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Once Upon a Time
I had fallen behind but I got all caught up last night! I'm not sure what the most current episode number is. Whatever was last week ("The Miller's Daughter").
And I looooooved it. :D
After the previous episode, I was going to make a post about how Team Good Guy is dumb. :D Emma "dealing" with Hook by locking him in the basement is bad enough (YES, I'M SURE HE'S COMPLETELY GONE AND WILL NEVER BOTHER YOU AGAIN) but Snow and Charming leading Regina and Cora to the Dark One's dagger ... just ... aargh. *bonks head against wall*
But then there was "The Miller's Daughter" and it was awesome and wonderful and pushed ALL my buttons. :D Some things I loved, in no particular order:
- I loved how Cora was handled in this episode. It just figures that the episode that made me like her is the episode in which she was killed. But I loved that she was just as devious and manipulative as Rumpelstiltskin, a Magnificent Bastard and a villain truly matched to him (as opposed to Regina, who was a Magnificent Bastard last season but has really frustrated me with her twist towards not redemption but victimhood this season). And they managed to give Cora compelling, sympathetic reasons for being cruel and manipulative without making her a likable person at all. I also really loved that Cora actually got one over on Rumpel. I do kind of wish that they hadn't had her genuinely fall in love with him - I would have preferred if she'd been playing him all along. That would have been AWESOME. But the way she turns the tables on him and his machinations was lovely; it gave me the same thrill as Season One Red turning out to be the wolf. This episode hit a lot of the same buttons for me as Regina and Gold's interactions as intelligent, powerful adversaries in season one. (... before it turned out that he'd been manipulating the whole situation all along. I do love Gold/Rumpel - see below - but I get frustrated with the show's ongoing efforts to insert him into every character's backstory and put him in charge of every major life decision that everyone makes. It worked for me here because Cora actually managed to dodge his machinations, at least for a while.)
- I love that they went there with Snow killing Cora. Fairy tales can be dark, and this show has impressed me in the past by being willing to deal with darkness without wallowing in it. It's not grimdark all the time, in fact it's the opposite (light, fluffy, and full of black and white, where Good is Good and Evil is Evil), which makes those sudden left turns into darkness all the more powerful and surprising. And on top of everything, Snow does it in a particularly cruel and manipulative way. It doesn't come out of nowhere for her, though; we've seen in past episodes what she's capable of - it's just that this is the darkest she's gone. To me, it makes her a much more fascinating character than if she were inherently 100% "good" (as most of the other characters seem to believe she is); she does have a dark, vindictive side (as people do!) that she has to choose to turn away from. (The fact that most of the other characters consistently talk up "sweet, innocent Snow" makes me wonder if the show is actually intending to portray her this way, but I suppose my headcanon is that smitten Charming sees her as a lot more perfect than she actually is. It doesn't make me like her less, though, if she's flawed and kind of selfish and has to choose to make the right decisions rather than having them fall into her lap. It makes me like her a lot more.)
It's a genuinely complicated moral situation, too. Killing Cora in cold blood (as judge, jury and executioner) is morally repugnant. But so is letting her go to continue killing and manipulating people. Snow is actually right that they'd all be better off if she'd let Regina die (or, for that matter, shot her with the arrow that one time). But it doesn't make killing her a morally "correct" option. OOH COMPLEXITY. :D
- I love that this show can make your heart bleed for Rumpel and, yet, it doesn't fall into the trap of woobifying him. Even when he's dying, he's still NOT a nice guy, blaming Henry and manipulating Snow into killing Cora. We may be headed towards a Rumpelstiltskin redemption arc in the future, but we're nowhere near that now. At the same time, he does have a heart and he does have people he cares about -- even though he still hasn't made the jump to genuine selflessness, even for people he loves; he does truly love them, but he still sees them as important because they are important to him, not because they are human beings and important in their own right. And people he doesn't love continue to be little more than tools to him. Redemption, if it ever comes at all, is a long way off. Still, his call to Belle, eeeeee. *heartwrench* I'm still frustrated that we've seen so little of Belle's post-amnesia life; apparently she's just living in a hospital room? BLARGH. But yeah. BUTTONS, PUSHED. (I love that he started out "You are a hero.") And, just, everything with Rumpel in this episode. BUTTONS. :D
- And I also loved that there wasn't a deathbed reconciliation with Neal. There was still love and grief - they were close, once - but Neal hasn't forgiven him (for good reason!), and made that clear. Still, like he told Emma, there's a difference between being angry at your father and wanting to see him die. ALL THE EMOTION. *flails*
- And while I'm flailing about Rumpel-related events in this episode, I continue to love his interactions with Emma. She won't let him bully her, but she'll do the "truce" thing when necessary. I enjoy their grudging respect and, perhaps, even more grudging fondness. Having said that, I have no idea where their relationship is going at all. I don't know if Rumpel is successfully leading Emma down the same dark path he's led so many other characters down. If he tries to kill Henry, though, Emma will END him. And that's another thing I'm enjoying: I have no idea which way Rumpel is going to fall on any moral question, no matter how dire. WILL he actually try to kill Henry? I don't know! He did it already once, though by neglect rather than direct action. I haven't got a clue where this is going; all the twists and turns of this storyline have been surprising and delightful for me so far, and there are SO many interesting places it can yet go. (And so many terrible, disappointing places. Don't break my heart, show!)
