If They Planned It All Ahead - Once Upon a Time (Part 1)

Happy New Year, everyone.  Welcome back to my blog.

I hope you’ve all had an invigorating Christmas (or Hannukah, if applicable).  As promised, we are kicking off 2023 with a new rewrite.  This time, we’re diving into the world of network television.  Let’s dust off Once Upon A Time (or OUAT, as we will call it moving forward).

Fair warning, there will be unmarked spoilers for the first six seasons of OUAT from here on out.  I do highly recommend this show, so if you haven’t seen it and you care about spoilers, I recommend that you go and watch those seasons before reading this series.  If you don’t care about that sort of thing, full steam ahead!

ONCE UPON A TIME ON ABC

OUAT is a fantasy drama series that ran on ABC from October 2011 to May 2018.  The show followed a straightforward Urban Fantasy premise: a curse had transported European fairy tale characters to a small Maine town, known as Storybrooke, and given them mundane identities while erasing their memories of their magical lives.  Each episode would follow one or more of these characters through a story of small-town drama, with a parallel flashback subplot that shows the character(s) in their fairy tale lives.  Some of these flashbacks were reimaginings of popular stories, while others were original stories using familiar characters.  Thanks to ABC being owned by Disney, they milked every possible connection to the Disney animated films (and crammed in a massive amount of product placement and cross-promotion for Marvel Comics and, after the Lucasfilm acquisition, Star Wars).

The core plot of the series follows twenty-eight-year-old Emma Swan, the (unknowing) daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, exiled to our world to escape the curse.  She is living in Boston when Henry, the son she gave up for adoption ten years earlier, tracks her down.  Henry was adopted by the mayor of Storybrooke, Regina Mills – the Evil Queen from Snow White’s story, ruling over the victims of her curse.  Henry persuades Emma to come visit Storybrooke.  Her arrival sets off the cascade of events that are Seasons 1 through 6.

I quite enjoyed the series, bingeing each new season on Netflix as they released.  However, I stopped after Season 6.  ABC decided to attempt a soft reboot of the story for Season 7 and then canceled the show.  Since Season 6 served as a satisfying conclusion to the original series, I decided to let things lie there.

Endless Adaptation

The first season of OUAT was a self-contained narrative.  Emma arrives in Storybrooke, butts heads with Regina, and helps the cursed townsfolk to relive their fairy tale stories, thereby chipping away at the curse until it is finally broken. For better or worse, it didn’t end there.  Network television rarely allows a show to have a finite endpoint or to simply exit gracefully while it is still popular.  OUAT constantly had to find ways to keep the story moving forward, even if that meant manufacturing drama or deviating from its original formula.

For the most part, I think that they handled this gracefully.

·         Season 2 changed very little.  The cursed fairy tale characters had to learn to adapt to being trapped in our world while still remembering the magical lives that had been taken away from them.

·         Seasons 3 through 5 shifted to having each season be split into two parts, with each one tightly focused upon a single story using Disney IP (like how Season 3 Part 2 was Wizard of Oz themed and how Season 4 Part 1 was a Frozen cash-grab).  These arcs were more serialized than the stories from Seasons 1 and 2.

·         Season 6 brought the story back to a season-long arc with a wide variety of characters and standalone stories.  Instead of just using fairy tale characters, literary characters from the public domain (like the Mr. Hyde and Captain Nemo) were incorporated into the series.

While I think ABC handled the evolution gracefully, the series was in a state of slow decline from Season 2 onward.  Seasons 3 and 4 hid this with some interesting concepts, but Season 5 was gasping for breath.  Season 6 only recovered enough to land on its feet.

It’s not that the stories being told were inherently terrible.  The problem was the characters.

Endless (?) Drama

The charm of OUAT in its first two seasons was the ensemble cast of colorful characters.  The central narrative stuck to Emma, Henry, Regina, and the people in their immediate vicinity, but there was always a sense of wonder and discovery, but most episodes used one or two secondary characters to drive their narratives.  It was fascinating to see real-world counterparts to so many fairy tale characters and to watch them play off of one another.  In a few cases, we would meet a character in Storybrooke early on and not learn their magical identity until several episodes later (or an entire season, in the case of Doctor Whale). 

