They planned S1 and S3A well, there was a good build up and a lot of pay off in both seasons, I think when they decided to do the show: Snow White, Rumplestiltskin and Peter Pan were always their top stories they wanted to do on the show. S1 was Snow White, S2 was passing time till Peter Pan rights were available, S3 Peter Pan.
This is not even remotely true. They did not plan Neverland from the beginning.We know that to be true because they said they had another plan for Season 3 and changed it at the last minute. They may have always wanted to do Neverland characters, but they always wanted to do a bunch of stories. Neverland isn’t special in any way anymore then they wanted to do Wonderland characters or Sleeping Beauty characters or any of the other stuff they have done.
After that, after the main storylines for each character were resolved: Snow and Charming finally together, Rumple finding his son and doing the right thing and being brave at the end, Emma having a second chance at being Henry’s mom, Regina realizing her mistakes, learning to let go of Her son because that’s what’s best for him and sacrificing her happiness by helping other – mirroring the pilot, the curse was undone and the fairytale characters returned to be only stories. This is what they planned for the story, this is when the story ended. After that what we got was subpar, ships, rushness, Frozen, millions of characters, infantilized characterization, cheap unplanned twists for the sake of shock value only, etc… – Everything just seems unplanned – which it is, they just want to keep their job, which I get, I don’t have a problem with that, but they should just stop lying about everything just to make excuses for their lazy writing, they should just stop talking and avoid social media.
Everything has been unplanned since mid season 2 when they tossed out their plan and decided to do Neverland, everything has been unplanned since they randomly kept Hook even though he was supposed to be in only one episode and that’s it. This show has been a mess for awhile. This season they had clearly not planned the end when they wrote the beginning.
Like I said, they planned Neverland, but didn’t know when they’ll do it because of copyrights issue. I agree that once they had the chance, they tossed everything away (Cora suddenly defeated midseason and not at the season finale like it should) in order to do it.
Hook was definitely not ment to be just in one episode, at least not how The Crocodile presented it.
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