Once Upon A...SHOULDA HAPPENED THIS WAY!

KingOfHearts · November 29, 2019

This Thanksgiving, I was thinking about the Underworld arc. Don't ask me why.

It would've been interesting if Regina was faced with a mob of her victims in the Underworld. The Charmings et al would have to defend her while trying to justify why they're doing so. It would be hella awkward and the mob would probably try to kill the Charmings too, but it would've been a good moral dilemma. Hades could've recruited a lot of people to go after Regina without even having to promise anything in return. The list of potential victims to come back would've been enormous - Leopold, Owen/Greg, the groom, the jester, Percival, just to name a few. Too bad there wouldn't be a snowball chance in hell that the mob would be portrayed as anything but evil or unenlightened.

Camera One · November 29, 2019

Well, those victims wouldn't have been killed if Snow hadn't told Regina's secret, and Regina wouldn't have been in danger from the mob if Emma didn't need help saving Hook!

The Land of Untold Stories should have been another mob of people who left to escape Regina.

Shanna Marie · November 29, 2019

Speaking of Thanksgiving, I'm still annoyed and sad that after David's quip about it being a good thing they didn't celebrate Thanksgiving in their world when they learned that Rumple was Henry's grandfather, we never saw a delightfully awkward attempt at a family Thanksgiving dinner. The Last Supper doesn't count because it was after they supposedly resolved everything and all was well and because we didn't get to hear the dialogue.

But imagine if Henry forced them all to have a traditional American Thanksgiving sometime in the middle of the series, like maybe during season 4, and they felt obligated to do it for Henry, but it got really awkward having Regina and Rumple there, and Emma wanted to bring her pirate boyfriend who hated Rumple. Ooh, maybe if they'd done it in 4A while Elsa was in town, so we'd have had two people (Elsa and Hook) who had no clue about Thanksgiving. And then Regina wanted to invite Robin and Roland, just as friends because they'd be sad with Marian in her ice coma, even though Thanksgiving meant nothing to them, but if Emma's going to have a boyfriend there, Regina doesn't want to be alone. Meanwhile, Snow is getting stressed out from trying to cook a meal she only has fake memories about and keeps calling Granny for advice, to which Granny finally comments that she's not the Butterball help line. Then Regina insists on hosting because she has the biggest house, but she gets picky about what side dishes people bring and that stresses Snow out even more about the cooking. Emma's kind of excited but trying not to admit it because she's never had a big family Thanksgiving like this. Henry wants everything to be perfect and is trying to make it some big Norman Rockwell thing. David keeps reminding everyone that they don't have Thanksgiving in their world.

KingOfHearts · November 30, 2019

21 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Speaking of Thanksgiving, I'm still annoyed and sad that after David's quip about it being a good thing they didn't celebrate Thanksgiving in their world when they learned that Rumple was Henry's grandfather, we never saw a delightfully awkward attempt at a family Thanksgiving dinner. The Last Supper doesn't count because it was after they supposedly resolved everything and all was well and because we didn't get to hear the dialogue.

Just another gentle reminder that these fairy tale characters doing anything close to what we'd normally call mundane would actually be really interesting.

Edited November 30, 2019 by KingOfHearts

Camera One · November 30, 2019

6 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

Just another gentle reminder that these fairy tale characters doing anything close to what we'd normally call mundane would actually be really interesting.

They could have played up everyone in Storybrooke trying to be "normal" for the sake of Amnesiac Henry in 3B, with that Thanksgiving idea. It would be funnier than him crashing a car on Main Street.

Edited November 30, 2019 by Camera One

Camera One · November 30, 2019

People are complaining that Disney+ doesn't have enough new content.

They really should've said "Once" would have a Season 8 there, or maybe a show in the "Once" universe.

If this had happened, what would have been best?

A) Keeping some of the actors who would return and continue from there

B) Requel featuring a minor character from the show with mostly a new cast... Adventures of Lily and her search of Zorro? Adventures of Dorothy to save Aunt Em? Continuing adventures of Merida?

C) Complete requel with new characters - continue from end of Season 7

D) Complete reboot with new characters - but as a prequel

E) Another option?

I'm not sure which of the main characters would agree to return if they announced a Season 8 today. Regina? Zelena?

Where would the setting be? Storybrooke? Somewhere else? If a prequel, a time in the past? I guess they could also go in the future.

Edited November 30, 2019 by Camera One

Shanna Marie · November 30, 2019

I think their best bet would be to go back to that concept they were originally going to do with the Wonderland spinoff, where it was a limited-term, closed-ending series focused on some particular storybook world (or land within a world) with its own unique cast, and maybe a little bit of crossover with the mother series -- maybe have a character from the main series appear or have them pay a brief visit to Storybrooke or one of the kingdoms in the series. Something with a definitive beginning, middle, and end and a specific number of episodes would probably work better for the streaming format.

I'm holding off on getting Disney+ until after the holidays because I won't have time to watch it until then, and I'll admit that I'm waiting until they have more original content because most of what they have that I'm interested in, I already have on DVD. It would be nice to have more Disney-like fantasy content (aside from the princess movies and live-action remakes) in addition to all the Star Wars stuff.

Edited November 30, 2019 by Shanna Marie

Camera One · November 30, 2019

12 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I think their best bet would be to go back to that concept they were originally going to do with the Wonderland spinoff, where it was a limited-term, closed-ending series focused on some particular storybook world (or land within a world) with its own unique cast, and maybe a little bit of crossover with the mother series -- maybe have a character from the main series appear or have them pay a brief visit to Storybrooke or one of the kingdoms in the series.

Agreed. The problem is they have burned through so many fairy tales/folk tales/Disney movies, that they would probably need to do a repeat. I suppose they already did that in Season 7 but the concept of multiple Cinderella's or Rapunzel's or whoever need to be more convincingly explained.

Shanna Marie · November 30, 2019

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

The problem is they have burned through so many fairy tales/folk tales/Disney movies, that they would probably need to do a repeat. I suppose they already did that in Season 7 but the concept of multiple Cinderella's or Rapunzel's or whoever need to be more convincingly explained.

It might work better without the ties to the original series, using the "Once Upon a Time" thing as a franchise label rather than pretending it's all in the same universe. Then they could mix and match stories with impunity.

PixiePaws1 · November 30, 2019

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

...but the concept of multiple Cinderella's or Rapunzel's or whoever need to be more convincingly explained.

So that leaves A&E out...they couldn't explain snow to Eskimos.

Camera One · November 30, 2019

I think I've got it...

TITLE CARD: A long long long long long long time ago.

A bent over hooded figure is standing beside a cauldron. Beside the figure are papyrus scrolls labelled "Cinderella", "Snow White", "Rapunzel", "Aladdin", "Hansel & Gretel", "Sleeping Beauty", etc.

A young woman goes up to the hooded figure.

WOMAN: Grandfather, what are you doing out of bed?

OLD MAN: The time is near.

WOMAN (looks around at the papyrus scrolls): All your stories. Who will be our next Author?

Before the old woman could react, the old man begins flinging all the papyrus scrolls into the cauldron and a great purple smoke emits.

WOMAN: Grandfather! What are you doing?!!!

OLD MAN: My stories must live on!

Purple smoke is shown exiting the hut in the village, covering the entire forest, into the sky, entering portals, going through the doors inside Jefferson's hat.

TITLE CARD: Present. Our World.

A young confident Latina woman wearing a leather jacket strides across the street.

A young boy and girl watch and follow her to her small house.

WOMAN turns around and sees boy and girl: Uh, can I help you?

BOY: Are you Luciferina Millner?

WOMAN: Yeah. Who are you?

GIRL: We're your son and daughter.

Dun dun dun!

Edited November 30, 2019 by Camera One

daxx · November 30, 2019

3 hours ago, Camera One said:

'm not sure which of the main characters would agree to return if they announced a Season 8 today. Regina? Zelena?

Since most of the mains have moved on in their careers I would safely assume we’d get Regina, they could fashion a story around wish Regina and her adventures after she left the wish EF. I assume she got passage with Smee after WHook gave him use of his ship. Where did she go and how did she learn to live without magic. Not something I’d watch but they could do something with it and introduce completely new characters. Some of the minor characters could come back as their wish version.

That would make how many different Regina’s? 😂

Camera One · November 30, 2019

5 minutes ago, daxx said:

Not something I’d watch

I suspect all of us will be pulled in by the Power of Regina™.

Speakeasy · December 1, 2019

12 hours ago, Camera One said:

Agreed. The problem is they have burned through so many fairy tales/folk tales/Disney movies, that they would probably need to do a repeat. I suppose they already did that in Season 7 but the concept of multiple Cinderella's or Rapunzel's or whoever need to be more convincingly explained.

