Once upon a time Rewatch: 3.12 - 3.22.
Sep. 14th, 2015 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakHow do we call this arc? The Zelena arc? The Oz arc? Wouldn't fit the way "Neverland" fits as designation for the first half, though. Anyway: I finished it, and the season, and thus the rewatch.
Marathoning takes care of one particular pacing problem during broadcast. Remember when I said that the fact they didn't drag out the bodswitch reveal near the climax in the Neverland arc but did it all in one episode? Well, letting the characters find out who Zelena is, by contrast, was spread across four of them, which dragged during weekly watching. Not so much when watched in a row, but still, could have been better paced.
While we're nitpicking - and I hasten to add that overall, I still loved this second half of the season as well -, Zelena curing Hook's lips (!) to take away Emma's powers was one of the most ridiculous plot devices in this not short of ridiculous plot devices show. Especially since there really was no good reason why Hook shouldn't just have told Emma immediately after it happened and spared himself, and the audience, three episodes of brooding over it. (Yes, he felt guilty re: Ariel, but he could have told Emma about the curse without mentioning Zelena's disguise while casting it.) Really, the only good thing that came out of this was the scene in 3.20., post discovery, where David told Emma to let it go, Hook said "See, even your father is on my side!" and Emma snarked "Yes, because he knows all about keeping secrets from loved ones!" (a hit, a palpable hit!), which left David protesting "hey!" That scene cracked me up, not least because Emma was absolutely right.
In this regard. One way the show keeps Emma real is that she's allowed to be wrong on occasion. (And I don't mean the let-it-go-already-it-never-works lie detector power.) Emma keeps insisting through the second half of the season that Henry was better off in their amnesiac New York life and should return to same. What's increasingly obvious (and intended to be by the narrative), and spelled out in giant letters once Henry regains his memories, is that this isn't about Henry at all. Henry is fine with Storybrooke, and wants to live there. It's Emma who wants to return to the year with fake memories and no fairy tale events (that she knew off, more about that in a second), no saviour responsibilities, no mixed up feelings about family. And this is why the finale, with its apparant disconnect from the Zelena shenanigans that preceded it, works emotionally so well (for me, at least) as a completion of Emma's emotional arc in both halfs of the season. The first half dealt with her lingering abandonment issues (re: her parents giving her up, and her giving up Henry), the second asks her what is home to her. She tries to define it as her and Henry (just as very young Emma thought her and Neal on the road were), but even leaving aside Henry sees it differently, the finale shows her the worth of all the other connections she's made. On the one hand, it's a charming "OuaT does Back To The Future" tale (and referenced as such in dialogue), with Emma in the Marty McFly role of having to fix her parents up because she interrupted their first meeting. On the other, it's Emma encountering people she's grown close to who don't know her and don't feel anything for her. (And this is Emma as River Song in Silence in the Library, if you'll alllow me the DW comparison.) Emma encounters Regina, and Regina is in full Evil Queen mode, solely destructive, with no hard won mutual respect and connection between them. Emma meets her parents, and they feel neither love nor guilt for her, they don't feel anything, because they don't know her. And that's when the "you don't know what home is until you miss it" realisation sets in. To me, it was important that Emma would want Storybrooke not just because Henry does, or because Villain of the Season threatens it, but because she really wants these people, wants to be with them, and the finale accomplished that. Along with her deciding to give it a shot with Killian, which works for me, too. Stupid kissing curse aside, I'm fine with Emma/Hook this season, and it's a part of a very welcome theme in parallel to Regina/Robin - that you can feel true romantic love more than once, that the death of one love doesn't have to mean being condemmed to loneliness forever after. (In earlier seasons, I remember this point being hotly debated, since the only character who was in love on screen more than once was Rumplestilskin.)