Basically I really loved this episode. :D
And I looooooved it. :D
After the previous episode, I was going to make a post about how Team Good Guy is dumb. :D Emma "dealing" with Hook by locking him in the basement is bad enough (YES, I'M SURE HE'S COMPLETELY GONE AND WILL NEVER BOTHER YOU AGAIN) but Snow and Charming leading Regina and Cora to the Dark One's dagger ... just ... aargh. *bonks head against wall*
But then there was "The Miller's Daughter" and it was awesome and wonderful and pushed ALL my buttons. :D Some things I loved, in no particular order:
- I loved how Cora was handled in this episode. It just figures that the episode that made me like her is the episode in which she was killed. But I loved that she was just as devious and manipulative as Rumpelstiltskin, a Magnificent Bastard and a villain truly matched to him (as opposed to Regina, who was a Magnificent Bastard last season but has really frustrated me with her twist towards not redemption but victimhood this season). And they managed to give Cora compelling, sympathetic reasons for being cruel and manipulative without making her a likable person at all. I also really loved that Cora actually got one over on Rumpel. I do kind of wish that they hadn't had her genuinely fall in love with him - I would have preferred if she'd been playing him all along. That would have been AWESOME. But the way she turns the tables on him and his machinations was lovely; it gave me the same thrill as Season One Red turning out to be the wolf. This episode hit a lot of the same buttons for me as Regina and Gold's interactions as intelligent, powerful adversaries in season one. (... before it turned out that he'd been manipulating the whole situation all along. I do love Gold/Rumpel - see below - but I get frustrated with the show's ongoing efforts to insert him into every character's backstory and put him in charge of every major life decision that everyone makes. It worked for me here because Cora actually managed to dodge his machinations, at least for a while.)
- I love that they went there with Snow killing Cora. Fairy tales can be dark, and this show has impressed me in the past by being willing to deal with darkness without wallowing in it. It's not grimdark all the time, in fact it's the opposite (light, fluffy, and full of black and white, where Good is Good and Evil is Evil), which makes those sudden left turns into darkness all the more powerful and surprising. And on top of everything, Snow does it in a particularly cruel and manipulative way. It doesn't come out of nowhere for her, though; we've seen in past episodes what she's capable of - it's just that this is the darkest she's gone. To me, it makes her a much more fascinating character than if she were inherently 100% "good" (as most of the other characters seem to believe she is); she does have a dark, vindictive side (as people do!) that she has to choose to turn away from. (The fact that most of the other characters consistently talk up "sweet, innocent Snow" makes me wonder if the show is actually intending to portray her this way, but I suppose my headcanon is that smitten Charming sees her as a lot more perfect than she actually is. It doesn't make me like her less, though, if she's flawed and kind of selfish and has to choose to make the right decisions rather than having them fall into her lap. It makes me like her a lot more.)
