Yeah, i think there were things in this that maybe shouldn’t have been in the like second episode, but showing baby Lucy, showing Henry and Ella married, Rumpel acting weird, the introduction of Robyn, some of the curse stuff could have been introduced. I think that some of this felt more like setup to an arc, by opening all these questions, instead of a conclusion to an ark.
I think they could have had a scene with Gothel about the curse early on and still kept that Drizella was involved out of it. The problem being that the writers have no plan. They are literally writing as they go. They don’t know how the arc is going to end when they start writing the beginning, either that or the only thing they know is the beginning and the end and that is why the middle doesn’t fit.
I just know that before this season started the most important thing, in my opinion, was making sure they replaced the female protagonist and started new mysteries and i feel like a lot of this could have helped it. Instead, they spent the early part of the season trying to finish off last season.
I think the only mystery that was interesting this season was that Drizella was evil. A lot of people were assuming that Tremaine was Rapunzel and that Alice was Hook’s daughter pretty early on. The only mystery in that was that Gothel is Alice’s mother, but she has really just been like an egg donor. Gothel doesn’t seem to actually be involved with Alice in any way. I wonder if she even knows that Alice is her daughter.
It just really feels like there is information in here that they could have hinted at over the first five or so episodes that would have really helped it along. The first episodes were definitely the weakest of this arc. I can just see their failure to plan all over this episode.