Now, re: Zelena as a villain. Along with most (though not all) of OuaT's villains, she's a damaged child. (I really have to do another poll, which would include the spin-off, because I'd want to included Jaffar getting drowned by dear old dad.) The fact that several of the heroes are damaged children as well makes the point about villainy being a choice, not an inborn trait, as well as the fact that the villains usually get one or more opportunities where they could choose differently. And sometimes they do. Not Zelena, though. What works for me about her is that she makes a good foil and challenge to Regina and Rumplestilskin at this particular point of the show - not in terms of magical power, in terms of the emotional challenge to them she presents and which 3.20. spells out. Until that point of the show, you could say both Regina and Rumplestilskin were on redemption storylines. A lot of their former victims were asked to either forgive them or at least come to terms with a detente, with them being part of their lives now. With the defeat of Zelena, the shoe is on the other foot. As Regina points out when Rumple says "after all she's done?": "How many people died because of us?" There is nothing Zelena does in the second half of the season which Regina and Rumplestilskin did not do to to other people. And they each know all about obsession.
Now, to be fair, the emotional stakes for Rumplestilskin and Regina were somewhat different. If Zelena had killed Henry instead of Neal I doubt Regina would have been up to giving her a second chance. (At least not this early, because Regina in this season has that fantastic conversation with Snow re: Cora.) But it remains still true that Regina, who early lin the show kept repeating the same bad emotiona patterns, in this season starts to break out of them and in similar situations makes different choices. Meanwhile, Rumplestilskin gets presented with an almost identical situation to 2.01 when Belle had asked him not to go after Regina. And again, when she asks him for his promise not to kill Zelena, he goes for the same old lie by omission approach; he doesn't say "yes" or "no" but answers with a platitude along the lines of "I don't know what I have done to deserve you, but I will try to" and pulls that stunt with the dagger. In 2.01. it was ostensibly about avenging Belle on Regina; in 3.20 it's ostensibly about avenging Neal on Zelena. But not really, any more than Emma truly wants to go back to New York for HENRY's sake (though she certainly thinks that, and Rumple thinks he's avenging) . Belle doesn't want to be avenged, and given young Baelfire's reaction to his father squashing warlords-turned-snails in front of him, I doubt Neal would want to be avenged, either. No, it's about the hurt Rumplestliskin himself suffered in both cases.
Which is emotionally understandable. I have a problem with Rumplestilskin being resurrected at all, instead of being left dead, especially in retrospect, but I have no problem with the psychological and emotional plausibility of his actions here. What happened to him in the second half of s3 has to be the all time worst case hell hell hell scenario: being brought back at the expense of his son's life - his son, who was the main emotional focus of his existence for centuries, whose life and safety and happiness were in the end what Rumple had died for -, and then being kept a helpless prisoner (this part would have done a lesser control freak in, let alone a man who became the Dark One not only to protect his son but because he wanted to never, ever, be powerless again). And all by someone whom he himself had partly formed into who she became. From an in-universe perspective, this was the absolute worst you could have done to Rumplestilskin, and it was bound to break him.
And still. If, in reply to Belle attempting to return the dagger to him and asking him not to kill Zelena, he'd simply said "I can't give you that promise", she would have understood why, and he'd have been honest with her. Instead, he resorts to "the one useful thing my father taught me" - the sleight of hand trick we see Not-Yet-Peter-Pan (whose original name, a look at fanfiction at AO3 informs me, was Malcolm - is that by Word of God or did they say so in later s4?) when he's introduced in his adult form, which we see Peter Pan use on Rumplestilskin with the Pandora box earlier this season, because in the end, he doesn't trust her enough not to repeat the same bad pattern. And this, as much as Zelena's death (or "death") itself, shows his renewed fall.
"Evil isn't born, it's made - and so is good", Regina says to Zelena earlier, completing and thereby altering a sentence she said to Emma early in s1 (when she just said "Evil isn't born, it's made"), and it's the heart of the show, in a way. People can change. For better or worse. But it's continued hard work, and you don't reach a stage at which you make the good decisions by default, nor are you born that way. Zelena never really tries; she latches on anyone approving of her (first Rumplestilskin, then Glinda) and sees any sign they might be invested in someone else as a horrible betrayal. Given Evil Drunken Adopted Father's emotional abuse through her life which we see in her first flashback episode, it's clear where she's coming from, but it still means Zelena, by herself and not in what she brings out in Regina and Rumple, isn't as interesting or complicated a character. I had a few moments of feeling for her- as when after Rumplestilskin has told her about his memory of meatpie with the spinsters, she prepares it for him -, but magical powers not withstanding, as far as villains go, she was neither as chilling as Peter Pan nor as impressive and intriguing as Cora.
