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I really am NOT looking forward to the CS stuff.
They have been portraying Emma as being not at all interested in getting with Hook in a romantic relationship sense. So help me God if she suddenly changes and shows interest in him now. If that happens, they’ll have pretty much destroyed Emma for me, I just won’t be able to take her seriously any more. That scene where SF were walking along, lamenting their evil former fiancees, there was such an easy chemistry between them, you could feel their closeness and their connection, and Emma wasn’t afraid to let it out when she was alone with him like that. Even the scene where they were alone in the hospital, that closeness was undeniably there. They were each other’s person, and no matter the crap they’d been through together, they still had a connection and a closeness and found a comfort in each other that hadn’t been severed. THAT is how (true) lovers are with each other. That is NOT how she has been with Hook. At all. So if they try to sell me that story in the rest of S3B, or even possibly S4, I will find it VERY hard to believe.
[adrotate group="5"]RG you don’t need to apologize!! I almost feel awful coming in and holding that shred out… it’s hard to have closure when someone is all, “But what if maybe…”
There are just… a few things… I am just not sold. I respect A&E and the stories they choose to tell, but I am not sold there is not trickery and semantics here. I am personally willing to own my overoptimistic thinking, knowing it is likely false hope, but I HATE that it might bring others false hope… it just seems cruel.
3×22? No place like home… Em(ma) & Henry? Still not sold it’s not important. Between that and Neal mentioning ruby slippers being a portal in 3×03… I think it’s not impossible. Particularly when we have an actor stating he neither quit nor was fired. The elimination of the two options reads to me as continuing employment.
…When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth… -An undoubtedly butchered version of a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle quote.
I both will and won’t be surprised if they do bring him back now. After the comments from A&E, they’re talking about it like it’s a done deal and alas they’re talking like they actually think it was a GOOD idea, but it’s not like they haven’t been trolls before, and it’s still bizarre that his castmates haven’t tweeted about him leaving. MRJ’s own comments do sound rather like he’s moved on, but again, he didn’t flat out say it. And at the end of it all, I am just baffled that they could honestly be so stupid as to totally destroy the core message of their own freaking show.
He spent his whole putting others before himself. He always knew what it meant to make a true sacrifice. His father didn’t teach it to him, it was quite the opposite I think.
I hope MRJ called up the writers and questioned that line, because seriously, it was completely bogus.
Is there anything they could do in the rest of the season to reinvest you (collective you) in the show again?
We shall see. I do intend to keep watching to see what they actually do next. It sucks because I was really looking forward to seeing OQ, and how Regina would grow during that. I’m always looking forward to more Rumple. I was loving the setup of all the Oz stuff, and how they were integrating parts of the traditional story into present day. Now everything is tainted, and they’ll have to have some really creative writing for me to be able to look past the big, gaping, Neal shaped hole in each ep, in order to properly appreciate the rest of the stuff they’re doing.
I’m not completely caught up in here yet, but I just posted a thing in the thread about if this is still a show about hope or not, and thought I’d share the link to my rant: https://oncepodcast.com/forums/topic/is-this-show-still-about-hope-post-neals-death/#post-257866
A story of hope was that the Stiltskin line was a sad story of a cycle of abandonment of fathers and sons – Malcolm and Rumple, Rumple and Bae, and then Neal abandoned his son without even knowing it, but from the moment he discovered he had a son he did everything he could to be there for him. Neal was determined to break the cycle, and he was doing it. THAT was about hope.
Henry having to bury his father, with no memory of who he even was, is not a hopeful story. Neal dying without his son remembering that they loved each other, is not a hopeful story. The cycle of abandonment in that family continuing, despite the fact that Neal did everything he could to make it stop, is not a hopeful story.
A story of hope was at the end of 311, when Neal told Emma and Henry that he would see them both again.
Him never actually getting to see his son again before he died, is not a hopeful story.
Rumple accepted responsibility for his actions and GAVE HIS LIFE so that his son could have a happy ending. That was a hopeful story, that even villains, who have abused many people in their time, can achieve redemption, eventually do the right thing to try and make up for it, and have some good come from it.
Rumple GIVING HIS LIFE to make up for his mistakes, so that his son could have a happy ending, and then having the son die, is not a hopeful story. What’s the point of villains trying to do better, if all they’re gonna get out of it is this. Everything that Rumple put everyone through in a bid to find his son, was for nothing, because now the son is dead. THE WHOLE STORY THE SHOW WAS BASED ON, EVERYTHING EVERONE WENT THROUGH, WAS FOR NOTHING IN THE END. How is there any hope in that story?