It's a genuinely complicated moral situation, too. Killing Cora in cold blood (as judge, jury and executioner) is morally repugnant. But so is letting her go to continue killing and manipulating people. Snow is actually right that they'd all be better off if she'd let Regina die (or, for that matter, shot her with the arrow that one time). But it doesn't make killing her a morally "correct" option. OOH COMPLEXITY. :D
- I love that this show can make your heart bleed for Rumpel and, yet, it doesn't fall into the trap of woobifying him. Even when he's dying, he's still NOT a nice guy, blaming Henry and manipulating Snow into killing Cora. We may be headed towards a Rumpelstiltskin redemption arc in the future, but we're nowhere near that now. At the same time, he does have a heart and he does have people he cares about -- even though he still hasn't made the jump to genuine selflessness, even for people he loves; he does truly love them, but he still sees them as important because they are important to him, not because they are human beings and important in their own right. And people he doesn't love continue to be little more than tools to him. Redemption, if it ever comes at all, is a long way off. Still, his call to Belle, eeeeee. *heartwrench* I'm still frustrated that we've seen so little of Belle's post-amnesia life; apparently she's just living in a hospital room? BLARGH. But yeah. BUTTONS, PUSHED. (I love that he started out "You are a hero.") And, just, everything with Rumpel in this episode. BUTTONS. :D
- And I also loved that there wasn't a deathbed reconciliation with Neal. There was still love and grief - they were close, once - but Neal hasn't forgiven him (for good reason!), and made that clear. Still, like he told Emma, there's a difference between being angry at your father and wanting to see him die. ALL THE EMOTION. *flails*
- And while I'm flailing about Rumpel-related events in this episode, I continue to love his interactions with Emma. She won't let him bully her, but she'll do the "truce" thing when necessary. I enjoy their grudging respect and, perhaps, even more grudging fondness. Having said that, I have no idea where their relationship is going at all. I don't know if Rumpel is successfully leading Emma down the same dark path he's led so many other characters down. If he tries to kill Henry, though, Emma will END him. And that's another thing I'm enjoying: I have no idea which way Rumpel is going to fall on any moral question, no matter how dire. WILL he actually try to kill Henry? I don't know! He did it already once, though by neglect rather than direct action. I haven't got a clue where this is going; all the twists and turns of this storyline have been surprising and delightful for me so far, and there are SO many interesting places it can yet go. (And so many terrible, disappointing places. Don't break my heart, show!)
Basically I really loved this episode. :D
no subject
I actually liked the fact that she really loved Rumpelstiltskin. While I totally see what you mean, I like that she could love him and still con him, that loving him didn't mean that she stopped looking out for number one.
Killing Cora in cold blood (as judge, jury and executioner) is morally repugnant. But so is letting her go to continue killing and manipulating people.
I actually think that killing Cora directly would have been morally justifiable. To copy and paste from my own episode review, Cora was an imminent danger to everyone Snow loves, and she was never going to stop. There's no jail cell that can hold her, and no higher authority beyond Storybrook to take responsibility for her. Killing her was simple self defense. It was the way Snow killed her that shocked me. Using Regina's abusive childhood to manipulate her into killing her own mother is seriously twisted. I never would have expected the show to go that dark. It's nice to be wrong. (Then again, I try to keep my expectations for TV as low as possible, so that I can be pleasantly surprised.)
I'm really interested to see where they go with Snow's character. Obviously, there will be consequences from Regina, but I want internal consequences as well. Not in the "punishment" sense of consequences so much. Snow has been battling this part of her for a long time. How do the events in this episode make her feel?
as opposed to Regina, who was a Magnificent Bastard last season but has really frustrated me with her twist towards not redemption but victimhood this season
Sigh, yes. I think the thing that disappointments me most about this show is its inconsistent handling of Regina. In early S1 I thought they were going for a sympathetic villain thing, but as the season progressed they moved further away from that and made her much more plainly evil. Then, in S2, it looked like we were getting a redemption arc, but it never went anywhere. Which would be fine (not every stab at redemption has to successful), if I felt the writing for her character was more even. As you said yourself, she's just been victimized, and I don't she has much to show for it, character wise. And it's frustrating because Rumpelstiltskin/Gold's storyline is proof that they can do this sort of thing well.
But ranting aside, I really did love the episode.
no subject
I can see what you're saying here! I guess that I was a little disappointed because I'd assumed that the whole love affair was a clever ruse and was surprised to find it was genuine. But I can see your point too, that the mere fact of being in love wasn't enough to divert her from her ambitions. (And I also love that it was his ruthlessness and ambition, and not Belle's vision of a redeemable nice guy under the bad-guy exterior, that drew Cora to him and made him attractive to her. Sociopaths in love!)
I actually think that killing Cora directly would have been morally justifiable. To copy and paste from my own episode review, Cora was an imminent danger to everyone Snow loves, and she was never going to stop. There's no jail cell that can hold her, and no higher authority beyond Storybrook to take responsibility for her. Killing her was simple self defense. It was the way Snow killed her that shocked me. Using Regina's abusive childhood to manipulate her into killing her own mother is seriously twisted. I never would have expected the show to go that dark. It's nice to be wrong.
