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Once Upon a Time (ABC) - 1x02 till the bitter end

Oz?

Yippee!

Bring on the prison-rape!

That's exactly the pie in the face these characters need for some perspective.
 
They try to undo the curse, and end up accidentally merging Fairy world with the rest of our world? Or the barriers start to break down and it's a piecemeal merge that comes and goes.
 
Temis the Vorta said:
^I like that. This show is too orderly and clean, it could use a healthy dose of chaos. Not to the degree Guy wants, tho. :rommie:
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Maybe not, but amazing as it may seen (because it feels like it's been running longer) it's only in its first 15 episodes. So it's still establishing itself and too much chaos could scare away the fans. The risk is of course if they turn things up a notch season 2, they run the risk of alienating viewers the same way Heroes did with the Japanese time travel subplot. IMO that's exactly how Heroes should have progressed after the first chapter - mini arcs focusing on the various characters - but viewers said no and the show never recovered. The wise OUAT showrunner will have gone to school on what killed Heroes and will try to avoid that, I hope.

Alex
 
What killed Heroes after season 1 was poor writing--incoherent storylines, giving us one plot point then discarding it and moving onto the next(esp in S3) without developing them, lame villians, plotholes, lapses in logic, timidity in shaking up the status quo, treating the characters as plot devices being jerked around by fickle writers.

Frankly I've noticed writers unnecessarily make things more complicated than they have to be because they want to be the next LOST. They think the larger the cast, the more densely plotted, the more information to keep track of, the more jumpoing around and the faster the pacing the better the story. That has never worked out in most cases. It leads often to the characters being cogs, character deaths that lack no emotional resonance since they are more of a footnote than a dramatic shocker and no depth to scenes because they spend all of 60 seconds on them because they want to cram as many scenes into the hour as possible.

I don't know why in the last decade writers are so quick to dismiss the old serialized drama format which I always thought worked perfectly in the 1980s and 1990s--in which there was a modest ensemble and fewer more manageable season long arcs that tell a linear story. A drama doesn't need to be the byzantine mess that so many LOST wannabes degenerate into--even LOST itself ultimately exposed itself as a convoluted mess where the writers simply thought that cool WTF moments and one twist after the other would be enough that solid writing.
 
Well I think Once is working well with its current format. You are learning more and more about the main characters, and the Storybrooke storylines are actually becoming interesting.

My gripe with the first of season one was that I could not give a flying flip about the "real world" stories.

However, I thoroughly enjoyed Gold hunting down Belle's father. I laughed at the town drunk and town harlot selling candles. I am intrigued by Katherine's "death," and I want to know who else Regina has in the basement.

I am sure they will have to change things in the future and we may already be seeing this. Emma saw that Regina's keys worked, and she is ready to team up with Gold to save Mary Margaret. David under hypnosis remembered his past life with Snow.

There is a lot of the main plot that we don't know yet:
We have only seen Archie solely focused on in one episode.
Who the heck is the Stranger?
We don't know how Snow ended up in that coffin.
What happened to James/Charming's dastardly daddy?
How did Snow/Charming oust the Evil Queen?
What did Snow do to the Queen?
Who is Henry's father, or does it even matter?

I think it has lots of places to go, and I will wait and see.
 
startrekwatcher said:
What killed Heroes after season 1 was poor writing--incoherent storylines, giving us one plot point then discarding it and moving onto the next(esp in S3) without developing them, lame villians, plotholes, lapses in logic, timidity in shaking up the status quo, treating the characters as plot devices being jerked around by fickle writers.
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The poor writing part is subjective, but it does support what I said earlier - that for whatever reason enough viewers decided the show had "lost the plot" for lack of a better term that they started to abandon it.

That said, Heroes did run for 4 seasons so it cannot be considered a failure in a society where SF/F series usually don't last a full season, and it lasted as long as the better regarded nuBSG did. But it did generate a lot of unnecessarily hostility in fandom. Lost, Alias and nuBSG ran into the same jackpots and overcame them to varying degrees.

If OUAT is able to avoid this and continue delivering strong episodes like last night's, it should do fine. But if the show's "best before date" becomes apparent, I'd rather see it close on a high than be stretched along. Heroes would probably be regarded as one of the best shows in history had it ended at the end of Season 1.

Alex
 
OK, normally I avoid throwing out wild speculation, but I just had a neat idea. What if Booth (motorcycle guy) who claims to be a writer actually is "the writer"? What if he is a manifestation of "god" writing both what is happening in "the real world" and fairytale land? It might explain him adding pages to the storybook. He's literally adding to the story.

Crazy idea that I'm sure is not true, but fun to think about.
 
sojourner said:
OK, normally I avoid throwing out wild speculation, but I just had a neat idea. What if Booth (motorcycle guy) who claims to be a writer actually is "the writer"? What if he is a manifestation of "god" writing both what is happening in "the real world" and fairytale land? It might explain him adding pages to the storybook. He's literally adding to the story.