ABC transitioned the show away from this ensemble cast as Season 2 progressed.  From the end of Season 2 onwards, most episodes focused on a core group that consisted of Emma, Henry, Regina, Prince Charming, Snow White, Captain Hook, and Rumplestiltskin.  This was an understandable decision.  The show was starting to run out of iconic and marketable characters who were owned by Disney or in the public domain.  Putting more emphasis on the established cast reduced the number of new characters they needed to introduce each season.  Focusing on a core cast also makes sense for fostering long-term audience investment.

The price of this transition is that they had to wring multiple seasons of development out of a small group of characters.  This yielded mixed results.  Emma, Henry, Regina, and Hook managed to steadily evolve over the course of the series, even if the drama was at times contrived or low-quality.  Prince Charming and Snow White ran out of things to do after Season 3, with Season 4 resorting to character assassination while Seasons 5 and 6 benched them.  As for Rumplestiltskin … well, he’s the reason we’re here today.

ALL THAT IS GOLD DOES NOT GLITTER

Rumplestiltskin – or, to use the name of his “cursed” self, Mr. Gold – is the most powerful, influential, and flawed character within OUAT.  (Going forward, I will refer to this character primarily as Mr. Gold, since that is how he is referred to by the characters in the present-day plots.  If I call him Rumplestiltskin, it will be to reference his role in a fairy tale flashback.)  He oscillates between villain and untrustworthy ally.  His only reliable motivation is his addiction to power, which stems from his cowardly nature.

Within Storybrooke, Mr. Gold is a landlord, moneylender, and owner of a pawn shop.  He is feared by many of the townsfolk, and that fear only intensifies once they recover their memories.  That’s because, within the fairy tale flashbacks, Rumplestiltskin wore multiple hats.  He made a Faustian pact with Cinderella, replacing her fairy godmother (after he murdered said godmother in front of her); he is the Beast who fell in love with Belle; he is the “Crocodile” who chopped off Captain Hook’s hand.  The curse itself was Rumplestiltskin’s creation, part of a master gambit to allow him to reach our non-magical world.

Tarnished Arc

Mr. Gold’s character arc is engaging across the first four seasons.  In Season 1, we learn about his origins and his son, Baelfire.  Season 2 follows his efforts to reconnect with Baelfire while also grappling with the fear of his own mortality, while Season 3 has him come to terms with that morality.  Season 4 is when he fully commits to villainy.  This culminates in the season finale, where his evil deeds have corrupted him to the point that his own magic nearly kills him.  He is saved only by taking away his power.

As the Beast, his romance with Belle is spread across the first four seasons.  It is, in a way, a metric of where he stands relative to the other characters.  Season 1 reveals their romance; Seasons 2 and 3 explore it.  They are wed during the Season 3 finale.  Mr. Gold’s villainy destroys their marriage midway through Season 4, at which point he abandons any pretense of being one of the heroes.

The deterioration of their romance was a breath of fresh air for the show.  In a series where True Love triumphs over all evils, it was powerful moment for Belle to finally reach her breaking point and literally exorcise him from her life. However, Season 5 launched both the relationship and Mr. Gold’s arc off the rails.

Season 5 Part 1 featured King Arthur and the sword Excalibur.  As part of having his magic taken from him, Mr. Gold’s heart was purified.  He gains the ability to draw Excalibur from its stone.  This was a powerful moment, and it was pivotal to the season.  He becomes a more selfless person, and as a result, Belle takes him back during the mid-season finale.

Sadly, that’s not the only thing that happened during the mid-season finale.

Seeing an opportunity to regain his magical powers, Mr. Gold choose to once more bind himself to evil.  This act invalidates the sacrifices made by the other characters during the finale.  He then goes right back to lying to Belle.

My reaction to this revelation was visceral disgust.  The moment Mr. Gold embraced evil again, he became irredeemable as a character.  It’s all well and good to give people multiple chances to improve in real life, but characters in a fictional narrative only get one shot at redemption.  Mr. Gold had exhausted his one chance at this point.

Despite this, OUAT spent the next season and a half giving him more chances.  He continued to choose evil right up to the last chance at the end of Season 6.  His relationship with Belle melts into abusive sludge as a result.  After all of this, his decision to stand with the heroes in the Season 6 finale brought no catharsis.  There was simply no reason to believe that he wouldn’t betray them again the next time it was convenient to him.

