Reply To: Emma + Baelfire = Swanfire

It’s completely unbelievable, Phee. (Erm. Cross-posted. The 180 is unbelievable. The headcanon is great!)

If this is ABC thing and CS is a mandate, I can understand that, and I can understand Neal needing to be dead for that to happen, I can hold A&E harmless for that. Where I do lay blame, though, is for how they opted to tell this story. You need CS by 322? Fine. How about you leave Neal dead after 221, or “dead” as I suppose the case was (even better,) and spend 22 episodes logically developing it as a love story? I still would not be pleased, but honestly, we would have been without the SF buildup in 3A, we would have been without Emma’s constant rejections of Hook that made CS send all the WRONG messages, and it could have been a gradual buildup that felt organic. That making out at the end of 322 could have been an “earned moment” that A&E were so fond of talking about. But instead, it was a 180, not just of the season but within the episode! It turned on its heel there at the end, for no other reason than to be exactly what it was. THAT part, I can and do fault the writers for. It wasn’t organic, it wasn’t earned, and there is no reason in the world it should have been.