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nym_wibblySo, I finally bit the bullet and boxsetted the final half-season of Once Upon a Time.
Once was my first fandom since the premature cancellation of Stargate Universe broke my heart. Yes, Robert Carlyle links the two and that’s no coincidence, but it’s only for one reason; he’s one of only a handful of the best, best actors I’d have been remotely willing to turn on another potentially-new-fandom TV show to watch, at that point. I’d been a Stargate fan since the movie, and after some initial wtf, I fell in love with SGU. And I fell hard. Seeing those characters, that much potential for groundbreaking, slow-burn, character-driven telly, left on a cliffhanger… well, it broke my heart worse than any human being ever has, I admit it. I was in a ‘never again’ place, after that - never prepared to let a mere media franchise affect me that deeply ever again. At the time, I thought that meant I’d never actually be able to enjoy or follow anything like that ever again - participate in a fandom again.
With the exception of Atlantis, which I shared with my best friend, Stargate was a solo fandom for me. Like Doctor Who, it’s never been one that I felt much of an urge to write fanfic about - just something that always drew me, absorbed me, entertained me, comforted me, and distracted me from a reality that was, at that time, becoming more than I could cope with. When I vowed ‘never again’, there was something I’d forgotten - something I hadn’t counted on; the other part of a fandom. The fans. The community that grows up around a cult media franchise, with its explosion of creativity. That’s been lifeblood to me since I was 13, but as I began needing to prioritise where I spent my energy, that busy community is something I’d drifted away from into isolation. Enchanted by the first half-season of Once Upon a Time and feeling creative enough to have something worth sharing in A Bed of Thorns, I googled and found Tumblr - Fyre’s blog, to be exact - and came here to participate for the first time in a long time in the shared enthusiasm.
You can never know what a fandom, a character, a ‘ship means to somebody - what dark place it might’ve pulled them out of, or how badly they need the motivation of that positive passion to get them through the day. That’s why I don’t post - and I actively distance myself from - hate and ‘ship bashing and character-trashing and all the other flip-sides of the fandom creativity that I love so much; I have no interest in wasting my energy throwing my love for a fandom against that toxic wall, and I have even less interest in adding bricks of my own to said wall by focusing on what I don’t love about a thing. If somebody adores that character I wish had never been invented, I say good for them. You go, you write, you draw, you ‘ship, you enjoy it while it lasts and apologise to no-one, because you’re doing no harm. I’m with you all the way (just, probably, not reading your squee). OUaT fandom has been difficult to navigate on that front - from the start, it was about ‘shipper factions, and pretty short on ‘live and let live’ between them. Even the actors were dragged in. It wasn’t the most promising fandom sea in which to dip a cautious toe. But I found a niche where things were a bit less rocky, at least at first; what the fandom calls, and I will forever refuse to call, Rumbelle.
Rumple and Belle. See, smooshing their names together into a single entity like that… it leaves out a big part of my own, particular passion for fandom and fanfic; the individual character and the individual performance of the actor who portrays them. Each character, plus their relationship - not the three things smooshed into one, a thing inseparable under a single label. Amorphous, dependent. Not for me. It’s probably the opposite of having an OTP - if nothing else, it’s certainly a better opposite than wasting one’s energy hating on a ‘nOTP’.
Rumple and Belle. Belle and Rumple. The show itself fell into the trap of making them a unit, one dragging around the storyline of the other like a ball and chain, limiting their individual story and character development. Rumple being a lead character, the burden of the ball and chain fell on Belle as his love-interest character, and I regret that it limited her. A lot. It’s hard to avoid in old-model, ad-supported network television, unless you go the route of Elementary and keep everything platonic between the leads, because it’s the kind of storytelling that pays the bills by appealing to the mainstream. More of the same, more of what works, safe and reliable. Everything that could shake up the model needs to get reset to safe parameters before it loses viewers. It works - it really, really works. It sells advertising, which in turn pays for the content. But it ties a writer’s hands - it makes the endings, if the show gets the opportunity to go the distance with the characters’ emotional lives, inevitable. Predictable. All the show can do meantime is tread water before smacking down that inevitable payoff with a tired ‘ta-da!’ at the end, or backing out with A Very Special Episode somewhere along the way - and the only way to avoid it is to not have romantic pairings as a predominant feature of the story. And if a show doesn’t toe that narrow line of doing what consistently fluffs the US viewer ratings, it goes the way of Stargate Universe. Netflix, Amazon and others are changing that by not trying to shoehorn mainstream appeal into everything they create - they recognise the value of a niche, of a concept piece, and that TV can be art - something worth a voice in its own right, as well as being a vehicle to generate revenue. Thank goodness, and about time, and long may they have the funds to explore the potential of this alternative model. Meanwhile, the majority of shows are old-skool, and doing the best they can with what they’ve got.
