation of who was killing her coven by playing with him. There was no reason behind making herself Victoria's prisoner, no reason for saving Lucy. I'm not even sure why she wanted the Guardian or the dagger. Why did she need someone else to cast the curse to get to our world? A magic bean would have taken care of that for the past 30 or so years. Humans re-evolved a very long time ago. Why did she let society get to this stage before she carried out her plan to wipe them out again? Are the people in the other world not really human? Otherwise, why didn't she wipe them out on other worlds?

She's basically a paper doll doing what the plot tells her to do, but there's zero depth or development to her character and no reasoning behind her actions.

And, again, we have the bad guys hating magic for no real reason. Hating magic makes you evil, even though most of the magic users on this show have been evil.

[Camera One]

21 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

So invoking violent racism and making her backstory a bloody, genocidal massacre seems a bit tasteless for such a disposable character.

It really was a cheap way to shock the audience into feeling something. 

3 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Why did she need someone else to cast the curse to get to our world? A magic bean would have taken care of that for the past 30 or so years. Humans re-evolved a very long time ago. Why did she let society get to this stage before she carried out her plan to wipe them out again? Are the people in the other world not really human? Otherwise, why didn't she wipe them out on other worlds?

All of this should have been explained by her backstory but it clearly wasn't.  There was no rhyme or reason for anything Mother Gothel did.

Edited December 31, 2019 by Camera One

[Speakeasy]

On 12/29/2019 at 5:44 PM, Camera One said:

And in this other world, she shall choose to work only with humans who are just as evil and vicious.  Did Tree Nymphs not exist in any of the realms?

If there are a thousand parallel Cinderellas and Snow Whites you'd imagine there would be other tree nymphs or equivalent, since they exist in the myths of almost every culture that knows about trees.

Maybe she went to them first and they just weren't convinced by her plan.

Gothel: 'Sisters! I have come from another world, where like you, my people frolicked amid the woodland glades until the BASTARD HUMANS slaughtered my mother and sisters! I wreaked my vengeance on then and destroyed all the humans of my world, diwnbti the last child, but in doing so I left the world bereft of magic. Now me and my faithful servant Patsy...'

Patsy: 'My name's...'

Gothel: 'Have come seeking allies so that once humans have re evolved from lungfish we may be able to return to my world, to restore magic and DESTROY THEM AGAIN! Sisters, will you help in my quest?'

Patsy: 'Wait...all the humans in the world? I thought you said the land, like the country around that party... By the Outer Gods! My little brother! what have I...'

Gothel: 'Quiet Patsy!'

Head Dryad: 'Umm... Yeah... Gothel, right? I... I don't think that this is really our kind of thing, and I'm really, to be honest I'm not sure what we get out of it... Why are you waiting for humans to re evolve on your world any... Look, doesn't matter, the answer is no, thank you though, for thinking of us, it really means a lot...'

Gothel: But...

Lieutenant Dryad: She said no you lunatic, now get the hell out of our woods! Your friend can stay though.

And it was thousands of years of that until she worked out she could get more recruits by preying on confused human teenagers and keeping her plans vague-since I doubt even Ivy would have gone for helping destroy another world because the ancestors of its population/a previous race of precambrian humanoids had killed their tree nymphs thousands or millions of years ago.

7 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Another thing that doesn't fit with Gothel's behavior vs. her backstory: She's supposedly the last remnant of her race, then she has a daughter, who would be half wood nymph. But this being who's been on her own for thousands (millions?) of years just ditches the only other being she's encountered who's even part wood nymph and who is the only family she's been near in all that time. She shows zero interest in Alice until the last second, when she needs someone to fill out her coven of human witches.

Yeah... The logical progression of this storyline is that she'd want Alice for, at the very least, something other than a doorstop to let her out of her tower... Which is a problem because the pathos for Alice's storyline is that her mother was so cruel and cold to her. Plus you would need to explain why she hadn't had a mixed race child before if that was an option-both of which are possible; maybe she could only conceive Alice with Whook because he was created by magic or because she used that magic flower, maybe she's cruel to Alice because she can't love her when she's half human, or she's had her War Face on for so long she just doesn't know how to be kind any more. You'd just need a bit of exposition dialogue and a few more world building notes.

Quote

And that's part of the reason she comes across as hollow. True, she's not human, but she's not treated as some kind of alien being whose behavior we can't understand. This isn't a dragon or ogre just doing what they do, which means someone gets hurt.

