Apparently someone replaced my brain with that of a 20-year-old girl’s, because I spent the better part of the last week binge watching Once Upon a Time on Netflix, and now I feel the need to talk about it. The last time I did a flashback review, it was fucking Mindhunters, so there isn’t a high bar to hurdle here.
I am decidedly not the demographic for OUAT, but nevertheless, I like the idea of all those classic characters palling around. It’s the same reason people like Kingdom Hearts, and to a lesser extent The Expendables. OUAT is, at its heart, fan fiction, and like all fan fiction, it can be truly stupid.
We open in Fairy Tale Land, where the Evil Queen (who is seriously just called “the Evil Queen” until episode 14 or 15) crashes Snow White and Prince Charming’s wedding to announce that she’s gonna put a curse on everyone to strip them of their happiness. Prince Charming convenes his war council, which includes – and I’m not making this up – Grumpy, Sneezy, Doc, Jiminy Cricket, Geppetto (who brings Pinocchio along), Red Riding Hood, and Granny. What. The. Fuck. “We have to act fast! Get the short guys, the bug, the carpenter for some fucking reason, the hot girl, and the old lady!” The Blue Fairy shows up to really hammer home that we’re dealing with fairy tale characters here, and announces that this enchanted tree can be carved into a vessel, which can save one person. As the Evil Queen’s curse starts to take effect (why this doesn’t happen all at once is anyone’s guess), Snow White puts her newborn baby into the vessel and it vanishes. Good fucking plan.
Side note: a couple times we see Snow White hanging out with the Seven Dwarves. Here’s what that looked like in the movie:
And here’s what it looks like on Once Upon a Time:
Also, apparently there were originally eight dwarves. Wanna know the eighth one’s name? STEALTHY. Happy, Sneezy, Dopey, Bashful, Grumpy, Doc, Sleepy, and STEALTHY.
Star wipe to the real world, and badass bail bondsman Emma Swan meets Henry Mills, the kid she gave up for adoption ten years ago. After one minute with Henry, I can see why. As played by Jared S. Gilmore, the second Bobby Draper on Mad Men, Henry is the most annoying kid I’ve ever seen on television. I’m talking Carl Grimes in season two of The Walking Dead bad. Worse than that, actually. He’s constantly correcting adults (which adults fucking hate, kid), he’s ten years old and way too into fairy tales, and he’s usually making some version of this face:
Everyone hates Henry Mills. It’s the hardest part of being a Once Upon a Time fan. It’s why there are multiple online polls asking if he’s the worst character on TV. (I can’t tell you how fun it was to look up all those polls.)
Anyway, Henry takes Emma back to Storybrooke, Maine (get it? It’s like “story book”!), where everyone is a fairy tale character but they just don’t know it. Henry flips the fuck out whenever someone calls him or his theory crazy, but have you heard that theory, kid? Say it out loud. Tell your psychiatrist, “You’re Jiminy Cricket and my mom is the Evil Queen.” Just because you’re right doesn’t mean it’s not insane.
Henry’s adoptive mother is Regina Mills, the town’s mayor and the Evil Queen. She’s also one of a few people to remember Fairy Tale Land. Regina is played by Lana Parilla, who has hall of fame cleavage and great resting bitchface.
Regina is a troublesome character, not just because she’s the show’s villain, but because everything comes back to her. Literally every bad thing that happens is her fault. Framed for murder? It was Regina. Playground torn down? It was Regina. Everyone’s always talking about how to beat her, but why is killing her not an option? Wouldn’t that break the curse? And if it did, who in Fairy Tale Land is going to try you for murdering someone who calls herself the Evil Queen? For fuck’s sake. Oh, it turns out that the Queen’s real name is Regina. Real creative, OUAT.
Everyone in town is someone. Dr. Archie Hopper is Jiminy Cricket (and as the town’s only psychiatrist, he does therapy, couples counseling, and hypnosis, and no I’m not kidding). The teacher, Mary Margaret Blanchard, is Snow White. The grumpy janitor Leroy is Grumpy. The dreamy Sheriff Graham (played by Fifty Shades of Grey‘s Jamie Dornan) is the Huntsman, and he also dresses like this:
The Sheriff is actually a good character, as he’s one of the first to start remembering his life in Fairy Tale Land. He starts believing Henry, which forces the Queen to get rid of him by destroying his heart, which she keeps in a vault underneath her father’s crypt. It’s a good scene, but it loses some of its impact when you notice a tear rolling down Regina’s cheek. That’s one thing this show does stupidly often: try to build sympathy for the Queen. The only time it comes close to succeeding is in “The Stable Boy,” wherein we learn why the Queen hates Snow White so much, but you can’t have someone be responsible for EVERY bad thing that happens and then expect us to accept a human side to her. By the way, “The Stable Boy” is episode eighteen. The damage is done.
