S07.E20: Is This Henry Mills?

[Rumsy4]

Adult's Henry's Season 7 arc revolved around his wishy washy attraction to Jacinda, his daughter's efforts to get him to believe. The very hook they used in the S6 season finale involved Henry giving Lucy a Fairy Tale book and giving a hope speech. So, by all logic, the Curse-breaking should have been between Henry and Lucy. But Henry's attempts at TLKs with both Lucy and Jacinda fail. He even intends to TLK Lucy awake when she's at the hospital, so it's not about him not believing. The TLK only works with his mother in a very lover-like scene. None of the people in the Writers' Room felt that it would send the wrong kind of vibe? 

[Shanna Marie]

Did Henry even try kissing Lucy after he got his memories back before he ran off to find Regina? He's reunited with his daughter when he knows and fully believes and she's over whatever ruined belief thing Victoria did to her, but he doesn't even kiss his daughter when reuniting with her? It's not just that he didn't think to try breaking the curse that way. He was in too big a hurry to get to his mother to give his daughter a kiss on the cheek.

[Camera One]

2 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Did Henry even try kissing Lucy after he got his memories back before he ran off to find Regina? 

No he didn't.  He rushed out of there leaving her alone in the apartment and went to the community garden, even though there was no indication that was where Regina was. I wonder if A&E considered it a "twist" that his kiss with Jacinda and Lucy didn't work.  But it really reflects badly on Adult Henry as a character. 

[Rushmoras]

Oh, I gotta love that particular rationalle from the show's ass, which was mentioned only now. "Oh, you see Henry, Gothel brought us to the past so the real us are still in Storybrook". Were was this reasoning before? They just pull stuff out of their asses.

And couldn't Gold just dip his dagger in to the magic lava and be the DO again, and interrupt the ritual with a finger snap? Oh, right, not in the script. 

And, hahahahaha, Henry is 18 in the flashback or so, Regina is 30-38 (dont know the actress age), and in the present Henry is 30-38 and Regina is also the same age. Hahhahahahahahana. F'in bull this is. 

Aaaaand, Mother Dreadlocks turned to a tree... so, her curse was stopped? I mean, usually either the owner of the curse needs to rescind it or die, but OK. 

Aaand... what is this? Angel's Season 4? Two Rumples. Light... sorry, grey and dark. Gee.. who will win.

On 5/17/2018 at 7:56 AM, Rumsy4 said:

Adult's Henry's Season 7 arc revolved around his wishy washy attraction to Jacinda, his daughter's efforts to get him to believe. The very hook they used in the S6 season finale involved Henry giving Lucy a Fairy Tale book and giving a hope speech. So, by all logic, the Curse-breaking should have been between Henry and Lucy. But Henry's attempts at TLKs with both Lucy and Jacinda fail. He even intends to TLK Lucy awake when she's at the hospital, so it's not about him not believing. The TLK only works with his mother in a very lover-like scene. None of the people in the Writers' Room felt that it would send the wrong kind of vibe? 

But he's adopted, so it's OK. 

[Camera One]

On 5/7/2018 at 9:30 PM, KingOfHearts said:

We'll all be watching this again in about a year and a half. 😉

Your prophesy has come to pass!  What dark magic did you wield to ensure this fate would be fulfilled?

Edited January 4, 2020 by Camera One

[Camera One]

I was going to come back and write about the episode, but I guess I'll have to save it for tomorrow.

As usual, the pacing for this show is horrible.  I mean, this wasn't a good episode, but at least there was actual momentum for the first time since... 5B?  

I didn't know Seattle was more dead than Storybrooke.  Gothel was sending giant trees up in the community garden and there weren't people running around screaming or anything.  No one even knew the "apocalypse" was coming, LOL.  It was like wanna-be disaster movie except no one even knew there was a pending disaster except a few of the main characters.

Edited January 4, 2020 by Camera One

[tennisgurl]

So there go our two big bads from this season, death by hand waving and death by a knife to the back. What an epic ending and not at all anti-climactic! 

There were some things in this episode that I liked, mostly all involving Rogers/WHook and Rumple, and the Tilly/Margot/Rogers stuff. I actually really liked the scenes between Rogers and Rumple, when Rogers was freaking out about magic apparently being real and Rumple called him Captain again, that was actually using the set up with the curse pretty well, and Bobby and Colin were both really doing some interesting stuff in their performances. And Rogers and Tilly and Alice and WHook are one of the few relationships that has actually been built organically and that I am actually invested in, so it was great seeing them get some good scenes here. While they arent as well built up, I also like Tilly and Margot (and to a lesser extent, Alice and Robyn) pretty well, so they had some nice stuff too that I enjoyed well enough. 