This, also. Earlier on in the season I could have believed they might have been building to her being some kind of totally inhuman being: Her tests could have been because she was some particularly mean spirited god of judgement, Nemesis or something. She could have been some kind of spirit trialling witches so she could devour the strongest ones and absorb their power, or some equivalent to the Dark One but with different rules, and actually seeking out a replacement who could kill her and take her place-not to be reunited with her lost love but just because That Is The Way.

Quote

She's a reasoning, feeling being, but she never shows any "humanity." When she's cruel, it's pointless and doesn't seem to give her pleasure. There's never any softness. She doesn't really seem to hate the way Regina did. It's so detached. She doesn't love anyone, not even her daughter. She creeps all over WHook/Rogers, but there's no sign that she was really attracted to him or that she despises him. Really, there's no reason behind her actions. There's no reason why she would have been toying with Rogers. She didn't need to have cozied up to him to use him as a hostage. She only got in the way of his investigation of who was killing her coven by playing with him. There was no reason behind making herself Victoria's prisoner, no reason for saving Lucy. I'm not even sure why she wanted the Guardian or the dagger.

I mean maybe her being detached was the point, that she'd been doing this so long shed become just this heartless thing that just caused pain for its own sake as much out of habit as anything, no longer caring one way or the other.

This is where, as half assed as the treenymph backstory was, I can see the vague shape of a potential... Something there... If you'd played her as a corrupted nature spirit, and that Alice could be tied into this whole spiritual legacy and her heroes journey could include taking on her mother's power and allowing it to grow in a healthy way again... I don't know...

Still doesn't explain the Guardian or the Dagger stuff.

Quote

Why did she need someone else to cast the curse to get to our world? A magic bean would have taken care of that for the past 30 or so years. Humans re-evolved a very long time ago. Why did she let society get to this stage before she carried out her plan to wipe them out again? Are the people in the other world not really human? Otherwise, why didn't she wipe them out on other worlds?

All good questions with no answer...I'm guessing she needed a Dark Curse for the same reason Rumpy did-to make sure she still had magic when she arrived, but for the others I'm not sure, she certainly didn't seem as discussed as Rumple was, especially if she'd had thousands of years to work on it compared to Rumple's 300 years maximum.

Another good question being 

Spoiler

Why send everyone 20 years back in time... If we're not worried about paradoxes why not go all the way back to antediluvian Seattle and kill the racist humanoids before they could kill Gothels family? I'd that's not possible but she's concerned about the environment why not go back to the 1700s before we had irreperably ruined it?

3 hours ago, Camera One said:

It really was a cheap way to shock the audience into feeling something. 

I notice it's a recurring theme, Nimue, Percival and Tiny also had their home and family murdered and were in the wrong for wanting revenge... Ok, Tiny WAS going for the wrong guy, so maybe he doesn't fit the pattern. Still, I think there is kind of a pattern of 'lose one loved one to violence=sympathetic and you should get some leeway when you do bad things; lose your whole family to violence=sad I guess but it's no excuse for doing bad things'

Maybe the idea of mass murder or genocide is honestly just too big for most of us to connect with. Someone kills your mother, you can imagine that, you can imagine how angry you'd be at the murderer and how you might become bitter and angry at the world especially if it seemed like there were other people trying to stop you bring angry or somehow getting in the way of however you decided to cope with it. But it's hard enough to imagine someone has killed everyone you know before moving on to how you'd react to it.

But you know... It does happen, and the more I think about it, which I shouldn't because this story isn't good enough to deserve that much thought, the more unpleasant it is to introduce the idea of such a horrible crime for it to be automatically dismissed because 'its no justification for whatever bad thing you are doing now' ('you mean like trying to kill the actual person responsible? I asked her earlier, she didn't even deny it! Witch! Did you murder my village?'

'I dunno, I did a lot of stuff')

[KingOfHearts]

7 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

Did Tree Nymphs not exist in any of the realms?

The Land Without Magic was the only realm with a Party City nearby.