Who makes a welcome comeback in one episode here via flashback (and in ghostly form in the present, galvanizing more great Regina and Snow scenes for me). I remember at the time of the original broadcast the only part of the retcon that felt clumsy to me was the Leopold part, though I was amused it basically made him into Innstetten from the novel Effi Briest, which at once explained his character to me. However, even while s3 was still going on, I changed my mind because both Eva's and the King's behavior in The Miller's Daughter from s2 actually gains layers and works better in light of the new information. (Eva isn't jerky to a random peasant when making Cora trip in The Miller's Daughter, then making her kneel, she's taunting the woman who almost married her fiancé. Which isn't better, au contraire, but it's personal and thus more interesting. Also, Eva's another case that good isn't born, it's made; as Snow observes, the girl from the flashbacks "wasn't the woman I knew", who told her servants were worth just as much as her - Eva, too, changed, in her case for the better.) What I like best about Cora is that she's the author or her own fate (up to and including her death; if she hadn't killed Snow White's mother, then played mind games with child!Snow re: the life saving/taking candle, if she hadn't raised Regina the way she did, Snow would not have been able to kill her the way Snow did). The Cora in 3.19 is more naive than her later self (buying Jonathan's "I'm a prince!" story would not have happened to the Cora in "The Miller's Daughter", let alone the Queen of Hearts later, plus later Cora is a far better liar than young Cora is here with Leopold), but she's already bound and determined to change her life one way or the other, doing the tavern job in addition to her work at the mill, getting Leopold to propose to her after the Jonathan disaster. In terms of writing and acting, she's also outranking her older daughter by virtue of not having to stick to only two modes (giggling psycho and pathetic child in Zelena's case); Rose McGowan does manage to be determined, vulnerable, increasingly desperate yet also ruthless all in one go. And I still love the idea that Snow has at least part of Cora's memories now, which I really wanted to something with, fanfiction wise, once upon a time.
And then there was Neal. You know, watching s3 as a whole, you could fanwank Michael Rayond James' non-reactions in 3.11. to Neal being already determined to undo it all, bring his father back and cross dimensions to Emma and Henry again. But that still leaves me with an ongoing actor and writing problem. I could buy the irony of adult Baelfire - who, of all the people, should know better - repeating his father's mistakes for similar reasons if both actor and scripts had previously sold me more on his emotions. I mean, in tandem to Neal's Rumple resurrection enterprise, you have elsewhere Regina trying to get out of the pain of missing Henry by first tearing her heart out and then, when Snow talks her out of this, planning on putting herself to permanent sleep. Which is not only a leftover from Regina's bad old pattern of trying to fix emotional problems via magic (which she overcomes here) but absolutely believable because the show has sold me on Regina's love for Henry before. Otoh, Neal managed to live without Emma for twelve years simply because August told him it's destiny, and has known Henry for only a few shared days, all in all. Coupled with the actorly non-reactions, I don't really buy this as motivation for doing something which could screw an entire dimension over. Similarly, if the actor had shown me Neal was horrified or at least terribly sad at his father's death, maybe torn apart by the irony that als Baelfire, he so desperately wanted his father to be good again and now it happens in a final loss way, and if the script hadn't made it sound as if the only reason why Neal wants to resurrect his father is because he needs dimensional travel advice (as opposed to, you know, wanting his father back), I'd have felt for Neal in addition to feeling for everyone else in his final episodes. As it was, I felt for Rumple, I felt for Emma, I felt for Belle, but certainly not for Neal, the idiot.
On the bright side: Belle's scenes with Neal were when I thought - and still think - the writing for Belle was back on track for the first time since 2.04 or so (the ep where she chews out both her father and Rumple), and Belle continued to be written well for the rest of the season from this point onwards, showing spine and intelligence alike. I loved that she figured out Lumiere was lying, that her love for Rumplestilskin didn't mean she thought "my Dark One, right or wrong" but told Neal resurrecting Rumple when they'd just found out it was part of the latest Evil Plan by the villain du jour, endangering everyone else, was completely wrong. Hooray for characters who manage to maintain their ethics along with being in love! Later, I similarly approved of Belle's scene with Regina (and the fact that Regina, in follow up from that scene, gave Belle the dagger - which backfired because Rumplestilskin, but still).