Unfortunately, all of that actually interesting stuff was in the background of the boring as all get out Henry and Regina stuff. It was kind of cool seeing Storeybrooke again, but the lack of Emma, even a passing reference to her, is just so frustrating at this point. They are so desperate to pretend that Emma was never important, that they dont even bring up Emma being a part of breaking the first curse, its just about Henry and his Truest Believer Heart, and all of his family stuff is about Regina, like he has no other family at all. They couldn't even have Hook stop by to give Henry some life advice, step dad to step son, and reference Emma, despite Colin being right freaking there, its all Regina, Best Mom Ever. Or Most Codependent Mom Ever, but whatever. Their relationship has gotten increasingly creepy and Oedipus complex-y over the seasons, but this season is really when things start to get full on uncomfortable, especially with Henry being an adult and Regina being the same age she always is. She doesent want him to even think about leaving town for college, I mean oh my God women! Regina probably created Storeybrooke College just so that Henry wouldn't want to leave town! Also, Storeybrooke has a college now? Did that come with the curse? Did it get accreditation the same way that Doc got his PhD? And no way do I buy that Henry got into that many top tier schools, how rigorous is the curriculum at Storeybrooke High exactly? 

If I was Jacinda, I would be pretty annoyed/concerned by the fact that my husbands True Love isnt me, or the child we have together, but his mother. Not helped at all by him laying on top of her crying and kissing her, which broke the spell, while Jacinda just gets a quick peck. Sorry Cinders, but you and your daughter will always be second and third place behind his real true love. A boys best friend is his mother after all. 

Wish Rumple is still great at least, and makes me think less of creepy Henry and Regina creepiness. 

"Home isnt a place, its the people." Its sad/hilarious that I can always tell what A&E just watched by watching this show. Like, yeah, I saw Thor: Ragnarok too guys, that line was a lot better when I heard it from Odin. And I think Henry kind of missed the whole point, considering he left while only saying goodbye to one person (nothing for Emma, Hook, the Charmings, etc) and never even bothered to call home or visit for several years, not even bothering to visit his baby sibling apparently.

[Shanna Marie]

I almost couldn't get through this one. It, as with much of this season, doesn't make a lot of sense, and the flashbacks are painful. Flashback Regina is clearly a pod person, and the only thing she has in common with Real Regina is her codependency with Henry. Do we really believe that Regina would ever have marred the surfaces in her all-white house with Henry's growth marks? I noticed that it started with double hearts in fifth grade. That should have been season one, when Henry hated her, based on his age, though he was in Snow's class and Snow talked about fourth grade, but then if that's the case, Henry would have been in fifth grade in New York. They seem to have forgotten that Henry didn't live with Regina from the end of season one until the beginning of season four. And can you really imagine Regina saying that scratches and dents are just part of life?

I still crack up when adult Henry says he's a friend of young Henry's mother and young Henry isn't immediately suspicious. As tight as they seem to be, how likely is it that Regina has any friends Henry doesn't know? All of Regina's friends are Henry's family.

I don't really get what the curse supposedly did and what breaking it did. The curse took them from a magical world to a world without magic (except in Storybrooke and if people are throwing coins in fountains), but breaking the curse gave them magic powers again? Regina still shouldn't have magic in Seattle.

The parent/child TLK was a twist in season one because we were used to seeing romantic true love, but it fit with the theme of that season, with Emma acknowledging that she really was Henry's mother, after spending the whole season denying that she could be a mother. It was the culmination of her character growth. I'm not sure what the TLK with Henry and Regina was supposed to tell us about the characters. It wasn't any kind of character growth for them to get to the point of having a kiss. Neither of them had to learn anything to get to the point of that kiss. Plus, it was staged more like a kiss between lovers than like a parent/child, which made the moment more creepy than heartwarming. The season one kiss made me a bit misty. This one made me queasy.

[Camera One]

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I don't really get what the curse supposedly did and what breaking it did. The curse took them from a magical world to a world without magic (except in Storybrooke and if people are throwing coins in fountains), but breaking the curse gave them magic powers again? Regina still shouldn't have magic in Seattle.

This episode raised a lot of questions about this in how this season-long problem was "resolved".