The problem is they relied on Disney brand name recognition and then they used up all the well known and accessible Disney brand stuff.

There are so many thousands of fairy tales, myths and legends in the world that could be used..While the show was on I read dozens of fairy tales to see how I would fit the characters in them into the show's framework (which is stupid, I know, but reading them was also rewarding on its own)

In terms of what was on the screen, though, we had 7 seasons of grabbing the lowest hanging fruit, the well known Disney princesses and the dozen or so fairy tales everyone can name. After seven years of that maybe it would seem odd to start bringing in Donkeyskin, Rip Van Winkle and Koschei the Deathless.

This being said you could probably squeeze a but more mileage out of the really well known stuff if you went for more things like Warlord Bo Peep. I'm imagining Little Miss Muffet as a masked avenger, with her encounter with the spider prompting her to use fear as a weapon against the unjust 😉

11 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

It might work better without the ties to the original series, using the "Once Upon a Time" thing as a franchise label rather than pretending it's all in the same universe. Then they could mix and match stories with impunity.

Could you... This is getting way off the original show's concept, but could you do something like a Black Mirror type of thing but for fairy tales, where each episode is a self contained mini-movie telling a different take on a classic tale?

Edited December 1, 2019 by Speakeasy

Speakeasy · December 1, 2019

9 hours ago, daxx said:

Since most of the mains have moved on in their careers I would safely assume we’d get Regina, they could fashion a story around wish Regina and her adventures after she left the wish EF. I assume she got passage with Smee after WHook gave him use of his ship. Where did she go and how did she learn to live without magic. Not something I’d watch but they could do something with it and introduce completely new characters. Some of the minor characters could come back as their wish version.

I'd watch that, sounds more interesting than season 7 Gina. I'd watch the further adventures of (Wish)Outlaw(Hyde)Queen as well. Imagine a love story with those two where they both actually have a personality, and then using their evil sorceress and ruthless bandit skills to unify and clean up the Enchanted Forest. I mean after all the curses and ogres that place must be a mess, full of refugees, colonists and adventurers from other countries as well as returning natives desperate to rebuild their old life, beset by raiders, barbarians and monsters on all sides. It's the kind of place where a determined, ruthless ruler who's happy to get her hands dirty could actually do some real good.

9 hours ago, daxx said:

That would make how many different Regina’s? 😂

At the end of season 7 you'd expect there's be at least 3: Good Queen Gina, Evil Queen Gina and Pirate Gina. Depending on how the FINAL CURSE worked their might also be Mayor Mills.

The stress of running the universe could result in the Good Queen splitting herself with Jekyll serum and doing her heart-blendibg trick with the copies who knows how many times, to split the workload. Then it's anyone's guess.

Alternately; maybe the Good Queen was elected because of the good will she got when she killed all the other Reginas.

Camera One · December 1, 2019

I wish the show was run by writers who were well versed and actually interested in the more obscure fairy tales, folktales and myths because there was so much material that could have been mined. Even more if classic novels were included, which supposedly was part of the "Once" universe. Between Grimm, Perrault and versions of stories from different countries around the world, there would have been a lot to play with.

I think a requel/reboot would probably need a big, well-known fairy tale/folktale/myth/Disney movie that would draw initial audiences with.

Shanna Marie · December 1, 2019

12 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

At the end of season 7 you'd expect there's be at least 3: Good Queen Gina, Evil Queen Gina and Pirate Gina. Depending on how the FINAL CURSE worked their might also be Mayor Mills.

I believe there were four at the end. There's the Evil Queen off ruling the Enchanted Forest, there's Wish Regina who may or may not be off having pirate adventures with Smee (she didn't seem to be around when WHook ran into Smee during season 7, though), there's time-traveling Roni-Gina from the future (I believe this is the one who was crowned queen of the universe), and there's present-day Storybrooke Regina. I don't think we saw present Regina or present Henry. I guess they were off visiting colleges that Henry won't be attending and couldn't make it to future Regina's coronation.

Speaking of past and present versions, it's interesting that when Hook and Emma time traveled in season 3, they had to make sure they didn't change anything. Even stealing clothes off a clothesline could change everything. Regina goes back in time in season 7, and it's like "while I'm here, I might as well alter the entire cosmos," and everyone elects her queen. Yeah, that's not going to affect history one bit. Then again, it might make it even more likely (and easy) for present teen Henry to go realm hopping and give him an even better excuse, since it would be weird to live in the same town with the adult future version of himself, his adult future self's wife, and their kid, who's not that much younger than he is now. And if Henry doesn't go realm-hopping, then history will have been really screwed up. If Regina doesn't join him and cast the curse, then they won't travel back in time and end up in Storybrooke. Would all those people start popping out of existence if Henry stays home or goes off to college?

Speakeasy · December 2, 2019

15 hours ago, Camera One said:

I wish the show was run by writers who were well versed and actually interested in the more obscure fairy tales, folktales and myths because there was so much material that could have been mined. Even more if classic novels were included, which supposedly was part of the "Once" universe. Between Grimm, Perrault and versions of stories from different countries around the world, there would have been a lot to play with.

I think a requel/reboot would probably need a big, well-known fairy tale/folktale/myth/Disney movie that would draw initial audiences with.

It's a little frustrating to ponder because the more I think about it the harder it is to think of something they could use to not only reinvigorate the fanbase they had but bring in new viewers. There's practically limitless options once you've started but you need to get people roped in. The core of the show is fairytales so you'd need to at least nominally stock to that. Could a more distinctive take on Cinderella version 2 have gained more traction? What if they had put the Princess and the Frog stuff front and centre? Or if they had been able to bring in Moana as a main character and focus on her (I can't imagine Disney would let them, but what if?). Could they have revisited something well known but not quite fairy tales, like the Greek or Norse myths?

I think about Supernatural, which is the longest running genre show I'm aware of and it's got a largely episodic format alongside epic long running plots. Maybe they could have done something like this, break the mould of having everyone stuck in a small town or neighbourhood and have Henry (or whoever) touring the country or fairytale land solving problems, with a big plot in the background?

13 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

I believe there were four at the end. There's the Evil Queen off ruling the Enchanted Forest, there's Wish Regina who may or may not be off having pirate adventures with Smee (she didn't seem to be around when WHook ran into Smee during season 7, though), there's time-traveling Roni-Gina from the future (I believe this is the one who was crowned queen of the universe), and there's present-day Storybrooke Regina. I don't think we saw present Regina or present Henry. I guess they were off visiting colleges that Henry won't be attending and couldn't make it to future Regina's coronation.

I doubt any of the other Reginas wanted to attend, it would suck seeing another, better version of yourself be made your boss forever, even without Regina's batteries of issues that would sting.

I will say I think that the realm merging and all the doubles, silly as they are, would present some pretty fun possibilities for people meeting and dealing with themselves as they would be under other circumstances. What does Wish Henry think of Storybrooke Henry, whinging about not being in a book when he has his loving mothers and grandparents and no real responsibilities? What does Emma think of Wish Henry after knowing he went off the deep end after she left him alone, and what does he think of her? What do Emma and Henry feel suddenly seeing an adult version of Henry with a wife and child, what does Zelena think seeing her five year old daughter come back as a full-fledged 20-something heroine with a fiancé? Does Drizella get to go back in time and steer her past self off the path of darkness? Is Little Drizella disbelieving, is she disgusted by what she will supposedly become and try to become a heroine, or does she figure she's broken and doomed and dive into the darkness?

Many many possibilities out of a very very stupid premise 😉

13 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Speaking of past and present versions, it's interesting that when Hook and Emma time traveled in season 3, they had to make sure they didn't change anything. Even stealing clothes off a clothesline could change everything. Regina goes back in time in season 7, and it's like "while I'm here, I might as well alter the entire cosmos," and everyone elects her queen. Yeah, that's not going to affect history one bit. Then again, it might make it even more likely (and easy) for present teen Henry to go realm hopping and give him an even better excuse, since it would be weird to live in the same town with the adult future version of himself, his adult future self's wife, and their kid, who's not that much younger than he is now. And if Henry doesn't go realm-hopping, then history will have been really screwed up. If Regina doesn't join him and cast the curse, then they won't travel back in time and end up in Storybrooke. Would all those people start popping out of existence if Henry stays home or goes off to college?

It's not as if you have to go all the way back to season 3 (those ancient and long forgotten days) fir this to be a problem. Two episodes earlier Regina is saying they can't ask their Storybrooke fumriebds for help because they're in the past. When she talked to Zelena half way through they dismissed talking to their past selves out if hand. Now...shrug.

