How has this season been awful?

Well since True North is probably one of my top three episodes ever i am not sure that we will be seeing eye to eye. What has been good about this season? It has been illogical. The characters are inconsistent. None of the good guys had a character arc. They overdid it with Regina. They made her a complete psycho, even using magic on Henry, and then the family is still hanging out with her. It is ridiculous. The characters say one thing in one episode and it is completely dropped and they are saying something completely different a few episodes later. The show just doesn’t make sense anymore.

None of the good guys had a character arc.

Disagree. Let’s take Emma as an example. She started this season not wanting to really be a family with Snow and Charming. She was too freaked out about it. She was also really freaked out about using her magic, acknowledging that she is a magical being. In 2×03 she cracked a little bit and let Snow know that she’s never had someone putting her first and it was scary for her. By the end of this season she willingly used her magic to save the town, knowing that she could do it. And she called Snow and Charming mom and dad, something Emma never would have done.

They overdid it with Regina. They made her a complete psycho, even using magic on Henry, and then the family is still hanging out with her.

Maybe in the real world but this show exists in a magically constructed universe where hope and redemption are REAL and we have to exist in that universe. This show is all about hope and redemption and Regina and Rumple were always going to make mistakes and stumble along their way, and they should: they have a lot to pay for. But in this show, family is the most important thing. It’s at the center of the entire show and when you have mythical characters that are larger than life they are capable of doing extraordinary things that we cannot: like forgivenss for crimes that we deem unforgivable. That’s a fairy tale.

The show just doesn’t make sense anymore.

Forgive me, but I don’t understand this. I know there are holes but I trust H and K to explain them, and if they don’t I can talk with my fellow Oncers and come up with a satisfying solution.

I look forward to what happens next. I think S3 is going to be exciting and emotionally driven and have huge developments for our characters, every last one of them.

I think there are some threads that are dangling right now, but so far they’ve been pretty good about picking up loose threads later on and making them fabulous (with rare exceptions). Some of the dangling has felt extreme this season (and things like just dropping Whale and Red almost completely kinda hurt…especially knowing that Red’s pretty much gone for the next year at least now), but that doesn’t mean that in the scope of the show it’ll be awful. This time last year, we could’ve been going, wait, why didn’t Rumple ever use his favor, or all kinds of other things that got addressed this season.

And although they DO make us fill in a few of the gaps between scenes with particular characters (how does Grumpy know about Lacey, for example–see my apologetics post elsewhere), I don’t think they’ve been too inconsistent with the characters. The characters are dynamic.

I do wish that they had spent a little more time on Belle because she’s my fave and I had expected to see a lot more of her than we got this season. She also had a fascinating SB story to tell; we didn’t get a whole lot on what Belle’s experience in the assylum was like or how that affected her, nor did we get anything really from amnesiac Belle (and that did feel a little inconsistent–in two scenes she’s freaking out, in three she’s calm and dealing–so what changed? What was setting her off and why?), and NOTHING about the Charmings actually trying to keep her safe (that annoyed actually). It didn’t have to be much, but just a little more than we got. And I think it would have helped continuity if Rumple had gone to see her sometime in the apparent week that happened between guard-dogging and his nightmare. That just felt odd–what did he do all week if he wasn’t trying to make it up to Bae and wasn’t trying to fix Belle? (and it uined my headcanon when they made it clear that he hadn’t been to see her all that time, AND made it clear that about a week had passed.)

But I’m obsessed with Rumbelle and Belle’s character and the episodes that were centric to either Rumple or Belle were all amazing if heartbreaking. So even with the little nitpicky things, I’m pretty happy with the show.

Won’t be if Belle winds up in the same position as Ruby next season, though. Adam’s tweets suggest that won’t happen, but they did put her in a precarious position by leaving her off that ship. It’s either going to be epic (adventures with Bae!) or…let’s not think about it. I’ll need cookies and hugs 🙁

For me, the show is on the tipping point of the Eight Deadly Words: “I don’t care what happens to these people”. (Ref: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EightDeadlyWords)

Season one had the ongoing tragedy — I mean that in the sense of good literary tragedy — of the town with amnesia. That made every victory in either timeline bittersweet. With season two, the characters have lost much of their complexity, and flashbacks now operate more like disjointed background information than like parallel storylines.