So Henry and Jacinda's kiss apparently didn't break the Curse because Henry didn't have his belief and he didn't have his belief because he didn't have his memories.  If that's the case, what was the big deal about in 7A with Roni needing to break up Henry and Jacinda because that might result in Henry's kiss of death?  

Lucy didn't even bother telling Roni about her plan to involve an ex-villain (Dr. Facilier) in "curing" her father?  When Roni first heard from Lucy about the kiss, she exclaimed "But Henry's poisoned!", even though she hasn't tried to break up Henry and Jacinda for all of 7B.

Henry's memories wasn't triggered until he talked to Younger Henry.  It all seemed very arbitrary.  

Even in such a pivotal episode, there were a bunch of stuff at the beginning which led nowhere.  As mentioned the first time the show aired, Gothel asked Regina to be the eighth witch.  But that was never mentioned again and the spell completed anyway.  

Rumple also gave Regina a "dusting of memory potion" he "distilled" from Nick's blood.  Could he have done that with Regina and Zelena's blood too?  But it was pointless because the thing Rumple gave Regina didn't even work.  So what was the purpose?  To show that Rumple had changed (again)?

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Do we really believe that Regina would ever have marred the surfaces in her all-white house with Henry's growth marks? I noticed that it started with double hearts in fifth grade. That should have been season one, when Henry hated her, based on his age

I noticed that too, this time.  Maybe the two hearts meant she wanted to take Henry's heart and Emma's heart (or maybe Snow and Charming's hearts) and crush them.

Poor Aquafina.  Gothel didn't even say goodbye to her.

Now thank goodness, Alice didn't turn into a tree at the end of the spell, eh?  

Oooh, teenage Henry was going to "study film in Los Angeles".  What a young Adam/Eddy.

The poison in Hook's heart was magically back, explained by Rumple as "activated" by Alice's magic.  Riiight.  So could Dr. Facilier have un-poisoned Hook's heart too?  

Henry: "I didn't write about how I got kidnapped by Peter Pan and got my first girlfriend in Camelot."  Uh, you wouldn't be writing about that stuff in your college admission essay regardless.

It's ridiculous how Whook, Weaver and Robyn could just walk into Gothel's secret theatre basement and she was nowhere to be found.  But she didn't even have to turn around to know Regina was behind her with a baseball bat.  She seemed to have no clue Dr. Facilier was gunning for her either.

2 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Plus, it was staged more like a kiss between lovers than like a parent/child, which made the moment more creepy than heartwarming. The season one kiss made me a bit misty. This one made me queasy.

Adult Henry to Roni: "I'm not your boy wonder."   LOL.

Edited January 4, 2020 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

11 minutes ago, Camera One said:

So Henry and Jacinda's kiss apparently didn't break the Curse because Henry didn't have his belief and he didn't have his belief because he didn't have his memories.

Haven't rewatched, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I thought it was more of Henry doubting himself, much like Emma's "I don't want to believe" problem. Its not that there wasnt evidence or that he needed his memories, but because he didn't want to deal with the fact he's Henry freaking Mills who needs to be a hero or something. I don't know, that's just how I interpreted it. Kind of like how Rumpbelle's TLK didn't work. Rumple was afraid. From what I remember, this episode was meant to deal with Henry's self doubt. The phone call to me was him being reminded of the person he used to be before he got jaded as an adult.

Or it was just a cheat code to force him to believe. Probably the latter because this is A&E.

[KingOfHearts]

3 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I'm not sure what the TLK with Henry and Regina was supposed to tell us about the characters. It wasn't any kind of character growth for them to get to the point of having a kiss. Neither of them had to learn anything to get to the point of that kiss. Plus, it was staged more like a kiss between lovers than like a parent/child, which made the moment more creepy than heartwarming. The season one kiss made me a bit misty. This one made me queasy.

It's really annoying that it's just a redo of 3B. The writers didn't try to do anything creative with the TLK. Were there really no other options? Not even Alice/Robyn? I'm the last person to clamor for a Henry/Jacinda kiss, but heck - not even Henry/Lucy or Jacinda/Lucy? 

I know this episode had a deleted scene where Henry and Regina had a fight while looking for colleges. I think this season was supposed to explore Regina's role in Henry's adult life, but the writers never did much with it. She's just kind of there and nothing really changes. I could see them doing an arc where Regina's struggling to let Henry go so she pals around with him on his adventures, but she acts over-protective and gets in the way. She'd then discover he's fine on his own and maybe get a love interest or new calling. The writers could've done more with her and Henry's relationship, imo.

