Reply To: Emma + Baelfire = Swanfire

[kfchimera]

I felt frustrated with the episode and it was further fueled by my internet dying out.  Even getting a $14 discount is not cheering me up over it, because the feeling are now somewhat solidified in my mind, both for the show and the quality of my internet company.  Since we cancelled cable our service has been consistently intermittent.  I cynically feel they are doing this to keep making us call them so they can try to upsell us (as they do EVERY time).

Ahem, rant aside, I am getting the same taste I had with Heroes Season 3.  It felt like a cheap device to hit a reset button on all the development, combined with a giant sidestep for a lot of mythology questions in the show.

What happened to the Darlings?  They are hundreds of years out of time but were not (Adam said) from a fictional land.  They met Emma.  Would they not during an entire year call or write or try to find out a thing about how Neal was doing?  Wendy spent hundreds of years in a cage for Bae.  They suffered enough, I know but it bothers me as a loophole.   Not even a postcard (even August “selfish puppet” Booth did that much)?

I also disliked the flashbacks as unnecessary rather than present day development of those same points, which would have been more meaningful.  Why did we need to see Smee, only to make it seem confusing as if Hook and Smee just got off the boat, even though we know Tink arrived hundreds of years later timeline wise?

Then we already knew Hook’s driving motives about his love or revenge–we saw him almost die for Milah, and we saw him willing to die for his revenge.  So all we learned there was that Tink knew that about him, and that could have come up in a present day scene, with Neal overhearing it.  Then Neal could have pulled Hook aside, and it would have been a bonding moment between them.  That Neal, even though he loves Emma and always will, wants her to be happy and if Hook loves her that deeply, he just wants Hook to know that either way, Henry is going to have Neal in his life.

That “the sake of the boy” doesn’t mean anything far as who Emma’s romances will be, because in the 21st century, we’ve worked out things like visitation–I don’t know, they could write better dialog on the point.  I just feel it could have reinforced the idea that if CS is what is to happen, that on some level, Neal and Hook actually respect and care about each other, as well as Emma enough that all three can manage to see past the awkward twists of relationships in the past.  So if they don’t mind then I don’t mind, because it is no longer this character “winning” by making the others unhappy–it is that on some level, they all want each other to be happy –just as with Regina loving Henry, despite all the messed up things that happened, she is sort of at peace and giving Emma this gift of forgetting all the pain, rather than wanting her to be miserable or even in the least happy about Snow being separated from her daughter again.  That was character growth for Regina, and wonderful to see, if painful, but the ONLY character who I felt really had that.

Rumple’s flashback was pointless too–just a fan service Skin Deep call-back–I would (as not a very intense Rumbeller at all, just someone who roots for them) have preferred a present day scene of Belle telling Rumple she’s worried about leaving him alone with Pan–not because he might do something evil but because he might not be able to do it.  It just would have been interesting to think she’s worried about him loving someone who doesn’t deserve it because they don’t love him in return  (as he has a history of doing, with Milah and Cora).

Then Rumple saying to her, even if something happens, he’s already had his happy ending because he has the love of people and he knows he is deserving of it.  Then Belle saying something about wanting a happy  ever after–and he could say even if he dies, he knows she will be there for his son.  I don’t know, just something connecting the dots between the fact Rumple wanted to be a good father, but even more, than having the experience of it for himself, that it was about making sure his child would have someone to love HIM–the same thing Neal did for Henry when letting go of Emma I suppose.    It would mean so much for Belle to know Rumple’s thinking of her as family to his son, and counting on her to “look after” Neal (even though yes, he’s older than her tehcnicallly and its funny).  So to look after each other and be family–it just would have been more romantic to me than the Skin Deep call-back of Belle seeing through Rumple’s brusque manner. Then Belle could have said to Rumple he’s being pessimistic, the prophecy is past.

Instead, I just felt annoyed with the scene where she falls down and no one pays attention to her in her grief, not even Neal.  He’s in shock, a mix of pride that his father conquered the selfish-self-preservation, and disbelief that he’s losing him so fast.   I understand that, but it was the writers once again not connecting dots.

Now reading through all the observations I realize there were more SF things than I thought the first time round, but it still read very much ‘CS is on deck” to me, which I knew they wouldn’t tilt the score all the way to one ship or the other.   They want to have people return in the spring, but I almost felt they’d gone so far CS that it was whiplash from the episode before.

I agree that it means a lot that Emma went to NY, that the song Charley’s Girl is playing as that is the song Neal played on his ipod in his first scene.  I also think it is true that Neal might think the reason Emma did not show at lunch was Hook, and therefore agree to let Hook wake Emma.  Yet it still strikes me as potentially letting these writers end-run around the messy history of Hook without the same for Neal.  Now Emma will get to know Hook as “an old love fighting to free her memories”, but she will have lost all the positive things she learned about Neal who is reset to “that jerk who left me holding stolen property”.

Now we know that the writers intended to revisit the reasons Neal left and how Emma ended up in jail.  I thought it would involve Pan being part of the reason he had to steer clear, blood-magic and all, plus the potential that Emma’s death could break the curse–seems anti-climactic to get into now, so doubt they will, so if it comes up, I think it will because of Emma’s memory reset.  So maybe Neal will get a second chance to explain why he left, how he never stopped loving her, but was afraid of being rejected, but how he almost died and knew they still loved each other, that they would be together–and meanwhile, far as Hook, since Happy endings aren’t what we think, his isn’t either as he thought, happiness with Emma, but something else yet to be revealed. .