Jennifer Morrison, Ginnifer Goodwin, Josh Dallas preview ‘OUAT’s’ "Lost Girl

ABC’s Once Upon A Time has taken its core characters and given them all the same goal for at least the first half of the third season of the fairytale genre. In doing so, the show has allowed itself room to breathe while letting the audience linger with the characters more to see their internal struggles just as much as any outward journey. After all, it is what is inside that motivates and drives them, and in many cases, characters are harboring issues and feelings that affect their relationships, let alone efficiency. Perhaps the greatest offender here is Emma (Jennifer Morrison) and Mary Margaret (Ginnifer Goodwin), who have never really been able to hash out how they feel about being separated for so many years. While Mary Margaret is a genuinely optimistic character who always believed things would work out and her daughter would come back to her, Emma grew up in the real world– and a hardened one at that– and harbors a lot of tough feelings. “Lost Girl” is an episode for her to work through some inner demons and also deliver on a confrontation that many may think has been a long time coming.

“I think Neverland has posed a lot of interesting opportunities for Emma to be vulnerable,” Morrison said when LA TV Insider Examiner visited her on set in Vancouver.

“I’ve sort of approached it as Neverland has made Emma about ten years old, in terms of her emotional capacity. It sort of takes you back to your most prevalent time of damage in your life, and you kind of go back to that place and operate from that emotional level. So that’s what I’ve sort of done with Emma for the season so far, which is giving the opportunity to see so much more of her. She’s been so closed off and hardened to life because of what she’d been through that there was only so far certain emotions could be pushed with her, and now not only has she been through a tremendous amount, and she thinks she’s lost Neal, and all she’s concerned about is trying to save Henry’s life, and her whole family’s being threatened on this island…and all of these things. She’s also in a land where she can’t really have her guard up, so she’s highly emotional and highly volatile. Everything’s heightened for her…She’s sort of emoting as she realizes things. Everything is sort of very in the present for her from this point on in Neverland, for her emotionally. There’s not as much holding back or hiding things or covering her feelings. She sort of has lost her capacity to do that in Neverland, so everything is sort of raw and present for her.”

In Neverland, Emma is challenged to look inside of herself and finally admit what she is in order to find the literal path to get to Henry. While Emma initially thinks that means saying she’s the savior or the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming aloud will do the trick, there is something much more layered behind it– something she may have buried for many years in an attempt to just seem tougher than she was and move on. And being asked to confront it brings out a lot of feelings about herself but also her family situation.

“We have the confrontation that we’ve been waiting for since the curse broke. I mean, I wanted to address the dynamic between Snow and Emma in episode 201, and our– and I mean this sincerely– very thrilling and exciting and wonderful plot last year kept interrupting any and every conversation that we went to have about what had happened between us. [So] we never addressed abandonment issues and guilt, and the thing is, these boys– our creators; we call them the boys; they’re men– they write such rich relationships, especially between women that I was begging for the conversation that does come in episode 302. And you know what I found really beautiful about it, too, is how fucked up it is that Snow clearly has thought that there’s some magical number of times that she could apologize that would then make things right. Like ‘Once I get to time 101, maybe she’ll understand, and she’ll believe me, and she’ll accept me, and this can all be water under the bridge’, but what she comes to learn is that she’s being looked at in a very different way than she understood herself to be looked at by Emma and that something very different is going to have to happen for them to come together, and it’s heartbreaking,” Goodwin said.

“What Emma says in episode 301 is ‘You two are so annoyingly optimistic’, and Snow and Charming say ‘But that’s who we are’…and I think that up until this point it has been, and so I think that realizing that Emma needs something different from her than what Snow has understood she needed to provide is now forcing Snow to say ‘Can I even provide this? And is there some sort of ultimate optimism that can sustain me through this, or is this going to be, to a certain extent, a lost cause?’ And that’s something that we’re going to address for many episodes, and that’s something else I’m really excited about this season. Because last season was so action-packed, and we kept growing and growing and growing very quickly, because we’re now trapped in a world where we’re now forced to face ourselves and face our pasts, which is you know kind of the theme. It makes sense in that Neverland is a world of youth and so we have to look at the youthful parts of ourselves. And because we’re stuck together in this place and really thinking about those things, these conversations– these conundrums– are really going to be addressed in a much more thorough way over a number of episodes instead of things having quick solutions. There’s something more real about things we’re going through now, I feel.”

While the women in the Charming family are dealing with some very serious interpersonal issues, Charming himself (Josh Dallas) is facing something serious, too. Only unlike his wife and daughter, he will choose not to share or confide in his family or “Save Henry” team but rather keep the secret to himself. It is something that Dallas believes Charming is doing out of a sense of “honor and his integrity,” but it may prove to cause even more problems down the road.

“We all have obstacles, and all of our obstacles are ourselves, and I think definitely this is something Charming is wrestling with, and he’s going to come up in this episode this Sunday, he’s going to have a very big secret that’s going to be revealed to him, and only he knows. And this is will develop later on throughout the rest of the [first half of the season], but he’s going to find out something that is going to put his integrity into question, and he’ll be wrestling with how that works and what the consequences are for compromising his integrity. So yeah, he’s got a big secret,” Dallas said.

“And [how he handles it] I think it has to do with him not wanting to be a burden.”

But as all three of these actors and members of the Charming family pointed out, the focus and goal of the group who sailed to Neverland is to get Henry back, and any obstacle they encounter along the way– even if that obstacle is an internal one– will only strengthen their desires to be successful in their mission that much more.

Speaking especially for Emma, who took a leadership position in the season premiere and will continue down that road, Morrison said: “She’s already realized on as deep of a level as you can imagine that she wants to take care of her son and she wants to get him back and she wants to keep him safe, but some of her own experiences of her own emotions and some of the things she may not have realized about herself coming to the surface has only made it more important for her to get to Henry and to keep everyone on track so that does happen.”

http://www.examiner.com/article/jennifer-morrison-ginnifer-goodwin-josh-dallas-preview-ouat-s-lost-girl