Season Review: Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time
Starring: Ginnifer Goodwin, Jennifer Morrison, Joshua Dallas, Lana Parilla, Robert Carlyle, Emilie De Ravin

Season Two Review

    My advice for those of you who have not seen this show yet: go back and watch season one. Then STOP.

Summary for Episode 201:
The curse is broken and the people of Storybrooke, Maine, remember their past. Emma is reunited with her parents. However, just as celebrations get into swing, Mr. Gold has another dark ploy up his sleeve. Plus, Regina's past actions appear to have consequences.

    Like many Oncers, I was very excited for this show to return last September. I was with it from the very first episode, and I've convinced many people, my mother and best friend included, to become just as obsessed with this show as I am. Once Upon a Time's first season was filled with great writing, a interesting and unique plot, some great re-imaginings of some old fairy tales.

     Also like many fans, I was very interested to see what the producers would do with the show since the first finale brought about the end of the Curse keeping the Storybrooke residents in the dark about their true identities. 

     What I got this season started out decently well, what with Emma and Snow/Mary-Margaret (who shall hereby be referred to as Snow) forced into some serious daughter-mother bonding time as they are plunged into the tattered remains of the Enchanted Forest, plagued by ogres and other not so niceys since Regina's big-bad Curse took out a good chunk of it. Snow was back in the business of being Disney's bad-ass princess/queen, being a killer shot with the bow and arrow, knowing how to live off the land, and all that. And there was a really interesting storying going on between two/three new characters and a new kind of evil monster.

     Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), Phillip, and Mulan had a really interesting relationship going on, and something tells me there was definitely more going on between Mulan and Phillip while they were searching for Aurora's "tomb" for 28 years. Then Phillip is kinda-killed by this weird shadowy soul-taker-sucker thingie that has a Chinese-sounding name but GREATLY resembles a Harry Potter-esque Dementor, and Aurora and Mulan are stuck working together to find a way to get back his lost soul. 


     THEN they meet up with Snow and Emma and they kinda help each other out but it's more Mulan and Aurora helping Snow and Emma get back to the real world before Regina's even more evil mother, Cora and Rumplestiltskin's (Gold) ultimate enemy, Captain Hook. 

     Hook and Gold's relationship was actually really well done, and has an interesting dynamic between the two, although "killing" each other and realizing later that they'd failed miserably does get a little old after a while. 

     Does that sound like a lot to take in? Yeah, it was for me, too. Not to mention that all of this is happening while a whole bunch of other crap is going on in Storybrooke, like how some people do and don't have magic, and how suddenly there's a mine of magic in town, and having to deal with everyone's fairy tale character traits mixing and mingling in with their own "real world" personalities and junk like that. Prince Charming (hereby known as David) turns into the "police chief" in town (since, you know, his daughter the real police is stuck in a magical world with no woodsy survival skills whatsoever), and he's in charge of keeping everyone's characters straight and making sure everyone is in and accounted for in Storybrooke, so everyone can find their friends, I think, but we didn't get a whole lot of looking at that aspect of it.

     Regina became a pariah in town due to her magic being returned, which nobody liked, even though after sending Snow and Emma to the Enchanted Forest, she tries to be a good person and not use her magic because she wants Henry to love her. She has some pretty cool episodes in this first half of the season. We learn more about her relationship with her evil mother, and then we get some more of her relationship to Snow and Gold, as well as her past love, the one that was killed by Cora. If you didn't appreciate Regina and her struggle in the first season, then you definitely grow to love her in this season. She really tries to prove herself to Henry and the other fairy tale people in town.

     So Snow and Emma and Mulan and Aurora and Cora and Hook are in what's left of the Enchanted Forest, trying to find a way to get back to Storybrooke. The method appears kind of complicated, requiring a magical bean that doesn't exist, and a dried-up lake of new life and some kind of crazy awesome magical circumstances. Obviously there's a huge struggle, and the bad guys almost win, but then, miraculously, Emma realizes that she's got some cool magic inside her and Emma and Snow escape back into Storybrooke, met by Regina, Henry and Gold.

      That's the end, right? HA, that's only nine episodes. We've still got another half to go. To give us something to watch, somehow Cora and Hook are able to sneak Hook's whole freaking Jolly Roger into the Storybrooke harbor with a new portal that was able to be summoned up in, like, a 90-second flashback scene. Why isn't everything that easy the first time?

     Then, you'd think, since we've just spent nine episodes falling in love with the strange relationship between Mulan and Aurora, we would get follow-up stories with them in the Enchanted Forest, following what Mulan suggested was a way to find Phillip's soul. I also think it would have been really cool to see Mulan's story and how she and Phillip teamed up together, not to mention how Aurora was put under her sleeping spell.

      But we never got to know what was up with that, did we, Producers? Nope. Nine episodes into this season, they're storyline is completely dropped.

     They're not the only ones, either. There were some cool things happening with Ruby, and a giant named Tiny, and we can't forget that no one can cross the Storybrooke town border that was born in the Enchanted Forest. If they do, they completely forget everything, who they were, who they know, and who they were under the Curse. They become a blank slate and everyone worries over them...for like two seconds and then we completely forget about them, unless your Mr. Gold and it's Belle that's lost her memory, because GODDAMMIT WHY??? THEY ARE PERFECT and oh wait, he's gotta leave town because he thinks he's found out where his lost son, Baelfire is hiding out.

      Hold on, back up. After Emma and Snow come back, Emma tries being nice and including Regina in a bunch of town-ish things, because she raised Henry and all that jazz. But Cora is a mean mean person and does some bad shit around town disguised as Regina to get the town to hate her again. Mother of the Year, right?

