OUaTiW 1x04: The Serpent
Jul. 10th, 2020 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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tori_reviewsOUaTiW 1x04: The Serpent
I'm going to talk about the flashbacks here first, but some of what I'm going to say when I circle to the present plot will also apply, it just applies more there.
Where last time I found the flashbacks so bland, this time they worked. They were necessary to the story we're told here, we now have backstory on Jafar, we see the shape of his plans (though not so much what he intends to do with the ability to rewrite the laws of magic), and it just makes him feel more realized. Yes they were a touch obvious in how they were going to progress, but not it a way I found distracting; we're basically skipping a stone across Jafar's backstory, only seeing bits and pieces, so my being able to guess the connections between them isn't that much of a problem.
That said, this could have been a much more effective backstory than it was. It's easy enough to fill in the gaps as to how he decided that 'yeah murder's fine if it helps me,' when he's presented as the type who wouldn't be super opposed to it to start with. It doesn't seem like a story of corruption (either by the other mage or the use of dark magics), it's more like a guy who showed up intending to use the dark side and just needed to learn the basics before he could do so.
Also, because we don't see that much of the early backstory we kind of skip over some of the creepy issues with him and the other mage (Amara? I'm not sure so I'll stick with mage). Because he was a kid when he showed up at her door and she must have raised him at least partially when she agreed to let him work with her, and then they're sleeping together. So the more you're willing to fill in the gaps for yourself regarding his backstory, the more this feels kind of gross. But because we get so little of them, and they're both basically framed as villains all the way through, we aren't left with too much room to feel judgey about this.
Put a pin in that for now, but it will be relevant to the final point.
I kept expecting someone to bring up that if Alice and Will were friends then yeah capturing him was more useful than killing him. But I guess team villain has some blind spots when it comes to using the way people care about each other, since they don't (apparently). But that doesn't work because so much of this scheme relies on knowing how to lead Alice along by her emotions regarding Cyrus. Maybe a better way to view it is as two not-super-smart people who are working at cross purposes; Jafar wants to control what's happening by having as few pieces on the game board as possible; while the Queen... Well she wasn't exactly thinking of Will as a game piece. She was perfectly fine locking him up, and we don't know exactly her reasons; and certainly later on she didn't want to reveal that Will is actually her weak spot (maybe that's why she did draw attention to him being on of Alice's).
I did like the standoff in the maze, bringing our various players together in one place; much like having flashbacks that explain the bigger game, there it feels like the show is clicking pieces into place. I would however question why they didn't make sure to capture Alice, it seems playing on her affections would be easier if you had her in your control. It's debatable if putting her and Cyrus together would be the most obvious choice for manipulation or if it could too easily backfire by reminding them each that they would die for each other.
As sort of a build up to the big point I'm getting to, is Wonderland about the size of a county or something? They walk around it really quickly and it seems sparsely populated; I will allow that Alice and Liz were headed towards the castle, but how far out do they bother to post execution notices and give people enough time to arrive the same day? Plus, even the supremely silly Robin Hood that I love usually thought to have executions better attended than this (if portraying it as a social event as this one does) or at least not so obviously underpopulated. Ironically this could even have an excuse that executions happen all the time so no one really cares, or wants to risk catching the Queens attention, but then there wouldn't be a crowd for Alice to slip into.
I actually think some things may be the inverse of what I talked about early on. It turns out that I find myself willing to forgive the show its cheesy CGI and hammy acting and silly dialog, because it feels like that's just how this world works; but if it's a cartoon, then it might want a cartoon's scope and populous crowd scenes. But the lack of scale was therefore distracting in this case.
Okay, on to the big question, let's try and crack this timeline. And before go too far, I should probably acknowledge that I've read Fables in the years since I stopped watching these shows. I always had issues with the timelines in this verse, but Fables, with it's fairly similar story concept brought some things into sharp focus about it.
For one, are the characters in in the Once-verse immortal? In the sense of dying of natural causes and aging past a certain point, obviously they can die in some forms. This is a question somewhat clouded by the fact we do have several characters whose backstories span very long stretches of time, and the weird time lag in OUaT, plus the split time in this show. It's also complicated by the fact that the same actors play the characters for most of their backstories unless they're obvious a child character at the point being shown, and because the actors age, scenes filmed later but slotted in the timeline earlier have the actors physical appearance inconsistent. But if people of fantasy realms just have longer lifespans than what we humans of this realm think of, it might smooth my concepts over a bit; but I don't know that the shows were saying that.
