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opera13 was asking in the chat just before about the context of Will telling Alice about his sister, so while I had the ep open, figured I may as well type it up in case anyone wants it to reference…
Will: You’re fighting to hold onto your father, the only family you’ve got left. If that makes you a terrible person, then I wish everybody was as terrible as you.
Alice: I don’t know why I still need to find proof for him, after all these years. I suppose I’m just –
Will: Stubborn.
Alice: Exactly.
Will: I grew up with a very stubborn girl. Always felt like they were the best kind.
Alice: Was she an old flame?
Will: Nothin’ like that. My sister, Penelope. Four years younger and better at almost everythin’. We had a lake by our cottage, and in winter it’d freeze over. We musta spent hours, days even, out on that lake. But all it takes is one second, one thin patch of ice, and your whole life changes forever. I always wondered what she’d be like when she grew up. Maybe, I think, she woulda been a bit like you.
[adrotate group="5"]I agree, Phee. Although, he might also have lose ends to tie up in Storybrooke and get caught up accidentally in their eternal winter before finally making it back to Anastasia and Wonderland. Personally, I hope that’s not the case…makes him easier to write off.
Yeah I’ve seen that suggested, but it’d be a “meh” way for them to introduce him IMO. Granted he’d be missing some of our world’s comforts when he’s in WL, but he’s a King there, so is it really that bad that he has to come back to SB to get stuff from his old apartment? And being a loner, I dunno that he’d have unfinished business with anyone in SB that he felt a desperate need to go back and resolve.
Is it possible that Hook and the Knave know each other from when Hook went to Wonderland to kill Cora?
Doubt that Hook was in WL long enough to get to know anyone. Alice would have freed Will from Cora by that time anyway. We don’t know how how or when, but it’s likely that Will ended up back in FTL at some point because he was caught in the Curse. I would guess that by the time Hook went to WL, Will was already back in FTL. If Hook had been in FTL from at least the time of Snow Falls, he and Will could have run into each other there, as opposed to in WL. Depending on when Will returned to FTL, he could have had the opportunity to interact with pretty much any of the other characters. He was briefly a Merry Man, but that was back before Robin and Marian, and he was only pretending to be part of their group so he could more easily steal the looking glass from Maleficent, and once he had that he slunk away from them so he and Ana could go to WL. It’s not like he and Robin were BFFs or anything.
Also I think I read some where that Will had a sister that drowned in a lake. Is that right?
Penelope. She fell through weak ice on a frozen lake. She was only mentioned once, when he told Alice about her.
Over the last few days I’ve been indulging a bit in 24. Found a great podcast that was created mostly to discuss S9, but they have several other eps where they recap and discuss various aspects of the previous 8 seasons too, so I’ve been taking a trip down memory lane and now really need to re-watch the whole show.
Death is so rampant on that show, it’s a minor miracle when someone actually survives a season. I think it came back just in time for me to use it as some sorta therapy, to indulge in a show I love where death is all over the place and you actually expect that anyone could die at any time. They’ve had a time or two where someone appeared dead, but it turned out they weren’t, but for the most part it’s just legit death that’s often expected but sometimes a complete shock involving a beloved character. It will forever break my heart that Michelle died, but because of the situation, and the lasting impact it had on her husband, I can accept her death as a believable plot point. Make a death fit in a logical context, show that even years later, that person hasn’t been forgotten, and even if I don’t like that they died, I can accept it and still adore the show. Make someone act OOC just to kill them off and have everyone seemingly over their death and moving on a week later, and it’s a helluva lot harder to accept.
It’s also reminded me how much I ship Jack and Audrey. They are messed up, but I will ship them in hell and so help me God my heart wanted to BURST in the most recent ep where she heard his name for the first time in forever and learned that he was alive and right there in town. They have issues. They have she-was-imprisoned-and-tortured-and-ended-up-in-a-catatonic-state-due-to-her-love-for-him level issues, and he-tortured-her-former-husband-in-front-of-her-and-later-ordered-a-surgeon-to-stop-operating-on-him-knowing-full-well-he-would-die level issues. But the way they’ve been written where their issues are actually a Thing, and not ignored, makes them a compelling couple I want to cheer for. She broke up with him after his treatment of her former husband. He accepted that he couldn’t be in her life any more after she ended up catatonic. But you know that the moment they come face to face again in the current season, there’s gonna be crazy chemistry because they just can’t stop loving each other despite it all, and that’s so beautiful it hurts.