This show is fucking stuffed to the gills with public domain fairy tale characters. There are one-off episodes, like the abysmal “True North,” which focuses on Hansel and Gretel even though they’re never seen again. Red Riding Hood – called Ruby in Storybrooke – doesn’t get any significant backstory until “Red Handed,” the damn good fifteenth episode, where it turns out that the wolf is actually Red. Pretty cool reveal. Until then, she’s mainly around to hang out in the background and dress like this:
Once Upon a Time isn’t very subtle with its visual cues, either. Dr. Hopper always has his umbrella; the newspaper is called the Mirror and it’s run by Sydney Glass, the human version of the magic mirror (played by Giancarlo Esposito for some reason); and Regina is constantly surrounded by apples. Like, baskets full to the brim of red apples. Apple tree in her backyard, more apples on the table, apples in her office. Have you ever had a red apple, Regina? They suck.
By far the best character on the show is Rumpelstiltskin, who goes by Mr. Gold in Storybrooke. Well, let me rephrase that: Mr. Gold is awesome, Rumpelstiltskin is kind of annoying. Robert Carlyle plays them as two separate characters, which in a way they are. Mr. Gold is stoic and soft-spoken, while Rumpelstiltskin is overly animated, speaking in a taunting singsong and laughing shrilly. It can get grating at times, but regardless of that, Carlyle does a magnificent job. He also gets some of the meatiest flashbacks, like in “Skin Deep,” where he and Belle (played by Lost‘s Emilie de Ravin) fall in love with each other. Carlyle projects tenderness, but also a considerable amount of menace as his lust for power deepens and his grasp on sanity loosens. Rumpelstiltskin is an agent of chaos, and loyal to no one. OUAT knows it has a great character on its hands, and perhaps uses him too often, but that’s a small complaint about a character who towers over everyone on the show, from the cipher of a main character to the one-dimensional villain.
Mercifully, Henry takes a backseat in the season’s latter half, but any goodwill engendered by that is squandered by bashing the viewer over the head with revisionist backstory. Why do we have to keep seeing the ups and downs of Snow and Charming’s relationship? I don’t mean bickering and breakups, I mean mortal peril and amnesia potion. We’re told in the first five minutes of the pilot that they get married, so all of these scenes fall flat because they completely lack narrative tension.
In Storybrooke, Mary Margaret and David Nolan (Charming’s real-world counterpart, played by Thor‘s Josh Dallas) are falling in love, despite him being married. This is actually a nice twist, and surprisingly scandalous for an ABC show. But ultimately it’s hard to buy Mary Margaret as someone who would go along with this, because Ginnifer Goodwin just looks so damn innocent and naive that I have a hard time believing she’d put herself in a position to be called “tramp” and “harlot” by Storybrooke’s populace, who are the kind of people who still use words like “tramp” and “harlot.”
It’s bad enough that Once Upon a Time is stupid, but it thinks the audience is stupid too. This would be forgivable if OUAT worked as a guilty pleasure or a hate watch, but it doesn’t because every once in a while something genuinely affecting or surprising happens. If anything, the show is hampered by being on ABC, and an over-reliance on backstory. Do I need to know how Grumpy got his name? No, especially because that episode, “Dreamy,” asks us to believe that this woman:
would fall in love with this man:
I can kinda-sorta buy Seth Rogen and Amber Heard in Pineapple Express, or Jack Black and Kate Winslet in The Holiday, but Lee Arenberg and Amy Acker is a much tougher sell.
Ultimately, Once Upon a Time misses more than it hits. If we wanted to know more about the past lives of Grumpy or Jiminy Cricket, we’d have fucking looked into it by now. But to be fair, it’s addictive enough that I watched the whole season in just a few days, and more than once I sat down and watched it for three or four hours at a time. So credit where credit is due. And for all the negative charges I brought against this show, I’m still going to start season two as soon as I publish this.
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