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Maybe it’s not Robin’s at all! Maybe Hades snuck in and pretended to be Robin one night and it’s really HIS baby?!
To paraphrase Regina, I have a feeling we don’t want to find out.
To me it sounds like the Mulan and Ruby stuff is just in the missing 6 weeks. Zelena and Arthur (on a quest for this week’s token magical object *EYEROLL*), will run into Merida, Mulan and Ruby. Which isn’t really any better than if they were retconning Red’s location in the past, because they’d still be retconning Red and Mulan’s location in the 6 weeks because neither were in the Diner. Unless they were secretly getting busy in the storage closet when the tornado hit?
All THIS.
but I’m feeling like she’s going to be mysteriously and completely absent now
Might be a bit on SB’s side, but yes, Belle, as usual, has a season pass to Forgotten Character Island.
[adrotate group="5"]To be honest, I no longer understand the purpose of “tethering” now that we know that the Season 4 explanation — tethering the Darkness to a person in order to contain it, then forging/creating the dagger to control that person — is no longer valid.
Here’s a theory, in light of recent spoilers. We know that Hook’s name is on the sword. If the sword now works much like the dagger, then the obvious explanation is if Hook killed Merlin. The current portrayal of Hook in Camelot is of someone progressively spinning out of control (another Desperate Soul?), and he’s already lashing out at Merlin anyway. Now that Merlin’s under Arthur’s thumb, it seems like neutralizing him would be a good idea. Many here have speculated that Merlin’s dead by the time they get to SB. So perhaps Hook decides to kill Merlin on his own initiative, or Merlin essentially requests Hook to kill him (to prevent the damage that Arthur might do with Merlin at his beck and call), as the most likely candidate to take one for the team, since Merlin’s and Hook’s predicaments are similar.
The only problem with this is that it’s maybe a little too obvious …
I like @SFG ‘s explanation, I think it’s as close as this show will ever get to making any sense at all. Also, that very round looking boulder was mildly conspicuous — like something pretending to be a boulder, and not doing a great job at it.
Here’s another crackpot theory/speculation, though I don’t think OUAT tries to go that deep these days. The cup is clearly not infallible. I mean, Arthur pulled Excalibur, and lived to tell about it, and we all know how he turned out. Also, other than its name, the Cup seems to have very little to do with its Christian counterpart. What if the Cup/Sword don’t in fact have any innate moral compass — after all, if it’s an artifact of the gods (presumably Greek), those folks weren’t exactly the paragons of virtue. So, like any non-human magical artifact, perhaps the cup doesn’t, in fact, come with a pre-build morality meter that corresponds to anything recognizably Good/Evil by human standards. It already sounds like it can be “tainted” by the intent of its wielder, if it can be “tethered” to a malicious entity.
Perhaps the thing is trying to balance itself out: it created Merlin, who, by all accounts, is a highly virtuous being. The next logical thing, to counteract the excess of virtue, would be to create Merlin’s opposite (ironically, also his partner).
Meanwhile, on Tatooine, two baby dark ones taking a selfie.
Ok, now onto the episode. Overall, I thought this was quite good. So, without reading the other reviews
Liked:
We got a fairly full back story on Merlin, Nimue, and the origin of the DO curse. So, essentially, the curse is what happens if the HG magic gets tainted by the drinker’s (later) intent? If there is a safety mechanism that prevents the unworthy from drinking it, you’d think there’d be a safety mechanism to prevent those who drank from turning unworthy, but whatever. It was well done.
Cup = Sword. Alright, so OUAT has its Tarot suites a bit confused, but it made for a good twist.
Nimue/Merlin. As brief and rushed as it was, the love story was touching and believable, and all the more heartbreaking when Nimue knowingly chose to crush Vortigan’s heart.
Zelena. Again, I never thought I’d say this, but I’ve been enjoying her this season. So much sass!
Mixed
Snow just steps on every singly rake that litters her path, doesn’t she?
So, Vortigan was just some random meanie? Though I thought it was interesting that the designs on his mask and the designs on the HG were very similar.
Arthur is such a twerp. On the other hand, his line about “the infidels” was sort of hilarious. Also, that giant cauldron of sulfuric acid, or whatever it was, seemed a bit silly from a tactics perspective. What were these two knights intending to do, chase down the Scooby Gang with it and hope it didn’t splash their shoes? You’d think they’d at least magic up some squirt bottles.
Disliked
So, Nimue, i.e. the first DO, Eviler than all the Evilz, is a woman of low birth. Really, OUAT, quelle surprise! (And the speech she gives to Emma is almost verbatim what Rumple has said at various points.)
That timeline is giving me a headache.
What, pray tell, was the Holy Grail doing in another realm?