Had they actually laid bare the unhealthy nature that should exist for CS and had them acknowledge it, deal with it, suffer because of it, and ultimately realise that their love could endure that darkness, then I’d find it easier to accept. One of the things I love about SF is that they didn’t brush over the hurt, they addressed it, they showed that both characters knew how much hurt there was, and then they showed them still being comfortable around each other and still loving each other despite all they’ve been through.
Made this:
This is perfect!
If the writers, actors and crew don’t genuinely feel as excited about the story they are telling now, versus the one they started in S1,well I can’t imagine any of them would (except maybe RC because he strikes me as someone who ‘s too established to care that much about Hollywood politics) feel like saying it. That’s not how you stay employed in this industry, and there’s so many examples of people who tried to be critical of the shows they were on, or backdoor politics in Hollywood who ultimately negatively impacted their own careers. So whatever is happening in the show, whether planned or not, desired or not–no one is ever going to say anything to get on someone else’s bad side, not without some clear example of outrageous behavior (like that guy on Two and a Half Men, Charlie Sheen)–or until its water under the bridge and the show is over, and its not like the actor involved fears reprisals would matter.
There seems to have been less passion in general from the cast on Twitter in recent times IMO. Whether or not there’s legit discontent, like you say, we won’t hear about that now, if we ever do, it won’t be until the show is long over. I know a couple of them have said in interviews how they really enjoy when they get to do the character stuff, subtly implying that they prefer that over the plot based stuff. I seem to recall an interview with Ginny where she was talking about how in S3 she and JMo were looking forward to exploring the more emotional side of their relationship, because it had been brushed over a bit in S2. I dunno that any of the actors, (like you say, with the possible exception of RC) would feel that they were in a position to raise their concerns directly with the writers, in an attempt to have things adjusted. We do know that MRJ for one questioned the writers and had them explain things to him, but that’s a bit different than one of them straight up saying that they don’t like the direction their character is going, they’re getting less satisfaction from playing it, and can things perhaps change please. I can just imagine that Colin must have been excited for the couple of times this season where he got to play that douchebag pirate he signed on to play, with the BB stuff and the Past!Hook in the finale stuff. Must have been a nice change from what he’s been having to do for the most part.
Fandom is about finding people who love what you love. It’s about finding someone in Israel who has the same reaction to Milo Ventimiglia’s bottom lip, or someone in Singapore who will share in your Downton Abbey geekery, or someone in Michigan who knows what you mean when you can’t express your emotions beyond “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.”
I love that they just randomly pulled three locations out of a hat, and those locations totally fit for people I’ve got to know (and actually meet) through my other big fandom.
I’ve been struggling to see how they can make him relevant, and even just have him present, because at this point in time he’s supposed to be living in WL, ruling with Ana, as the White King. Something will have to happen that would pull him away from that, and now we have Elsa, so I think it’s a decent bet that she’s either his sister or Ana’s.
Even people who aren’t longterm hardcore shippers can see it…
sourceOK, retyping my previous post that didn’t post (don’t you hate when you get the wording of a post just right, the the forum eats it)…
In regards to them dancing around the Milah topic. I think the finale confirmed that Emma doesn’t know all that history. She didn’t comment on it at all when Rumple was saying how he wanted Hook dead and we even got a scene of her asking how he got the hook.
If I still had faith in the writers, I’d say that maybe they were reminding the audience that that sordid history exists because they are going to have Emma discover it all. But what’s the point in reminding the GA about it in a season finale when it will be months until it gets picked up again, by which point the GA has forgotten it again and it’s lost its impact? So instead it smacks of, “Oh yeah, remember all that stuff with Rumple, Hook, Milah and Bae? Yeah, that’s no biggie these days, so moving on.” And that is so aggravating!
