Once Upon A Time has so many flaws it's hard to believe I still watch it. The acting, with a few exceptions, is weak. The restructured fairy tales don't really hold my interest (especially compared to their model--the
Lost flashbacks). And the part of the story that does intrigue--the action in Storybrooke--is told with simplistic characters and barely functional plotting.
I guess I like the central mystery--how will Emma bring the village around, and when will they discover the curse? But as week after week grinds on, I find myself less interested. My guess: rather than get stuck in this rut, they'll have a big season one finale where some adult (probably Emma) finally catches on that something is happening, and so next season the show will be at a different level, being more directly about waking people up. If not that, perhaps they'll have some cliffhanger, but really, even if someone's life is hanging in the balance, or if Mr. Gold is going to take on the Mayor, who really cares?
4 Comments:
I feel exactly the same. I'm halfway through last Sunday's episode. So now Rumplestilskin is a sympathetic character.
Obviously, my theory that the Queen doesn't know she's the evil queen and is a victim of the curse got blown out of the water when the Mayor had a human heart in her safe deposit box and crushed it. But now, what exactly is her motivation? She wants to be mayor of a crappy little town in New England (sorry NE Guy), instead of Queen of a fantasy country?
Maybe you are right, and next season this thing will really start going somewhere. At least the screen presence of little Henry seems to have been limited. How will they handle him getting older, I wonder.
P.S. Grimm is getting better, if you watch that.
The question is does Mr. Gold knows about the curse. If he does, as I've noted before, he pretty much owns the Mayor since she has to do anything he asks. Or will the show just drop magical powers when it's convenient (such as Emma's "power" in the pilot to know when people are lying).
I had forgotten about Emma's power.
My guess is that Rumplestiltskin does know everything, and that somehow he distorted the Queen's curse so it didn't go exactly as she wanted (I think I got this idea from one of you, btw) -- but it is still close enough to what she wanted that she prefers the new universe to the old. Also, i do believe that the Queen honestly cares about her son -- but that doesn't mean she will make decisions based on his own good, any more than she did with regard to her father, whom she loved.
Watching the latest episode, I ended up being the mirror image of LA Guy -- I felt as if the fairy tale backstories were interesting, and the modern day stories are boring. The Rumplestiltskin origin story, as well as the various Snow White backstories, were interesting and I wasn't able to predict them. But the main show is predictable: Snow White (heartbreak), the Queen (a few seconds of likeability, inevitably followed by her ingratitude), Emma (indecision, followed by tentative decision).
Jennifer Morrison has a pretty good gig. She gets to be the star of a show but knows she won't have to work for half the production schedule.
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