Also, I don't remember how it was explained that Neil was part of so many stories at different points in time. I know he spent time in Neverland, but he was also connected with Hook...maybe someday I'll rewatch OUaT too...maybe just the first few seasons.
I think the implication can be that Alice's world is a different realm than our 'real earth' realm where it's present day for the OUaT story. That leaves the above question in play as to whether people from Alice's realm have the lengthened lifespan than the other characters may or may not have, and I'm absolutely sure the writers in this verse did not think too hard about how history would be effected if there was history of these events rather than legend.
But then let's try and put the pieces together. If Will was supposed to have been in Storybrooke for the 28 years it was stuck in time (unless the Robin Hood characters showed up later and I've forgotten? But who would have brought him in that case?), and has only been interacting with time properly for a few years since it started moving forward again, when did he meet Alice? I'm pretty sure we heard over the years that other realms kept moving forward during that time; and a spell being able to stop everything except randomly for our world where the person who cast it actually is seems a bit too big a spell to allow.
Let's be kind of generous and say Alice's first adventure in Wonderland was 20 years ago; how would she have even met the Hatter who we know was already in Storybrooke? How long had the Hatter actually been in Wonderland before the big spell was cast since his daughter didn't have time to age? I'm pretty sure Cora was still reigning in Wonderland when Regina left him behind to go mad. I might suggest a slight possibility that different realms move through time at different speeds, but I don't think that actually makes this work and I do think it contradicts other points in the Once-verse. In the first episode here they only briefly reference that the Hatter hadn't been seen in 'many years,' how long could it have been since Alice last went to see him, or at least asked about him?
Here we have to assume Ana was already Queen during Alice's first adventure in Wonderland, or at least an early one since Ana references knowing Alice when she was a child, but Ana barely looks older than Alice and looks close to the same as she did in her earlier set scene with Will in the Enchanted Forest; if there's a possibility that she's using magic to slow the aging process, you'd think Will might comment on it and/or it's something expected in magical realms in which case how does that effect someone like Alice who seems to have to worry about time in ways we don't see in Ana? Or, to move backwards, someone like Emma, who is born into those magic influences but grew up in a land without it and still by and large does, but hops into other realms pretty often?
Seriously, read Fables, it actually considers these implications. It's continuity is jumbled and messy, but it doesn't strangle the story the way it does in the Once-verse.
I'm going to talk about the flashbacks here first, but some of what I'm going to say when I circle to the present plot will also apply, it just applies more there.
Where last time I found the flashbacks so bland, this time they worked. They were necessary to the story we're told here, we now have backstory on Jafar, we see the shape of his plans (though not so much what he intends to do with the ability to rewrite the laws of magic), and it just makes him feel more realized. Yes they were a touch obvious in how they were going to progress, but not it a way I found distracting; we're basically skipping a stone across Jafar's backstory, only seeing bits and pieces, so my being able to guess the connections between them isn't that much of a problem.
That said, this could have been a much more effective backstory than it was. It's easy enough to fill in the gaps as to how he decided that 'yeah murder's fine if it helps me,' when he's presented as the type who wouldn't be super opposed to it to start with. It doesn't seem like a story of corruption (either by the other mage or the use of dark magics), it's more like a guy who showed up intending to use the dark side and just needed to learn the basics before he could do so.
Also, because we don't see that much of the early backstory we kind of skip over some of the creepy issues with him and the other mage (Amara? I'm not sure so I'll stick with mage). Because he was a kid when he showed up at her door and she must have raised him at least partially when she agreed to let him work with her, and then they're sleeping together. So the more you're willing to fill in the gaps for yourself regarding his backstory, the more this feels kind of gross. But because we get so little of them, and they're both basically framed as villains all the way through, we aren't left with too much room to feel judgey about this.
Put a pin in that for now, but it will be relevant to the final point.
I kept expecting someone to bring up that if Alice and Will were friends then yeah capturing him was more useful than killing him. But I guess team villain has some blind spots when it comes to using the way people care about each other, since they don't (apparently). But that doesn't work because so much of this scheme relies on knowing how to lead Alice along by her emotions regarding Cyrus. Maybe a better way to view it is as two not-super-smart people who are working at cross purposes; Jafar wants to control what's happening by having as few pieces on the game board as possible; while the Queen... Well she wasn't exactly thinking of Will as a game piece. She was perfectly fine locking him up, and we don't know exactly her reasons; and certainly later on she didn't want to reveal that Will is actually her weak spot (maybe that's why she did draw attention to him being on of Alice's).
