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This episode felt a bit disjointed to me, but overall it was Ok-ish. Better, and less inconsistent that a lot of 5A.
Liked:
Cruella. Lol.
Hades is fun. But for the Greek god of the underworld, he sure seems rather Mephistopheles-like. Wandering around mutinous ships, striking deals, ensuring that he gets fresh souls…
Henry: “Moms…” That right there. SQ bait, but hey.
Regina. Her writing is consistently really good this half-season.
Captain Silver’s coat. It reminded me of Jefferson. I miss Jefferson.
Henry/David. Although, David: “May I think with you? So, what are we thinking about?” LOL!! That, in a nutshell, is David. But seriously, that was actually a really good scene.
Also, Henry and his realization with the pen. Yay for Henry.
Mixed:
I’m gonna try to think through the Liam/Emma/Hook/mutineers story, but maybe I’m reading it in a very particular way. So Liam points out, rightly, that, in saving Hook, Emma’s being selfish and completely inconsiderate of anyone but her own desires. But all this insight gets potentially annulled because it turns out Liam is a liar who made a deal with Hades to sacrifice his men in exchange of saving himself and his brother. In other words, he put his family first, at the expense of the crew of people for whom he became responsible the second he took command of the ship. (Similarly, Emma is de facto responsible for “her” crew of people she dragged to the Underworld with her). Yet, on the other hand, Liam makes the right choice in the end: Killian tells him that he must forgive himself — this, after all, is the thing imparted on Hook by Emma, who in turn gets it from Regina — but Liam, I think rightly, refuses this approach, and lets go. He then actively forgives his former crew members, who were about to execute him, and allow them to move on to their version of a better place. He even extends his forgiveness to Hook — in the shape of a kind of de facto blessing of Hook and Emma’s relationship. And here’s where I think the whole thing derailed. Because instead of taking Liam’s life as a lesson — misdeeds require atonement — Hook goes “Hey, everything Liam did was for me. Everything Emma did was for me. Oooh! That must mean I’m a great guy! Sure, I’ve screwed up, but if all these cool people are sacrificing others and themselves just to make sure I have a cushy life, I must deserve it”.
No, dude. You missed the point.
David’s reaction to Cruella. Sort of hilarious, but my, prudish and judgy much?
Disliked:
Emma. I’ve actually come to realize that I really dislike Emma. She’s become clingy and seemingly emotionally callous about anyone other than Hook, and defensive of anyone who isn’t affirming her 100% all the time. It’s little things, but cumulatively, they add up to create this impression of someone who is both shallow and judgmental. For example her flipping her fingers to fix Hook’s bruises early in the episode — it wasn’t framed as her healing his injuries, so much as restoring his looks. Or her little snarky comment about Henry being emo. I mean, you drag your teenager to “Hell” to save your boyfriend (but not said teenager’s dad), an “emo” response seems pretty darn mild to me. But it’s all about Emma and her discomfort. And her dislike of Liam: that bit of dialogue with Hook was sort of hilarious, as I remember it, it was something like “Hey, Liam doesn’t like me, I think there’s something wrong with him.” If that’s the Savior, the the SB crew is in real trouble.
#headdesk
[adrotate group="5"]Yeah, you guys make an excellent point. The second born deal leads us to conclude that either (a) Rumple is an idiot who, over 300 years, hasn’t learned the first thing about contracts or (b) that he knew all along, and failed to tell Belle — which borders on criminality (in the same way that withholding information about, say, one’s HIV status from a sexual partner does.)
Narrative wise, this second born child thing is a horrible, horrible idea in my opinion. Because so much of the character “development” is subservient to PLOT, and PLOT is subservient to the paradigm of the more scandalous and over-the-top the better, they’ve ended up with a real impasse. They either must rewrite Rumple’s character once and for all as an irredeemable sociopath: short of making him a genocidal maniac (oh wait, we have one of those) or a child abuser, I don’t know what more they can do to make the audience write him off. Or, alternatively, they take away the arguably only interesting/likeable thing about Rumple that’s left, which is his smarts, and make him into the worst kind of antagonist: evil and stupid. After Snow, this is arguable the worst example of character assassination I’ve ever seen on TV in recent years.
Ok, I suspect I’m going to be the dissenting voice on this, but… I don’t know. Human fertility is a fickle thing. So I don’t think that the fact that Rumple and Belle re-consummated their marriage, and that this resulted in Belle’s pregnancy under the circumstances is another symptom of how awful Rumple is. Horrid bad luck, in some ways, yes. But I think it’s unfair to pile Belle’s pregnancy into the betrayal as an added bonus. (And yeah, maybe this is because the show clearly wants its audience to see the pregnancy as the last straw/cherry on the cake/especially horrid thing that I find it so manipulative and am resisting the impulse to lump it together with the rest of Rumple’s bad behavior).