I think the only way this can possibly make sense if the FINAL CURSE acted like a reverse shears of destiny, cutting off all the Hyperion Heights people from their past and pasting the present-as-is over the present-that-was, erasing the 'previous' timeline as it formerly would happen after this point and even trying to describe this is difficult enough so I'm fairly confident that this wasn't the idea, it certainly isn't mentioned at any point in the episode.

It would make sense if that was what did happen, though, because as you said, two people going back in time and trying REALLY HARD not to step on any butterflies were constantly in danger if wrecking things, the HH curse sent back thousands of people and they had no idea they were even in their own past. Something that eliminated the future and broke the time loop might be the best way to prevent a storm of paradoxes.

Not sure why that would require squeezing the whole universe into Storybrooke, though.

legaleagle53 · December 7, 2019

On 11/30/2019 at 11:51 AM, Camera One said:

People are complaining that Disney+ doesn't have enough new content.

They really should've said "Once" would have a Season 8 there, or maybe a show in the "Once" universe.

If this had happened, what would have been best?

A) Keeping some of the actors who would return and continue from there

B) Requel featuring a minor character from the show with mostly a new cast... Adventures of Lily and her search of Zorro? Adventures of Dorothy to save Aunt Em? Continuing adventures of Merida?

C) Complete requel with new characters - continue from end of Season 7

D) Complete reboot with new characters - but as a prequel

E) Another option?

I'm not sure which of the main characters would agree to return if they announced a Season 8 today. Regina? Zelena?

Where would the setting be? Storybrooke? Somewhere else? If a prequel, a time in the past? I guess they could also go in the future.

They already did that. It was called Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, and the original idea was to have just that kind of anthology series, with each subsequent season being set in an entirely different world with an all-new set of characters. Then when Wonderland turned out to be better than the main show (and it was), the plan changed to just having a continuation of the original first season. Unfortunately, the show was canceled before any of that could be brought to fruition.

Speakeasy · December 12, 2019

A thought experiment for anyone interested; if Regina Queen of Everything was the intended goal of the series, and if it was meant to be as a contrast to the same first scene with Regina crashing Snow's wedding and if the premise of Regina cursing everyone to Maine was still there...what would it take for this to

A) make sense plot wise?

B) be thematically and emotionally satisfying?

Fusing all the realms together is the easy bit, I think someone on here mentioned the idea that they could have done some variation on the Dark Curse during the crisis of 6:22 which let all the story world's take refuge in Storybrooke-ideally you'd want something better than 6:22 but something along those lines.

But why elect Regina? She would have to demonstrate a lot of leadership skills I'm not confident were there in the series. She would need to be the one who was steering them through the crisis, coming up with the plan and keeping everyone together while Emma was fighting the monster causing the crisis or whatever.

That's not quite enough though, all that would mean was that she was good in that particular tough situation. You would effectively need a whole season or two or three, with her acting as a guiding force for the awkward new neighbours while they faced new crises. She'd need to be chosen after she had led them through these problems and made difficult choices that helped ensure the realms were preserved, and after the final crisis she could be chosen as their new leader because she's demonstrayed she was the woman for the job.

I think you would need at least another season that was all about this, season 7 would have to change the tack of the series completely from a family drama/action*-adventure show to some kind of weird metafictional Babylon 5 type thing.

Whether this would be thematically or emotionally satisfying is something that would be a very individual issue. I think something along these lines (maybe not Queen of Everything) could be a good end to Regina's arc, if it was stressed that her being a leader was her doing a service more than wielding power, if she learned to see the value of using her powers and skills to help the people she had terrorised, and if she recognised she was lucky to have the chance to do so.

Of course if you don't like Regina then any version of this ending will always be anything from irrelevant at absolute best to offensive at worst. All the other characters would need to get a satisfying close to their arcs somehow.

I would say part of that is if she doesn't have a love interest at the end, she's essentially alone at the top and this contrasts with the other surviving heroes... Maybe. I don't know, maybe that's too mean spirited, it shouldn't enhance their relationships if their former enemy is lonely.

Any thoughts? Is there any way 'Good Queen Regina' could have been a happy and logical ending to the series?

*In the widest possible sense of the word, my god, throughout the later seasons there were so many times I found myself counting the other action/adventure protagonists who could pummel Team Storybrooke or whoever they were fighting just by virtue of having standard human reaction times...

Shanna Marie · December 12, 2019

3 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

Is there any way 'Good Queen Regina' could have been a happy and logical ending to the series?

I think she would have needed an actual character arc, which would have had to go back to 2B to fix. What we had was a pivot, but showing an entirely opposite situation without having the dots connected is meaningless.

For instance, I think they did an arc for Emma that was bookended by her sad solo birthday party in the pilot and the Last Supper with her friends and family at the end of season 6. It wasn't always handled well, but at least there were some dots connecting the two -- season one was about her accepting her role as Henry's mother, 2A she was getting to know Snow as her mother, 3A she was part of her family, later she was learning to be part of a couple and to accept Hook's love. When you saw the pilot scene, you knew that what this person needed was connections to others, so the ending was apt.

With Regina, when you see her storm into Snow's wedding in the pilot, you're not thinking, "What this person really needs is for all these people to accept how wonderful she is and choose her as their leader." I would have said based on the pilot, and given the idea that Regina would change sides and become good, that what she needed to learn was humility and empathy, and the outcome we got was the opposite of that.

3 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

She would have to demonstrate a lot of leadership skills I'm not confident were there in the series.

That's one of the problems. She never demonstrated any leadership qualities. She was often bossy, but that's not the same thing. She wasn't the person who was able to rally others. She generally didn't come up with the good ideas. She had a tendency to bail on any leadership position when things got hard or when she had other things to worry about. This is the woman who quit her job as mayor because her boyfriend broke up with her -- I guess that was tougher than having just given birth. Even her triumphs tended to be selfish. She "saved" them all from her own doomsday device, she was able to free herself from Pan because she didn't regret her own evil. Throughout the first six seasons, it was always either Snow or Emma (sometimes Charming) rallying everyone in a crisis. Even in season seven when she was away from the usual Storybrooke do-gooders, she didn't rise to the occasion and become a leader. Maybe she's who you'd choose to be a figurehead ruler in a constitutional monarchy where her job would involve smiling and waving and wearing pretty clothes, but there was no indication that she'd actually be any good at ruling.

Maybe what we don't see is the formation of the fictional omniverse parliament, with Snow elected Prime Minister to do the actual governing (though there are also issues with Snow's leadership, since she had a tendency to put her personal values over the greater good).

So, to make the ending work, we'd need to go back to 2B, have Regina have a genuine change rather than a pivot, face some consequences for her evil, have to gradually earn the trust and respect of her former victims, show some leadership qualities, show some empathy, do some good things that aren't about her or people she's close to, and then really rise to the occasion in season 7, with her bringing the realms together having some actual purpose.

Camera One · December 13, 2019

Was it the Season 6 finale or the Season 7 finale where the Dwarves bowed to Regina or accepted her as Mayor?

The parallel between the pilot and The Good Queen coronation was very much surface-level. It was more the shift from having Evil in the title to having Good in the title.

10 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

But why elect Regina? She would have to demonstrate a lot of leadership skills I'm not confident were there in the series. She would need to be the one who was steering them through the crisis, coming up with the plan and keeping everyone together while Emma was fighting the monster causing the crisis or whatever.

Plus did Regina even want to be the Supreme Leader? Was that what she really wanted deep down?

These Writers were so stuck on maintaining the status quo that they kept Regina as the default mayor for the whole series, except for the blip where they considered having Snow take her rightful place as leader and then changed their mind.

6 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

For instance, I think they did an arc for Emma that was bookended by her sad solo birthday party in the pilot and the Last Supper with her friends and family at the end of season 6. It wasn't always handled well, but at least there were some dots connecting the two

In that sense, The Last Supper was also a happy ending for Regina. Someone who thought she had nothing in her life worth living except for revenge in Episode 2, to a woman who had the love of a son and all her former victims and the family she never had.

Rumple also got his happy ending, reunited with Belle and with a new son.

Snowing already got their happy ending in the Season 2 premiere, reunited with each other and their daughter.

Shanna Marie · December 13, 2019

21 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Was it the Season 6 finale or the Season 7 finale where the Dwarves bowed to Regina or accepted her as Mayor?

That was the season 6 finale as the lead-in to the Last Supper, when they did the montage of everyone living out their happy endings. The dwarfs stenciled "queen" on her office door and bowed to her. That whole thing came out of the blue because it wasn't as though she did anything in the finale or even the whole season that led to that, and having the dwarfs' respect was never an issue that came up. She didn't do anything to prove herself, didn't do a big sacrifice, or anything like that. It was just so random, much like the season 7 finale. I guess they just couldn't resist giving Regina prizes.