*Looks at spoilers* *Then looks at THIS *
Dude! Wow. Just wow. I had completely forgotten the level of slimebag there.
Honey, none of us do. But that’s the white heterosexual privileged male gaze for you. They honestly think the way they write Hook is acceptable because it’s been “acceptable” in TV for years and years and years.
Two things really annoy me about all this, apart from the obvious. First, the degree to which the writers seem to have forgotten their original point of departure, and appear to think that the audience is a bunch of brainless zombies, drooling mindlessly in front of their televisions. It’s obvious from that gif set that they started with Hook being a very clear, and rather appalling antagonist.
Now, the standard move for the romance trope would have been to then reveal that his philandering ways are just a brittle outer shell, and mostly bluster, hiding a soft gooey center of insecurities and (<del>mommy issues),</del> excuse me, desire to be loved. But they didn’t really do that with Hook. He ISN’T a vulnerable, insecure, self-doubting sort of guy. What you see is actually exactly what you get. He’s just that bad. And he’s also not the other trope — the Casanova carpe diem type who is eventually tamed by the heroine. I’m sorry to say, he’s just not that charming. And yet, we are supposed to extend him the same credit as if he were either profoundly broken (and hence sympathetic) or the ‘seize the day’ type (and hence enjoyable in a wish fulfillment kind of way), just because the particular skirt he’s chasing at the moment is Emma’s. Cue RG’s point about the privileged heterosexual white male gaze.
The other thing that just annoys me to no end, and I’ve said this before, is the way in which the fandom sometimes responds to this show, and how other relationships (both romantic and not) get torn to shreds on the basis of some kind of moral high ground. The most obvious example is how RumBelle always seems to get paraded as the paragon of the abusive relationship. Don’t get me wrong, it’s totally problematic, but at least it follows the classic romance trope (in many ways, it’s almost straight up Jayne Eyre). One might not like its gender roles, but it’s very clearly meant to have these troubling, psychologically complicated elements. And the same, of course, with SF. But with CS we have the writing, which is constantly hinting at how screwed up the relationship is, and PLOT which keeps shoving it down our throats, awful writing and all, like it’s the most natural thing ever.
O.o
Ugh. Bah. Too early for a Saturday morning rant, but I couldn’t help myself. [climbs off the soapbox]
I said everything I needed to say about the sneak peek for 507 privately but those who know me well can guess what I had to say.
You know, I’m just going to hope that we’re not going to get a back story / significant plot detour for every piece of jewelry that Hook wears, because OUAT would have to do a spin off show.
So. Many. Baubles. O.o
Well, this is embarrassing. Now, I’ve not done this little exercise before, but it’s been one of those weeks at work, and I have the cold from Hades, and I just thought — oh look, Netflix has OUAT Season 1, why don’t I re-watch the episodes I remember enjoying. And so, here I am, about 1/2 in through Skin Deep. Yeah. OK, that’s like clinically diagnosable masochism, right? But aside from that, qu’est ce que what happened to our show??? It used to be amazing!
Ugh. I shouldn’t have done that. It’s so much easier to do cynical critical analysis snark. :-/
Well, my beliefs about Nimue are pretty much cemented now. 2nd Dark One probably. Only…how will they find her if Dark Ones are usually killed to pass on the mantle?
I’m going to venture a guess that individual DOs are not in fact dead as such, but rather their souls become part of the Darkness and are stored somewhere (in the dagger, the vault, or some other pocket universe) until the reforged Excalibur somehow releases them back to a physical plane. I think Rumple’s whole heart drama in the previous season hinted at a process of progressive corruption where the host eventually becomes ALL darkness – my guess is that when they reach that point they more or less lose their mind or personality altogether, and become sort of individual embodiments of the (general) Darkness. Something like that.
However, the question is are all the writers singing from the same hymn sheet?
Hah! I love that expression. And it’s an excellent question. To continue with your metaphor, I think they’re not.
– I’m pretty sure that A&E are mostly humming the Star Wars theme song (because PLOT at all costs);
– David Goodman and Andrew Chambliss are rocking out to Robin Thickle’s Blurred Lines (based on the fact that Mr. Chambliss and crew are responsible for the Zelena pregnancy episode, while Mr. Goodman gave us Arthur and the Magical roofie, pardon, Sands of Avalon. In other words, lack of consent makes for good entertainment);
– Jane Espenson… I have no idea. I think Jane is ad-libbing while secretly taking swigs from a tequila bottle.
Ok, in all seriousness though, I’m not sure they’re actually reading each other’s work, let alone coordinating OUAT’s overall message. At this point I think they’re probably having their minions ghostwriting this stuff. And that’s why CS looks a bit like this (see what I did there):