Also, apart from Emma not knowing about how Hook gave Bae to Pan, RUMPLE doesn’t know that either. Rumple who in his current mindset had no qualms killing Zelena for her having abused Neal. It might even make Rumple’s regression slightly easier to accept if it resulted in Hook’s secrets being exposed and him being held accountable.
*slaps self to keep from dreaming*
testing (just tried posting a thing and it didn’t work, the pages of posts aren’t even loading if I just click on a page number)
Finally getting around to responding to some of the points in DSB’s EPIC post from a few pages back…
But it’s one thing to lose something that was on a hope or a wish – there is nothing worse than losing something that you just KNOW wasn’t supposed to happen that way. It makes the struggle so much harder. The only thing I can liken it to (and this is so morbid, and probably just wrong,) is attending the funeral of your 87 year old Aunt Myrna. It’s sad, yeah, but she had a good life and it was time. But change that to a 25 or 30 year old cousin Myrna, and though the end result is the same – a beloved person gone from your life – it is somehow that much harder to deal with. And I think (for me at least) that’s the struggle now; this is a story that had had all of the hard work put into it and the setup was there and beautiful and all that was left was for it to mature and blossom. And then, bam, it was cut off at the knees.
It may be a morbid analogy, but I think it’s spot on.
I think it would be easier to handle all of this if they just killed Neal and let it go. 315 death, beginning of 316, funeral, by the end of 316, have her talking to Hook (as a friend) for comfort. Leave Neal behind and develop it over the next half-dozen episodes and end up in exactly the same place we did at the end of 322. Make it reasonable, and logical, let us SEE it and let it feel legitimate for Emma! But instead we see this story where she’s not attracted to him, fine. But worse, we had this bizarre situation where they were telling CS on the surface but still had SF as the undercurrent. That finale? That finale should not have made ANYONE happy. Us, as SF, for obvious reasons. But for CS? They did a two-hour CS movie, that was all about how Neal got her home.
The actors aren’t typically told where the plot for their character is going, except in rare cases, like Ginny being told from the start that Snow had cast the Curse. So it’s safe to assume that JMo didn’t know that Emma would be making out with Hook by the end of the finale. So she was playing the character in a consistently disinterested way, because that was what made sense when she thought about how Emma would be reacting to Hook, because DUH it’s just what would make sense for how Emma would react to this guy. The script for the finale spelled out the opposite of what JMo had been putting into her performance up to that point, which is why it feels like whiplash.
As to your second point about the finale having an undercurrent of SF, I think the other side is just simply oblivious to the subtlety and importance of Emma’s realtionship with Neal, so they just get blinded by the obvious and lap it all up.
322 made it so, so crystal clear… ABC, you can have your CS, but WHO EMMA SWAN IS is defined by Neal. And maybe that’s why we’ve lost Emma this season; “story demanded” Neal be gone but when you erase him, you erase so much of what makes Emma Emma. “Story demanded,” more like, “ABC said we had to go CS, and in order to make that even remotely believable, the story demanded Neal be dead.” They couldn’t ever put Emma with Hook if Neal was around – it would be complete betrayal of what they had set up. It takes all of the pain and heartbreak of losing him for, like, the sixth time in order to get her to cave to the pressure. What that says about the CS relationship I’ll leave for you to mull over, but rebounds? Yeah, they never end well. Not while staying true-to-character, anyways.
People can say until they’re blue in the face that Neal’s death had nothing to do with them wanting to put Hook and Emma together, and I’ll never believe it. They had consistently shown that Emma still had love for Neal. Even up until the moment when she was telling Rumple about his death, and she declared that she wanted to save him because she loved him. It’s right there, in the dialogue…EMMA. STILL. HAD. LOVE. FOR. NEAL. That’s how they freaking wrote it themselves. Now, if they really, desperately felt the need to put Emma with Hook despite how she feels about Neal, the more compelling writing choice would have been to keep Neal alive and have Emma LEGITIMATELY deal with having feelings for both men. Show her working through that, and eventually coming to a decision. Instead they conveniently eliminated the guy she’s repeatedly declared love for, as a shortcut so she’d end up with the other guy by season’s end by default. That’s such lazy writing, I can’t even. And if the other guy needs to be DEAD so a relationship can happen, that’s not a convincing foundation to build a believable and lasting relationship on.