 

[Camera One]

12 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

I could see them doing an arc where Regina's struggling to let Henry go so she pals around with him on his adventures, but she acts over-protective and gets in the way. She'd then discover he's fine on his own

They tried to do that in a single episode with "Wake Up Call", which was pretty badly written.  And apparently dealing with Henry not needing her anymore just led to her making the dumb decision to mentor Drizella.  

12 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

The writers didn't try to do anything creative with the TLK. Were there really no other options? Not even Alice/Robyn? I'm the last person to clamor for a Henry/Jacinda kiss, but heck - not even Henry/Lucy or Jacinda/Lucy? 

Yeah, really.  It always has to be about Regina?  Sometimes I wonder if it's all in our heads and then the show basically tells you otherwise.

Edited January 5, 2020 by Camera One

[Camera One]

Eddy on writing the end of the season:

Quote

“Going into Season 7 with a new cast as a reboot, you always have to plan for it to be the last season or you would be irresponsible,” he said. “So we knew this was a possibility. And ABC let us know in early December or January, so that we were able to finish out the story that we were telling in Seattle and then transition to the finale. So we had enough time to actually be able to do what we wanted on both sides.”

For a long time we had a sense of how we wanted to end the series,” Kitsis said. “The end of Season 6 we looked at as a finale for the story we told for the first six years, but we had always had these thoughts about how we’d wrap the whole thing up.  So, thankfully, ABC gave us enough notice to really plan it well and to be able to execute what we wanted and we were able to get as many of our legacy characters back as we could.”

This is what they call "really plan it well"?   I guess it's pretty much the same pattern as the last few seasons, where the plot would plod along aimlessly until the penultimate episode of the arc.

What episodes were they filming at the beginning of January?  I'm curious if all they did was tack on a 2-hour ender with Wish Rumple with little to no change to their "arc".

It really shows A&E's capabilities.  Or lackthereof.

[Shanna Marie]

2 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

It's really annoying that it's just a redo of 3B. The writers didn't try to do anything creative with the TLK. Were there really no other options?

The most obvious option would have been Whook and Alice. We've got the series bookending by having it be a parent/child kiss instead of it being a romantic relationship. They ended up believing in their relationship without clear evidence or even magic making them believe. They just went by their feelings and accepted it, which you'd think would be pretty powerful. They'd built a solid relationship even in their curse identities. I could even have believed that Rogers and Tilly could have had a parent/child-like TLK without knowing they really were father/daughter. Alice was both the Guardian and the daughter of the one behind the curse, so her being involved would have been Savior-like. It would have been a bit of dramatic irony that they spent the whole curse worrying about Henry and Jacinda, only for it to be someone else. And it's less expected than a rehash of something that happened in season 3. Plus, it would actually be the culmination of a character arc as homeless Tilly found a home and family with Rogers. Then there's the twist that their kiss would then instantly nearly kill him once the curse broke.

And speaking of the magic coming back (? to the land without magic?) when the curse broke, is it possible that they misremembered their own show? Magic did come to Storybrooke when the curse broke in season one, but it was a separate event. Magic didn't come because the curse broke, but because of Rumple's True Love potion. And magic wasn't gone because of the curse, but because the curse took them to a world without magic. Rumple imported magic to this world, expecting it to fill the whole world, and was disappointed when it didn't work over the town line. The way things are in season seven doesn't make a lot of sense. The only thing I can think of is that because Gothel is the last remnant of this world's original magic, once she came back here, it was no longer a world without magic, and everyone with magical talent can now use magic anywhere, not just in Storybrooke, but the curse was putting a damper on all that.

Gothel was defeated by too complicated a plot. I still don't know why she bothered with the Dark Curse, which brought over the people who would want to stop her. If she'd just used a magic bean at any time after the first Storybrooke curse broke (aside from the missing year), she and her coven could have jumped through and done their spell with no one to stop them. Using Henry as a hostage and sending all his family through with the curse was what ruined Gothel's plans.

[Camera One]

28 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

The only thing I can think of is that because Gothel is the last remnant of this world's original magic, once she came back here, it was no longer a world without magic, and everyone with magical talent can now use magic anywhere, not just in Storybrooke, but the curse was putting a damper on all that.