I don’t delude myself that Once Upon a Time was high art. Season One was about as close to TV perfection as I’ve ever seen in a mainstream, family-viewing, US network show. Skin Deep, episode 12, remains one of the best 42 minutes of character-driven, show-don’t-tell telly I’ve had the pleasure of seeing. Truly magical. I think they recaptured a little of it there at the end - the final half-season, likely through necessity, was without the drawn-out, fake suspense and the last-minute, too-rushed, unsatisfying reveal that’s been the show’s trademark between seasons two and six. They paced it, prioritised it; they gave everything enough time, and I’m glad. I’m so glad they were given the luxury of enough time to bring it to a conclusion that was plausible, let alone one that made for emotional payoff. I was particularly watching Adelaide Kane (Ivy/Drizella), having just shallowly enjoyed her last show, Reign, which was forced to snatch for a grotesquely truncated ending at the last second when the plug got pulled. She got a better resolution for her character here - I truly don’t think that Once could’ve done any more justice to the ‘reboot’ characters than they did. I wasn’t expecting them to do what they did - to do what I would have done, if backed into the same writing corner - and swiftly tie off those loose ends for the newer characters so that they had the luxury of time to focus on the older, core characters who’d made the transition to the reboot - Rumple, Hook (2.0), Regina, and Henry. On the unwieldy, crazy-complex extended family that’s been at the heart of the show from the beginning. That’s been its heart, even when its limbs have been flailing.
Belle and Rumple were just one branch of the family tree, but the one ultimately driving much of the plot. When you give a character as much power, as much immunity to physical harm as OUaT gave Rumple, your storytelling options are severely limited. It’s not a helpful move, in character development, to make anything easy for a character - to give them a clearly marked way out. You have to devote a heck of a lot of storytime to explaining why a character with superpowers can’t fix the thing, save the day, save the girl; why they can’t undo the bad with the magic handwave, the magic wand, the time machine, the stun gun, the reset button that’s right in front of them. For the rest of ever, I’m calling that ‘the magic bean’. But Rumple was his own worst enemy. OUaT spent a lot of time tying itself in knots, just to make sure it actually had a story to tell, because so many of its central characters had magic. Regina, Emma or Rumple could’ve handwaved the plot away. Henry could’ve obliterated it with a stroke of the Author’s pen. They had to spend a lot of their time and energy coming up with reasons why not. Why not happy ever after. Why? Because we want the show to run long enough - drag this storyline out long enough - to make a syndication package, for a start. It’s a fundamental conflict of interest with good writing that’s not going away any time soon. Other shows have made way more of a hash of it than Once did. With Rumple, they turned it into the story.
Rumple tied his own hands, cut off his own avenues of escape, his own solutions to problems. Rumple’s ‘can’t’ or ‘won’t’ was convoluted and epic, and touched every character. I’m not saying that the storytelling was always sophisticated - there were times when the writers laid the excuses, the exposition and the handwaves on with a bloody cement trowel to avoid giving the characters too-obvious solutions to their plot challenges - but it did serve a specific purpose; to turn the necessity of limiting Rumple’s ability to magic big plot problems away into the meat and drink of his character development.