24 minutes ago, Camera One said:

Plus did Regina even want to be the Supreme Leader? Was that what she really wanted deep down?

Just as the merging realms bit was like:
Everyone: ...
Regina: I know! I'll merge all the realms!

Naming Regina Supreme Leader was like:
Regina: ...
Everyone: We're electing you queen of the universe!

It might have made some sense if there had been an arc about her taking a leadership role during season seven, like if she'd been the general who led them to victory in the rebellion or if Roni had taken decisive charge of events in Hyperion Heights, like if she'd run for city council or something in order to fight Victoria. But with Regina mostly in the background all season, it was a very random ending.

27 minutes ago, Camera One said:

In that sense, The Last Supper was also a happy ending for Regina. Someone who thought she had nothing in her life worth living except for revenge in Episode 2, to a woman who had the love of a son and all her former victims and the family she never had.

The Last Supper was sort of a generic happy ending for everyone. I do think it's more specific for Emma because of the solo birthday party scene in the pilot, which contrasts with the family meal. With Regina, it's a much broader parallel from empty life to full life. I think if you were going to draw a more direct line, maybe it would be Regina "barging" into a place where she was welcomed, bringing something good instead of a threat, like if she came bursting through the doors of Granny's carrying presents for everyone and they all greeted her warmly.

I can't really get from the opening of the series to the closing of the series. I guess the writers couldn't bring themselves to write the last scenes sober and this was what we got. It doesn't really track with Regina's story, given that the thing that started all this was that she didn't want to be queen. It was (sort of) forced on her by her mother. She wanted to run away with Daniel and only became queen because her mother murdered Daniel. She only got to be a ruling queen instead of a consort by murdering her husband and kicking out Snow, the rightful queen. Ending the show with her being elected queen of everything is all wrong. Maybe she should have been the one ending up happily on a farm (a horse farm), getting to do what she chose instead of what her mother chose for her. Not only did she end up chosen by her former victims to rule over them, but she ended up fulfilling her mother's wildest dreams. This show was so warped.

Camera One · December 13, 2019

12 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

I do think it's more specific for Emma because of the solo birthday party scene in the pilot, which contrasts with the family meal.

I was just remembering how Regina and Zelena both got a solo birthday party scene too.

Thinking about that Last Supper really warms the cockles of my darkened heart.

12 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

It might have made some sense if there had been an arc about her taking a leadership role during season seven, like if she'd been the general who led them to victory in the rebellion or if Roni had taken decisive charge of events in Hyperion Heights, like if she'd run for city council or something in order to fight Victoria. But with Regina mostly in the background all season, it was a very random ending.

I wonder if this was in the cards for Season 8. Not that they had a plan or anything because they could have just done some of your suggestions for their star in Season 7.

Edited December 13, 2019 by Camera One

Shanna Marie · December 13, 2019

13 minutes ago, Camera One said:

I wonder if this was in the cards for Season 8. Not that they had a plan or anything because they could have just done some of your suggestions for their star in Season 7.

Yet again, they completely failed to bother to actually write for their favorite character. They could have made Regina the center of season 7, or at least a driving force, but she was marginalized. They loved to give her things, but they didn't seem to like giving her things to do. There could have been a lot more bitch-offs between Roni and Victoria or Ivy, a lot more witch-offs between Regina and Drizella or Gothel in flashbacks. At the very least, she really could have served the purpose of the heart of the group, or the ambassador who could reach out to other realms. She had top billing on the series, but they seemed to almost forget she was on the show.

I guess at that point in the timeline she hadn't yet ditched her job as mayor without warning to go gallivanting around the realms, so that must not have factored into their decision, but since they were electing a future Regina, they had to know that at some point in their future she had ditched them. And isn't that something of a timeline issue, for a person from the future to be ruling in the past?

Camera One · December 13, 2019

22 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Yet again, they completely failed to bother to actually write for their favorite character. They could have made Regina the center of season 7, or at least a driving force, but she was marginalized. They loved to give her things, but they didn't seem to like giving her things to do. There could have been a lot more bitch-offs between Roni and Victoria or Ivy, a lot more witch-offs between Regina and Drizella or Gothel in flashbacks.

Yes. If they were trying to position Evil Real Estate Tycoon Victoria as the villain in Hyperion Heights, then maybe Roni would have been a tenant of a building who steps up to represent all the residents who would be kicked out. From the Season 7 premiere, it sort of seemed like where the story was going.

It's like they started with "We're going to need a Granny's where characters in Hyperion Heights congregate", and that led to "Oooh! Let's make Regina the owner of the bar!"

And then they literally just had Regina be the boring bar maid. She stood up to Victoria but it was all empty words.

The "dream team" of Roni, Henry and Rogers lasted how many episodes?

Why didn't they start the season with a few episodes showing Victoria actually kicking people out of the neighborhood or doing insensitive things to build Roni up as a reluctant leader? After all, they were so desperate to include her in the new requel.

Ditto for Useless Weaver. By shoehorning these two into the new season, if anything, it took screentime away from developing new stories and added to the feeling of retread.

Though having said all this, the "What could have been" still would have fallen short with miscasts like Jacinda, Lucy and Victoria making the lame story fall flat right from the first episode.

Edited December 13, 2019 by Camera One

KingOfHearts · December 13, 2019

17 hours ago, Camera One said:

Though having said all this, the "What could have been" still would have fallen short with miscasts like Jacinda, Lucy and Victoria making the lame story fall flat right from the first episode.

I think if the regulars like Rumple and Regina didn't come back, we'd be left wondering what would've happened if they were. I do believe S7 would've been worse if it were only the new characters.

Shanna Marie · December 13, 2019

41 minutes ago, KingOfHearts said:

I think if the regulars like Rumple and Regina didn't come back, we'd be left wondering what would've happened if they were. I do believe S7 would've been worse if it were only the new characters.

I'm not sure there was a good way to do a "requel" that would have been successful. If you've got something that people like largely because they like the cast and characters, they're probably not going to be keen on seeing the same thing with different characters. Focusing on the returning characters would have meant not taking advantage of the newness, but focusing on the new characters meant we didn't care. What they ended up with was a pale imitation without any of the charm or magic. While doing magic in a city instead of small town had potential, Hyperion Heights never really felt like a neighborhood. So we had lackluster casting, lame characters, the focus on the wrong characters, and in the wrong setting.

It might possibly have worked with absolutely stellar execution and striking the same gold with the new characters as they did with the original cast, but I think we've seen that these writers weren't capable of that kind of execution. Really, the show should have either been continued the way it was (which might have had some problems with cast members wanting out and their contracts up) or just canceled at the end of season 6. Season 7 is a weird footnote to the series.

I kind of like the concept we were discussing a month or so ago of focusing entirely on the Wish characters -- when Emma sends Wish Hook back to the Jolly Roger, Regina's still on board and the two of them stumble across some fountain of youth on their journey that de-ages them. Wish Rumple cozies up to Wish Henry and cons him into going after Wish Regina for revenge. When a curse hits, they all end up in a modern American city, where nerdy teen Henry is hanging out in the library and discovers a strange set of storybooks, and then he starts noticing people in the neighborhood who look like the people in the books. Maybe do the flashbacks in reverse order so we start with the curse, and only at the end of the season, after they've all banded together in the present, do we learn that these are the wish versions and the books they're basing things on aren't about them. This Regina was never this Henry's mother. She's the one who murdered his family. Breaking the memory portion of the curse only leads to more drama and shock, not joyous reunions.

Camera One · December 14, 2019

5 hours ago, KingOfHearts said:

I think if the regulars like Rumple and Regina didn't come back, we'd be left wondering what would've happened if they were.

I think for me, I was so done with Rumple that I would not have wondered if he could have made the new season better. I can't say I was yearning for any more Regina either. Emma left, but I don't wonder too much what would have happened in Jennifer Morrison had agreed to be part of the seventh season.

I had doubts about the Wish Realm but considering they did a good job with Wish Hook, I agree the best alternative was to focus on Wish Henry, who actually had issues, along with Wish Hook, Wish Regina and Wish Rumple. All of them would have had different unresolved issues.

4 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

While doing magic in a city instead of small town had potential, Hyperion Heights never really felt like a neighborhood. So we had lackluster casting, lame characters, the focus on the wrong characters, and in the wrong setting.

It might possibly have worked with absolutely stellar execution and striking the same gold with the new characters as they did with the original cast, but I think we've seen that these writers weren't capable of that kind of execution.

With these Writers, sadly it's true. Their creative well had run dry a full season before this requel. And all they could think of as a premise was a lamer version of the exact same thing.

But as you said, I think the city idea did have real potential.