I don't even understand when/how Gothel got her various powers back.  At first, it was solely due to Anastasia, and then Anastasia left and it seemed like Gothel was powerless.  And then last episode, she could hypnotize people and make them forget what she did to them.  It felt arbitrary and based on what they needed for the plot. 

I guess Gothel's full power didn't emerge until Alice and the Coven finished their spell?  Yeah, it made no sense that Regina would have magic too.  Though they could use Weaver's excuse explanation for Whook's poison coming back - all magic was "activated" by the Coven's spell, so maybe magic didn't have to do with Henry breaking the Curse.  Gothel wasn't counting on that happening anyway.

I'm surprised they didn't defeat Gothel by all holding hands and dancing a 1960s style Flower Power dance, especially when Tilley said she chose love.

Edited January 5, 2020 by Camera One

[Speakeasy]

7 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

Haven't rewatched, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I thought it was more of Henry doubting himself, much like Emma's "I don't want to believe" problem. Its not that there wasnt evidence or that he needed his memories, but because he didn't want to deal with the fact he's Henry freaking Mills who needs to be a hero or something. I don't know, that's just how I interpreted it. Kind of like how Rumpbelle's TLK didn't work. Rumple was afraid. From what I remember, this episode was meant to deal with Henry's self doubt. The phone call to me was him being reminded of the person he used to be before he got jaded as an adult.

It's a bit if a stretch but this is certainly a more positive interpretation and so one would imagine this is closer to what was intended; Henry did after all have his big conspiracy collage in his apartment where he was apparently starting to think it was all true.

In either case it doesn't look good for him because he believes this girl is his child and he barges past her to go look for his mother... But at least by your interpretation he doesn't do this after actually remembering 8 years of fatherhood.

Plus if he just believes intellectually that Regina is his mother but all the actual feelings he has developed have been towards his friend, an attractive single woman about his own age, then the fact he goes and almost-but-not-quite-makes-out with her is a little better. A little. Because he still thinks she's his mother.

And also whether or not he thinks or believes or feels Lucy is his daughter... Wasn't he still babysitting her whole her mother was off breaking and entering? So he still left a ten year old girl alone in an apartment while there was a hurricane coming on to go look for his crush/mother when he was supposed to be looking after her.

Is this Henry Mills? 

[Camera One]

4 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

is it possible that they misremembered their own show? 

Magic did come to Storybrooke when the curse broke in season one, but it was a separate event. Magic didn't come because the curse broke, but because of Rumple's True Love potion.

I just rewatched a scene, and it looks like they did misremember their own show.  It was Rumple who tells Regina near the beginning of this episode that when Henry remembers/the kiss works, "the Curse will break, and we will get our magic back."  And as you said, Rumple of all people should know breaking the Curse doesn't automatically mean they will get their magic back.

Quote

And also whether or not he thinks or believes or feels Lucy is his daughter... Wasn't he still babysitting her whole her mother was off breaking and entering? So he still left a ten year old girl alone in an apartment while there was a hurricane coming on to go look for his crush/mother when he was supposed to be looking after her.

Both Lucy's parents abandoned her.  Jacinda and Sabine first left her alone at the apartment to find Drew.  And then her Aunt Roni texted her to go to the cemetery even though she didn't need Lucy to help dig up a body in the middle of the day.  Then later on, after Henry touched the exhumed book and it didn't work, he accompanied Lucy home, talked to himself, all his memories flooded back, and then he abandoned Lucy with full knowledge she was his daughter and the psycho Mother Gothel was still roaming around town. 

So many candidates for Parent of the Year in this episode/season.  Should it be Henry, Jacinda, Victoria, Rumple, Belle or Mother Gothel?

Edited January 5, 2020 by Camera One

[Shanna Marie]

13 hours ago, Camera One said:

I don't even understand when/how Gothel got her various powers back. 

Oh, right, she didn't seem to have had powers all along. Why did she wait three years, spent pretending to be a prisoner, chained up in Victoria's basement, before she started taking action toward her goal and doing anything about getting her powers back? Or did she put total trust in Rogers solving the case and eventually finding her?

11 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

Plus if he just believes intellectually that Regina is his mother but all the actual feelings he has developed have been towards his friend, an attractive single woman about his own age, then the fact he goes and almost-but-not-quite-makes-out with her is a little better. A little. Because he still thinks she's his mother.

And he still thinks he's in love with Jacinda and that maybe she could be his wife. He makes the big "I kissed her because I'm in love with her" speech, but when he starts believing he runs toward Regina, not the person he has DNA evidence for being his daughter.