It meant that Belle, as Rumple’s true love, was shackled to his plotline. The plot devices that kept her from moving towards resolution before Rumple was ready were frustrating, repetitive and limiting to her character growth - all the worst pitfalls of the mainstream TV ‘reset button’ model falling on a character I love to bits - whose relationship with another character captivates me. That wasn’t easy to stomach, both because I wanted to see the character celebrated better than she was, and because it’s not good to see the awkward mechanics of basic storytelling on show like that - it throws me out of the make-believe. For all that frustration, though, I never hated where they took Belle as a character, or as Rumple’s other half - only how awkwardly and afterthoughtily it was done, and how it kept Belle from making the same seven season character journey as the others. She was always - and now always will be - a facet of ‘Rumbelle’ only. But Rumple got to have a life of his own.
And I loved him. In and out of makeup; imp, coward, manipulator and romantic lead - I loved Robert Carlyle’s Rumplestiltskin.
Once upon a time, loving a single character in a show was enough to hold me as a viewer. I was the kind of fan who fell for the once-a-season guest villain and stayed for the rest of the eps. These days, not so much. I’ll sit up and pay attention if an actor whose career I follow closely shows up in an episode of something, but if content makers want my attention these days - if they want my cash, or to make me sit through ads to get at their content - it takes more than occasional glimpses of something I love to hold me. I’ve grown, mainly thanks to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to love the ensemble cast style of TV storytelling. And to be incredibly picky about which ones I fall for.
The thing with Once Upon a Time was that the characters captivated me from the beginning. Well, almost from the beginning. Episode 3 was a bit of a wobble. I came because Robert Carlyle agreed to be in it, which is usually an indicator that the bar is set quite high, and because the premise sounded a lot like everything I’ve ever wanted from fairytales. The story of what happens after the trite, final, arbitrary, disappointing ‘happily ever after’ that ended the stories I loved and took the characters away from me? Snow White and Prince Charming having to actually live a life, like me, complete with its day to day, unheroic drudgery, unmagical experiences and endless personal growth and compromise? I’m in. Hand it over. I never wanted to be a fairytale princess. I’m completely sold on a fairytale princess who has to live in the real world, like me.
That was my starting place, (that and Robert Carlyle having way too much fun in tight leather trousers and thigh-length boots), but it was the ensemble - cast and characters both - that kept me watching Once Upon a Time and got me invested in the story. I’ve loved them, and I’m going to miss them.
I never expected their stories to be so permanently interwoven, or to take the central characters so far from their starting point without breaking up the band. It was an ambitious concept, this sprawling and non-traditional family as an ongoing plot, as well as providing the cast of characters. I boggled hard over it (and, with hindsight, maybe didn’t even ‘get it’) right up to the point where Rumple introduced Emma to his (dead) ex-wife Milah as the lover of both their (dead) son and her (currently dead) other ex. Thereafter, I just nodded, smiled, and thoroughly enjoyed the crazy. Just as the characters had accepted by that point in the storyline that family - one’s own, unique definition and experience of family - was the entire point, so had I.
A large ensemble cast is an unwieldy thing. Serving all of those characters equally while moving the collective story forward is difficult to do, and the larger the central ensemble is, the harder it gets. For my money, OUaT made a mistake in S2 by trying to centralise more of the peripheral characters, not because it wasn’t thoroughly worth doing, but because it was unsustainable. Even if they hadn’t slammed on the brakes and gone to Neverland instead of wherever they were going with Ruby, Belle, Cora, Aurora, Neal et al, I think they would still have bitten off more characters than they could chew. Those characters right there bore many of the consequences, being, to varying degrees, airbrushed or sidelined for the sake of the original central characters. Cora fared okay as a guest character - she got a good storyline out of it. Neal… gah. That’s another post. Taking Rumple’s motivation off in a different direction, that’s another post again. And don’t get me wrong - I think the culling of these characters had to be done. I don’t think the expanded-ensemble show could ever have worked without switching out some of the original characters for these new ones. What puzzles me is why they tried it in the first place. It’s a numbers game. Lines per page, scenes per script, pages per 42 minutes… There just wasn’t enough room for what they (seemingly) tried to do with S2.