They came from "Lost" but they didn't have the courage of the "Lost" showrunners to actually follow through with change. On "Lost", every season revamped the premise. On "Once", every jump in a new direction (eg. Rumple no longer being The Dark One, or Regina no longer being Mayor, or the 3A finale, etc.) was reset so quickly that you could ignore the initial change even happened.

Edited December 14, 2019 by Camera One

Shanna Marie · December 14, 2019

12 hours ago, Camera One said:

I think for me, I was so done with Rumple that I would not have wondered if he could have made the new season better. I can't say I was yearning for any more Regina either. Emma left, but I don't wonder too much what would have happened in Jennifer Morrison had agreed to be part of the seventh season.

Yeah, I was surprised to find that Rumple was one of the ones coming back. His character had more than run its course. I could have personally lived without Regina, but I can see how she's considered essential to the show -- except they barely used her. Her character had run its course, too. They skipped to the end for her redemption, so where do you go from there? But she was also ineffective in a mentor role. She seemed to mostly be there because they like her and the actress and seemed to think that the fans wanted her. I don't think there's a purpose to her being there beyond that. WHook had an actual story, and I don't think it's just because he was a new character. The thing was that they gave him goals. I guess Rumple had the goal of finding the Guardian, but how that worked was always vague. WHook's issues were a lot more concrete.

The thing with Emma is that if she'd been there, they might have been able to just continue the series instead of doing the "requel" idea. The Charmings would have been gone (since they wanted out), but they were mostly offscreen anyway. Just say they're out at the farm, refer to family dinners, but center the action elsewhere. Belle also spent a lot of time offscreen or asleep, so they could have written around that. But it would have been hard to continue the Storybrooke story without Emma, especially if Hook was there. Without her, they had to reboot.

13 hours ago, Camera One said:

Their creative well had run dry a full season before this requel. And all they could think of as a premise was a lamer version of the exact same thing.

A city that was like season one Storybrooke could have worked, but season six Storybrooke wasn't like season one Storybrooke. It was a weak shadow of itself with no real life to it.

If the new characters had really grabbed us, the reboot could have worked. With season one, it helped that the actors were so perfect for embodying these storybook characters. Ginny was the perfect Snow White, Josh was an ideal Prince Charming. That brought us into the story and allowed them to spin off from there and still have it feel like Snow White and Prince Charming. With season seven, they were going against type rather than doing the typical imagery of Cinderella. But that meant they really needed to stick closer to the classic story at first before spinning off. We had someone we wouldn't have known was Cinderella if they hadn't told us doing very un-Cinderella-like things and not being particularly charming or engaging while doing so.

Adult Henry might have made a good throughline, but he wasn't like Emma, who was a damaged person finding wholeness by finding herself. He was a spoiled brat out looking for glory, but that wasn't treated like a bad thing or a lesson he really needed to learn (until it was?), so he didn't make for a sympathetic hero. Maybe if he'd had a less selfish reason for going realm-hopping, then we'd seen him having adventures, then we'd seen Cinderella being more Cinderella-like before she hopped on the murder train.

Camera One · December 14, 2019

3 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

Adult Henry might have made a good throughline, but he wasn't like Emma, who was a damaged person finding wholeness by finding herself. He was a spoiled brat out looking for glory, but that wasn't treated like a bad thing or a lesson he really needed to learn (until it was?), so he didn't make for a sympathetic hero. Maybe if he'd had a less selfish reason for going realm-hopping, then we'd seen him having adventures, then we'd seen Cinderella being more Cinderella-like before she hopped on the murder train.

That was the biggest problem. The main characters in Season 7 did not have any room for growth. That's important for any pilot and Season 7 Episode 1 was pretty much a pilot of sorts.

The edge that Henry had as a character in Season 1 evaporated in 2B and I don't think there was much room for development in Adult Henry either. They stamped out pretty much every aspect of a realistic human being from 2B to 6B. The only way would have been to add a lot of trauma in his life post-Season 7. Maybe during his time as Writer, his wife and child did perish. But then the show would have become bleak and you know the company policy... dark is okay but bleak is a no no. They could easily have revolved the season around Henry finding his wife and child alive, and then they got caught up in the Curse.

The fact that Hyperion Henry's backstory was all fake made it hard to connect with him. Not to mention they dropped his grief by the fourth or so episode when it wasn't even developed in the first place.

That's why Wish Henry was really the only viable route to have an interesting version of Henry. It's not like they were going to keep Violet so did we really need the Storybrooke Henry as the protagonist?

It's clear to see why they did have Storybrooke Henry, though. Because they wanted to replicate the feelings we got in Season 1 when Emma interacted with Mary Margaret and they didn't know they were mother/daughter. And the anticipation of Emma, Mary Margaret and David finding out they were a family unit.

But somehow, I don't think that worked at all in Season 7. I didn't anticipate Regina and Henry remembering each other. I liked Whook and Alice, but I wasn't on the edge of my seat waiting for their reunion either. I don't really remember the reunions very well, so they must have been pretty forgettable.

Even if Emma had returned, I suspect A&E would have changed the setting to Hyperion Heights. I think they had a pipedream that they would squeeze a few more seasons out of the show with the requel. And it's unlikely Emma would have stayed for more than one season anyway.

Edited December 14, 2019 by Camera One

Shanna Marie · December 14, 2019

52 minutes ago, Camera One said:

The main characters in Season 7 did not have any room for growth. That's important for any pilot and Season 7 Episode 1 was pretty much a pilot of sorts.

They didn't have room for growth that the show was willing to admit to. Regina and Rumple definitely had room for growth. Regina could have learned a lot about empathy, Rumple could have actually tried to live a good life without Belle goading him. The problem is that they wanted to believe that Rumple and Regina were totally 100 percent good at the end of season 6, so they had season 7 with supposedly perfect people.

56 minutes ago, Camera One said:

The edge that Henry had as a character in Season 1 evaporated in 2B and I don't think there was much room for development in Adult Henry either. They stamped out pretty much every aspect of a realistic human being from 2B to 6B. The only way would have been to add a lot of trauma in his life post-Season 7.

I think there were ways Adult Henry could have had room for growth without trauma, but it also would have required them to question some of their assumptions. A Henry who goes out looking for heroism but has to start seeing things in less black-and-white ways might have been interesting. But that would have required him to be a realistic human being.

1 hour ago, Camera One said:

It's clear to see why they did have Storybrooke Henry, though. Because they wanted to replicate the feelings we got in Season 1 when Emma interacted with Mary Margaret and they didn't know they were mother/daughter.

That's where I think they could have really had fun with that with the Wishverse characters, setting up the expectation of those reunions, but with the twist that these weren't actually those characters reuniting.

Camera One · December 15, 2019

8 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

They didn't have room for growth that the show was willing to admit to. Regina and Rumple definitely had room for growth. Regina could have learned a lot about empathy, Rumple could have actually tried to live a good life without Belle goading him. The problem is that they wanted to believe that Rumple and Regina were totally 100 percent good at the end of season 6, so they had season 7 with supposedly perfect people.

Yes. That is why I don't think they had any further room for genuine growth. Through the 6 seasons, they had already skipped over vital milestones of the development and proclaimed them good and worthy of redemption. With Rumple, they had even see-sawed a few times. The characters had become the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and I can't see any story that could have made me truly believe in their journeys anymore since they had been short-circuited way too many times.

KingOfHearts · December 15, 2019

10 hours ago, Camera One said:

Yes. That is why I don't think they had any further room for genuine growth. Through the 6 seasons, they had already skipped over vital milestones of the development and proclaimed them good and worthy of redemption. With Rumple, they had even see-sawed a few times. The characters had become the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and I can't see any story that could have made me truly believe in their journeys anymore since they had been short-circuited way too many times.

If Rumple had survived and returned for an S8, there's no reason I wouldn't believe he'd backslide.

Camera One · December 15, 2019

On 4/17/2018 at 1:24 PM, Mitch said:

This Chad guy should have been Regina's boyfriend from the start..so when she wakes up and remembers she was the EQ..and really has a totally different personality..what to do?

I think this could have been a good possible arc for Regina in Season 7 if she must have a love interest. Plus it would have used the whole idea that Hyperion Heights was in a REAL city with real, non-fairy tale people.

Chad could have been developed before Regina woke up. Maybe Chad's family might live in Hyperion Heights too and interact with Lucy, Jacinda, etc.

At least this would have been something new to explore. Too little of Season 7 was fresh.

The other Should've/Would've for Season 7 is they should have kept Zelena instead of Rumple. He literally added nothing to the season. The Guardian subplot sucked and should have been eliminated completely. If they must have someone else at the police station, they could have used Dr. Facilier in that role and Rogers could have exposed him. Heck, Zelena could have been a police officer if they needed someone to interact with Rogers. Wish Rumple could still have been the villain towards the end of the season.