Crazy idea that I'm sure is not true, but fun to think about.
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So he's a Grimm? ;)
 
The Grimm brothers collected those old stories into a book, but they'd existed for far longer.

This guy, if he is the "Author" would be a being beyond human. A creature wished into existence by human thoughts/creativity to make myths and fables. Basically, a Man-Made God.
 
Nerys Myk said:
sojourner said:
OK, normally I avoid throwing out wild speculation, but I just had a neat idea. What if Booth (motorcycle guy) who claims to be a writer actually is "the writer"? What if he is a manifestation of "god" writing both what is happening in "the real world" and fairytale land? It might explain him adding pages to the storybook. He's literally adding to the story.

Crazy idea that I'm sure is not true, but fun to think about.
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So he's a Grimm? ;)
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Heh. Wouldn't it be a funny way to tweak the other show if it was?

Thing is, though, it can't be God or "the writer" because there's no one writer for the stories being featured. True, a good chunk of them are Grimm stories, but I don't believe Pinocchio is, the Little Mermaid (already foreshadowed) is Hans Christian Andersen, we've got some Lewis Carroll action coming up soon and after a recent interview by one of the writers, apparently there may even be a strictly Disney-created character (a title character from one of the movies but I can't say more without potential spoilage) who has no "fairytale" connections at all. It's also only a matter of time before Tinker Bell appears. Heck, probably the only "Disney" character off limits to them is Tarzan and even then I wouldn't put it past them.

Point being it would be stretching things too far to make it a "God" like character. And pulling a deus ex machina would alienate a lot of viewers, I think.

Still, it's intriguing to speculate who he might be. I have a suspicion worthy of a Doctor Who Christmas special (that's a hint) as to who he might be...

My two favorite scenes in last night's episode were both from near the beginning: that kick-ass scene where Red goes all wolf on the guards for one. And did anyone catch the significance that she didn't kill the soldiers? Has she learned to control her powers?

And the other, of course, is the complete send up of Snow serenading the bluebird. Sheer brilliance.

Alex
 
23skidoo said:
startrekwatcher said:
What killed Heroes after season 1 was poor writing--incoherent storylines, giving us one plot point then discarding it and moving onto the next(esp in S3) without developing them, lame villians, plotholes, lapses in logic, timidity in shaking up the status quo, treating the characters as plot devices being jerked around by fickle writers.
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The poor writing part is subjective, but it does support what I said earlier - that for whatever reason enough viewers decided the show had "lost the plot" for lack of a better term that they started to abandon it.
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Heroes was the most objective case of being subjectively bad that I've ever seen. There were plenty of inarguable aspects of bad writing on display that didn't come down to matters of taste. They were things I've actually seen described in basic fiction writing textbooks, examples of things you shouldn't do unless you're trying to churn out absolute crap. It's like they picked up the book and did everything they weren't supposed to do.

Viewers abandoned it because the writing was atrocious. That show actually hung onto its audience longer than it deserved. I've seen plenty of better written shows that were cancelled much faster.

The wise OUAT showrunner will have gone to school on what killed Heroes and will try to avoid that, I hope.
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No fear of that. OUAT is Shakespeare compared with Heroes. I haven't noticed much in the way of egregious bad writing. The big cast and loosey-goosey structure (for example: what's the main conflict, Emma vs Regina over Henry or Snow vs Regina over whatever happened in their past?) does sap some of the narrative drive, but to tighten it up would require paring things down, and that would give them less "stuff" to fill up episodes with. Considering that they're not a 13-episode cable series, they're doing just fine.
 
23skidoo said:
The wise OUAT showrunner will have gone to school on what killed Heroes and will try to avoid that, I hope.
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There's no school needed for that. All that's required to not be Heroes is common sense. One of the recurring actors on Heroes said that the show, rather than go from Act I to Act II to Act III, basically kept repeating Act I.
 
Yeah I think they'd done a good job expanding the scope of the story, and still keeping things interesting. The show has to be about more than just Emma breaking the curse, if it's going to last very long.
 
She should break the curse as the cliffhanger this season, and then the show can deal with whatever that means in S2. Just throw all the pieces up into the air and make something new of whatever comes down. The audience is stable and loyal, so as long as they don't take a meat cleaver to major characters, they're not going to hurt the ratings.

People become invested in shows principally because they like the characters. The real danger here is driving the audience away with a stagnant plotline. They can afford to take risks.
 
So... after watching last episode...

Is Rumpelstiltskin channeling his inner Darth Plageuis which would make Emma Anakin...? :guffaw:

Mr. Gold as been saying that he is invested in Snows future and suddenly he manages to catch love in a bottle. I was just waiting for the two strands of hair turn into DNA... :vulcan:
 
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