408: Critical Analysis

I think they will have RumBelle separate and Rumple will have to work hard to earn back Belle’s trust.

I so want to see Rumple have to work hard to win Belle’s trust back…I’m scared they won’t show us that, though. I mean, we barely got any of that with the memory loss/Lacey plot at all and it could’ve been so much more than it was.

But I’m worried that they’ll either have Rumple give up on her (because he feels he doesn’t deserve her and she’s better off without him…I’d like to think in part he asked her to marry him to make HER happy, not just because it’s what he wanted) and go full on Dark One or have her go back to him without making him work for it.

The main problem with the amnesia/Lacey plot is that they had what could’ve been two potentially good plots but instead of picking one or the other, they tried to cram both into a short amount of time whilst other important plots were going on and didn’t give it enough screentime. 211-216 happen in such a short amount of time, they are literally consecutive events. From Lacey to ASOTM was literally 3 days.

I think initially Rumple will give up. He’ll lose hope and descend further into the darkness. However I think there will be something (perhaps a possible RumBelle baby??? They did have Charming’s line about Belle being “a natural” with Neal and she’s been doing a lot of babysitting for Snowing) that will give Rumple a spark of hope that all is not lost which will inspire him to pull himself out of the darkness and be a better man. Belle would still love Rumple so if she saw him really trying to change and be better, I think she would give him a second chance instead of just shooting him down without it seeming like she’s just rolling over and taking him back.

I wonder if the 11/11 split of the seasons has actually been detrimental to the storytelling of Once. Whilst it is nice to have an episode each week for 11 weeks (except AMA week), it feels like the writers are trying to shoehorn a season’s worth of story into half a season and as a result, characters aren’t being fleshed out beyond the role they play and characters aren’t being allowed to emote or even deal with something that happened before they have to jump from one crisis to another. Regular characters, such as Belle and Henry (and Neal last season) are MIA quite a lot of the time. Regina and Hook were even barely in a few episodes in 4A as the Frozen story took centre-stage. Whilst it is nice to have a break from some characters now and then, in the case of Hook and Regina who do tend to get the lion’s share of screentime alongside Rumple and Emma, for characters like Belle and Henry who are supposed to be regulars, their screentime is more like that of a recurring star not a regular. Elsa has been more of a regular than Belle and Henry so far this season.