It doesn't help that the relationship shown in all the flashback scenes has some really weird subtext. There's Regina being all clingy and assuming Henry will stay in Storybrooke forever (though I guess the college explains how she thought things would work if the curse hadn't broken -- she would have made him go on to college in town and keep living in her house, even while his original classmates were still in kindergarten). There's Regina sending Granny away when Granny and Henry were working on the car together. And the scene in which they were coming home from the graduation party could be taken just about word-for-word and played out by characters who were a married or romantically involved couple after coming home from a party. I know this is all part of their rehabbing and retconning Regina into Mother of the Year, the Most Maternal Person who Ever Mothered, but the result comes across as really creepy, especially when they also don't make any effort to show Regina aging as Henry grows up into an adult.

I still say there should have been at least one scene with Henry and Hook Prime just to acknowledge that Regina wasn't Henry's sole parent, to give him some other sounding boards, and to dilute some of that codependent energy by showing that Henry has other people in his life. As it is, you can kind of see why he wanted to flee to another world when Regina is practically chaining him to the bed in his childhood bedroom.

I seriously doubt that Henry managed to get into every college he applied to. There were remarks throughout the series that implied he wasn't the best student. He struggled with math. He couldn't put "fighting evil" as an extracurricular activity on his college applications, but what else did he do? I suppose maybe he was able to start getting into clubs and things after they all got official Happy Endings and there was no more evil to fight. He was possibly on the school newspaper staff or maybe wrote for the school literary magazine. And then there were all the absences. He shouldn't have been able to graduate on time after missing school for months at a stretch. There were the six weeks in Camelot, then however many months in the Underworld. He should have had to repeat seventh or eighth grade (wherever he was in the timeline at that time). And if he was 10 and in fifth grade in the 2011-12 school year, he shouldn't have graduated until 2019, assuming he was able to make up for lost time and didn't have to repeat a year. If he was in fourth grade that year (he was in Mary Margaret's class, and she talked about teaching fourth grade), he shouldn't have graduated until 2020.

[Camera One]

18 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

but when he starts believing he runs toward Regina, not the person he has DNA evidence for being his daughter.

There seems to be a big hole in the plot at that point.  

Once he remembered, he told Lucy, "I'll explain everything.  But right now, I need to help my mom."

Why?  How did he know what Regina was planning?  How did he know where she was?  Since he was now awake, then wouldn't his first instinct be to break the Curse?  He doesn't try to do TLK on Lucy.  He doesn't ask where Jacinda went, so I assume he didn't know.  If he did know, wouldn't he be concerned that she had gone into the lair of Dr. Facilier?  Mother Gothel and her Coven was around, so wouldn't he be worried about Lucy's safety?  Yes, it's dangerous everywhere but leaving her alone at the apartment would be worse.  

He also heads to "help" Regina with no plan.  He has no magic.  He doesn't have his Author's pen.  So what could he do against someone of Gothel's calibre?

It might have made more sense if Henry remembered their plan to defeat Gothel, a plan we had seen in a flashback before, and he goes to carry it out.  But then again, it was more satisfying to see Alice defeat Gothel, though that light battle was so ridiculously short.  Maybe Henry could have gotten something to help Alice defeat Gothel.  They should have expanded the events from this episode into a 2-parter.  There was so much of 7B they could have cut instead.

Edited January 5, 2020 by Camera One

[Speakeasy]

20 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Oh, right, she didn't seem to have had powers all along. Why did she wait three years, spent pretending to be a prisoner, chained up in Victoria's basement, before she started taking action toward her goal and doing anything about getting her powers back? Or did she put total trust in Rogers solving the case and eventually finding her?

Man imagine of Rogers hadn't got promoted or if he'd just been hit by a car and not even died or left the force but if he had to go on desk duty... How long was she going to wait this out?

Actually I've forgotten the whole chain of events in 7A... I think the whole thing started with Henry following Lucy and that made some flowers grow... But everyone in this curse had free movement in and out if the Curse Zone. What if Henry met this girl and told Jacinta 'look, Miss Vidrio?, I don't want to stick my nose in where it's not wanted but... Your kid needs help, ok? Professional help, please get it for her, this stuff she was telling me... Either she's imagining stuff or she's acting out in a really dangerous way, and you need to keep her safe,'

Then he just left because he didn't want to get involved and he moved to another neighbourhood or even another city because he needed a change and like... What then? 