I did like the standoff in the maze, bringing our various players together in one place; much like having flashbacks that explain the bigger game, there it feels like the show is clicking pieces into place. I would however question why they didn't make sure to capture Alice, it seems playing on her affections would be easier if you had her in your control. It's debatable if putting her and Cyrus together would be the most obvious choice for manipulation or if it could too easily backfire by reminding them each that they would die for each other.
As sort of a build up to the big point I'm getting to, is Wonderland about the size of a county or something? They walk around it really quickly and it seems sparsely populated; I will allow that Alice and Liz were headed towards the castle, but how far out do they bother to post execution notices and give people enough time to arrive the same day? Plus, even the supremely silly Robin Hood that I love usually thought to have executions better attended than this (if portraying it as a social event as this one does) or at least not so obviously underpopulated. Ironically this could even have an excuse that executions happen all the time so no one really cares, or wants to risk catching the Queens attention, but then there wouldn't be a crowd for Alice to slip into.
I actually think some things may be the inverse of what I talked about early on. It turns out that I find myself willing to forgive the show its cheesy CGI and hammy acting and silly dialog, because it feels like that's just how this world works; but if it's a cartoon, then it might want a cartoon's scope and populous crowd scenes. But the lack of scale was therefore distracting in this case.
Okay, on to the big question, let's try and crack this timeline. And before go too far, I should probably acknowledge that I've read Fables in the years since I stopped watching these shows. I always had issues with the timelines in this verse, but Fables, with it's fairly similar story concept brought some things into sharp focus about it.
For one, are the characters in in the Once-verse immortal? In the sense of dying of natural causes and aging past a certain point, obviously they can die in some forms. This is a question somewhat clouded by the fact we do have several characters whose backstories span very long stretches of time, and the weird time lag in OUaT, plus the split time in this show. It's also complicated by the fact that the same actors play the characters for most of their backstories unless they're obvious a child character at the point being shown, and because the actors age, scenes filmed later but slotted in the timeline earlier have the actors physical appearance inconsistent. But if people of fantasy realms just have longer lifespans than what we humans of this realm think of, it might smooth my concepts over a bit; but I don't know that the shows were saying that.
Also, I don't remember how it was explained that Neil was part of so many stories at different points in time. I know he spent time in Neverland, but he was also connected with Hook...maybe someday I'll rewatch OUaT too...maybe just the first few seasons.
I think the implication can be that Alice's world is a different realm than our 'real earth' realm where it's present day for the OUaT story. That leaves the above question in play as to whether people from Alice's realm have the lengthened lifespan than the other characters may or may not have, and I'm absolutely sure the writers in this verse did not think too hard about how history would be effected if there was history of these events rather than legend.
But then let's try and put the pieces together. If Will was supposed to have been in Storybrooke for the 28 years it was stuck in time (unless the Robin Hood characters showed up later and I've forgotten? But who would have brought him in that case?), and has only been interacting with time properly for a few years since it started moving forward again, when did he meet Alice? I'm pretty sure we heard over the years that other realms kept moving forward during that time; and a spell being able to stop everything except randomly for our world where the person who cast it actually is seems a bit too big a spell to allow.
Let's be kind of generous and say Alice's first adventure in Wonderland was 20 years ago; how would she have even met the Hatter who we know was already in Storybrooke? How long had the Hatter actually been in Wonderland before the big spell was cast since his daughter didn't have time to age? I'm pretty sure Cora was still reigning in Wonderland when Regina left him behind to go mad. I might suggest a slight possibility that different realms move through time at different speeds, but I don't think that actually makes this work and I do think it contradicts other points in the Once-verse. In the first episode here they only briefly reference that the Hatter hadn't been seen in 'many years,' how long could it have been since Alice last went to see him, or at least asked about him?
Here we have to assume Ana was already Queen during Alice's first adventure in Wonderland, or at least an early one since Ana references knowing Alice when she was a child, but Ana barely looks older than Alice and looks close to the same as she did in her earlier set scene with Will in the Enchanted Forest; if there's a possibility that she's using magic to slow the aging process, you'd think Will might comment on it and/or it's something expected in magical realms in which case how does that effect someone like Alice who seems to have to worry about time in ways we don't see in Ana? Or, to move backwards, someone like Emma, who is born into those magic influences but grew up in a land without it and still by and large does, but hops into other realms pretty often?
Seriously, read Fables, it actually considers these implications. It's continuity is jumbled and messy, but it doesn't strangle the story the way it does in the Once-verse.
