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5A is the most sloppily written arc in all of OUaT. No doubt. I myself was asking those very same questions. There is a name for what they were doing.
To be fair, there are different writing styles — the whole plotter vs pantser debate (for example, Agatha Christie was allegedly a “pantser,” and didn’t actually know who the murderer would be until the last chapter of the detective story she was writing). I think these are different types of authorial styles, and one isn’t inherently worse than the other.
That said, it doesn’t take away from your point, which is that OUAT plotting has gotten horribly, insultingly lazy. I’d imagine a pantser would need to do a lot of editing work for plot holes, loose threads, and so forth, which in OUAT’s case isn’t done at all. So with each season, we’re getting sloppier and sloppier first drafts.
Which makes me wonder — clearly, ABC doesn’t care too much about the quality of this show, because the downward spiral has only gotten steeper with each season since S3. But don’t A&E care? I mean, it is their career. I don’t know if I quite understand how the shobiz industry works, but I’m assuming that eventually they’re going to move to a next project. Won’t a downtrend on a show and pretty forceful criticism from both the fans and the professional critics not hurt their chances at future funding? Or is OUAT still considered successful by the industry’s standards because, simply put, it still makes money?