What was the plan?! 

Did they need Henry to come to the Curse Zone? Cos Ivy was trying to keep him away from Jacinta when he was there so that seemed like it was an unexpected spanner in the works. Did Gothel and/or Ivy even know Henry arriving was significant? Did these morons have any idea how their own goddamn plan was working?!

20 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

And he still thinks he's in love with Jacinda and that maybe she could be his wife. He makes the big "I kissed her because I'm in love with her" speech, but when he starts believing he runs toward Regina, not the person he has DNA evidence for being his daughter.

This is why I can't help but feel sorry for Ella 'Murderella' Tremaine and her daughter (I also like her daughter because Alicia Fernandez was in 'Jane the Virgin' and remembering that show makes me happy ☺️). Her mother in law looks the same age (or younger) than her, and is always hanging around her husband being just a little too close, plus the fact she's got a body count as big as a good sized tsunami or Ebola outbreak has to make her a bit nervous...

Spoiler

Then her mother in law becomes Queen of the Universe. I get on really well with my in laws but I'd be freaked out and feel trapped and scrutinised if one became Emperor/ess of Everything Forever.

20 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

It doesn't help that the relationship shown in all the flashback scenes has some really weird subtext. There's Regina being all clingy and assuming Henry will stay in Storybrooke forever (though I guess the college explains how she thought things would work if the curse hadn't broken)

It's incredibly disturbing to think about the idea she planned that. What was her plan afterwards? Had she picked out a girl for him to marry, knowing she'd stay the same age while he got older and more frail? Was she planning on having him stay a lifelong bachelor living with his mother forever, even while he got older than her? 

Was she planning on him to be a bachelor if he lived with her... If she could wear him down and convince him it was normal that no one else was aging, she could convince him anything was normal...

Even if that was the plan, would she have kept him when he stopped being a child, or if he got too unwieldy? Maybe she'd have gotten rid of him and adopted a new child, maybe she'd get a new one every fifteen years or so, keeping them just long enough to scratch that maternal itch before they got too much, asked too many questions and forced her to look at the reality of her life, then she'd... Make them go away, and bring in a new baby to complete her.

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There's Regina sending Granny away when Granny and Henry were working on the car together. And the scene in which they were coming home from the graduation party could be taken just about word-for-word and played out by characters who were a married or romantically involved couple after coming home from a party. I know this is all part of their rehabbing and retconning Regina into Mother of the Year, the Most Maternal Person who Ever Mothered, but the result comes across as really creepy, especially when they also don't make any effort to show Regina aging as Henry grows up into an adult.

This should be fodder for good drama, really, but there was only the most cursory if nods made toward this being a problem. It's also inconsistent with the set up for this season; is the kind of woman who purpose builds a college in her personal fiefdom so her son never has to leave, who won't let him have an hour alone to work on his bike, who hovers over him wherever he goes... Is this the kind of woman who just shrugs at the idea of her son going backpacking all on his own in the witch and ogre infested lands of fairytale?

Seriously she should have been terrified by the idea 

'Henry, no! If this place is anything like our Enchanted Forest it's far too dangerous; that country was full of dangerous monsters, I should know, I was one!'

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I still say there should have been at least one scene with Henry and Hook Prime just to acknowledge that Regina wasn't Henry's sole parent, to give him some other sounding boards, and to dilute some of that codependent energy by showing that Henry has other people in his life. As it is, you can kind of see why he wanted to flee to another world when Regina is practically chaining him to the bed in his childhood bedroom.

He had his stepdad, his grandfather and his aunty as regulars or semi regulars this season, so there was plenty of opportunity for that.

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I seriously doubt that Henry managed to get into every college he applied to. There were remarks throughout the series that implied he wasn't the best student. He struggled with math. He couldn't put "fighting evil" as an extracurricular activity on his college applications, but what else did he do? I suppose maybe he was able to start getting into clubs and things after they all got official Happy Endings and there was no more evil to fight. He was possibly on the school newspaper staff or maybe wrote for the school literary magazine. And then there were all the absences. He shouldn't have been able to graduate on time after missing school for months at a stretch. There were the six weeks in Camelot, then however many months in the Underworld. He should have had to repeat seventh or eighth grade (wherever he was in the timeline at that time). And if he was 10 and in fifth grade in the 2011-12 school year, he shouldn't have graduated until 2019, assuming he was able to make up for lost time and didn't have to repeat a year. If he was in fourth grade that year (he was in Mary Margaret's class, and she talked about teaching fourth grade), he shouldn't have graduated until 2020.