[tennisgurl]

So...this episode....it was sure a thing wasnt it? Definitely an episode that was properly foreshadowed as to the both the motivation of our main villain and the entire origin of what is supposed to be "our" world....and not a forty minute screech of absolute nonsense and madness and that is so right out of nowhere that it makes your head fully spin all the way around, and a backstory of the planet that is so batshit insane, the ancient alien guys are looking at this like "that seems a little...far fetched" that raises approximately a billion questions right before the end of the show that will never be answered, and the show clearly had never even thought about. Absolutely! 

Yeah this whole backstory is so deeply crazy, and is so totally random, even by this shows standards. I know that this show sucks at world building, but this is impressive, even by their standards. I read my post about this from back when it aired, and my thoughts are unchanged. This was never foreshadowed as Gothels backstory (besides her having a garden once and maybe one or two comments about plants being awesome) and as a backstory for the Land Without Magic, its absolute nonsense from every perspective possible. The idea that in the greater Seattle area there was once an entire society from a prehistoric era that were these Victorian/80s mean girls in poofy dresses (I guess Native Americans didnt exist in this universe?) but also Tree Nymphs and that the entirety of humanity was destroyed by one angry tree nymph who covered presumably an 18th century style society in trees and no one noticed in the modern day, and that, by crazy random happenstance, the exact same species of humans evolved and had the exact same society as these prehistoric mean girls, is just so deeply absurd. Even if you ignore the fact that a few thousand years isnt that long of a time, in the span of the history of the Earth (I mean, a few thousand years ago was the height of the Roman Empire, not some Victorian 80s magic hating mean girls), the whole set up is so random and poorly thought out. Like, is Tamara a descendant of these idiots, because she also wanted to kill everyone even tangentially involved with magic because it was "an abomination" without any other kind of reasoning, and it was just as stupid there. Its like A&E wanted to do a sort of witch burning/religious fundamentalist thing when they wanted to show how people who persecute people with magic are evil, but they're so terrified of actually mentioning religion (these are the people that did a whole arc in freaking Camelot involving the Holy Grail without mentioning God) they have to be super vague about it, just having them say "its an abomination!" without really following up on what that actually means or why they would think that. Like, why do these people hate magic this freaking much? I can buy it, just they give us no reasoning other than EVIIILLLLLLL and thats it. It really hurts the whole story when we have no real idea what the actual motivations of our villains are. 

Another thing that really takes me out of this? Those costumes are really, really shitty. That body paint, those dead butterflies in the nymphs hair, those terrible cheap looking dresses with the freaking zippers showing, its like the whole costume budget was just a quick Party City run on a budget of $10. 

But instead of picking apart the many ways this episode sucks, I am just going to point out, much like I did earlier in the re-watch, that this is literally just Anton's backstory from Tiny, but really fucking stupid! I mean, its almost shot by shot. Magical creature is fascinated by humans but lives in a secret magic enclave with their family who dont get why they are so into humans, they put on a disguise to blend in with humans and meet some seemingly nice people, only for these people to show themselves to be evil and betray them, using their kindness to get access to their magic enclave, and murder their families, complete with sad dying speech by their parental figure, and then they decide they hate all humans. Its almost the exact same freaking plot, except Tiny is a million times better. For one thing, it all fits into the lore of the universe already, it doesent raise a billion insane questions and involve multiple genocides that are now coloring the entire universe. For another, the humans in that story were evil, but they had an actual reason for killing the giants. They were greedy and wanted money, which is evil, but a motive that we can understand. What are these peoples motives? They just hate magic because they're evil? God this episode is a mess. 

The only good parts involved Tilly and Rogers, but thats all drowned in the bullshit of the rest of the episode.

[Camera One]

I wonder if A&E acknowledges this was the worst episode they had ever written.

[KingOfHearts]

21 hours ago, Camera One said:

I wonder if A&E acknowledges this was the worst episode they had ever written.

They probably think it's "Selfless, Brave, and True" just because of the taser. 

[Camera One]

I can't believe I spent New Years' Day rewatching "Flower Child".  I can reminisce on January 1, 2030.

Why did Gothel need to break into the house to touch fabric?  Couldn't she just go into any store or business?  

It's too bad Mother Gothel couldn't use Mind Control™ the past 18 episodes because it sure was handy in this one!  I did think it was funny when she said to Mind Controlled Robyn, "We've met before.  Such an insipid human you are."

I still don't understand how the magic-less police officer minion "woke" the Coven members.

It was really icky when Jacinda subtly tried to say she and Henry never slept together and Henry said "You ever been to Cabo?"  So he had sex with a bunch of anonymous women there or something?  

