708 "Pretty In Blue" Favorite/Least Favorite Moments

The are still doing the same thing though that they have done in past seasons. They are plodding along, hiding things from the audience, just waiting for these big reveals as if these reveals are enough to keep the show interesting. The problem being they are not developing the characters.

Seriously, what do we actually know about Ella’s character, like real character, not cursed. She loves her daughter and being separated from her has caused a lot of stress. She thinks she killed Anastasia and that has scarred her. She willingly worked for Tremaine because of the guilt of what happened with Anastasia. She was tricked by Tremaine into trying to murder the prince. She will punch some guy and steal his motorcycle, so that she can more quickly get to the murder. She has some abandonment issues because of her mother leaving, but that was barely touched on. She is with the resistance, but they haven’t really done anything with that. She likes Henry, but she hasn’t been open and honest with him. There hasn’t been a lot shown between the two of them besides she can take care of herself in a fight.

Think about Emma now. She followed and arrested a guy because he wasn’t paying child support. That is her job, arresting criminals. She can take care of herself in a fight. She was lonely, but it scared her to death when Henry showed up in her doorway. She loved Henry, but she didn’t think she could be a good mother. She wanted to make sure Henry was safe with Regina. She would go toe to toe with Regina and Rumpel about what they are doing to other people that was wrong, about Henry, Snow, Ashley, Jiminy, Graham. She grew up in the system and the situation was neglectful if not downright abusive. Henry’s father left her and that caused trauma and she doesn’t want Henry to know. But when it came down to it, she is all punch back, be who you are, do the right thing. She took care of Henry even though it was scary. She became part of the town, took care of the people, because it was the right thing to do, because it was what she would do.

And that all came very quickly in the show. We are eight episodes in and i don’t feel like i know at all what Ella will do and i know very little about what happened to her to explain how she ticks. I knew very quickly that Emma would stand up for the little guy. Ella barely supports her own friends. She is constantly shown to be afraid of Tremaine in both worlds. I never thought Emma couldn’t hold her own against Regina or Rumpel. Part of it is because Ella is cursed and that has always been why Ella being cursed for a significant period of time was going to be a real problem for the show, but even in the Enchanted Forest she is shown to get walked all over. And now we are standing here with all the villains, Regina, Rumpel, Tremaine, Drizella, and Gothel, all of them except Hook, have their memories and none of the good guys do.

That is why what Regina and Rumpel are doing is more interesting then what Rogers is doing. That is why Drizella, Tremaine, Gothel, and even Alice who had her memories for a little bit, have become more interesting because we are actually learning something about them, whereas with Ella and Sabine and even Henry, they are all just cursed and their behavior is meaningless. Even the new Henry has not been developed properly at all in the Enchanted forest where it is actually him. Henry is just bland and weirdly attracted to Ella for seemingly no reason at all and has become somewhere between slightly boring to just annoying to me at this point.

They need to make me care about the characters and they need to do that by making me want to figure them out, by developing them, by showing us why Henry likes Ella, by showing her stand up for her friends and for Henry and for Lucy, not by showing her constantly getting walked all over by the bad guys.

I’ve counted:

1. Regina to Graham (heart control)
2. Zelena’s father to Cora (claimed to be a king)
3. Zelana to Robin (impersonating Marian)
4. Arthur to Guinevere (Sands of Avalon)
5. Mentions of Hook getting women drunk
6. This episode

There’s also the issue of Cora painting a lion tattoo on the SoN to fool Regina.

Maybe also Tamara to Neal. We don’t know what they did behind closed doors, but he was only an assignment as far as she was concerned.

I’m half and half with this episode….some good…some bad.

Rating: 5/10

Liked:

All of Alice.

Regina dumping Rogers cake…lol…classic Regina Mills.

Mixed:

Why are you here Nick?

Jacinda?!

Dislike:

I think just about everything else….this episode was a tad boring for me.

Best thing about this ep was the set for the Tea Party. Everything else was rather MEH.

More unneeded plot spaghetti through exposition with Ella’s sad family tale. Show me Ella’s life, stop telling it to me! It’s not helping bolster her character.

–Honestly, the Ella/her mother/the curse stuff would be more powerful if Ella wasn’t such a drag of a character (also if they would SHOW us this stuff!)

This needed to be a further back Ella flashback ep if they wanted to dump this bit of plot history on us. Just hearing a brief recap of what happened with Ella’s mother was pointless, it doesn’t make me feel any sort of connection to the story, or what Ella and her father went through. It’s the sort of story I could care about though, it could have served as a way to get us on board emotionally with Ella, but they botched the opportunity. Show us that flashback of Ella’s mother trying to get home, and instead ending up dying in Wonderland, and then maybe we’ll care about how sad it is that Ella lost her mother.

Instead of falling in love slowly over time, Henry and Ella have a necklace do the work for them! Geeeeeez, come on.

Lord knows that I’m fine with a necklace being a symbol of true love in this show, but the way they did this was infuriating. Maybe when they wrote it, they were anticipating that Henry and Ella’s love story would have come across more convincingly on the screen by now, so they thought this wouldn’t feel too early for magically glowing true love necklaces? But seriously though, now it just feels like they’re gonna full on fall in love because they saw the necklaces tell them to, and that just cheapens any genuine emotion that develops between them.

Nick is Jack? Jack a giant killer?

I was relieved that he wasn’t AdultBabyNamestealer like some of us had feared he would be. I was not relieved that he was confirmed as one part of a love triangle like some had feared he would be. I have to say though that a Giant Killer is actually a decent correlation to a lawyer, (provided someone is the right type of lawyer).

No one wants to be a Kathryn.

Actually made me LOL!