I think the thing that offends me the most about this show is that Disney/ABC allowed a show to use their canon, they allowed them to use the Disney names and the Disney clothing and the Disney songs even and lean on them in Ouat. That is unheard of and it might only be this one show that is allowed to do that. To treat the Disney versions as something we know about these characters and as far as i am concerned they completely wasted it.
In Season 1, they used our childhood memories of the Disney movies as sort of a backdrop for which they fleshed out their ideas. That was really interesting. It wasn’t a retelling of the Disney versions exactly, it was building upon those preconceived notions about the Disney versions. Like they didn’t have to explain who the mad hatter was or who Red Riding Hood is or who Jiminy Cricket is or who the dwarfs are, it was just known and then they tangled it all together and made it their own and made it more.
That just stopped at some point. I, actually, think it was Season 3A when they did just Neverland. They stopped tangling the stories all together and they stopped fleshing out from what we know and instead just rewrote the story. There are things i like about 3A. Pan, Rumpel, Bae, Tink, some good Emma and Snow, some good Henry being Pan, some good Regina in there even, but still it felt stilted. We knew they were going to escape. We knew that everyone was going to be fine and there was no tangling of Neverland with the other fairytales. It was all Neverland and that was it. Rumpel being Pan’s father was the only twist there and it was good, but it left a lot of filler going on that season.
This might be it. This might be the one chance that a tv show gets to use the Disney canon in this way and it just is so frustrating because of how badly this show is written. Just think if someone could have written like a multi generational, family oriented show with their new fairytale characters and incorporated that into the Disney canon in a cohesive and consistent and well written way, it would have been epic. If this show was internally consistent characterwise, world building wise, storywise it would have been remembered as one of those cult favorites and would still be talked about like Buffy in twenty years.
That is not going to happen now, in my opinion, and this might have been the one chance where someone is able to use the Disney in this way and it is just disappointing to me in every way. It is such a good idea and it was just so badly executed.