Why do magic tree nymphs need keys?

I laughed when Eloise said "My sisters are asleep.  It's time for my Coven to return".  Well, finally.  Why didn't this happen in the second episode in 7B?  There was zero explanation.  Were the Doctor and the Blind Witch not Coven members?  Which one did Alice replace?

LOL when Mother Gothel said to the coat hangers "My sisters, it's so good to see you again" and no one replied.  The extras couldn't have any lines?  What about Sarafina, the Magical Undercover Mean Girl?  She couldn't have any lines until her dramatic entrance later at the theatre?

There was no explanation why Gothel suddenly decided to approach Alice, even though it was oh so obvious, as Shanna Marie explained given she had tree nymph blood in her.

How did Henry of the Sudden Conspiracy Wall know of Weaver's chipped cup?

Lucy: "You once drove me to a boat."  Wow, what a call-back!  I thought the Writers forgot all about Jacinda's dream which should have been a reality now with all the money they inherited from Victoria and Ivy going poof!

So the Victorian Mean Girls in 1980s Prom Dresses had Medieval Knights to guard them.

Just when things are getting tense, Regina and Rumple are absolutely nowhere.  Frankly, I hardly noticed they weren't around.

Edited January 2, 2020 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

I still don't understand how the magic-less police officer minion "woke" the Coven members.

Since they kept featuring that officer, I kept waiting for him to show up in a flashback so we'd see what fairytale character he was, but I guess he was just an ordinary Seattle cop.

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

It was really icky when Jacinda subtly tried to say she and Henry never slept together and Henry said "You ever been to Cabo?"  So he had sex with a bunch of anonymous women there or something? 

And around the time his now-dead daughter would have been born. He was having sex with anonymous women in Cabo while his wife was pregnant or while his wife had a newborn at home. Or had he decided by this time that those were fake memories, even though he found their tombstone?

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

How did Henry of the Sudden Conspiracy Wall know of Weaver's chipped cup?

I guess maybe he had a chat with Tilly.

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

Just went things are getting tense, Regina and Rumple are absolutely nowhere.  Frankly, I hardly noticed they weren't around.

I didn't notice at all. But then the only way I manage to get through these episodes is by doing something else while they're on in the background. There's a lot I don't notice.

And I'm still amused by the fact that in Seattle, a city famously built in layers, so that there's an old city underneath the present one, a prehistoric artifact is intact in the basement of a movie theater. They didn't clear any big stones before laying the foundation, and no one discovered this monument before a movie theater was built in the 20th century. It would have made more sense if it had been in a botanical garden, where they kept it there as part of the exhibit, or if it had been moved into a museum and they were doing this ritual there. But it having been in the basement of a movie theater all this time without anyone knowing it was there, and with it having been undisturbed all along, with the theater built around it, was rather ridiculous.

[Camera One]

So about Gothel's BFF Sarafina.  I guess she's related to whoever created the Aquafina water.  Where the heck was she all season?  She was asleep?  I wonder what she thought of Mother Gothel taking her sweet time selecting the other 7 members of the Coven.  Sarafina seemed like a decent person but she was fine with Gothel carrying out genocide and putting women in towers and running Hunger Game competitions?  She didn't want to have a life on her own in an Enchanted Forest where magic was more accepted?  

It's such a shame because maybe Sarafina would have been a fleshed out character in Season 8 if the show hadn't been cancelled.  

[Speakeasy]

12 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Since they kept featuring that officer, I kept waiting for him to show up in a flashback so we'd see what fairytale character he was, but I guess he was just an ordinary Seattle cop.

It's a sad testament to working conditions for the police today that they need to do favours for mad dreadlocked cult leaders to make ends meet...

12 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

And around the time his now-dead daughter would have been born. He was having sex with anonymous women in Cabo while his wife was pregnant or while his wife had a newborn at home. Or had he decided by this time that those were fake memories, even though he found their tombstone?

Maybe his wife was one of the anonymous women he was having sex with but he happened to fall for her and that put an end to his rakish ways (or she just turned up at his house six months pregnant)

If he's decided he doesn't care about his dead family because they're fake memories then that opens up more questions... Because surely that means his memories of all these one night stands are also fake... Unless the curse algorithms have worked out he doesn't care about his dead family and have just given him a bunch of new memories as damage control to try to maintain some kind of internal consistency.