Mr. Gold is a wonderful example of how characters in serialized television can suffer from not having a pre-planned end point for their arc.  Had he left the show or faded into the background at any point prior to the mid-season finale of Season 5, his arc would have been functional.  The need to drag out his story ultimately destroyed any reason to remain invested in said story.

But what if the creators had pre-planned a six-season arc for Mr. Gold? Could they have preserved his arc without radically altering the entire show?

The answer to this question, as cliché as it may sound, is that trope I touched upon earlier: the power of True Love.

A Dead Rose

Beauty and the Beast is one of the most iconic films of Disney’s Renaissance era.  The OUAT creators understood this.  While not a core member of the cast, Belle is one of the most important secondary characters.  Multiple callbacks were made to the animated film to help keep the audience invested. One example of this is Chip.  They didn’t bring back the character of the animated teacup, but there is a “chipped” teacup from Rumplestiltskin’s castle that was repeatedly referenced as a symbol of his and Belle’s relationship.

One of the reason Mr. Gold’s fall in Season 4 stood out from his generally shady behavior in earlier seasons is that he was lying to Belle.  Before, he’d made no pretense about being a moral person, but once he married Belle, he made a big deal about turning over a new leaf.  He even gave her the magical item that could be used to control his powers.  Season 4 marked the point where he began actively deceiving her for his own gain.  He was pursuing an agenda that she’d be appalled by.  His efforts to cover his tracks were so through and manipulative that she began to actively question whether she was an abusive spouse for doubting him.  (Granted, that episode also involved a demon mirror that poisoned Belle’s mind, but Belle only reached the demon mirror in the first place because Mr. Gold’s deception facilitated her, and he took advantage of her shame rather than coming clean.)

Belle’s decision to cast Mr. Gold out of Storybrooke at the mid-season finale of Season 4 was therefore very cathartic.  She started to move on with her life in second half of the season.  Even when Mr. Gold was purified, she didn’t trust him right away.  The fact that he earned her trust back and then pivoted right back to deception made the betrayal all the more frustrating as a viewer.

It was almost refreshing when Season 6 went all-in and turning Mr. Gold into an unapologetically abusive spouse.  At least the story and Belle herself acknowledged that what he was doing was wrong.  Belle stopped trying to see the good in him.  Her story became more about her trying to figure out how much contact to maintain with the man who was the father of her child.  It was more interesting and less uncomfortable than watching him mislead and betray her again and again.

For some baffling reason, the creators tried to pivot this relationship back into being a wholesome tale of True Love for the Season 6 finale.  The two of them got back together and were about to start a new life with their infant son.  This felt as hollow as his final decision to aid the heroes had been.  As much as Mr. Gold loved Belle, he always chose power first.  Him choosing not to grasp for power at one key moment is not enough to completely undo everything else he’d done.

Midas Touch

The romance between Mr. Gold and Belle helped to seal Mr. Gold as an irredeemable character.  I also think it is what could have saved his arc.  It just needed a bit of pre-planning and reconfiguring.

This could be resolved by something as simple as not having Mr. Gold and Belle get back together during the mid-season finale of Season 5.  However, I think the writers could have taken things even farther.  With six seasons of advance planning, they could have given one of the most significant romances in the Disney catalog the gravitas it deserves.

Is this unrealistic for network television, especially a network owned by Disney?  Yes.  However, the point of If They Planned It All Ahead is to reflect on how planning ahead can bring out the best possible version of a story.

I call this version “The Enchantress and the Beast.”

A NEW PARADIGM

We’ll leave off here for this week.  On January 15th, we’ll dive into the details of this alternative story concept, with further discussion on how it deviates from the original and the ripple effect across the first six seasons of the show.  Starting on January 29th, and going week by week as needed, we will explore the execution.  This will be an episode-by-episode summary like the one we did for Falcon and the Winter Soldier.  Not every episode of the show will be included, but we will try to touch on all of the episodes with a significant development for Mr. Gold and Belle.

Thank you all for starting the New Year with me.  I hope you all have a good January.  See you all on the 15th.