5 X13 LABOR OF LOVE … Favorite or Least Favorite Moments

Overall: 6/10

Liked:

– Hercules and Snow in flashbacks.  I thought both actors did very well and it was super cute.  And I actually wanted the kiss in the end.  I also liked that we finally learned how Snow got good at shooting arrows and it was nice to see her struggle at first.  We had never really gotten this time period with Snow before and I enjoyed it.

– Cruella was amazing as always.  Her motives are interesting in that I like them better than what Pan’s plans are.  And it gets Henry back into the story and back to potentially being a relevant author.

– Hades and Emma meeting.  I continue to enjoy Greg Germann in this role.

Mixed:

– Cerberus….CGI was fine, but once again the writers built up these monsters like they are the most ferocious things…and then they don’t deliver by the end of it.  They tried making it act really dangerously (all the effects with the beast crashing through the apt and what not), but when it came time to kill it, way to easy.

Disliked:

– MEG WAS HORRIBLE

– Is Henry really going to fall for this?  I like Cruella’s plan, but come on.  Nobody blames Emma for killing her.  No one labels her a murderer.  If Henry falls for this, uhhhhhh.

Overall, I liked this more than I thought I would.  It was less filler than I anticipated.  But Meg, Cruella’s ridiculous reasoning and Henry not calling her out on it and then lying to Robin, and somehow Meg being able to move on with Herc after just meeting him, really brought this episode down for me, despite enjoying Hercules and Snow in the flashbacks.

I just realized there was some “Go The Distance” tune in the episode. Usually, I found those things really nice, now it is just annoying.

Ok, finally got to watch this. All in all, this was a perfectly adequate episode, but also utterly forgettable.

Liked:

Regina’s lines were on point and hilarious. She consistently has some of the best dialogue in the show, but at some point this “Regina’s there to deliver the snark” role is going to exhaust itself. So far, though, it works fine.

Snow finally renouncing her identity as MM, with an added quip about the uselessness of Hallmark motivational speeches. Finally! Maybe she can also ditch the heinous MM fashion, while we’re at it.

Cruella’s back!

Hades. I think so far I’m enjoying how the actor plays him.

Mixed:

I didn’t really mind the Herc storyline, but I’m not crazy about what they did to Megara. Did the writers decide they’d reached their strong women quota, and that any new female character they introduced from here on has to be a helpless damsel in distress?

The medals for Hercules’s labors is what would happen if a quarters collection and a video game achievements system had a love child.

Let me get this perfectly straight then: the pen is alive, and a magical entity, and is the epitome of unfinished business, because… why? Because it has to be used? Because it has a specific story to write and it hasn’t written it? Because it didn’t want to die? And why does Cruella suddenly have great insight into the nature of the pen? I’m putting this in mixed because at least we now have a story for Henry, and something for him to do, which marginally justifies why he got dragged along to the UW. But still, this is just a little silly.

Disliked:

Ham-fisted rehashing of the “try try again” message. There are better, more subtle ways to do this.

Total lack of explanation, even foreshadowed, about why Hades is torturing Hook (or Megara for that matter). Actually, Megara and her connection to Hercules at least makes sense, since it seems that Hades has a bone to pick with his bro (and hence his offspring). So far my understanding is that Hades is a kind of mid-level bureaucrat at an institution like an other-worldly DMV, presiding over what is essentially a waiting line before whatever comes next. His goal, as it appears, is to maximize the amount of people stuck in said waiting line because… well, I suppose because it augments his sense of power and self-importance. This seems odd, though — unless a lot of people don’t have unresolved business when they die, Limbo-Brooke should be majorly overcrowded. Seriously, where is everybody? Anyway, Hades for some reason doesn’t actually want anyone to move on, so they run about depressed, doing whatever repetitive things they’re doing, and unable to move out of the UW. Or something like that. But then why focus on Hook and torture him? For the lulz? Myeh. Anyway, so far my biggest gripe with this half-season is that the world building is limping along in a way that’s confusing rather than intriguing.

Here is one of the issues that Lily Sparks raised about this episode and entire arc in general; I happen to agree.

Now look, just gonna be real here for a sec. Feel free to disagree! This country is a rich tapestry of volatile opinions and this is not different. It’s my personal opinion that a series jumps the shark when the main characters go to visit an afterlife in a dream sequence. I believe that was true for True Blood, for The Vampire Diaries, for Supernatural, and so on. Because once you take away the mystery from your series’ conceptualization of death, you take away all stakes and/or the idea of death as a real threat to the characters. For example, when characters “die” on Once Upon a Time, we now imagine them in reddish Storybrooke, wearing sweaters and eating burgers (maybe slightly dryer, but still). It’s not exactly the same stakes as when death is what it is to real people: the great unknown. So the idea that Hook was threatening Hades with non-death or death plus or whatever… felt kind of stake-less? They would find a solution to this later that was very elegant—I’ll get to that at the end of the review—but in this moment, all I could think was “Right. Conceptualized afterlife added onto premise is just never a good storyline.”

Source: TV.com

Do you think showing the Underworld is a “jump the shark” moment of any fantasy show?

Do you think showing the Underworld is a “jump the shark” moment of any fantasy show?

No. Fantasy operates with a lot of archetypes and tropes. The Hero for instance. Whether literal or metaphorical, the hero tackles the Underworld/concept of death and is victorious, thus signaling his status as the hero. It can be powerful and very well done–just look at Harry Potter with their metaphorical crossing the threshold to the “Underworld” in book 1 or the more literal Limbo-like status of King’s Crossing in Book 7. Like Lily said, it’s about the stakes. The stakes are extraordinarily high in HP (of Buffy or SPN or even their katabasis moments of fantasy literature, like ASOIAF or the more urban and deconstructed world of the Magicians).

The problem isn’t the appearance of the Underworld and a lord of said place—that is a pretty natural situation for OUAT given their adoption of the hero myth. The problem is that the stakes in the Underworld haven’t been made big and bad yet–Hades just sort of blandly threatens them (while being charming, yes) and Cerberus is too easily killed–and at the end there’s a bridge to Heaven.  It also doesn’t help that the world building is fairly unimpressive and leave a lot of questions open.