The curses themselves honestly seem smarter and more powerful than the people casting them sometimes, they're like some kind of hyperintelligent AI straightjacketed into maintaining the existence of a curse neighbourhood and given free reign to warp time and space however they can in order to keep the curse going.

12 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

And I'm still amused by the fact that in Seattle, a city famously built in layers, so that there's an old city underneath the present one, a prehistoric artifact is intact in the basement of a movie theater. They didn't clear any big stones before laying the foundation, and no one discovered this monument before a movie theater was built in the 20th century. It would have made more sense if it had been in a botanical garden, where they kept it there as part of the exhibit, or if it had been moved into a museum and they were doing this ritual there. But it having been in the basement of a movie theater all this time without anyone knowing it was there, and with it having been undisturbed all along, with the theater built around it, was rather ridiculous.

...

At this point, with the Wish Realm establishing that an entire world can be retroactively inserted into the history of the multiverse via genie magic, maybe it makes the most sense to assume that the Hyperion Curse actually retroactively changed the history of the Land Without Magic.

It makes as much sense as anything else. 

Maybe Gothel had a completely different goal but she wanted to go so deep undercover that no one would ever know her real goal,not even her, so she actually changed her own past to cover her tracks.

'it's not that, that's stupid.'

Yeah but is it more stupid than what's actually there?

12 hours ago, Camera One said:

So about Gothel's BFF Sarafina.  I guess she's related to whoever created the Aquafina water.  Where the heck was she all season?  She was asleep?  I wonder what she thought of Mother Gothel taking her sweet time selecting the other 7 members of the Coven.  Sarafina seemed like a decent person but she was fine with Gothel carrying out genocide and putting women in towers and running Hunger Game competitions?  She didn't want to have a life on her own in an Enchanted Forest where magic was more accepted?  

It's such a shame because maybe Sarafina would have been a fleshed out character in Season 8 if the show hadn't been cancelled.  

 

I think for her to be fleshed out Gothel and the whole backstory of prehistoric Seattle would have to have been more fleshed out so we had some kind of context for her to exist in. Like why she has magic, why everyone else hates magic, who exactly these people are/were, whether there were different groups etc...

She was the only black Ancient Mean Girl, wasn't she? Is that significant? Like... Did anyone see the animated Disney movie about Atlantis (Atlantis: The Lost Empire, I think)? The Atlanteans were dark skinned there, at least the ones you saw,including the emperor and the princess, and they blew themselves up with some kind of nuclear magic... Were they thinking of that? Was this society a post Atlantean remnant that hated magic because it had destroyed the mother country and Serafina had powers because she was secretly descended from Atlantean royalty or nobility, but had to keep it secret because everyone was violently paranoid about the possibility of sorcerers blowing up the world again?

What was her relationship to Gothel? I don't think thst was worked out.

But then who were any of these people in relation to her? This coven she had was bizarre, if they were all dupes like Ivy who she'd caught as angry teensgers and groomed to be her minions that would have worked (would be an interesting and eery use of the age/appearance dissonance if, for instance, we saw Blind Witch 2's backstory and she, as a young girl, had been taken in by Gothel, who looked like she does in the rest of the series...) But she was inviting Regina and Zelena to join her gang, when both of them were old, experienced witches with families and goals of their own who had both been screwed over by a creepy warlock posing as a teacher, so they weren't really likely to go for anything she was offering, even if she had been offering something appealing.

 

[Camera One]

44 minutes ago, Speakeasy said:

But she was inviting Regina and Zelena to join her gang, when both of them were old, experienced witches with families and goals of their own who had both been screwed over by a creepy warlock posing as a teacher, so they weren't really likely to go for anything she was offering, even if she had been offering something appealing.

Yes, it made no sense Gothel was inviting people like Zelena who would clearly have her own agenda.  It seems possible to make a list of everything Gothel did in Season 7 and show how it was not explained by this backstory.  

She would also presumably need to recruit Coven members who were immortal.  How was her sidekick Aquafina still alive, anyway?

I'm presuming the parents of the Mean Girls were involved in destroying the Tree Nymph Sanctuary.  Shouldn't we have seen the people who chopped down the trees at the ball too?  