And in all fairness: Emma's Neal flashback in the season finale worked both from a scriptwriting and acting level - I can only repeat my "Michael Raymond Jones must be one of those actors who can't work in fantasy surroundings" theory because he does completely manage to sell me on Neal's mix of emotions as he tells Emma about his childhood and father while they're breaking into an amusement park, and writing wise, it's a good way to foreshadow Emma's realisation re: home at the end of the season finale.
Which, with a few tweaks, would have made a great show finale. The tweaks: no Frozen tag scene with Elsa, obviously, but also no time travelling Marian. The rest works fine. The show has come full circle while also having gone forward: I already mentioned Emma's and part of Regina's developments. Furthermore, Regina in 3.20 breaking the second curse via kissing Henry the way Emma did in the s1 finale hammers home their equal love for Henry (and both being equally his mothers, just as Henry now is able to love them both equally back). We're back to the beginning with Snow and Charming as well, literally in the Enchanted Forest with their (Emma altered) first meetings and falling in love, in the present symbolically as they have and almost lose another child again, and yet all is different - both their children are returned to them, Snow has made peace with Regina and vice versa. The finale even brings back missed s1 regulars we haven't seen for eons, like Red and friendship with Snow, or Kathryn/Abigail. And Emma not only has found a home she wants to stay with, but has become part of the book, part of the story, literally. This would have been the perfect place to leave everyone. With a question mark re: Belle and Rumplestliskin, since he's just lied to her, but then, in my ideal world he would have remained dead after his mid season exit. Robert Carlyle could still have been part of the the rest of the season via Zelena's flashbacks. (As for Neal, let him live or kill him off in another way, I don't really have an opinion on that one.) If you need Zelena to taunt someone other than Regina, and someone whose brains she needs for her time travel spell, well, why not Belle, as long as it's clever Belle with a spine? But say Rumplestilskin does get resurrected the way he did, then okay, let's end with a question mark as far as he's concerned, but it's still a better ending than the mess to come in s4.
Yes. My OuaT canon ends here.
Marathoning takes care of one particular pacing problem during broadcast. Remember when I said that the fact they didn't drag out the bodswitch reveal near the climax in the Neverland arc but did it all in one episode? Well, letting the characters find out who Zelena is, by contrast, was spread across four of them, which dragged during weekly watching. Not so much when watched in a row, but still, could have been better paced.
While we're nitpicking - and I hasten to add that overall, I still loved this second half of the season as well -, Zelena curing Hook's lips (!) to take away Emma's powers was one of the most ridiculous plot devices in this not short of ridiculous plot devices show. Especially since there really was no good reason why Hook shouldn't just have told Emma immediately after it happened and spared himself, and the audience, three episodes of brooding over it. (Yes, he felt guilty re: Ariel, but he could have told Emma about the curse without mentioning Zelena's disguise while casting it.) Really, the only good thing that came out of this was the scene in 3.20., post discovery, where David told Emma to let it go, Hook said "See, even your father is on my side!" and Emma snarked "Yes, because he knows all about keeping secrets from loved ones!" (a hit, a palpable hit!), which left David protesting "hey!" That scene cracked me up, not least because Emma was absolutely right.
