We’ve talked a lot about Belle’s individual role in her thread so I’m not going to dwell on that but I think the overarching problem is not so much everyone’s individual storyline, despite what I wrote above, but A and E’s writing style and their notion of how to create drama: external violent magical mythology.
Think about S1. What made S1 so great? It was almost all internal drama: David and MM falling in love even though they were cursed, Emma getting ever closer to breaking the curse while simultaneously getting closer to Henry, the son she gave up; Regina trying to drive Emma out of town through various means and only going to magic at the last hour. The way the characters interacted with each other and with the world that wasn’t there’s.
But S2 and S3 has been external drama–GOAT, Cora/Hook, Peter Pan and the Home Office. All the internal beauty that made S1 what it was has been lost or rug swept. There is a lot of development for all these characters when they interact with each other. But A and E, IMO, seem to think that the best way to create watchable TV is to continuously throw more confusion, more plot twists, more family dysfunction on to the fire. I don’t know if they think they need to keep adding iconic characters to keep it interesting, if they have a list of “things Disney has done and therefore we need to do” but at some point you gotta say, “ok. No more mythology, no more lands, how about we let these characters work between themselves.” And the death–which will most likely occur at the hands of the WWW–is for the sake of this ONE story arc. A story arc that will end at 322 before–inevitably–the next big bad, next adventure to part unknown, the next show down. So the death might seem in story for the moment, but when those moments and those arcs fail to carry over, it seems pointless.
Graham is almost never mentioned. Cora hasn’t been brought up since her death. GOAT were totally rug swept. PP will get a passing mention and then be left in the shadows, belonging to S3A. And when Wicked dies–as we know she will because that’s how A and E deal with their big bads–she’ll be forgotten when the new one comes in.
All those deaths were important in the moment but how has it carried over? What emotional drama or drive has it given our cast? And that leads me too: when whoever dies in S3B, will they be forgotten just as quickly?