Only Hook made the transition fully from guest villainy to protagonist. That they left out the moment where he had his change of heart and change of direction - that there’s a missing scene on the box set of S2 that fits the bill but wasn’t thought necessary for the aired ep - still makes me so sad and what-iffy. The rest of Hook’s storyline was built on that missing foundation - his personal epiphany left to the viewer to assume, to deduce, to read between the lines, and above all to conflate with his feelings towards Emma. Once bluntly articulated its major epiphanies, as fairytales do. It left that one out, then tried to pretend it hadn’t and that nobody noticed. I’ve enjoyed the character(s) of Hook so much, and Colin O’Donoghue even more, but I could never unsee that omission of a major step in the character’s journey from self-serving scum to selfless hero. Which is part of the reason I broke down and cried when his long-running and tangled story with Rumple came to such a simple, pure, peaceful conclusion at the end. How much better it would’ve been - how much more real and meaningful to me - if the house of cards that brought them there didn’t wobble with my constant, ‘yes, but…’
Niggles like that made my enjoyment of Once Upon a Time less than it could have been, there’s no doubt of that. Their basic idea of villain motivation continued to baffle me right to the end, with Gothel’s origin story - betraying everything she was only because somebody else betrayed everything she was - as did the show’s uncanny ability to pull a worthwhile follow-on story or emotional payoff out of such flimsy backstory. It shouldn’t have worked, but it often did. In the end. After a rocky road through some dodgy exposition. Rumple gained much more of a plausible, grey-area, slippery-slope backstory to his evildoing as the thing progressed and gave more flashbacks; so did Regina, and to a lesser extent, so did Hook. But the half-season antagonists? Shoot me now. Butthurt is not plausible motive for an immortal reign of terror. Intelligent, amiable people do not suddenly start believing that two wrongs make a right. I like to be at least guiltily on the side of the bad guys. I like to root for them and be horrified at myself for being swept up in their cause and for finding them more than a little bit sexy in their lack of inhibition. Wanting to make them stay after kindergarten and write “I must not be a self-entitled, nasty little twunt” on a board ten thousand times until the message sinks in isn’t quite the same.
Season One proved that the team behind the show was capable of more consistency, tighter writing, spot-on pacing, and serving every character, even the ones we only glimpsed, with worthwhile plot and development. I think the final half season bore that out as well - the skill, the capability was there, yet it didn’t always make it to the screen. And it was frustrating. I was a frustrated viewer, but no less in love with Regina, Emma, Rumple, Belle, Henry and all the rest of them. I wanted to be there with them in their story - and the fact that I wanted to be there more than I wanted to get away from the wobbly pacing and the plotholes is all I need to make a fandom out of a TV show.
The actors knocked it out of the park. Out of the stratosphere. Lana Parilla had, at times, some of the dodgiest lines I’ve heard this side of Star Wars (the original, I mean - the one that goes with the Harrison Ford anecdotal quote, “you can type this shit, George, but you can’t say it”.) Lana Parrilla nailed it, killed it, blew me away with her Regina - didn’t flinch from making her hateful and hate-able when she needed to be. Suspended my disbelief in every aspect of her character, from Mayor Mills to the homicidal Evil Queen to the elected Good Queen of Storybrooke, all through that faltering and messy redemption story. Her relationships with Emma, with Snow, with Henry and with Rumple are aspects of this show that will never leave me. Aspects I learned from. Fairytales instruct and caution us - that’s what they’re for, and why they reach us on a level we can’t quite explain or justify. The folk and fairytales of our particular culture shape us from before we’re old enough to remember. To get to explore mine again as an adult, personified by the strongest ensemble cast I’ve seen since Buffy, has been a gift. A story about how much stories matter.
I’m going to miss Once Upon a Time, and I’m going to miss the characters and those wonderful performances. Terribly. I’m going to miss Belle and Rumple more than I think I can bear. BUT. They got to tell their story - a whole story. They even got two bites of the cherry when crafting themselves a fitting, planned ending. Most shows don’t get that, most don’t even get a second season, or they go out like Reign did with a token wrapup.
Before Once Upon a Time, I’d given up hope that any show or character I loved would ever last the distance. Warts and all, frustrations and all, I’m grateful for six years of being allowed to escape into this fantasy world that lifts my spirits. I’m grateful to have Rumple’s fictional voice like a devil on my shoulder, inspiring me to make stories of my own. I’m grateful that it reconnected me with others in fandom.