Neal was a good guy, contrary to what his death scene would want you to believe, he ALREADY KNEW what it was to selflessly sacrifice yourself for others, because he had done it multiple times. He didn’t learn that lesson from Rumple, if anything it was the other way around. He got beaten down time and again, from the time he was a child. He wasn’t perfect, he did things that hurt others, but he owned the guilt of his mistakes, and he apologised, and tried to do better. That was a story of hope, that even if life deals you a CRAP hand, and even if you make some choices you’d go back and change if you could, that as long as you hang in there and keep fighting, that you can be the better, stronger person, and keep striving for that happy ending.
Killing a character that was the embodiment of those qualities is NOT a story of hope. Many people believe that the whole message of the show has been a lie. Personally, I’m VERY disenchanted with the show now, not just because of fact they killed one of my fave characters, but because the way it happened alters the entire message of the show from, “Hang in there, keeping fighting the good fight, and you’ll get a happy ending,” to “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”
And I don’t give a crap if sometimes real life IS just a bitch and then you die, because while this isn’t “just a TV show”, it IS a TV show, that real people look to for hope in their own lives, hope that even if they’ve made similar mistakes to these characters, (and I’m talking about all the characters, not just Neal), even if they’re in the same crappy position in their own lives, there’s still a happy ending out there for them to keep dreaming about, because everyone deserves a happy ending. That message has been shot to crap now, and people are feeling on a VERY PERSONAL level.
So please, if people could refrain from commenting that Neal fans should just get over it and move on, just don’t go there, because this show is about FAR more than just characters on a screen, it affects people on a personal level, it affects how they think about their own lives, and you cannot tell someone to just get over something that affects them on a deep emotional level. It’s not just about Neal dying, it’s about the message that, “nope, you’re probably just screwed,” is the message that this death is sending. I feel like I’ve interpreted the entire message of the show incorrectly, and that’s just sad, the whole story feels like a waste now.
I honestly fail to see how killing a character like Neal was a natural progression of the HOPEFUL story they claim to have been telling. They had Neal’s story on a hopeful trajectory, and then they just abandoned all hope for him, for Rumple, for Henry, for Emma. Emma who has been saying that as Saviour, she doesn’t get the happy moments in life, and her parents have been trying to convince her otherwise, and now this man she loved, the father of her child, is dead, essentially proving her fears about her life correct, that crap will just keep happening to her. We all know that Henry will get his memories back at some point, but all Emma knows now is that her son’s father died without him knowing that they loved each other, and that’s something she’ll have to carry around for the rest of her life, alone, not being able to share it with Henry, then their grief over this SHOULD be shared. Or she’s probably thinking that if Henry DOES remember, does remember the love he had for his father, and then has to grieve for him, that will be painful for him. Henry will forever live with the knowledge that his father died when he didn’t remember him. That he stood by his grave with no memory of who he was.
How is any of that a hopeful story in ANY way for anyone?
Adam and Eddy’s attempts at justifying the decision are crap. I dunno what universe they live in where they thought this was a good and natural development for the story. It was anything but.
RG, one other thing you might wanna mention on the podcast (can’t recall if slurpeez included it in her list off the top of my head).
Neal’s story of his relationship with Henry had been a progression of the story arc of the whole Stiltskin line. From the moment Neal discovered he had a son, he vowed that the cycle of abandonment would stop with him, and from then on he was always there for Henry, and THAT was a story full of hope. While Neal’s death isn’t him abandoning Henry exactly, it’s still continuing the hopeLESS story of how fathers and sons in that family are doomed to be separated. All the time they’d invested in showing Neal working to break that cycle, suddenly all of it is just undone, and that was an important and central theme of the show, and the history of the story.
Yeah. But neither was like, “byeeeee!” I just want a door slammed in my face. Not because I necessarily have any hope (I don’t), but it’s just so absurd and such crappy writing and inconsistency with like, the entire show and even dialogue 2 episodes ago… that can’t help but wonder if that weirdness is because of a loophole. I just want it to be gone. I want confirmation that it’s really that ridiculous and absurd.
I feel you! Apart from these tweets, there’s still so much other stuff that just feels off. Nothing about it feels resolved.