Well his mother is the mayor, his other mother is the sheriff, his grandparents are semi-retired royalty and his whole home town has only a paper thin facade of modern democracy over its feudal culture, so I'm sure his teachers could be persuaded to give him good references 😉

The real tricky business comes when you have to ask about whether Storybrooke, Storybrooke Highschool or Henry Mills actually exist in any way that any other college admission boards could verify.

I headcanon that he didn't get in and Regina used magic to forge those letters to make him feel better.

[Shanna Marie]

On 1/5/2020 at 12:12 PM, Camera One said:

Why?  How did he know what Regina was planning?  How did he know where she was?  Since he was now awake, then wouldn't his first instinct be to break the Curse?  He doesn't try to do TLK on Lucy.  He doesn't ask where Jacinda went, so I assume he didn't know.  If he did know, wouldn't he be concerned that she had gone into the lair of Dr. Facilier?  Mother Gothel and her Coven was around, so wouldn't he be worried about Lucy's safety?  Yes, it's dangerous everywhere but leaving her alone at the apartment would be worse.  

He also heads to "help" Regina with no plan.  He has no magic.  He doesn't have his Author's pen.  So what could he do against someone of Gothel's calibre?

They really had to stretch all rules of logic to make it so that Henry and Regina broke the curse with a TLK. Oddly enough, they set up so many other things that would have made a lot more sense, so it was as though they didn't write the big confrontation with that outcome in mind but rather tacked it on. And yet you know that had to have been what they wanted all along.

8 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

What was the plan?! 

The weird thing is, there doesn't seem to have been one. They really thought they'd made a curse without a Savior (and instead that seems to have made it so that any TLK would have broken it, so it was even easier to break, not harder). Unless there's something that happened offscreen that they never told us about, there's no equivalent of Rumple putting a back door into Regina's curse so that it could be broken. Gothel doesn't seem to have wanted the curse to break, so it's not like the 28 years thing in the first curse, where Emma came to town as per prophecy and started changing things because she was the Savior built into the curse. I guess maybe turning WHook's quest for his daughter into Rogers' obsession with finding the lost girl who turned out to actually be Gothel may have been what she set up, but why? Why did she need to be a prisoner at all for all this to work?

I keep coming back to the belief that this outcome wasn't what the writers originally planned. They set up one story, then when that fell apart they created something entirely new from the ashes, so it's sort of set up in that it uses existing characters and situations, but their actions make zero sense.

Like, why did Gothel send them back in time about 20 or so years? The only real explanation is that setting the Hyperion Heights part 20 years in the future would have strained their budget and their imaginations. I suppose it could have been to keep the Storybrooke gang from coming to the rescue, but then we're back to why bring them all with her in the first place?

8 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

Was she planning on having him stay a lifelong bachelor living with his mother forever, even while he got older than her? 

Probably. Basically, she was growing herself a Norman Bates.

8 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

It's also inconsistent with the set up for this season; is the kind of woman who purpose builds a college in her personal fiefdom so her son never has to leave, who won't let him have an hour alone to work on his bike, who hovers over him wherever he goes... Is this the kind of woman who just shrugs at the idea of her son going backpacking all on his own in the witch and ogre infested lands of fairytale?

Well, she did end up ditching her entire life and going to join him, so I guess she had second thoughts.

[Speakeasy]

You know one thing I'll say in this episodes favour is that Alice's big hero moment and her romance with Robyn is actually made better in the context of the show's history of wonky protagonist morality:

Here you have two young women conceived through deception and violation for selfish reasons. Robyn indeed doesn't just have her mother but her aunt and grandmother forming a whole clan of evil witches who have used magic to kill, control and terrorise people by forcibly removing their agency.

And Robyn's moment if glory, where she saves the world from an evil witch who has enslaved her lover after seeking to constrict and control her for her whole life... Is in taking this girl's hand and asking if she can help, no magic, no trickery, no pressure or pleas or demands. She just wants Alice to be alright and is offering to be there for her.

It's an ok scene on its own, but if you think about it as also being Robyn definitively cutting herself free from her family's poisonous legacy-which then allows Alice to finally free herself from her own toxic relations, and even to symbolically give Gothel a chance at some kind of peace- it's pretty beautiful.