      So Gold (with the help of some magic potion he was able to concoct that allows him to pass the town border and keep his memory) and Emma (and Henry, because no one trusts Regina around him) run off to New York, where supposedly Gold's long-lost son is living. (If you don't remember Baelfire, he hated what the power of The Dark One did to change his father's personality and got a magic bean from a fairy to take them to a world where there was no magic so they could live happily together again. Gold proved to be too much of a coward to let the magic and power go, and accidentally let Baelfire slip into The Real World. Ever since that moment, every thing Gold has ever done, said, and schemed, in The Enchanted Forest and Storybrooke, has been to find and get back to his son).

     Where they think they'll find Baelfire, they find Emma's ex-boyfriend, Neal. He's made brief appearances before this, having received a Storybrooke postcard in the opening of episode one and a nice little flashback episode of his and Emma's crookery relationship before Emma was arrested and knocked up with Henry.

       Then we find out that Hook won't freaking die, even after being shot -by a gun! He turns up in New York (don't know how he remembers what he's doing, since he's OUT OF STORYBROOKE) and stabs Gold.

   

   Back in town, there's a stranger, and no one knows who he is, what he's doing in Storybrooke, or if he saw some magic fighting Gold and Hook and Belle were doing when he crashed his station wagon. There's a dumb little flashback episode about when the Curse first took place and how outsiders used to be allowed into town, and then we're like OMG IT'S THE SAME LITTLE KID FROM, LIKE 30 YEARS AGO. WHAT THE HECK IS HE DOING HERE? And I don't know about anyone else, but I was hoping for some kind of huge new-media drama, with camera crews coming all up in the town's business, checking out the new magic bean crops, and sniffing around Regina's poison apples. No, instead they do something really dumb with it.

      First, though, let's talk about the one other GREAT episode in this season besides The Crocodile. The Miller's Daughter was FANTASTIC, and it is the story of how Cora came to be how she is. It is fantastic, and it's pretty upsetting how it ends, not because it was badly written, but because you're so briefly happy for Cora and Regina and even a little bit for Gold, and then all your hopes and dreams are dashed with a bit of Snow being really frickin' annoying.

       Anyway, the last good villain in this show dies, and then we need some new villains, so lets go back to the outsider, who i can only remember as Owen, even though that's not his name anymore, and then we bring in Neal's useless fiance, Tamara (Tam-AAAARRRR-a). First of all, she's just got a look about her that says "you know i'm up to no good," and he's a creepy old dude, and together they make the dumbest evil duo trying to "rid the world of magic" -also, they are an ugly couple. She is so pretty, she can do SO much better than that guy.

       They're storyline and "plot" is really dumb, and they think kidnapping Regina will make people freak out and that she'll tell them how to get rid of the magic in town and get rid of their whole Enchanted Forest world or something stupid like that. I don't know, I tended to tune them out when they were on screen.

       So yeah, they do some stupid stuff, and while everyone in town is getting SUPER DUPER excited to use the magic beans to go back to the Enchanted Forest, Team Stupid steals all the beans that Regina steals from the town and then they kidnap Henry and, in the name of some nameless government organization bent on destroying magic, head to another world with the last magic bean. Why this seemed like a good plan, i don't know, because they ended up in Neverland, where there is a giant Shadow playing the part of Peter Pan that is kidnapping little boys. WHY WOULD YOU BRING A LITTLE BOY TO NEVERLAND, YOU DUMBASSES??

       There are obviously some other things going on during the season, and they can be summed up in bullet points:

• Snow White being really annoying and virtuous and "omgoodness we have to help and make all the world wonderful and beautiful and I love my family and thank goodness we're all back together again!"
• Charming/David is useless. Literally. He takes over as police chief while Emma is in the Enchanted Forest, and literally everything that could go wrong does and he's almost never the one to fix things. The one time he does is because he talks to Ruby in her wolf form and calms her down. 
• Cora and Hook's weird little relationship.
• Everyone, literally EVERYONE trying to find Gold's Dark One Dagger to kill him.
• Aurora's, Henry's and Snow's crazy freakish trapped fire dream that they all get from being under a sleeping curse -that was kinda cool.
• Regina being stupid and spiteful after someone dies and changes Belle into a really annoying piece of Rumbelle fanfiction
• The Rumbelle fanfiction episode, Lacey.
• The huge freakin' deal the media team made about "the new hero, Robin Hood," who was barely in 10 minutes of his own episode.
• What happened to Emma's magic? Why did we forget that existed?
• Snow killed someone, intentionally, and darkened her own heart. Why wasn't that explored?
• The townspeople want to go back home and Snow is uncomfortable with that.
• Ruby disappears :,(
• The producers forgetting their own rules for their universes. Watch this season a second time if you can bare it and play the "point out the inconsistencies" drinking game. you'll be dead by episode three, I promise.
• Henry alternately being brilliant, a human prop, a brat, or just kind of not there.

      So there you have it, Season Two of Once Upon a Time in a very opinionated nutshell. 

      Although I was highly disappointed with it, I'm told by my less critical peers that I'm being too harsh. 

      I tell my less critical peers that I deserve some glimmer of quality television with all the bullsh*t that's on today, and Once used to be that last season. They spoiled me with good writing and quality dramedy last year, and then they expect me to eat the slop they tossed on my TV screen this year? HELL NO.

      Sorry I'm not sorry, but a Blonde never lies and she'll never let a show/book/movie off easy.

      
Blonde's Rating: 1.5/5
IMDB.com's Rating: 7.7/10 (3.8/5)
Amazon Instant Play Rating: 4.7/5

That's all for now. If I find any news about Season 3, or the upcoming "Once Upon a Time in Wonderland" thing, I'll post it on my Shows Page.

Thanks,
The Blonde