I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Once was my first fandom since the premature cancellation of Stargate Universe broke my heart. Yes, Robert Carlyle links the two and that’s no coincidence, but it’s only for one reason; he’s one of only a handful of the best, best actors I’d have been remotely willing to turn on another potentially-new-fandom TV show to watch, at that point. I’d been a Stargate fan since the movie, and after some initial wtf, I fell in love with SGU. And I fell hard. Seeing those characters, that much potential for groundbreaking, slow-burn, character-driven telly, left on a cliffhanger… well, it broke my heart worse than any human being ever has, I admit it. I was in a ‘never again’ place, after that - never prepared to let a mere media franchise affect me that deeply ever again. At the time, I thought that meant I’d never actually be able to enjoy or follow anything like that ever again - participate in a fandom again.
With the exception of Atlantis, which I shared with my best friend, Stargate was a solo fandom for me. Like Doctor Who, it’s never been one that I felt much of an urge to write fanfic about - just something that always drew me, absorbed me, entertained me, comforted me, and distracted me from a reality that was, at that time, becoming more than I could cope with. When I vowed ‘never again’, there was something I’d forgotten - something I hadn’t counted on; the other part of a fandom. The fans. The community that grows up around a cult media franchise, with its explosion of creativity. That’s been lifeblood to me since I was 13, but as I began needing to prioritise where I spent my energy, that busy community is something I’d drifted away from into isolation. Enchanted by the first half-season of Once Upon a Time and feeling creative enough to have something worth sharing in A Bed of Thorns, I googled and found Tumblr - Fyre’s blog, to be exact - and came here to participate for the first time in a long time in the shared enthusiasm.
You can never know what a fandom, a character, a ‘ship means to somebody - what dark place it might’ve pulled them out of, or how badly they need the motivation of that positive passion to get them through the day. That’s why I don’t post - and I actively distance myself from - hate and ‘ship bashing and character-trashing and all the other flip-sides of the fandom creativity that I love so much; I have no interest in wasting my energy throwing my love for a fandom against that toxic wall, and I have even less interest in adding bricks of my own to said wall by focusing on what I don’t love about a thing. If somebody adores that character I wish had never been invented, I say good for them. You go, you write, you draw, you ‘ship, you enjoy it while it lasts and apologise to no-one, because you’re doing no harm. I’m with you all the way (just, probably, not reading your squee). OUaT fandom has been difficult to navigate on that front - from the start, it was about ‘shipper factions, and pretty short on ‘live and let live’ between them. Even the actors were dragged in. It wasn’t the most promising fandom sea in which to dip a cautious toe. But I found a niche where things were a bit less rocky, at least at first; what the fandom calls, and I will forever refuse to call, Rumbelle.
Rumple and Belle. See, smooshing their names together into a single entity like that… it leaves out a big part of my own, particular passion for fandom and fanfic; the individual character and the individual performance of the actor who portrays them. Each character, plus their relationship - not the three things smooshed into one, a thing inseparable under a single label. Amorphous, dependent. Not for me. It’s probably the opposite of having an OTP - if nothing else, it’s certainly a better opposite than wasting one’s energy hating on a ‘nOTP’.
Rumple and Belle. Belle and Rumple. The show itself fell into the trap of making them a unit, one dragging around the storyline of the other like a ball and chain, limiting their individual story and character development. Rumple being a lead character, the burden of the ball and chain fell on Belle as his love-interest character, and I regret that it limited her. A lot. It’s hard to avoid in old-model, ad-supported network television, unless you go the route of Elementary and keep everything platonic between the leads, because it’s the kind of storytelling that pays the bills by appealing to the mainstream. More of the same, more of what works, safe and reliable. Everything that could shake up the model needs to get reset to safe parameters before it loses viewers. It works - it really, really works. It sells advertising, which in turn pays for the content. But it ties a writer’s hands - it makes the endings, if the show gets the opportunity to go the distance with the characters’ emotional lives, inevitable. Predictable. All the show can do meantime is tread water before smacking down that inevitable payoff with a tired ‘ta-da!’ at the end, or backing out with A Very Special Episode somewhere along the way - and the only way to avoid it is to not have romantic pairings as a predominant feature of the story. And if a show doesn’t toe that narrow line of doing what consistently fluffs the US viewer ratings, it goes the way of Stargate Universe. Netflix, Amazon and others are changing that by not trying to shoehorn mainstream appeal into everything they create - they recognise the value of a niche, of a concept piece, and that TV can be art - something worth a voice in its own right, as well as being a vehicle to generate revenue. Thank goodness, and about time, and long may they have the funds to explore the potential of this alternative model. Meanwhile, the majority of shows are old-skool, and doing the best they can with what they’ve got.