Because here’s the thing. He was a “bad guy,” a crook and a thief. You can rail on Neal for that all you want. I think the haters forget something, though – so was Emma!! They met because she was stealing his car, for heaven’s sake, it’s not like she was walking into a dress shop all innocent and sweet. She was ALREADY living a life of crime. She was ALREADY broken when she met him; she wasn’t some innocent kid from suburbia who had her life flipped on its head by this guy.
People’s inability to grasp that concept drives me up the wall. If someone has that mindset, I will pretty much instantly write them off as being willfuly ignorant, because it’s a thing that’s so blatant and non-negotiable that the only reason someone doesn’t believe it is simply because they don’t want to. Some things are up for interpretation when viewed through shipper goggles. That fact that Emma was already a criminal before meeting Neal, and that her part in that crime was her idea, is not one of those things.
There’s something to genetics, you know – her mom was a bandit (because she had to be,) and their kid has shown a penchant for thievery as well. Someone really should talk to him about that, by the way, perhaps he can break that particular family cycle. Clearly the one he was supposed to break, of having a functional relationship with his father, is not going to happen.
It makes me want to weep every time I think of how they set Neal up to be the one strong enough to break the abandonment cycle, only to make him weak and OOC in order to write him off. They’d been doing so well with writing him as being strong. Why did they just trash all of that?!
But back to 322 – so as they wrap around on the back end, and Hook pops through the portal, the conversation again comes back to… Neal. And Emma makes a great, enormous betrayal, a betrayal of pain and fear and frankly FAR WORSE than his lack of action in Portland. Are they even now? IMO, they are more than even. He broke her heart, removed her from society for less than a year, and led to her giving up their child. Fair enough – not cool. Emotionally wrecking. I get that. She ensured he remained out of society, permanently, and prevented him from EVER having a relationship with their child… or anyone else, for that matter. It’s worse, it’s way worse, and furthermore she did it without a noble cause. She was just too afraid of getting hurt to allow herself the possibility of a happy ending. At least Neal was trying to get her home.
He didn’t just try, he did it. We can play “what if he hadn’t left back in the day”, but canon fact is that his leaving her put her on the path that eventually led her to SB. His sending the dove with the note and the potion is the only reason she’s not still blissfully ignorant living in NYC right now. His teaching her what home meant is how she got her magic back. Emma’s belief of home and the fact that she found it is intrinsically linked to Neal for forever. Whatever does or doesn’t happen in the future, Neal’s association with Emma finding home cannot be changed.
As for her ensuring he stayed dead, it really is an ultimate abandonment on her part. If there’s someone you’ve had a kid with, and even though you’re not with them any more, but you still get along and you still have love for each other in any capacity, if you’re handed a way to bend the rules of time and ensure that person stays alive, you bloody well grab that chance with both hands and make a concerted effort to make it happen! The fact that neither Emma or Rumple seized that opportunity is beyond unbelievable.
But he was faced with a choice, and he chose for her to find those parents he knew she so desperately longed for, and to save the countless people his father had cursed – he chose to send her home. And (unknowingly) he gave her the child who brought her home… then sacrified again and again (three or four more times by my count) to make sure she got there. Through the portal, to keep her with her family and for the good of Henry – again, he could have pulled her through with him but chose to let her go – and at the town line. Then with the bird, he sacrificed memories (which could have allowed someone to make a plan for a safe magical separation, so, his life,) to get her BACK to her family, and finally his life again with the magical separation itself.
Is that all the character of Baelfire has been reduced to; a pawn in Emma’s story of home?