Edited December 15, 2019 by Camera One

KingOfHearts · December 15, 2019

5 hours ago, Camera One said:

Wish Rumple could still have been the villain towards the end of the season.

They should've brought in the Wish characters like Wish Rumple and Wish Henry in sooner. Heck, maybe even Wish Regina could've showed up at some point. That would've been better than the Coat Hangers, but then again, anything would've been. Even Bo Peep the Warlord would've been a better Big Bad. Heck, why wasn't she in the coven?!

The whole season could've been "Revenge of the Side Characters." They were all chilling out in the Land of Forgotten Episodes.

Edited December 15, 2019 by KingOfHearts

Speakeasy · December 16, 2019

18 hours ago, Camera One said:

I think this could have been a good possible arc for Regina in Season 7 if she must have a love interest. Plus it would have used the whole idea that Hyperion Heights was in a REAL city with real, non-fairy tale people.

Chad could have been developed before Regina woke up. Maybe Chad's family might live in Hyperion Heights too and interact with Lucy, Jacinda, etc.

At least this would have been something new to explore. Too little of Season 7 was fresh.

This would definitely be an interesting take on things. The writers would need to forgo the tried and tested fairyta flashback introduction technique and just have him be a guy who moves into the neighbourhood and makes an impression on his own merits...

You could have him be one of these new residents supposedly replacing the fairytale people to show that that was actually happening.

18 hours ago, Camera One said:

The other Should've/Would've for Season 7 is they should have kept Zelena instead of Rumple. He literally added nothing to the season. The Guardian subplot sucked and should have been eliminated completely. If they must have someone else at the police station, they could have used Dr. Facilier in that role and Rogers could have exposed him. Heck, Zelena could have been a police officer if they needed someone to interact with Rogers. Wish Rumple could still have been the villain towards the end of the season.

I would absolutely have loved to swap Rumple for Zelena this season because besides the glorious return of his Sparkly Devil version in the finale he was so bland in S7. I love Selena, and besides which she ended S6 with the challenge of trying to be a good person and raise her rape baby in a responsible way, she's got a lot of built in drama Rumple doesn't because we're assuming that he was totally good no backsies and had his twu wuv happy family all sorted out the same as the extended Charming family.

But I can't imagine any realm where the writing staff wouldn't plaster Carlisle pnto the screen as long as they had him.

Speakeasy · January 6, 2020

16 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 -- 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.

Cross posted from the 7.20 episode thread because this reminds me of an idea I had fir an alternate Wishy episode:

So 'Wish you were here' was a bit of a mess both mechanically and thematically since it was, I think the Evil Queen saying 'I wish Emma's wish not to be the Savior came true!' and apparently this was a case if 'be careful what you wish for', and we can all see that is really stretching things because Emma wasnt seriously considering or trying to get rid of her saviorism and it was the Evil Queen that made the wish...

So this might end up getting too dark for this show, but what if, instead of this, we somehow got Regina (good or evil version) getting a genie lamp and wishing that Emma wasn't the saviour or that 'Emma Swan Never Came to Storybrooke'

I haven't worked out exactly how this happens, but that's not the important part.

The important part is Regina wakes up in a world where her curse was never broken. David is still in his coma, Mary Margaret is still a lonely science teacher, etc... And Henry is older and angrier and more miserable than ever and hates his mother, he hates her so, so much. I thought at one point that she might have put him on some kind of medication to blunt his emotions and he'd be acting dull and zombie like until they started to wear off, and when they wore off he could get furiously angry or start crying inconsolably... Or maybe he could stay quiet and smile while he's working out ways to take things into his own hands, to be the hero in this story by defeating the villain for good...

And modern Regina would end up here, taking the place of Wish Regina, and be horrified and appalled... But she'd be all alone in this world, no one but her would recognise that anything was different, and she'd have no magic to help her.

Now I'm not sure if this scenario is better with Regina on her own trying to undo her wish with the help of Wish-Emma or Wishwashed-Emma, or if she needs to be fighting against the Evil Queen, who would be prepared to accept this new world as long as she was in charge.

The point is this would be a good opportunity for her to realise how useless her curse had been and how, in a way, her having a chance at hsppiness is down to Emma arriving and breaking it and forcing her to learn how to compromise.

Anyone think this could have worked? And if so, would season 6 actually have been a bit too late for it?

Camera One · January 6, 2020

4 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

The important part is Regina wakes up in a world where her curse was never broken. David is still in his coma, Mary Margaret is still a lonely science teacher, etc... And Henry is older and angrier and more miserable than ever and hates his mother, he hates her so, so much. I thought at one point that she might have put him on some kind of medication to blunt his emotions and he'd be acting dull and zombie like until they started to wear off, and when they wore off he could get furiously angry or start crying inconsolably... Or maybe he could stay quiet and smile while he's working out ways to take things into his own hands, to be the hero in this story by defeating the villain for good...

And modern Regina would end up here, taking the place of Wish Regina, and be horrified and appalled... But she'd be all alone in this world, no one but her would recognise that anything was different, and she'd have no magic to help her.

Even though this would have made it all about Regina, I think it might have worked to replace the Season 6 finale or even stretch more episodes. The Black Fairy's Curse in Storybrooke was just so boring.

This way, it could have been different. An angry and resentful Henry who hated Regina would be a new scenario. It might have been nice to see Regina trying to finally be nice to her townspeople, Mary Margaret, etc., she wakes up David, she frees Belle from her cell in the basement and tries to break the Curse herself but she can't. With no Savior, maybe somehow, Hook and Zelena have Cursed personae in Storybrooke. She then goes to get Emma in Boston and outright tries to convince her, unlike her stonewalling in Season 1. Maybe Regina concocts a wacko scenario like she's a scientist who froze her parents and now have woken them up or something. We could have gotten to see the main couples "reunite" one last time. There could still have been a bunch of cameos like Wish Robin that Regina reunites with Wish Marian, for example.

This would be more enjoyable than the other scenario that I was sure A&E would pull in Season 6, a world where Regina and Rumple didn't cast the Curse and everyone was miserable and they would beg R&R to Curse them.

Edited January 6, 2020 by Camera One

Shanna Marie · January 7, 2020

11 hours ago, Camera One said:

This would be more enjoyable than the other scenario that I was sure A&E would pull in Season 6, a world where Regina and Rumple didn't cast the Curse and everyone was miserable and they would beg R&R to Curse them.

They came pretty close to that with the Wishverse. Not begging for the curse, but Emma learning the valuable lesson that she was stronger and better off because of the curse and wanting to go back to the cursed reality.

16 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

The important part is Regina wakes up in a world where her curse was never broken. David is still in his coma, Mary Margaret is still a lonely science teacher, etc... And Henry is older and angrier and more miserable than ever and hates his mother, he hates her so, so much. I thought at one point that she might have put him on some kind of medication to blunt his emotions and he'd be acting dull and zombie like until they started to wear off, and when they wore off he could get furiously angry or start crying inconsolably... Or maybe he could stay quiet and smile while he's working out ways to take things into his own hands, to be the hero in this story by defeating the villain for good...

That would have been really interesting. Not that these writers would ever have done that, showing Regina to be in the wrong and Henry against her. After all, they had Wish Henry who had never had Regina as a mother, who only knew Regina as the villain who tormented his grandparents, and who watched our Regina murder his grandparents ending up being inexplicably close to that same Regina at the end of the series -- and not to Emma, who had been the only mother he ever knew in the Wishverse.

But I love the idea of seeing an extended curse with Henry scheming against Regina.

Shanna Marie · January 8, 2020

The idea of a wish that the curse hadn't broken has really taken over my brain.

How it would work would depend on when/why the curse didn't break. Some possible turning points:

Mary Margaret doesn't give Henry the storybook, so he doesn't develop Hope and doesn't go in search of Emma
When Henry finds Emma, she takes him to the police as a runaway and goes on with her life
Emma takes Henry home but then immediately leaves town
Emma stays in town, season one goes as it did, but then when she plans to leave after getting fed up with Regina, she just leaves, tossing the apple turnover in the back seat of her car and forgetting about it
Emma stays in town, season one goes as it did, but Emma eats the turnover before Henry gets to her place and goes into the sleeping curse, where she still is.