In this regard. One way the show keeps Emma real is that she's allowed to be wrong on occasion. (And I don't mean the let-it-go-already-it-never-works lie detector power.) Emma keeps insisting through the second half of the season that Henry was better off in their amnesiac New York life and should return to same. What's increasingly obvious (and intended to be by the narrative), and spelled out in giant letters once Henry regains his memories, is that this isn't about Henry at all. Henry is fine with Storybrooke, and wants to live there. It's Emma who wants to return to the year with fake memories and no fairy tale events (that she knew off, more about that in a second), no saviour responsibilities, no mixed up feelings about family. And this is why the finale, with its apparant disconnect from the Zelena shenanigans that preceded it, works emotionally so well (for me, at least) as a completion of Emma's emotional arc in both halfs of the season. The first half dealt with her lingering abandonment issues (re: her parents giving her up, and her giving up Henry), the second asks her what is home to her. She tries to define it as her and Henry (just as very young Emma thought her and Neal on the road were), but even leaving aside Henry sees it differently, the finale shows her the worth of all the other connections she's made. On the one hand, it's a charming "OuaT does Back To The Future" tale (and referenced as such in dialogue), with Emma in the Marty McFly role of having to fix her parents up because she interrupted their first meeting. On the other, it's Emma encountering people she's grown close to who don't know her and don't feel anything for her. (And this is Emma as River Song in Silence in the Library, if you'll alllow me the DW comparison.) Emma encounters Regina, and Regina is in full Evil Queen mode, solely destructive, with no hard won mutual respect and connection between them. Emma meets her parents, and they feel neither love nor guilt for her, they don't feel anything, because they don't know her. And that's when the "you don't know what home is until you miss it" realisation sets in. To me, it was important that Emma would want Storybrooke not just because Henry does, or because Villain of the Season threatens it, but because she really wants these people, wants to be with them, and the finale accomplished that. Along with her deciding to give it a shot with Killian, which works for me, too. Stupid kissing curse aside, I'm fine with Emma/Hook this season, and it's a part of a very welcome theme in parallel to Regina/Robin - that you can feel true romantic love more than once, that the death of one love doesn't have to mean being condemmed to loneliness forever after. (In earlier seasons, I remember this point being hotly debated, since the only character who was in love on screen more than once was Rumplestilskin.)
Now, re: Zelena as a villain. Along with most (though not all) of OuaT's villains, she's a damaged child. (I really have to do another poll, which would include the spin-off, because I'd want to included Jaffar getting drowned by dear old dad.) The fact that several of the heroes are damaged children as well makes the point about villainy being a choice, not an inborn trait, as well as the fact that the villains usually get one or more opportunities where they could choose differently. And sometimes they do. Not Zelena, though. What works for me about her is that she makes a good foil and challenge to Regina and Rumplestilskin at this particular point of the show - not in terms of magical power, in terms of the emotional challenge to them she presents and which 3.20. spells out. Until that point of the show, you could say both Regina and Rumplestilskin were on redemption storylines. A lot of their former victims were asked to either forgive them or at least come to terms with a detente, with them being part of their lives now. With the defeat of Zelena, the shoe is on the other foot. As Regina points out when Rumple says "after all she's done?": "How many people died because of us?" There is nothing Zelena does in the second half of the season which Regina and Rumplestilskin did not do to to other people. And they each know all about obsession.
Now, to be fair, the emotional stakes for Rumplestilskin and Regina were somewhat different. If Zelena had killed Henry instead of Neal I doubt Regina would have been up to giving her a second chance. (At least not this early, because Regina in this season has that fantastic conversation with Snow re: Cora.) But it remains still true that Regina, who early lin the show kept repeating the same bad emotiona patterns, in this season starts to break out of them and in similar situations makes different choices. Meanwhile, Rumplestilskin gets presented with an almost identical situation to 2.01 when Belle had asked him not to go after Regina. And again, when she asks him for his promise not to kill Zelena, he goes for the same old lie by omission approach; he doesn't say "yes" or "no" but answers with a platitude along the lines of "I don't know what I have done to deserve you, but I will try to" and pulls that stunt with the dagger. In 2.01. it was ostensibly about avenging Belle on Regina; in 3.20 it's ostensibly about avenging Neal on Zelena. But not really, any more than Emma truly wants to go back to New York for HENRY's sake (though she certainly thinks that, and Rumple thinks he's avenging) . Belle doesn't want to be avenged, and given young Baelfire's reaction to his father squashing warlords-turned-snails in front of him, I doubt Neal would want to be avenged, either. No, it's about the hurt Rumplestliskin himself suffered in both cases.