That’s exactly what it feels like, and at the risk of sounding 12 years old, it’s just not fair. All his life he searched for his happiness, a place he belonged, someone to belong with. He figured life out on his own, learned things to help him survive on his own, and when the time came, he looked after Emma and passed on what he’d learned as a means of helping her. And in the end, he got no reward, no happy ending. What a depressing message for the show to send.
So if Emma and her family became a casualty in the Baelfire story, which then led to Bae becoming a casualty in the Emma story, and the end result is Emma with her family and Rumple has lost Bae – then what was the point of the curse, really? What is the point of the SHOW? Wouldn’t we be at exactly the same place (or better, even,) if there had been no curse, Emma had been allowed to grow up in FTL with her parents in a functional family and Neal had been allowed to live out his life in LWM? The whole thing seems ridiculous and cyclical now.
The only thing to have come out of it is Henry’s existence, but if things had played out differently, they’d be none the wiser about Henry even being a possibility, so they wouldn’t have lost out on anything because this current future wouldn’t have ever been an option. Rumple still hasn’t learned, so the journey he went on since having the Curse cast hasn’t achieved anything significant. Like you said, he’s still without his son, just like before. And he hasn’t learned anything, hasn’t become a better, more honourable man, so the experience hasn’t taught him anything, (it HAD, until they decided to go and retcon their mid-season finale, making his progress null and void), so it’s all been for nothing.
And that, my friends, destroys the possibility for me that Once can ever truly be itself again. If I am being completely honest, had things gone the way they “should” have gone, I think to some degree that would also be true… the fabric of the show was set up to unite this tiny family, and the forward movement of the plot was sustained by it. Had we gotten a SF adventure and happy ending on 322, we still would have had to define a new show post-322. When you remove the motivation of so many of the characters, what is going to make them tick?
Any half decent writer should be able to resolve one plot and think up another that the story could flow into and do it in a believable and consistent way. PROGRESS the story instead of attempting to reset things and make characters regress.
And I guess, for my headcanon of how things went down BTS, it makes sense. Some stubbornness from guys who had their core story taken away from them, trying to hang onto some tiny piece of it in the most backwards way possible. They say they don’t ship, or that they ship the show, but inherently THIS is the fabric of the show, so it’s not about shipping, it’s about Once. You pull the strings out of the fabric, the whole thing WILL unravel.
And that’s where we went this season. Looking back, there were clear acknowledgements – which I saw at the time, but hoped would be used as bookends. They weren’t. The dreamcatcher in 312, the nightmare in 314 – the tangled web that is Once is now torn, and it is now a nightmare. They LITERALLY showed us the hole in the show, they LITERALLY told us we were entering a walking nightmare. It is everything it’s NOT supposed to be. How – HOW – do you write a show about fairytales, and SCREW UP the fairytale of the main protagonist? I mean, really? How do you do that?!
I do sometimes wonder if things like this are acknowledgements from the writers that they’re conscious of the story going to hell. Beofre the finale, I thought how things really started to go downhill from the moment Neal used the key, like that shift in the natural and logical order of things threw everything off kilter, but they were doing that for a reason and by the end of 3B balance would be restored and things would be set right. Instead things are just further up the creek now, and we’re still without a paddle. I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean that those signs in the show about it being headed into unraveled territory weren’t inclusions of writers who were trying to make a statement because of what they’d been cajoled into doing with their story by network higher ups. But right now, it doesn’t feel like they’re really aware of the mess their story became.
You can’t tell me, at the end of the day, Emma’s happy ending is going to be with Captain Hook. It’s just… not. He’s a stop on her road to somewhere, but this is a freaking fairytale. That is not going to be Emma Swan’s happy ending. Because being with a guy whose values and morals are so fully misaligned with your own is a surefire recipe for disaster. Especially when you embark on the relationship with eleven billionty things that have been hidden. My roomie postures that we will get CS until a few episodes from the end, so ABC can have them for marketing, and then the last few episodes A&E will fix it all. Her opinion is that based on what I’ve said about A&E (which is not always terribly favorable, although I have tried to keep it factual) that they won’t let the story they’ve prepared for ten years go so easily and that they WILL fix it by the end. She might be right. By the end of the series, the advertising has been sold and ABC doesn’t need to keep such a tight reign on what happens.