Yes, he should have told her. But in-story, one might imagine a spur of the moment thing where neither was thinking too clearly. And I think it needs to be taken in context of a long-standing sexual relationship anyway (I don’t think the show gives us any reason to believe they have/had a platonic marriage). If I were to think about the in-story explanation — and knowing that two people were married, and together for some time, even if the relationship is in hiatus, then you might assume that either (a) they have some long-standing and non-invasive form of contraception going on that on this occasion failed (Storybrooke has a medical facility after all) (b) they don’t, and are hence open to the possibility of pregnancy anyway or (c) they don’t think they’re fertile, so don’t worry about it (which, considering the age difference, Rumple’s DO condition, and the fact that over 300 years he hasn’t fathered anyone as far as we know, seems likely). We have no reason to think of any religious prohibition on either of their sides that would make their sexual relationship only procreative. So really, I think it’s a lot more realistic, story wise, to interpret the pregnancy as the result of bad luck (or bitter irony, maybe), rather than use it as retroactive justification for moral condemnation. It’s a separate issue, in my opinion. *shrug*
OK, where I live, if a boy snaps a girl’s bra on the playground, that boy would be expelled. It’s totally unacceptable, and it’s sexual harassment. Maybe this is why we don’t see eye to eye on this.
A corollary of this “he pulls your pigtails, so he must like you” logic is that it also does a disservice to boys. There is an assumption that comes with this that boys are doing this because they are emotional idiots, or somehow are socially stinted — but nothing needs to be done about this, because “boys will be boys”. In fact, being a ‘sensitive’ boy is socially penalized. So much of this rape culture business is also about the ways in which only a very narrow, rather toxic form of masculinity is cultivated (or allowed to develop), at the expense of other forms of gendered expression.
But how on earth do we even classify this? Because it’s such, to me, a deep level of betrayal because there was sex involved–or maybe, we should say intimacy involved since sex and intimacy don’t have to go hand in hand and moreover, it was reconciliation intimacy after a lengthy separation–that I have to call it *something.* Calling it problematic isn’t giving it the full weight that I do think it requires.
This is exactly what I was trying to put my finger on — that the problem is the intimacy more broadly defined, and focusing it back on sex misses the deeper psychological and moral quandary. Here, I think, is one of the problems: it’s that we’ve gotten used to thinking that truly profound moral offenses are only recognizable through legal redress. And so making it a sexual offense puts it in that realm where justice might, conceivably, be done. But this doesn’t help us with cases that are ambiguous, like this one.
That’s a cultural thing, too. For example, there are/were cultures where (moral) offenses might have been dealt with by public shaming. Essentially, the logic is that if you take liberties with the social order, there will be consequences. The moral offender would get placed in a circle of his peers, and they’d all loudly recite all the bad juju he’d done and embarrass the crap out of him for the whole village to laugh at and scold. Then there’d be some penance, typically through labor. And to be sure, the way our legal system works also has this element of public shaming, but that’s arguably not its alleged function. So, exactly, how does one classify this (because it should be recognized for exactly all the reasons you so beautifully list, as something profoundly immoral) without trivializing it as a talking point for a divorce lawyer?
Rape culture is about the power dynamics between men and women and our conditioned responses to them based on perpetuated stereotypes and beliefs on everything from power, gender performance and roles for each gender as they relate to one another.
This a 100%. But I also think @POM is onto an important distinction.
But if these women are willingly consuming alcohol and then drunkenly make the choice to go back to a guy’s place for sex but then regret it in the morning, where does that fall on the consent scale?
One of the problems with rape culture and some of the aspects of the backlash against it — and really, OUAT actually helps exemplify this — is that as much as the woman is conceived as not being able to say no, she is also denied the agency to say yes.
That’s not about gender per se, but about what seems to be a long puritan history of prohibition/taboos on sexuality, especially in the US. Considering that second wave feminism emerged out of the sexual revolution half a century ago, it is deeply problematic that it is so difficult to think about a woman having a casual, alcohol-fueled random sexual encounter with someone as objectionable and shallow (but arguably pretty) as Hook, and not thinking that she has somehow been wronged. Or giving her the room to feel conflicted, but not victimized. There’s a subtle patriarchal logic that works itself into the argument that suggests that it’s still on the woman’s shoulders to “consent” because sex is potentially polluting or devaluing to her. I think as we think about this, we need to make room for different expressions of agency, without automatically placing women in a position of disempowerment as a result of their sexual choices.
Ok, I’m going to throw in my two cents, with the caveat that I think there are no good or easy answers here. But before I get on, I also wanted to highlight something. The criminalization of marital rape began in the US in the 1970s, and by 1993 most states had recognized it as a type of sexual offense. Similar timeline for the UK I think. If you think about this, it’s extremely recent in the grand scheme of things. Before that, non-consensual sex between spouses was a non-issue because, the logic went, a marital contract stipulated the husband’s sexual access to his wife, period, and this access could not be retroactively retracted. I’m bringing this up because I think, because Belle and Rumple are technically married, there is a risk of treating consent a little differently, which shouldn’t be the case.
Ok, what follows is long so,
TL;DR: If we treat Rumple’s issues as a form of addiction then what he did is indeed an offense, but I don’t think the offense is sexual in nature, and treating it as such unduly conflates sexuality with intimacy more broadly defined.