I think the last might have the most potential. That would certainly sink Henry into a cynical funk, if everything he did came so close to succeeding, only to fail. Maybe Regina gets to Emma first (Emma eats the turnover at Regina's house) and hides her, letting Henry think she left town. It would also come closest to them being able to use the whole cast and not needing Graham (he'd probably still be alive if Henry had never gone to get Emma, and they wouldn't have been able to get the actor in later seasons). One question would be whether there would be magic. Despite what they seemed to think in season seven, the coming of magic wasn't really linked to the curse breaking. Rumple just needed to find someone willing and able to fight a dragon to get his potion for him, and conning Emma into thinking she had to do it to get a cure for Henry was his first chance, but without Emma, he might have found some other way. By the time of season six, he might have been able to start working on Henry. I'm not sure if travel between worlds was possible before magic came back or if it could have happened once time started moving so that Hook and Zelena could have ended up in Storybrooke by then, or maybe they show up after Rumple gets Henry to kill the dragon and brings magic back during the episode/arc.

If the curse didn't break because Emma left town or never came to town, then we have a Regina/Henry road trip to find her, and I don't think we really want that.

As to how we have the wish in the first place, it could be the Evil Queen's wish, and since Regina is the same person, she ends up there, too, as a wild card. The Evil Queen is in the role of Mayor Mills, while our Regina is a free agent who has to try to win Henry's trust and find Emma and get Henry to break the curse, hoping that this will also break the wish and send them back to normal.

Or if we want to get wild and crazy with the rewrite, we could do this in place of the Evil Queen, where Regina secretly wishes the curse hadn't broken because this being good stuff is hard, so she finds herself in a reality in which the curse didn't break, but she's still conscious of the other life and as Mayor Mills she starts trying to change things, but the problem there is that there's no opposition, no one who would be trying to stop her from breaking the curse. Her only challenge would be restoring Henry's hope so he'd at least try a TLK with Emma. In the other scenario, she'd have to tavoid the Evil Queen, who'd be trying to thwart and undermine her efforts.

Alas, there's not much for Emma to do if she's under the sleeping curse and everything goes back to normal when she wakes. She would get a bigger role in the road trip to find her, with us getting to see what Emma would have been like a few years down the line and how they'd go about persuading her to come back to the town. But then that cuts out all the other characters, unless it takes a long time from her return to her breaking the curse.

I guess they could do something with the normal reality if it creates an alternate universe, like the Wishverse was, rather than temporarily rewriting their reality. Then Emma and the others could be back in regular Storybrooke, doing something.

Maybe we could see what Emma's doing during the curse, trying to fight her way out of the red room, hearing Henry and responding to him, even if he can't hear her. Or do they remember that people who've been under sleeping curses can communicate with each other if they go to sleep, so Emma ends up talking to her mother? That would give Emma something to do while spending most of the episode(s) in a sleeping curse.

Camera One · January 8, 2020

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

The idea of a wish that the curse hadn't broken has really taken over my brain.

How it would work would depend on when/why the curse didn't break. Some possible turning points:

Mary Margaret doesn't give Henry the storybook, so he doesn't develop Hope and doesn't go in search of Emma

When Henry finds Emma, she takes him to the police as a runaway and goes on with her life

Emma takes Henry home but then immediately leaves town

Emma stays in town, season one goes as it did, but then when she plans to leave after getting fed up with Regina, she just leaves, tossing the apple turnover in the back seat of her car and forgetting about it

Emma stays in town, season one goes as it did, but Emma eats the turnover before Henry gets to her place and goes into the sleeping curse, where she still is.

All these would have been fun and interesting to see. Heck, there could be several episodes where we followed each of these paths to see where it would go.

Season 6 would have been better as a series of "What if's" and there are so many. Who needs an overarching arc when they're crappy as hell.

But then again, look at the disappointment of the big "What if" we actually did get in Season 6 - What if Regina failed to cast the Curse? The result we got was terrible, boring and pretty arbitrary.

I would rather have seen the immediate aftermath of Regina failing to enact the Curse and scenes of Emma's life as she grew up in the Enchanted Forest. They could have had some cameos from the actresses who played Young Emma.

daxx · January 8, 2020

8 hours ago, Camera One said:

But then again, look at the disappointment of the big "What if" we actually did get in Season 6 - What if Regina failed to cast the Curse? The result we got was terrible, boring and pretty arbitrary.

They played it as a joke, weren’t at all serious in this particular what if scenario. It’s too bad they didn’t actually delve into what it would have looked like if the curse wasn’t cast instead of how many jokes they can throw at it.

Speakeasy · January 8, 2020

46 minutes ago, daxx said:

They played it as a joke, weren’t at all serious in this particular what if scenario. It’s too bad they didn’t actually delve into what it would have looked like if the curse wasn’t cast instead of how many jokes they can throw at it.

Where do you go with a serious No Curse scenario, though?

I mean the curse was meant to be a bad thing but it's the basis of the series so... Basically the overarching message of a no curse story kind of diminishes the series leading up to it, it either points out how crap Storybrooke is and how much the setting you've watched these last 6 years sucks for everyone, or you end up in some way or another saying 'hey, this curse wasn't so bad'. The actual series ended up with the second one but I don't think the first would have been more satisfying.

Camera One · January 8, 2020

35 minutes ago, Speakeasy said:

I mean the curse was meant to be a bad thing but it's the basis of the series so... Basically the overarching message of a no curse story kind of diminishes the series leading up to it, it either points out how crap Storybrooke is and how much the setting you've watched these last 6 years sucks for everyone

I think the problem with a no-curse story might be the lack of conflict, because it becomes a happy ending. To me, it doesn't diminish the series to acknowledge that the Curse did a lot of damage to Snowing and Emma's life, that Emma could have grown up in that environment and become as strong but maybe in a different type of way.

The Enchanted Forest was a dangerous place so the characters would still need to face problems and difficulties, but together. It also explores alternate paths or events that would alter decisions. For example, in the Wish flashback, we saw Regina sort of giving up because her Curse didn't work. Would Rumple have tried a different route to bringing Baelfire home? It could also show characters meeting under different circumstances. What if Zelena came to the Enchanted Forest after Regina had lost? How would a loser Regina have related to a returning Cora? What if Emma met Hook under different circumstances? Would Snowing be able to help Prince Philip break Aurora's Sleeping Curse and would Maleficent exact revenge?

The whole attraction of the Whook storyline in Season 7 was seeing how Whook somehow having a child could have changed his entire path and helped him to reclaim aspects of the person he was before he became a pirate.

KingOfHearts · January 8, 2020

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

I think the problem with a no-curse story might be the lack of conflict, because it becomes a happy ending.

I think that's the conflict in of itself. Emma, after making amends with her parents and BFF Regina, seeing the life she could've had. Supposedly she had worked out those issues and chose Storybrooke over the real world - but can she choose it over the fairy tale world? I'm not saying she'd move to Wish Realm, but can she be happy knowing what her life could've been? Those kinds of questions I think do fit into S6's loose narrative. However, if you broaden the scope to all Storybrooke citizens, it becomes messier. Some people had worse lives in the Enchanted Forest and got better because of the curse. Others' lives were ruined, making Storybrooke as a whole look worse. So I think if the focus was kept only on Emma, there's still something to mine in the story.

One of the main problems with the Wish Realm was that it changed Emma herself instead of just her circumstances. The writers tried to make the Wish Realm look worse by turning Emma into a sniveling coward. But if they had to the balls to say the Wish Realm was actually better, that would've flipped it around and created an interesting dilemma. How can you be happy with your current circumstances when they're worse? How can you be satisfied with your life knowing most of your suffering could've been avoided? How do you accept that? Granted, this was just a totally "fake" alternative universe and not a timeline change. If this were Emma having to choose whether or not to go back in time and change the future for the better, that would've been a whole lot more sophisticated of a problem. But as it stands, the Wish Realm is pretty weak sauce. (Except maybe it isn't because it might be real?!)

Having Wish Henry there was such a cop-out. In a no-curse scenario, she wouldn't have Henry or Hook in her life. Because of this, Hook would've been a better character to reel Emma back in than Regina. She wouldn't have her BFF either, but her BFF was literally responsible for it all so that's dead on arrival.

Edited January 8, 2020 by KingOfHearts

Shanna Marie · January 9, 2020

The tricky thing about a Wishverse type story is that the wish reality has to be something the audience wants to leave, unless you're planning on blowing up the premise of your show and just moving into this entirely different reality. Even if life is better for the characters in the other reality, it can't be better for the audience or they'll want the series to stay there and wonder why you did the original reality in the first place. And, in most cases, it has to be a reality the characters want to leave so they can get back to normal, so that they'll actually do something to set things right.

On Buffy, Buffy wasn't the one making the wish, so she wasn't the one learning the "careful what you wish for" lesson about the world turning into a hellhole. The weird thing on OUAT is that it was sort of Emma's wish, but not something she actually wished, so it was a punishment for her both in the "be careful what you wish for" sense and because it was doing something to her that she didn't actually want by taking her away from her real friends and family and busting up her relationships (since Wish Hook wasn't a viable romantic prospect for her). Plus, although Regina not casting the curse really should have been a good thing, since it would have prevented a lot of suffering for a lot of people, they weren't willing to show it as a good thing because Regina. So we ended up with this weird muddle that didn't make a lot of sense, their usual mutually exclusive things -- Emma grew up as a princess with her family, a terrible fate she has to escape!