Why did Gothel have to feed Rogers and Alice fake information to do a stakeout at the theatre?  She could have walked up to them and told them to come with her and erase their memories right away.  I'm glad they didn't since one of the few good scenes were Rogers and Tilly in the car doing the stakeout, but still...

[Shanna Marie]

On 12/31/2019 at 4:10 AM, Speakeasy said:

I notice it's a recurring theme, Nimue, Percival and Tiny also had their home and family murdered and were in the wrong for wanting revenge... Ok, Tiny WAS going for the wrong guy, so maybe he doesn't fit the pattern. Still, I think there is kind of a pattern of 'lose one loved one to violence=sympathetic and you should get some leeway when you do bad things; lose your whole family to violence=sad I guess but it's no excuse for doing bad things'

I think it depends on who the viewpoint character is. The survivors of genocide on this show haven't generally been the main characters, and in some cases the perpetrators have been, so the sympathy is with the perpetrator. I think they actually pulled off a nice balance with Tiny, where you understood his perspective and you were pulling for him to realize the truth. It was rather heartwarming when he found acceptance. It's creepy when we run into Regina's former victims because they're treated like they're making a big fuss out of some minor, petty wrong (like having their whole village slaughtered). With Gothel, it's a weird case because in the flashback she's definitely painted as the victim. The villains are so one-dimensional that they're stereotypical Mean Girls with less depth than the bullies in Carrie. We don't know why they want to destroy magic, why they bothered pretending to be Gothel's friend before betraying her and going out to destroy her entire race. It's clearly an evil act. But I'm not sure what we're supposed to think about Gothel's response. I know we're not supposed to empathize with her in the present. She hasn't been given the slightest spark of humanity, not even Regina's sad face and tear-filled eyes. There's nothing in the present in this episode to make her at all ambiguous now that we know her sad backstory. It's not like with the revelation that Rumple was trying to reach his son in season one, where you can kind of understand where he's coming from and what he was doing, even if you think his method was terrible. With Gothel, there's no moment of "Ah, now I get it, it all makes some kind of sense now." And I'm not sure what we're supposed to think about her retaliatory genocide. Are we supposed to cheer her own for going all Carrie on them? Are we supposed to be sad that she lost her way as a wood nymph by committing violence rather than just dying with her people?

4 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

I think for her to be fleshed out Gothel and the whole backstory of prehistoric Seattle would have to have been more fleshed out so we had some kind of context for her to exist in. Like why she has magic, why everyone else hates magic, who exactly these people are/were, whether there were different groups etc...

I was wondering if she was supposed to be a wood nymph living under cover as a human. After all, she's still alive all these thousands (millions?) of years later. I guess she could have been a Merlin-like immortal human. But then there's the problem of why these super-powerful magic beings are living in fear of non-magical humans. Gothel alone was able to singlehandedly wipe them all out. How did they manage to slaughter a whole community of people with the same powers? Even if the wood nymphs were committed to nonviolence, couldn't they have put up a protective barrier of plants or used the twining vines to relocate the attackers?

[Camera One]

3 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

But then there's the problem of why these super-powerful magic beings are living in fear of non-magical humans. Gothel alone was able to singlehandedly wipe them all out. How did they manage to slaughter a whole community of people with the same powers? Even if the wood nymphs were committed to nonviolence, couldn't they have put up a protective barrier of plants or used the twining vines to relocate the attackers?

Mother Tree Nymph had True Goodness™ meaning they do nothing but have Hope™ when they get attacked.

Quote

I think they actually pulled off a nice balance with Tiny, where you understood his perspective and you were pulling for him to realize the truth. It was rather heartwarming when he found acceptance. It's creepy when we run into Regina's former victims because they're treated like they're making a big fuss out of some minor, petty wrong (like having their whole village slaughtered).

Yes, and with Tiny, he's not forgiving the perpetrators of the murders.  He was realizing that not all humans were evil.

Quote

With Gothel, it's a weird case because in the flashback she's definitely painted as the victim. The villains are so one-dimensional that they're stereotypical Mean Girls with less depth than the bullies in Carrie. We don't know why they want to destroy magic, why they bothered pretending to be Gothel's friend before betraying her and going out to destroy her entire race. It's clearly an evil act. But I'm not sure what we're supposed to think about Gothel's response. I know we're not supposed to empathize with her in the present. She hasn't been given the slightest spark of humanity, not even Regina's sad face and tear-filled eyes. There's nothing in the present in this episode to make her at all ambiguous now that we know her sad backstory. 