I don’t delude myself that Once Upon a Time was high art. Season One was about as close to TV perfection as I’ve ever seen in a mainstream, family-viewing, US network show. Skin Deep, episode 12, remains one of the best 42 minutes of character-driven, show-don’t-tell telly I’ve had the pleasure of seeing. Truly magical. I think they recaptured a little of it there at the end - the final half-season, likely through necessity, was without the drawn-out, fake suspense and the last-minute, too-rushed, unsatisfying reveal that’s been the show’s trademark between seasons two and six. They paced it, prioritised it; they gave everything enough time, and I’m glad. I’m so glad they were given the luxury of enough time to bring it to a conclusion that was plausible, let alone one that made for emotional payoff. I was particularly watching Adelaide Kane (Ivy/Drizella), having just shallowly enjoyed her last show, Reign, which was forced to snatch for a grotesquely truncated ending at the last second when the plug got pulled. She got a better resolution for her character here - I truly don’t think that Once could’ve done any more justice to the ‘reboot’ characters than they did. I wasn’t expecting them to do what they did - to do what I would have done, if backed into the same writing corner - and swiftly tie off those loose ends for the newer characters so that they had the luxury of time to focus on the older, core characters who’d made the transition to the reboot - Rumple, Hook (2.0), Regina, and Henry. On the unwieldy, crazy-complex extended family that’s been at the heart of the show from the beginning. That’s been its heart, even when its limbs have been flailing.
Belle and Rumple were just one branch of the family tree, but the one ultimately driving much of the plot. When you give a character as much power, as much immunity to physical harm as OUaT gave Rumple, your storytelling options are severely limited. It’s not a helpful move, in character development, to make anything easy for a character - to give them a clearly marked way out. You have to devote a heck of a lot of storytime to explaining why a character with superpowers can’t fix the thing, save the day, save the girl; why they can’t undo the bad with the magic handwave, the magic wand, the time machine, the stun gun, the reset button that’s right in front of them. For the rest of ever, I’m calling that ‘the magic bean’. But Rumple was his own worst enemy. OUaT spent a lot of time tying itself in knots, just to make sure it actually had a story to tell, because so many of its central characters had magic. Regina, Emma or Rumple could’ve handwaved the plot away. Henry could’ve obliterated it with a stroke of the Author’s pen. They had to spend a lot of their time and energy coming up with reasons why not. Why not happy ever after. Why? Because we want the show to run long enough - drag this storyline out long enough - to make a syndication package, for a start. It’s a fundamental conflict of interest with good writing that’s not going away any time soon. Other shows have made way more of a hash of it than Once did. With Rumple, they turned it into the story.
Rumple tied his own hands, cut off his own avenues of escape, his own solutions to problems. Rumple’s ‘can’t’ or ‘won’t’ was convoluted and epic, and touched every character. I’m not saying that the storytelling was always sophisticated - there were times when the writers laid the excuses, the exposition and the handwaves on with a bloody cement trowel to avoid giving the characters too-obvious solutions to their plot challenges - but it did serve a specific purpose; to turn the necessity of limiting Rumple’s ability to magic big plot problems away into the meat and drink of his character development.