Which is emotionally understandable. I have a problem with Rumplestilskin being resurrected at all, instead of being left dead, especially in retrospect, but I have no problem with the psychological and emotional plausibility of his actions here. What happened to him in the second half of s3 has to be the all time worst case hell hell hell scenario: being brought back at the expense of his son's life - his son, who was the main emotional focus of his existence for centuries, whose life and safety and happiness were in the end what Rumple had died for -, and then being kept a helpless prisoner (this part would have done a lesser control freak in, let alone a man who became the Dark One not only to protect his son but because he wanted to never, ever, be powerless again). And all by someone whom he himself had partly formed into who she became. From an in-universe perspective, this was the absolute worst you could have done to Rumplestilskin, and it was bound to break him.
And still. If, in reply to Belle attempting to return the dagger to him and asking him not to kill Zelena, he'd simply said "I can't give you that promise", she would have understood why, and he'd have been honest with her. Instead, he resorts to "the one useful thing my father taught me" - the sleight of hand trick we see Not-Yet-Peter-Pan (whose original name, a look at fanfiction at AO3 informs me, was Malcolm - is that by Word of God or did they say so in later s4?) when he's introduced in his adult form, which we see Peter Pan use on Rumplestilskin with the Pandora box earlier this season, because in the end, he doesn't trust her enough not to repeat the same bad pattern. And this, as much as Zelena's death (or "death") itself, shows his renewed fall.
"Evil isn't born, it's made - and so is good", Regina says to Zelena earlier, completing and thereby altering a sentence she said to Emma early in s1 (when she just said "Evil isn't born, it's made"), and it's the heart of the show, in a way. People can change. For better or worse. But it's continued hard work, and you don't reach a stage at which you make the good decisions by default, nor are you born that way. Zelena never really tries; she latches on anyone approving of her (first Rumplestilskin, then Glinda) and sees any sign they might be invested in someone else as a horrible betrayal. Given Evil Drunken Adopted Father's emotional abuse through her life which we see in her first flashback episode, it's clear where she's coming from, but it still means Zelena, by herself and not in what she brings out in Regina and Rumple, isn't as interesting or complicated a character. I had a few moments of feeling for her- as when after Rumplestilskin has told her about his memory of meatpie with the spinsters, she prepares it for him -, but magical powers not withstanding, as far as villains go, she was neither as chilling as Peter Pan nor as impressive and intriguing as Cora.
Who makes a welcome comeback in one episode here via flashback (and in ghostly form in the present, galvanizing more great Regina and Snow scenes for me). I remember at the time of the original broadcast the only part of the retcon that felt clumsy to me was the Leopold part, though I was amused it basically made him into Innstetten from the novel Effi Briest, which at once explained his character to me. However, even while s3 was still going on, I changed my mind because both Eva's and the King's behavior in The Miller's Daughter from s2 actually gains layers and works better in light of the new information. (Eva isn't jerky to a random peasant when making Cora trip in The Miller's Daughter, then making her kneel, she's taunting the woman who almost married her fiancé. Which isn't better, au contraire, but it's personal and thus more interesting. Also, Eva's another case that good isn't born, it's made; as Snow observes, the girl from the flashbacks "wasn't the woman I knew", who told her servants were worth just as much as her - Eva, too, changed, in her case for the better.) What I like best about Cora is that she's the author or her own fate (up to and including her death; if she hadn't killed Snow White's mother, then played mind games with child!Snow re: the life saving/taking candle, if she hadn't raised Regina the way she did, Snow would not have been able to kill her the way Snow did). The Cora in 3.19 is more naive than her later self (buying Jonathan's "I'm a prince!" story would not have happened to the Cora in "The Miller's Daughter", let alone the Queen of Hearts later, plus later Cora is a far better liar than young Cora is here with Leopold), but she's already bound and determined to change her life one way or the other, doing the tavern job in addition to her work at the mill, getting Leopold to propose to her after the Jonathan disaster. In terms of writing and acting, she's also outranking her older daughter by virtue of not having to stick to only two modes (giggling psycho and pathetic child in Zelena's case); Rose McGowan does manage to be determined, vulnerable, increasingly desperate yet also ruthless all in one go. And I still love the idea that Snow has at least part of Cora's memories now, which I really wanted to something with, fanfiction wise, once upon a time.