Yeah, I'm not sure what we're supposed to feel after finding out Gothel's backstory.  I think that's what makes Adam and Eddy such master storytellers.  They're not telling you how to feel and the moral situation they've woven together really makes you ponder the existential question of human existence, the othering of groups, genocide and environmental destruction caused by civilization.  

[Speakeasy]

13 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I think it depends on who the viewpoint character is. The survivors of genocide on this show haven't generally been the main characters, and in some cases the perpetrators have been, so the sympathy is with the perpetrator.

This always throws me I think... I'm not sure if this is to do with the show being about family relationships and personal growth, and it would be hard to sympathise with someone who'd lost their whole family... Maybe it's just the general fact that the background characters generally seem to be treated as props for the important people-if you worried about the lives of all these peasants in the background it would get too distracting, maybe?

13 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I think they actually pulled off a nice balance with Tiny, where you understood his perspective and you were pulling for him to realize the truth. It was rather heartwarming when he found acceptance.

I remember the last scene with him digging with the dwarves, it was really nice... Made all the more so just because Jorge Garcia still towers over the whole cast when he's human sized, but they all get that he's a dwarf.

13 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Are we supposed to cheer her own for going all Carrie on them? Are we supposed to be sad that she lost her way as a wood nymph by committing violence rather than just dying with her people?

I think probably closer to the second one... If I remember rightly her mother said she should go somewhere else and start a new race of wood nymphs (no word on whether she needs any... assistance... to do this but apparently that WAS always an option) buy she chose to go and get revenge instead, so I think it's meant to be understandable but also sad and tragic. As you said, though, this is the only time you see her as a human(oid) being so it's not as effective as in other cases, and once she's done her Carrie thing she's become the same cold blooded monster she has been all season, no regrets, no sadness, no doubt or confusion. Just 'I must continue my vengeance forever'

13 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I was wondering if she was supposed to be a wood nymph living under cover as a human. After all, she's still alive all these thousands (millions?) of years later. I guess she could have been a Merlin-like immortal human.

What kind of magic does she do at the party? I think she did something with some water to defend herself from Gothel's Audrey 2? Maybe she's a sea nymph or mermaid or something.

13 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

But then there's the problem of why these super-powerful magic beings are living in fear of non-magical humans. Gothel alone was able to singlehandedly wipe them all out. How did they manage to slaughter a whole community of people with the same powers? Even if the wood nymphs were committed to nonviolence, couldn't they have put up a protective barrier of plants or used the twining vines to relocate the attackers?

Good magic doesn't seem to be able to do much, I think that's a major theme of the show... Maybe not a deliberate one... That you can only defend yourself or achieve anything by resorting to evil but once you do it will steer you down a path of darkness for the rest of your life. 

I mean look at the Enchanted Forest... Old Shady Blue and her girls weren't doing a lot to stop the ogres from rampaging into the place every generation, killing and eating everyone they could get their hands on, only the Dark One seemed able to do anything worthwhile in that case. 

[tennisgurl]

On 1/3/2020 at 5:49 AM, Speakeasy said:

Good magic doesn't seem to be able to do much, I think that's a major theme of the show... Maybe not a deliberate one... That you can only defend yourself or achieve anything by resorting to evil but once you do it will steer you down a path of darkness for the rest of your life. 

Yeah, good magic is pretty consistently shown to be useless (like with Blue and the fairies) or deeply unstable and scary to use (like with Emma) and leads to bad things for people that use it (like The Savior stuff...maybe, I am still confused honestly) and trying to stop evil people is often shown to be evil. I mean, of course the Nymphs couldn't do anything to save themselves from being killed by a bunch of random people with axes, not even just use their magic to shield themselves, they had to just stand there and let themselves die! They saw season six of Once and saw the whole thing about Emma having to embrace her destiny by standing there and letting herself be stabbed! They knew that letting yourself be murdered is the only way to be a good person!

This shows treatment of magic is generally weird and deeply inconsistent, because world building is something that A&E think happens to other people, but its especially frustrating in how it seems like the only people that can actually do anything helpful with magic are evil people, or people that used to be evil. 