It meant that Belle, as Rumple’s true love, was shackled to his plotline. The plot devices that kept her from moving towards resolution before Rumple was ready were frustrating, repetitive and limiting to her character growth - all the worst pitfalls of the mainstream TV ‘reset button’ model falling on a character I love to bits - whose relationship with another character captivates me. That wasn’t easy to stomach, both because I wanted to see the character celebrated better than she was, and because it’s not good to see the awkward mechanics of basic storytelling on show like that - it throws me out of the make-believe. For all that frustration, though, I never hated where they took Belle as a character, or as Rumple’s other half - only how awkwardly and afterthoughtily it was done, and how it kept Belle from making the same seven season character journey as the others. She was always - and now always will be - a facet of ‘Rumbelle’ only. But Rumple got to have a life of his own.
And I loved him. In and out of makeup; imp, coward, manipulator and romantic lead - I loved Robert Carlyle’s Rumplestiltskin.
Once upon a time, loving a single character in a show was enough to hold me as a viewer. I was the kind of fan who fell for the once-a-season guest villain and stayed for the rest of the eps. These days, not so much. I’ll sit up and pay attention if an actor whose career I follow closely shows up in an episode of something, but if content makers want my attention these days - if they want my cash, or to make me sit through ads to get at their content - it takes more than occasional glimpses of something I love to hold me. I’ve grown, mainly thanks to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to love the ensemble cast style of TV storytelling. And to be incredibly picky about which ones I fall for.
The thing with Once Upon a Time was that the characters captivated me from the beginning. Well, almost from the beginning. Episode 3 was a bit of a wobble. I came because Robert Carlyle agreed to be in it, which is usually an indicator that the bar is set quite high, and because the premise sounded a lot like everything I’ve ever wanted from fairytales. The story of what happens after the trite, final, arbitrary, disappointing ‘happily ever after’ that ended the stories I loved and took the characters away from me? Snow White and Prince Charming having to actually live a life, like me, complete with its day to day, unheroic drudgery, unmagical experiences and endless personal growth and compromise? I’m in. Hand it over. I never wanted to be a fairytale princess. I’m completely sold on a fairytale princess who has to live in the real world, like me.
That was my starting place, (that and Robert Carlyle having way too much fun in tight leather trousers and thigh-length boots), but it was the ensemble - cast and characters both - that kept me watching Once Upon a Time and got me invested in the story. I’ve loved them, and I’m going to miss them.
I never expected their stories to be so permanently interwoven, or to take the central characters so far from their starting point without breaking up the band. It was an ambitious concept, this sprawling and non-traditional family as an ongoing plot, as well as providing the cast of characters. I boggled hard over it (and, with hindsight, maybe didn’t even ‘get it’) right up to the point where Rumple introduced Emma to his (dead) ex-wife Milah as the lover of both their (dead) son and her (currently dead) other ex. Thereafter, I just nodded, smiled, and thoroughly enjoyed the crazy. Just as the characters had accepted by that point in the storyline that family - one’s own, unique definition and experience of family - was the entire point, so had I.
A large ensemble cast is an unwieldy thing. Serving all of those characters equally while moving the collective story forward is difficult to do, and the larger the central ensemble is, the harder it gets. For my money, OUaT made a mistake in S2 by trying to centralise more of the peripheral characters, not because it wasn’t thoroughly worth doing, but because it was unsustainable. Even if they hadn’t slammed on the brakes and gone to Neverland instead of wherever they were going with Ruby, Belle, Cora, Aurora, Neal et al, I think they would still have bitten off more characters than they could chew. Those characters right there bore many of the consequences, being, to varying degrees, airbrushed or sidelined for the sake of the original central characters. Cora fared okay as a guest character - she got a good storyline out of it. Neal… gah. That’s another post. Taking Rumple’s motivation off in a different direction, that’s another post again. And don’t get me wrong - I think the culling of these characters had to be done. I don’t think the expanded-ensemble show could ever have worked without switching out some of the original characters for these new ones. What puzzles me is why they tried it in the first place. It’s a numbers game. Lines per page, scenes per script, pages per 42 minutes… There just wasn’t enough room for what they (seemingly) tried to do with S2.