All that being said, there’s a couple of things that come to mind for me. First, I think the writing in the recent seasons has tended towards the vapid. There is a lot of very weird, clunky, and pretty tawdry plot twists around sexual intimacy (Zelena and Robin, this thing with Rumple and Belle, and, lets face it, much of CS) that seems to me to be aimed at a kind of soap-opera (or, lets face it, high-schoolish) sensibility. I think this is harmful, because a family show that’s constantly treating sex in this sort of breathlessly scandalous way is not doing anyone any favors: it’s not feminist, it’s not helping create positive and interesting conversations around the topic with younger viewers (sure, you can turn anything into a “teaching moment,” but in OUAT’s case it’s more the result of how bad and thoughtless some of its gender politics seem to be), and it’s not offering adults the sort of intellectual provocation that S1 certainly had on the table. So with this in mind, I have trouble thinking through the Rumbelle thing because I honestly don’t know how much thought the writers put into it. It’s one thing to contemplate an ambiguous and divisive object — to use an art analogy, say a Kandinsky, or a Picasso — and an altogether another to read too much into a toddler’s squigglies, or a splash of ketchup on the wall.
But back to the Rumbelle debacle — the problem is that insofar as the show is “allegorical,” it would be important to decide what it’s an allegory for. So we don’t have a society that has a morality built around magic use. Therefore we have to apply a different set of moral codes to OUAT, by analogy. But that’s the question — what analogy do we choose? For example, if we say that Rumple’s DO thing is an addiction like, say, alcoholism. If a husband promised his wife he would stop drinking because it puts a strain on their marriage, but then he secretly starts again but doesn’t tell her, and they have sex, is this wonky consent? I don’t think so. Grounds for divorce, or at the very least some serious couples therapy? Oh yeah. No doubt about it. But is that a sexual offense? Again, I don’t think so, because that’s privileging sex as somehow the core of the marriage or the main thing that makes it real, or the main thing that’s imperiled by the alcoholism, at the expense of other aspects that constitute the partnership. I mean, we wouldn’t get so upset if they went out for ice cream and dancing and Rumple’s failed to fess up, so why make sex the pivotal litmus test for the breach of trust? Again, I think you guys are right — this is a breach of trust, it is grounds for some serious criticism of the relationship. But I am very reluctant to equate it to a sexual offense because it gives a very specific expression of sexuality (heterosexual, cis, and in this case, reproductive) undue weight.
And on S5a there are mushrooms, the characters actually pass the time looking for mushrooms, talking to mushrooms, when they dont have mushrooms, there are some “Drug” Flowers, or whatever, you can now have several Dark ones at same time, like is the most easy thing in the world to make and in bwt all this , there are portals to everyone, if Oprah was on the show, she would be giving portals.
See, S4 was a long extended metaphor about humans’ troubled relations with their accessories: hence, at the center of the story were Rumple’s dagger, the Sorcerer’s Hat, the Author’s Pen, Emma’s necklace, the Sisters’ bracelets etc. As his heart progressively turned into <del>fossil fuel</del> coal, Rumple realized the nature of their collective obsession with material things, and tried to set things right by creating a pre-capitalist AU without the trappings of technology and excessive dependence on material things. He failed.
S5A turns towards a different problem: that of humans and their relation to the ecology, hence hallucinogenic mushrooms, plantations of (clearly pheromone-secreting and consciousness altering) flowers, trees-are-people-too, sands of avalon (a naturally occurring mineral compound similar to flunitrazepan), eternal sparks (finally, a source of clean energy), and the peril of extracting metal from rocks.
Seriously. This makes way more sense to me than the actual story lines.
At the mercy of Hades, Gold creates a portal to Storybrooke, which transports Belle, Zelena and Baby Hood to the Underworld.
Um… why? Also, can’t they just all hoof it back to SB through that portal? Or is it a one-way?
only to learn some tremendously shocking news that will change her life forever.
Press releases. The art of writing breathless platitudes.
Lets see, “Hi sweetheart, how was your trip? Oh, by the way, I am the Dark One™ again. Oh, and you’re pregnant.” What could possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile, Snow and David hopelessly attempt to send a message from the Underworld to their son, Neal.
“Hopelessly” because the message isn’t going through (the Underworld not having cellphone towers and all that), AND because they are trying to impart information to a 2 month old infant. I can only assume that this is a message to his future self? I get it, infant-induced sleep deprivation makes idiots of us all, but maybe they should have thought about abandoning an infant before marching off into the UW to save their daughter’s boyfriend with whom she’s been for what, a few months at most? And with whom they have, at best, a strained relationship. In what world does this part of the story make any sense at all? I still can’t with this writing choice. Good God, but it’s stupid.
but finds himself with more than just a partner in crime
Is that meant to suggest that they are/were an item? (Halena? Zedes?)
A nephew or student who knows the wise old dragon but who now help the younglings with whatever they need.
Yup. That being said, do the NYC visitors even know about the Dragon? The only clear connection is August, and as far as we know, he’s still playing with legos.
I have this vague memory that Regina has his notes… or is it Henry? I suppose if everything else fails, Rumple can always be called upon to infodump some vague but crucial information, which he is privy to for no discernible reason.
Your questions. They are pointless.