[Camera One]

1 hour ago, tennisgurl said:

I mean, of course the Nymphs couldn't do anything to save themselves from being killed by a bunch of random people with axes, not even just use their magic to shield themselves, they had to just stand there and let themselves die! They saw season six of Once and saw the whole thing about Emma having to embrace her destiny by standing there and letting herself be stabbed! They knew that letting yourself be murdered is the only way to be a good person!

This shows treatment of magic is generally weird and deeply inconsistent, because world building is something that A&E think happens to other people, but its especially frustrating in how it seems like the only people that can actually do anything helpful with magic are evil people, or people that used to be evil. 

Yep... this is what Gothel's mother said before she "died":

Quote

No, my darling, you haven't failed me. Nature has taken its course, and now you are the Mother. 

So humans coming to chop down the trees and kill all the nymphs was "nature" taking its course?  Huh?  Isn't human-caused destruction and homicide the antithesis of "nature"?  I guess Gothel's mother knew it was going to happen all along, eh?  She probably had shaky branches.

Edited January 4, 2020 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

On 1/2/2020 at 2:46 PM, Camera One said:

Yeah, I'm not sure what we're supposed to feel after finding out Gothel's backstory.  I think that's what makes Adam and Eddy such master storytellers.  They're not telling you how to feel and the moral situation they've woven together really makes you ponder the existential question of human existence, the othering of groups, genocide and environmental destruction caused by civilization.  

(Snort) Actually, I'm okay with ambiguity and letting the audience make up their minds, but there's not a lot of ambiguity in a character whose plan is apparently to destroy all humans on earth in order to get revenge for something a previous race of humans did thousands (millions?) of years ago before she wiped them all out and they had to evolve all over again.

That "pick your own team and decide for yourself" thing works better when things are more or less equivalent and on a personal level: Hook was a bully and jerk to Rumple and lied to him about Rumple's wife running away with Hook, Rumple murdered Hook's love and cut off his hand, so Hook swore revenge -- which one is in the right/wrong? Which one do you pull for?

But when it's genocide on both sides and now the person is going to commit genocide again against people who had nothing to do with the initial wrong, showing the person being sad in the past doesn't add any real nuance.

It reminds me of a meme I saw recently on Facebook that showed a person with a lot of the usual visual coding for evil but hot (it looked like it was from anime, so it may have been a specific character), with the caption saying something like, "Yes, I'm evil, but you don't understand. I was sad once in the past."

[tennisgurl]

This episode really hits on a consistent issue with the show in general, the writers just have no understanding of scale or scope. They dont really think of how old the Earth actually is, so they just throw out this crazy Victorian 80s Mean Girls Nymph backstory that happened a few thousand years ago apparently,, they dont think about how many people would have to have been killed if Gothel killed the entire population of the planet, they dont think about how big the EF is or how many people live there, or how big of a deal it would be if Regina killed several people, they dont see how big any of these things are, morally, legally, geographically, or along any kind of timeline. 

[Speakeasy]

Now springtime is starting I have been walking dog in the park while staying at least 3 metres from all other humans and I've had time to look at all the trees... Stupid as this is as something to think about... Can anyone actually recall another series where tree nymphs were an important part of the plot at any point?

In 'The Witcher' there's a group called 'dryads' in one episode but it isn't explained what they are. And in the original 'Charmed' I think there was an episode with nymphs. That's all I can remember.

I like trees and I like mythical tree spirits. It's a little sad to me there can be 101 shows about witches and/or vampires and dryads and all regional variants (Leshy for instance is an unusual Russian one) don't seem to get a look in.

[KingOfHearts]

I had to see why people were posting in this thread, LOL.

On 3/20/2020 at 7:05 AM, Speakeasy said:

I like trees and I like mythical tree spirits.

I do kind of wish the show did more with nature because stuff like tree nymphs, talking animals, and earthy gods existed. The writers could've borrowed some pagan mythology.

[Camera One]

It's spring time and with the birds tweeting outside and the flowers starting to bloom, it's hard not to think about poor Gothel.

[KingOfHearts]

20 minutes ago, Camera One said:

It's spring time and with the birds tweeting outside and the flowers starting to bloom, it's hard not to think about poor Gothel.

I mean, Gothel is so iconic, how can you not?

[Speakeasy]

13 hours ago, Camera One said:

It's spring time and with the birds tweeting outside and the flowers starting to bloom, it's hard not to think about poor Gothel.

That and the thrice-hourly news updates indicating we are in fact living through the last days of human civilisation.