I love it when the show goes dark, because it's capable of being quite dark and twisted (from season one, the Mad Hatter episode and the reveal on Ruby having killed her boyfriend spring to mind) but it's not like that most of the time. I think a steady diet of blackness would be way too much, but I love the show's sudden left turns into wicked darkness because they're so startling and unexpected. (There are times when it almost feels like the show is in the hands of two different groups of writers pulling it in different directions; there are episodes that are so strikingly black-and-white and saccharine in their morality that it's almost painful, and then there are episodes that are filled to the brim with shades of gray and an underlying sense of darkness lurking in all the characters' hearts, like this one.)
And yeah, like I just wrote in the comments on LJ, I think there are times when trying to keep one's hands (morally) clean, at the expense of everyone else, becomes its own kind of moral failing. Killing Cora really is the only option she's left them with, and for Snow and Charming to cling to their ideals while letting the world fall into darkness is monumentally selfish. Sometimes you have to become the monster to defeat it (which is exactly what Snow did in this episode, in fact). I also can't even tell you how much I appreciate the show's avoidance of one of my least favorite copout tropes: when the narrative sets up a situation where the hero can kill the villain in a guilt-free way. For example, when the hero lets the villain live and then the villain immediately pulls out a weapon and tries to backstab, forcing the hero to kill him (her) in self-defense. Oh, I hate that. OuaT could very easily have gone there, and it didn't, and I am so glad.
And I second your hope for consequences! I agree with you, it's not that I want to see Snow punished, it's that I want to see her similarities and differences from Cora and Regina brought out into the open. One of the things I love about this show (although there have been a few episodes that undermine this theme) is that it presents "evil" as something that is a matter of choice, not nature. People are not inherently evil; they become so through the choices they make. I love that, and I think that the darkness we occasionally see in Snow fits that theme very well. Although I go back and forth on whether the writers actually intend it to be there. You could also argue that it's a simple case of "the end justifies the means because it's the good guys doing it"; I am about 50-50 on whether Snow's occasional pettiness and cruelty is the writers deliberately trying to reflect Regina and Cora's storyline in Snow, giving her the opportunity to make different - better - choices, or whether it's just a case of not thinking things through. It does, however, work just fine if it's viewed as an intentional aspect of the "evil is a choice" theme, so hey, I'm cool with that.
But Regina ... yeah ... it is very frustrating. I think the fundamental thing that bothers me about her is that she's gone from being a strong, independent character in her own right to basically a tool of Rumpel and her mother. I have philosophical problems with the show retconning a strong, powerful woman into a lackey of a male character (Doctor Who did this recently, too, and I hated it there as well), but even aside from that, I'm frustrated that the show seems to be moving backwards with Regina rather than forward. Like you said, not every redemption attempt is successful, and I would even be okay with Regina embracing her evil side, if she'd just do something on her own rather than being forced into the mold of someone who is constantly running after the approval of other people. (In some sense, they do this with Rumpel as well -- all of his motivation is centered around finding Bae -- but the difference in the two storylines is stark; Rumpel gets agency, he's in control, while Regina is constantly victimized by other people or spends all her time running after the approval of Henry or her mother. It's frustrating.)
no subject
Have I mentioned my take on this to you yet? I see OUaT as having gone so unfortunately "Lacroix Lite" with Regina, thus necessitating the intervention of her "Divia," Cora. I had figured that Cora was going to completely eclipse this increasingly pointless Regina, but now that Cora is dead... have the writers re-learned what it takes to depict a genuine, story-worthy, villainous villain? I hope so!
When they first got so badly off track with Regina, I started making a list of all the wonderfully vile women villains in literature who blow this Regina out of the water by comparison... starting with her own archetype, the actual Evil Queen from the fairy tale. It's okay to make your evil women EVIL, guys.
no subject
and I would even be okay with Regina embracing her evil side, if she'd just do something on her own rather than being forced into the mold of someone who is constantly running after the approval of other people.
Yes! At the start of this season, I really thought that they were giving Regina a redemption storyline, and for that, I think the victimization could have worked, because she could have ended it by becoming a better person.* She could have realized that she had been letting her mother and Rumpel control her, and the only person stopping her from making better choices was herself.
Instead she's lost her agency and much of her power, without gaining anything in exchange.
*I'm not saying that one's response to abuse must be to become a better person, or that abuse should be seen as a growth experience or something. Is it clear that I'm not saying that? I'm talking specifically about Regina and her actions. In her particular case, making better choices would loosen the power Cora and Rumpel have over her.