This half-season has been FUN? Hardly.
Macy, welcome! I am starting to forget who all is in the tent with me and I LOVE it. Come over to the optimistic side, we have cookies!! (Okay okay – the cookies are RG’s and in the foyer available to everyone, but you can bring them into the tent with you :p)
Head in the tent of doom but heart in the tent of optimism… sounds about right. Despite the fact that I am apparently Tent President, I DO oscillate a ton, but I just keep ending up back in the Tent.
I want to pick out a couple of things you said and expound on them –
…storywise there are more hints and foreshadowing for SF than there ever have been for CS. These can’t have been there by accident…
I think it was a tweet by JMo, back when someone asked about the 8:15, that explained there were no coincidences. The show is patterned after Lost, and I have learned quickly that certain items appear and certain turns of phrase, they are not accidents. To harp on my current fav, you don’t *accidentally* have a kid ASK for the keys so that he can steal his Mom’s car, when his parents’ backstory is that of car thief parents who discussed asking for the keys. It’s an intentional thing. The question is, why do these things pop up? As they plot out the seasons and episodes, they are either forward-planning (putting a reference in intending to use it in the future) or culling backwards, looking for history to pop into the scenes. Price of Gold is obviously forward-planned; they plotted Tallahassee/the Neal-Emma backstory and littered it through S1. Things like the Henry carthief moment are culled backwards. But the bus reference? I’m not sure – my guess would be it just happened to fall in that 2×15 scene, and someone grabbed it and pulled it into 3×19 as more than happenstance. But still, they took the time to do that, and that’s A Thing.
And it got me wondering “when was the last time she seemed like Emma?” and that’s when it hit me and I really understood: before 315.
This is a brilliant point. It’s one that has occurred to me, too, but I don’t think has ever been discussed. Emma smashes stuff down, that’s what she does. Aside from immediately after, we haven’t seen her react to his death. We saw her react in Neverland, so we know how she “should” react but we just get… nothing. I was thinking after 3×19 that she just seems… flat to me. There are no peaks or valleys to her emotions; the closest she has gotten to any sort of emotion is snapping at Henry. She NEVER snaps at Henry, never ever. She could have slapped him and I think he would have been less hurt.
I don’t know if they are delaying her reaction by using her characteristic of burying things down, or if we are supposed to be reading her flatness as a subtext of grief and they never plan to handle it. But she is definitely off, so so so walls up right now – the closest I can think of her being this walls-up is in the opening scenes of the Pilot, with Ryan, where she is just ruthless and badass and mean and doesn’t give a crap. She’s got so much pent up hurt she slammed the guy’s head into his steering wheel for no reason, really. She’s had walls-up since then, certainly, but since Henry’s been around the max wall height has been lower. Until now. They’re higher even than they were in Neverland, but that makes sense – seeing your love fall through a portal alive and “knowing” he’s dead is not the same as having him die in your lap. Especially not with all of the guilt and responsibility that, as you said, comes between Echo Cave and the magical separation.
I’d just like to see Emma have a good breakdown cry over this. Seriously, you don’t witness a death – ANYONE’S death, let alone your love and child’s father… even if you want to say she was over him, he was still her first love and child’s father – and have NO reaction. It’s ridiculous. Weep, child! Perhaps they’re setting her up to go off the rails, I dunno. I doubt it, but that would be more consistent than what we are getting. Anyways. Just wanted to say you’re not alone in this thinking. I’d love to hope that we’ll see it dealt with in the next three episodes, but in all honesty, I’m more hopeful for MO322 than Emma handling her grief. Maybe – maybe – after the WWW is gone, she’ll take a moment to breathe and deal, but I’m not hopeful. They don’t get to deal with their emotions in Storybrooke anymore, it’s just one plot point after another.
Cause this story needs some mending & a better happy ending...