Fairly Tales
It took me a few days to catch up on Mad Men, so it wasn't until the end of the week that I caught up to last Sunday's Once Upon A Time, "Hat Trick." And as the first season winds down, the story is going in odd directions.
The specifics aren't that important. What matters is we meet the Mad Hatter. The Mad Hatter?! What's he doing in Storybrooke? This is about fairy tale characters, mostly from Grimm. Okay, I can see the occasional borrowing from 1001 Nights, Hans Christian Anderson, even Mother Goose and perhaps Aesop. But Alice In Wonderland (and its sequel) is a specific novel that stands on its own. Alice itself borrows characters from other places--so do they live in Wonderland or the Enchanted Forest? But Alice also created its own indelible characters, and I've never felt they were part of the fairy tale world. Who else might show up? Achilles? D'Artagnan? Madame Bovary? John Carter?
So apparently all fiction is real, and our world is just one among many others. I'm confused as to how this works out. This reality was always here, and the Evil Queen moved the Enchanted Forest denizens to this place (though, as always, if she did, why should they care if they're not aware?). Couldn't she have just moved them to another reality? Why this one? Or is this the only "real" reality.
Also, did she take all the fictional characters from everywhere, or just the Enchanted Forest (which seems to have all sorts of characters from various fiction anyway)? And if everyone in Wonderland is still there, then why did the Mad Hatter/Jefferson get swept up in the curse (since he was stuck in Wonderland at the time--in fact, it's not such a curse, since being stuck in horrifying Wonderland without his daughter seems a lot worse than being stuck in pleasant Storybrooke with).
And if all fiction is real somewhere, then why are the stories in books and fairy tales so wrong (except in Henry's book)?
Anyway, he knows what's going on, which is nice. Everyone but the Mayor and Mr. Gold not knowing is kind of tiresome. Jefferson kidnaps Emma (and Mary Margaret--isn't that overdoing it?) because he recognizes she's magical--she got the town going again--and figures she can rebuild his magic hat so he can return to the Echanted Forest and be with his daughter again (he certainly wouldn't want to go back to Wonderland). But how can he if the Forest characters are all in Storybrooke anyway? He claims living with two realities in your brain drives you mad, but he was always aware of other realities even back in the Forest, and Regina and Mr. Gold live with two realities in their head and seem to function quite well.
Sadly, he seems to escape through his hat at the end, since I want more characters in on the secret so things can move forward. Emma and Mary Margaret don't seem to think much of it. (Earlier, there'd been a story feint where Emma contemplated Henry's stories being true, but I doubt many viewers were fooled that she was doing anything but trying to trick Jefferson.) I heard he might come back, which would be nice. The faster they wake up the sooner we can all go home.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:03 AM
3 Comments:
They finally gave us some action sequences, and Emma repeated the old cliche of untying your ally but not realizing the badguy is behind you. I'm not surprised that the Emma we've seen for the last ten episodes is that dumb, but Emma in the pilot was a super-smart super-athletic bounty hunter who never would have done that. Step one is to disable or kill the badguy; step two is to untie your friends.
I had the same reaction as you to the Alice thing. Although
I noticed in the pilot that when Henry was flipping through his book, there was a picture from Wonderland, and another picture from Oz. I thought maybe we might see Wonderland -- it's probably not under trademark, and there's already a Disney movie and a Disneyland ride based on it. On the other hand, I doubt that they'll pay the royalties to whoever owns Oz these days to use their characters.
Although the episode was good, I agree that the Alice world didn't mesh with the world we've seen so far. But the biggest problem with using Wonderland, in my opinion, is that in every version of the Alice story, a visitor from our world visits Wonderland. Same with the Oz books. That raises insuperable problems in my view; was Alice really from our world? If so, she must have died of old age in England half a century before Storybrook appeared in Maine.
At an SF convention long ago, an expert in fantasy said that one way to classify fantasy stories is by sorting them into three groups:
(1) Some character[s] from our world travel to a magical world.
(2) Some character[s] or objects from a magical world end up in our world.
(3) The entire story takes place in a magical world, and our world is not part of the equation.
She pointed out that the three fantasy writers from the Inklings illustrate these three categories (C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien, respectively).
The main story of Once Upon a Time is an example of # 2, and I think that's why it's jarring for them to introduce Lewis Carroll's stories (which are in category # 1) as a world within their world.
On Star Trek they regularly met historical figures, but they occasionally met ficitonal figures on the Holodeck who'd then come to life.
I think at the end of the episode, Emma was inching toward recognizing that something supernatural just may be going on in Storybrooke. Before the season is over she may finally be on track.
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