They clearly haven’t had every step of the journey planned since day one. I mean, ELSA, so that argument is pretty much dead in the water. They had the start planned, and they’d have had the engame planned, but the whole middle bit has always been up for grabs. And if, during those 10 years of planning, they never knew if they would ever get the rights to use characters from Peter Pan, but they DID create an original character to be the true love of their other original character. That’s just logic, that’s just facts, that makes it undeniable that IF CS ends up as endgame, it was NOT their original plan that they’d had in mind for a decade. Like your roomie, I’d like to think that they wouldn’t completely sell out and change the happily ever after for the fairy tale they’d been dreaming up for so long. Even if they get forced into an unforeseen detour, I’d like to think that they wouldn’t sell out completely. I’d LIKE to think that, but I don’t exactly believe it at this point in time.
But for now, we end up back at Echo Cave… “I was hoping you were dead… because it would easier for me to put you behind me than to face all of the pain that we went through all over again.” And that was Emma’s choice, to put him behind her instead of facing the pain. Is that really, truly where they leave this story? Forget SF – is that really where they leave EMMA’S story? It makes me simultaneously angry at Emma and brokenhearted for her; obviously a reflection on my realization of a few days ago. It makes me absolutely gutted and brokenhearted to believe that this is where Emma’s character growth stops, and that she’ll never have that realization that sometimes you have to walk through the h*ll to get to the happiness. Yet, as much as I want to hope that we’re going to see that explored in S4 – that we see her have ANY sort of reaction to the trauma she underwent in the latter half of this season – I am completely missing that faith. I think we’re running into the problem where the true and authentic thing for the characters is at cross-purposes with what the network wants. If the network wants them to go CS, the ONLY way for that to happen is to stunt Emma’s character, maybe even regress it. Because an Emma showing growth would be fighting to overcome that, but instead, we found her in 3×22 at precisely the same spot as we found her in 3×06. And if the network-mandated story dictates that she stays there, then there is literally no hope for the show not to suck. Absolutely none.
Like, they actually went to the trouble of spelling out in an honest and anguished way that Emma wished she could take the emotionally easy path. And they went to the trouble of bringing Neal back, so Emma would have no choice but to actually deal with the emotional stuff, instead of doing the easy thing and ignoring it. There was so much potential for growth for Emma. And now they’ve just put her back where she was before, putting the pain behind her, (perhaps her telling Rumple to leave things be was in part subconsciously because she was reverting to that “it’s too much to accept emotionally if he comes back again” so she’s essentially self-sabotaging her progress). Now, if I thought they were doing this as a mean to have her realise once and for all that she CAN’T do that, then maybe I’d be less pissed about what’s currently happening. If they were putting her with Hook right now to make her discover that that path really isn’t the right path, the healthy path, the honest path that can lead to happily ever after, then maybe I’d be less pissed about what’s currently happening. But the reality seems to be that they just wanna whitewash Hook, ignore the problematic aspects of his past and personality and try to portray him as a romantic hero. And that just makes me pissed.
*SIGH*
Heather, that is adorable! A friend of mine, her youngest daughter has ALL the Disney Princess dresses. I’ve told her that some day she’ll end up making adult size versions of them all for her too. LOL
And the fact of the matter is, for me, the way in which they told the SF story was absolutely ingenious and I’d like to see it catalogued somewhere.
This is a big thing for me. The other side like to call us delusional for having thought SF was ever intended as endgame. A clearly defined catalogue of how the SF story was a vital part of the fabric of the show from the very beginning would clarify the importance of SF for everyone to see. I’m not up for a rewatch yet, maybe in a few weeks, or a month or more, and maybe even then I still won’t be able to rewatch it sober, but however long it takes, I think it’s a thing that should be done.
In other news, DSB your massive post is a thing of beauty! I started quoting and replying to a few parts of it, but the post was gonna get huge and I’m on my phone, so I’ll tackle it later when I’m on the computer. For now I shall just say BRAVO to the whole post!
