OUaTiW 1x12: To Catch a Thief
Aug. 14th, 2020 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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tori_reviewsOUaTiW 1x12: To Catch a Thief
Well that definitely ended in the middle of things. I even decided it wouldn't hurt to check if these were shown as a double length episode. They weren't, and I'm not surprised this show didn't rate the super-sized finale, but the way this is structured felt like it could be. And maybe they were hoping for it but didn't get it? I can't be sure of that, certainly not without doing a lot more than my super quick Wiki check and that's all I was going to do.
This whole episode feels a little bit off, mostly in ways that either can already make sense or still could, but also in some places just a little weird. As far as the 'might make sense later' part, it still feels like we're in the midst of a plan that the audience hasn't been let in on; there just ended up being a few too many pieces of the plan that unfolds that don't seem correct presently.
Like, how did Amara get out of the staff? Alice can't have always been psychicly connected to Cyrus or she would have known he wasn't dead before, which makes this feel like it was set up so she could anchor him to the living. Why did they tie Cyrus' ropes in such a way that it took him an interminably long time to get out of them when he'd been testing them all along? It would only make sense for the Jaberwockey to have some part to play in this showdown and that hasn't happened yet. And by the conventions of storytelling, if we don't see the plan being made, things are going according to it throughout the plot; it would only feel like they're in danger if we knew this wasn't part of the plan.
Apparently I just can't let it go, so more timeline talk. Also I'm now convinced Cyrus is just the Doctor, he keeps changing what he says about how long he was in the bottle, at one point it was years, then 100 years, now it's a few hundred years. It's almost like this show was deliberately done to vex me, as even the on screen time stamp is 'some time ago' when Alice and Will were running together pre-Cyrus (they must have met up again some indeterminate amount of time later since it always seemed like Will knew Cyrus at least somewhat).
Will's characterization in this is one of the things that I say kind of makes sense but also doesn't quite work. And it ties back to me not getting him and Ana. It makes sense that he would be upset by her death, especially as he had just gotten his heart back and so was feeling things fully for the first time in some indeterminate amount of time. But to the point of wanting to go along with Jafar? To put it another way, I get him being heartbroken, but I don't understand why this is what his heart would want to do. If anything, maybe his heart is stuck as it was some even longer indeterminate amount of time ago when Ana first broke his heart, which makes his heart juvenile compared to the rest of him and probably shouldn't be listened to.
Also, anyone going to mention Liz?
While Alice's stance here is rational, Will isn't wrong that she would go to any lengths if it was her and Cyrus but wasn't planning to fight for him and Ana. Although if there were any lines I'm not sure Alice would cross even for Cyrus, necromancy might be it; tempted, yeah, but might still be rational enough not to go through with it. I don't know that Will's way of putting it, that she thinks only her love story matters, is quite the way I would have said it; others just don't matter as much, Cyrus is the only one she would move heaven and earth for.
I liked the flashback story in this, it was background detail it's good we got, although I do now wonder why we never saw kid-Alice again, we could have had some of Alice's flashbacks to her own story in this. But I find I have very little to say about Alice and Will's relationship. I guess that I do think I probably would ship them more if Cyrus wasn't around, but I'm an OTP sort of person and I like that relationship so I stick with it, so I'm okay with the show establishing Alice and Will as surrogate siblings. Although it does sort of raise questions about how she was going to leave him behind as much as anyone by staying England and getting lobotomized.
What thought the flashbacks did inspire, are that this works well with Alice's attitude when she meets Cyrus. She just had someone that was bound and controlled by magic and she realized she had to give that up, so when she met Cyrus she wanted to do what she could to give him freedom too. Alice is a naturally fairly empathetic person, but it works really well for me that she had also involved experience in her early decisions on how to treat the genie she found.
Really this episode just didn't give me a lot of thoughts, although I am still finding the Sultan confusing I have to admit.
Well that definitely ended in the middle of things. I even decided it wouldn't hurt to check if these were shown as a double length episode. They weren't, and I'm not surprised this show didn't rate the super-sized finale, but the way this is structured felt like it could be. And maybe they were hoping for it but didn't get it? I can't be sure of that, certainly not without doing a lot more than my super quick Wiki check and that's all I was going to do.
This whole episode feels a little bit off, mostly in ways that either can already make sense or still could, but also in some places just a little weird. As far as the 'might make sense later' part, it still feels like we're in the midst of a plan that the audience hasn't been let in on; there just ended up being a few too many pieces of the plan that unfolds that don't seem correct presently.
Like, how did Amara get out of the staff? Alice can't have always been psychicly connected to Cyrus or she would have known he wasn't dead before, which makes this feel like it was set up so she could anchor him to the living. Why did they tie Cyrus' ropes in such a way that it took him an interminably long time to get out of them when he'd been testing them all along? It would only make sense for the Jaberwockey to have some part to play in this showdown and that hasn't happened yet. And by the conventions of storytelling, if we don't see the plan being made, things are going according to it throughout the plot; it would only feel like they're in danger if we knew this wasn't part of the plan.
Apparently I just can't let it go, so more timeline talk. Also I'm now convinced Cyrus is just the Doctor, he keeps changing what he says about how long he was in the bottle, at one point it was years, then 100 years, now it's a few hundred years. It's almost like this show was deliberately done to vex me, as even the on screen time stamp is 'some time ago' when Alice and Will were running together pre-Cyrus (they must have met up again some indeterminate amount of time later since it always seemed like Will knew Cyrus at least somewhat).
Will's characterization in this is one of the things that I say kind of makes sense but also doesn't quite work. And it ties back to me not getting him and Ana. It makes sense that he would be upset by her death, especially as he had just gotten his heart back and so was feeling things fully for the first time in some indeterminate amount of time. But to the point of wanting to go along with Jafar? To put it another way, I get him being heartbroken, but I don't understand why this is what his heart would want to do. If anything, maybe his heart is stuck as it was some even longer indeterminate amount of time ago when Ana first broke his heart, which makes his heart juvenile compared to the rest of him and probably shouldn't be listened to.
Also, anyone going to mention Liz?
While Alice's stance here is rational, Will isn't wrong that she would go to any lengths if it was her and Cyrus but wasn't planning to fight for him and Ana. Although if there were any lines I'm not sure Alice would cross even for Cyrus, necromancy might be it; tempted, yeah, but might still be rational enough not to go through with it. I don't know that Will's way of putting it, that she thinks only her love story matters, is quite the way I would have said it; others just don't matter as much, Cyrus is the only one she would move heaven and earth for.
I liked the flashback story in this, it was background detail it's good we got, although I do now wonder why we never saw kid-Alice again, we could have had some of Alice's flashbacks to her own story in this. But I find I have very little to say about Alice and Will's relationship. I guess that I do think I probably would ship them more if Cyrus wasn't around, but I'm an OTP sort of person and I like that relationship so I stick with it, so I'm okay with the show establishing Alice and Will as surrogate siblings. Although it does sort of raise questions about how she was going to leave him behind as much as anyone by staying England and getting lobotomized.
What thought the flashbacks did inspire, are that this works well with Alice's attitude when she meets Cyrus. She just had someone that was bound and controlled by magic and she realized she had to give that up, so when she met Cyrus she wanted to do what she could to give him freedom too. Alice is a naturally fairly empathetic person, but it works really well for me that she had also involved experience in her early decisions on how to treat the genie she found.
Really this episode just didn't give me a lot of thoughts, although I am still finding the Sultan confusing I have to admit.