Only Hook made the transition fully from guest villainy to protagonist. That they left out the moment where he had his change of heart and change of direction - that there’s a missing scene on the box set of S2 that fits the bill but wasn’t thought necessary for the aired ep - still makes me so sad and what-iffy. The rest of Hook’s storyline was built on that missing foundation - his personal epiphany left to the viewer to assume, to deduce, to read between the lines, and above all to conflate with his feelings towards Emma. Once bluntly articulated its major epiphanies, as fairytales do. It left that one out, then tried to pretend it hadn’t and that nobody noticed. I’ve enjoyed the character(s) of Hook so much, and Colin O’Donoghue even more, but I could never unsee that omission of a major step in the character’s journey from self-serving scum to selfless hero. Which is part of the reason I broke down and cried when his long-running and tangled story with Rumple came to such a simple, pure, peaceful conclusion at the end. How much better it would’ve been - how much more real and meaningful to me - if the house of cards that brought them there didn’t wobble with my constant, ‘yes, but…’
Niggles like that made my enjoyment of Once Upon a Time less than it could have been, there’s no doubt of that. Their basic idea of villain motivation continued to baffle me right to the end, with Gothel’s origin story - betraying everything she was only because somebody else betrayed everything she was - as did the show’s uncanny ability to pull a worthwhile follow-on story or emotional payoff out of such flimsy backstory. It shouldn’t have worked, but it often did. In the end. After a rocky road through some dodgy exposition. Rumple gained much more of a plausible, grey-area, slippery-slope backstory to his evildoing as the thing progressed and gave more flashbacks; so did Regina, and to a lesser extent, so did Hook. But the half-season antagonists? Shoot me now. Butthurt is not plausible motive for an immortal reign of terror. Intelligent, amiable people do not suddenly start believing that two wrongs make a right. I like to be at least guiltily on the side of the bad guys. I like to root for them and be horrified at myself for being swept up in their cause and for finding them more than a little bit sexy in their lack of inhibition. Wanting to make them stay after kindergarten and write “I must not be a self-entitled, nasty little twunt” on a board ten thousand times until the message sinks in isn’t quite the same.
Season One proved that the team behind the show was capable of more consistency, tighter writing, spot-on pacing, and serving every character, even the ones we only glimpsed, with worthwhile plot and development. I think the final half season bore that out as well - the skill, the capability was there, yet it didn’t always make it to the screen. And it was frustrating. I was a frustrated viewer, but no less in love with Regina, Emma, Rumple, Belle, Henry and all the rest of them. I wanted to be there with them in their story - and the fact that I wanted to be there more than I wanted to get away from the wobbly pacing and the plotholes is all I need to make a fandom out of a TV show.
The actors knocked it out of the park. Out of the stratosphere. Lana Parilla had, at times, some of the dodgiest lines I’ve heard this side of Star Wars (the original, I mean - the one that goes with the Harrison Ford anecdotal quote, “you can type this shit, George, but you can’t say it”.) Lana Parrilla nailed it, killed it, blew me away with her Regina - didn’t flinch from making her hateful and hate-able when she needed to be. Suspended my disbelief in every aspect of her character, from Mayor Mills to the homicidal Evil Queen to the elected Good Queen of Storybrooke, all through that faltering and messy redemption story. Her relationships with Emma, with Snow, with Henry and with Rumple are aspects of this show that will never leave me. Aspects I learned from. Fairytales instruct and caution us - that’s what they’re for, and why they reach us on a level we can’t quite explain or justify. The folk and fairytales of our particular culture shape us from before we’re old enough to remember. To get to explore mine again as an adult, personified by the strongest ensemble cast I’ve seen since Buffy, has been a gift. A story about how much stories matter.
I’m going to miss Once Upon a Time, and I’m going to miss the characters and those wonderful performances. Terribly. I’m going to miss Belle and Rumple more than I think I can bear. BUT. They got to tell their story - a whole story. They even got two bites of the cherry when crafting themselves a fitting, planned ending. Most shows don’t get that, most don’t even get a second season, or they go out like Reign did with a token wrapup.
Before Once Upon a Time, I’d given up hope that any show or character I loved would ever last the distance. Warts and all, frustrations and all, I’m grateful for six years of being allowed to escape into this fantasy world that lifts my spirits. I’m grateful to have Rumple’s fictional voice like a devil on my shoulder, inspiring me to make stories of my own. I’m grateful that it reconnected me with others in fandom.
I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.