One show that did something similar with their Wishverse story was Haven, about that other weird little coastal town in Maine. In that show, a lot of people in the town have various "Troubles," which are part curse, part superpower, and the heroine is immune to them. The town is kind of a mess due to these things, which have gone on for generations. Then someone who has a wish Trouble absentmindedly wishes that the Troubles had never come to town after his wife is killed in a Trouble-related incident. Our heroine is the only person (other than the wisher and the villain, who's also immune) who's aware of the shift in reality. She finds herself in a safe, prosperous town where her friends' lives have gone in a totally different direction, without their own Troubles or their families' Troubles that have affected them. She finds that her boyfriend, a tough, terse cop, is a sweet, goofy doctor -- who has a wife and daughter. It hurts her, but she's happy for him getting to have the things she knows he wants but feared he'd never be able to have. She's actually willing to let things stay this way because even though she's lost her friends (no one remembers her), she believes their lives are better. It's the villain who wants to take things back to the way they were, and she tries to stop him, but she fails. That struck a balance where the audience wants things to go back to normal because the Wishverse is boring even though it's better for the characters, but it's also sad for the main character and we want her to be happy, so it's bittersweet. We get to see another side of all these people and what their potential was (and some of those aspects of the characters end up coming out in the real world as the series progresses). It's a tertiary character's wish that sets it off, so the heroine is just dealing with it, and she's not the one trying to get back. She's trying to stop the villain from ruining everything. Even when the characters are "weaker" because they haven't been through adversity, their core selves shine through in a crisis. The doctor may be a bit of a dork who doesn't know what to do with a gun, but he rises to the occasion and makes an effort when someone else's life is at risk. There's no implication that he's a worse person because he hasn't been through the hell that shaped him in the real world.

That doesn't translate so easily to OUAT because in that show, the heroine was an outsider who wasn't really part of the alternate reality and her own history wasn't changed, so it's not like Emma, who would have experienced an entirely different life. But they could have had someone else in town wish that the curse hadn't been cast, and maybe Emma, who doesn't remember her other life (because reality has been temporarily altered, not an entirely separate world created, which makes no sense) is trying to save the kingdom while Rumple is desperately trying to get the curse cast, or maybe he's the one who's aware, thanks to his Dark One powers, that this is all wrong and he wants it to go back to the way that seems right and Emma is fighting him.

However it goes, it only works if they really take it seriously and not treat it as a joke. There can be humor, but they needed to think through how things would have worked. There should have been no Henry, since Baelfire wouldn't have been in that world. The Charmings should have had many other kids. Emma wouldn't have been an idiot because Snow and Charming would have brought her up to learn to take care of herself. If it's an altered reality and not a separate world, Regina can't kill the Charmings. And then after everything is set back to normal, Emma needs to have some emotional aftereffects, aware of what might have been, what she missed out on, and that should affect the way she sees Regina.

Camera One · January 9, 2020

36 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

And then after everything is set back to normal, Emma needs to have some emotional aftereffects, aware of what might have been, what she missed out on, and that should affect the way she sees Regina.

And this is why A&E would never do it. They're going to push the Emma/Regina and Snow/Regina BFF agenda even if it's a square peg in a round hole that they created.

Heck, you'd think after seeing Regina burn her mother alive in the 3B finale, that should affect the way Emma sees Regina.

Speakeasy · January 9, 2020

9 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

The tricky thing about a Wishverse type story is that the wish reality has to be something the audience wants to leave, unless you're planning on blowing up the premise of your show and just moving into this entirely different reality. Even if life is better for the characters in the other reality, it can't be better for the audience or they'll want the series to stay there and wonder why you did the original reality in the first place. And, in most cases, it has to be a reality the characters want to leave so they can get back to normal, so that they'll actually do something to set things right.

On Buffy, Buffy wasn't the one making the wish, so she wasn't the one learning the "careful what you wish for" lesson about the world turning into a hellhole. The weird thing on OUAT is that it was sort of Emma's wish, but not something she actually wished, so it was a punishment for her both in the "be careful what you wish for" sense and because it was doing something to her that she didn't actually want by taking her away from her real friends and family and busting up her relationships (since Wish Hook wasn't a viable romantic prospect for her). Plus, although Regina not casting the curse really should have been a good thing, since it would have prevented a lot of suffering for a lot of people, they weren't willing to show it as a good thing because Regina. So we ended up with this weird muddle that didn't make a lot of sense, their usual mutually exclusive things -- Emma grew up as a princess with her family, a terrible fate she has to escape!

The thing with 'Once' is it really doesn't lend itself to a prospective AU episode, because a dystopian AU that has to be reversed would always look at least s bit like a rehash of Season 1, and the Normal Happy and Boring AU is really hard to fit in when the first curse was for the characters to be normal and boring. Normal Happy and Boring for these characters has them being Kings and queens and heroes in a magical land of fable and myth!

So it would inevitably be frustrating if it was taken seriously because a continued Enchanted Forest would be a fascinating and exciting place! But it's one that they couldn't stay in because it would annihilate the central relationships of the story: no Henry, which in turn means no real connection between Emma and Regina, no weird relationship between Emma and her same age parents, no pretense that Rumpelstiltskin would see any of the other characters as more than tools to be opportunistically put to work. Hook and Zelena might become significant to the rulers of Wishaven-but there's certainly no guarantee and I can't see them becoming part of the family (and let's remember Killian Jones the pirate fell for Emma Swan the bounty hunter, Princess Emma is likely to be a very different woman).

So the best thing might actually be to do what they did and cleave it off into its own reality, to be periodically visited of the series went on. But doing that in a satisfying way would require putting some serious thought into the cosmology of this world.

Shanna Marie · January 10, 2020

13 hours ago, Speakeasy said:

Normal Happy and Boring for these characters has them being Kings and queens and heroes in a magical land of fable and myth!

So it would inevitably be frustrating if it was taken seriously because a continued Enchanted Forest would be a fascinating and exciting place! But it's one that they couldn't stay in because it would annihilate the central relationships of the story

I think that's the key, the emotional investment in the relationships. Of course a non-cursed Enchanted Forest would be a great setting for stories, since that's where most of the flashbacks come from. If we were starting from scratch, we'd love to see that series. But the thing that would make seeing the non-cursed version bittersweet is that we'd lose those relationships we're invested in. Princess Emma might be happily married to the king next door, and they might even have had an exciting and romantic courtship, but we didn't see it, and what we're invested in is her relationship with Hook. Some of us might think Regina deserves to be old and lonely in exile, but for a lot of viewers, they're invested in her redemption and in the relationships she has with Emma and Snow. That's what would make the audience want to go back to "normal" even if this new reality is better for the characters in a lot of ways and even if it would be a cool setting for stories. You could have a series based in this new reality, but it's not the series we signed up for and are emotionally invested in.

23 hours ago, Camera One said:

They're going to push the Emma/Regina and Snow/Regina BFF agenda even if it's a square peg in a round hole that they created.

Heck, you'd think after seeing Regina burn her mother alive in the 3B finale, that should affect the way Emma sees Regina.

And that's pretty much the show's downfall. The one thing that would have made the series dramatically better and that would have had a massive ripple effect is to have allowed the characters to have at least slightly realistic reactions to Regina. There would have been a lot more story logic and the heroes would have been a lot more relatable and three-dimensional. Them being forced to act like no one really would made them rather flat.

That doesn't mean she had to be tortured and executed for her crimes, but Emma coming back from seeing the devastation of the Enchanted Forest and seeing glimpses of the life she should have had and realizing who was at fault shouldn't have come back and immediately invited Regina to a potluck. They might have been glad Regina was willing to sacrifice herself to stop the failsafe, but they still should have been upset that she was planning to use it to kill them all and would have if she hadn't been caught in it, too. Henry shouldn't have gone just about directly from being held prisoner by Regina's vines to wishing he'd never brought Emma to town so he could have stayed with Regina and then a TLK. Emma coming back from seeing Regina in full Evil Queen mode and seeing her execute her mother shouldn't have immediately started begging Regina to be her friend and groveling for saving Marian. Robin should have been horrified to learn that he was dating the woman who had taken his wife away from him in the first place. What kind of weirdo would have actually been torn in that situation? The series would have been a lot better if Regina's redemption had been more gradual and more earned, if she'd had to gradually build/rebuild relationships, and if people she'd harmed had been actually allowed to be angry about it.

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