Once Upon A Time

Once Upon a Time was a show that I picked up when it was in its second or third season. I remember thinking that the fairytale angle was brilliant and they could make it so much darker than the Disneyfied versions of these stories. It has been about a decade since the last time that I’ve seen this show but I know that it got weird towards the end. So this is on the list of shows that started good but went off the rails and we are going to analyze it just the same to figure out where the breaking point was. So here we go with the first season of Once Upon A Time.

It is already a little campy but I think that's intentional. I don’t actually think that I have ever seen the pilot before. I didn’t know that Emma was brought to Storybrooke by Henry.

Okay so we are starting with a very normal and basic storybook prophecy. Everything is laid out quite well in the first episode. Emma will be the one to take down the evil queen. She is Snow White and Prince Charming’s daughter. Her 28th birthday will mark the beginning of the battle. Now my super writer senses are tingling and they are saying that this main storyline is the thing that's dragged on too long.

I kind of love that they integrated an actual storybook into this narrative, it's cute. The casting is great, they are doing a great job of building the tension. Little Henry is the perfect driver for this story.

The visual effects are truly terrible but in a campy way I can appreciate.

Regina is definitely the evil queen but there is something off about it. Like obviously she is a bitch but there doesn’t seem to be a motive behind it. I kind of prefer it that way. I don’t believe every villain needs motivation, I would like more villains to be evil just for evil’s sake. Also having two villains in the evil queen and Rumplestilskin is genius. You want to raise the stakes and therefore we should have someone or something that strikes fear in the heart of the evil queen…brilliant.

The hero's journey is pretty clear, and that is a lot harder to do in a more serialized format simply for structural reasons. I also don't really love it when writers shove women into the hero’s journey because we experience the world differently and the heroine’s journey IS something that exists. However so far it’s working fine only because both Emma and Henry seem to be going through the hero’s journey together.

So far I like the integration of the other storybook characters. They have established that this world and this curse very specifically affects characters of storybooks. That might actually be where their problem lies. We’ve got Snow White and prince charming as the central story, and then we seem to be structured in a monster of the week like thing with Cinderella, Jiminy Cricket, Little Red Riding Hood we were at one point solidly in fairytales.

This show is so classic 2010s it feels like Grimm, like Smallville. It has a very specific tone and I really kinda love it. I am officially invested. This is a very very solid first season. The plot is so clearly laid out, the characters and their roles are extremely well detailed and developed. Now I know that eventually this show goes off the rails but it really does start off very intriguing. I will continue to watch the show because I would like to see exactly where it goes weird.