What if the show had ended after season 3A?

For me, this show has a terrible legacy. It is generally thought very badly of outside of the people who make money off pretending that it is good. I do think that Going Home would have been a better ending then what we have, without a doubt. I don’t know that it was a spectacular ending though. Season 2 was still a mess with Regina waffling back and forth between murderer and Emma, Snow, and Charming using her as a babysitter. That and Greg and Tamara. Also, a lot of the Neverland arc was boring until they got into the Pan, Rumpel, Neal, Henry stuff, so it isn’t as if the show was awesome until that moment.

There was a lot of really great stuff in those early seasons though. The Emma and Snow stuff in the Enchanted forest in Season 2, as well as their stuff in Neverland was awesome. The Emma/Henry/Neal/Rumpel episodes was awesome. The Cora stuff was awesome. I just think that the over reaching arc was terrible and clearly changed at the last minute to keep Hook alive. The whole fail safe, let’s chance destroying the whole town to save Regina, Snow taking that risk, Emma agreeing, was complete crap. Then when they rewrote Hook for Season 3 and suddenly Emma is randomly kissing him when before she pretty much though he was misogynistic trash that was in her way that she constantly had to keep arresting or locking up somewhere.

There is a lot of good in those early seasons, but there is a lot of bad too. Of course, the legacy would be better in that the show hadn’t at that time ruined Emma. The protagonists of the show Emma and Snow were still liked at that time, at least in some capacity. That was before they really wrote Emma liking Hook. That was before they quit writing for the mother/daughter relationship with Emma and Snow. That was before they dropped Rumpel’s connection to the family and his entire reason for what he was doing by killing Baelfire.

I watch this show because i like the sword and sorcery genre and there are complicated female main characters on this show, but the writing is just terrible. Even in Season 1 there were major writing errors. For me though, this show was never going to be remembered like Buffy. It would have been better thought of if it ended at 3A, mostly because it would have been a cliffhanger, but not thought of as like a cult classic. This show was never going to be that.

Season 3A felt more than a bit claustrophobic, with a small cast and seemingly endless wandering through darkly forested sound stages. I think that’s when the show lost touch with Storybrooke as a character — which was an important source of the show’s charm — and never recovered. If they’d kept Storybrooke on-screen during the early part of 3A, and returned the core cast to town a little earlier than they did, it would have been a good closing point.

I’d say Going Home, while not a perfect ending, would’ve left a much better legacy than what ultimately the show has become. I feel that the characters at that point in the series were still mostly on point and it could’ve been a bittersweet kind of happy ending. Emma’s happy ending is finding true love with her son. Rumple gets to find Bae and Belle and make some peace with them and then die a hero. Snow and Charming get their daughter back. Bae/Neal finds Emma and Henry and in some way their love heals both their hearts (Neal and Emma were very much alike with their backstories)…. it would’ve been a good ending.

Granted we have had several very good episodes in the seasons following 3a, but imo the overall narrative has been lacking and very particularly the characters have been incredibly inconsistent in the time since 3a. But I also think that the fact that I’m still watching the show after all the complaining I’ve done over the last four years speaks volumes for how well they wrote the first season and how deeply invested emotionally we all became with those original characters. So I’ll always thank the writers for that. Season one was amazing.