And then there was Neal. You know, watching s3 as a whole, you could fanwank Michael Rayond James' non-reactions in 3.11. to Neal being already determined to undo it all, bring his father back and cross dimensions to Emma and Henry again. But that still leaves me with an ongoing actor and writing problem. I could buy the irony of adult Baelfire - who, of all the people, should know better - repeating his father's mistakes for similar reasons if both actor and scripts had previously sold me more on his emotions. I mean, in tandem to Neal's Rumple resurrection enterprise, you have elsewhere Regina trying to get out of the pain of missing Henry by first tearing her heart out and then, when Snow talks her out of this, planning on putting herself to permanent sleep. Which is not only a leftover from Regina's bad old pattern of trying to fix emotional problems via magic (which she overcomes here) but absolutely believable because the show has sold me on Regina's love for Henry before. Otoh, Neal managed to live without Emma for twelve years simply because August told him it's destiny, and has known Henry for only a few shared days, all in all. Coupled with the actorly non-reactions, I don't really buy this as motivation for doing something which could screw an entire dimension over. Similarly, if the actor had shown me Neal was horrified or at least terribly sad at his father's death, maybe torn apart by the irony that als Baelfire, he so desperately wanted his father to be good again and now it happens in a final loss way, and if the script hadn't made it sound as if the only reason why Neal wants to resurrect his father is because he needs dimensional travel advice (as opposed to, you know, wanting his father back), I'd have felt for Neal in addition to feeling for everyone else in his final episodes. As it was, I felt for Rumple, I felt for Emma, I felt for Belle, but certainly not for Neal, the idiot.
On the bright side: Belle's scenes with Neal were when I thought - and still think - the writing for Belle was back on track for the first time since 2.04 or so (the ep where she chews out both her father and Rumple), and Belle continued to be written well for the rest of the season from this point onwards, showing spine and intelligence alike. I loved that she figured out Lumiere was lying, that her love for Rumplestilskin didn't mean she thought "my Dark One, right or wrong" but told Neal resurrecting Rumple when they'd just found out it was part of the latest Evil Plan by the villain du jour, endangering everyone else, was completely wrong. Hooray for characters who manage to maintain their ethics along with being in love! Later, I similarly approved of Belle's scene with Regina (and the fact that Regina, in follow up from that scene, gave Belle the dagger - which backfired because Rumplestilskin, but still).
And in all fairness: Emma's Neal flashback in the season finale worked both from a scriptwriting and acting level - I can only repeat my "Michael Raymond Jones must be one of those actors who can't work in fantasy surroundings" theory because he does completely manage to sell me on Neal's mix of emotions as he tells Emma about his childhood and father while they're breaking into an amusement park, and writing wise, it's a good way to foreshadow Emma's realisation re: home at the end of the season finale.
Which, with a few tweaks, would have made a great show finale. The tweaks: no Frozen tag scene with Elsa, obviously, but also no time travelling Marian. The rest works fine. The show has come full circle while also having gone forward: I already mentioned Emma's and part of Regina's developments. Furthermore, Regina in 3.20 breaking the second curse via kissing Henry the way Emma did in the s1 finale hammers home their equal love for Henry (and both being equally his mothers, just as Henry now is able to love them both equally back). We're back to the beginning with Snow and Charming as well, literally in the Enchanted Forest with their (Emma altered) first meetings and falling in love, in the present symbolically as they have and almost lose another child again, and yet all is different - both their children are returned to them, Snow has made peace with Regina and vice versa. The finale even brings back missed s1 regulars we haven't seen for eons, like Red and friendship with Snow, or Kathryn/Abigail. And Emma not only has found a home she wants to stay with, but has become part of the book, part of the story, literally. This would have been the perfect place to leave everyone. With a question mark re: Belle and Rumplestliskin, since he's just lied to her, but then, in my ideal world he would have remained dead after his mid season exit. Robert Carlyle could still have been part of the the rest of the season via Zelena's flashbacks. (As for Neal, let him live or kill him off in another way, I don't really have an opinion on that one.) If you need Zelena to taunt someone other than Regina, and someone whose brains she needs for her time travel spell, well, why not Belle, as long as it's clever Belle with a spine? But say Rumplestilskin does get resurrected the way he did, then okay, let's end with a question mark as far as he's concerned, but it's still a better ending than the mess to come in s4.
Yes. My OuaT canon ends here.
