Operation Mongoose

Spoiler Alert: Just finished watching Season 4 of Once Upon A Time. If you don’t want to know what transpires, stop reading now!

Given my interest in how magical worlds intersect with non-magical worlds (a la Harry Potter), I’ve been slowly working my way through Once Upon A Time. The series features plenty of creative story-telling and mash-ups – how characters from two different fairy tales interact with each other. It also prompts me to think about the boundaries of magical systems (I’ll need to post further on this topic some time).

The chief problem with a TV series, as opposed to a stand-alone movie or well-defined miniseries, is how to keep the viewers coming back. Once Happily Ever After is reached, there is no more story to hold the attention of viewers. This seems a tad ironic given that one central theme running through Season 4 is “finding one’s happy ending”. Obstacles have to be surmounted, but to keep the story going, new and more powerful obstacles have to be devised. In the case of Once Upon A Time, this means more powerful characters wielding more powerful magic.

Frozen makes its entry primarily focusing on Elsa as she finds herself in Storybrooke at the beginning of Season 4. I think it’s fairly obvious that she is not an evil sorceress, so the powerful antagonist introduced in this case is the Snow Queen. This is the main theme of the first half of Season 4. I felt that the story and character of the Snow Queen was very well developed – and the way it draws together the web of intersecting lives was done in a clever way. The patience and perseverance of the Snow Queen, hidden in plain sight, was much more compelling in my opinion than the way Zelena, the wicked witch from Oz and Regina’s sister, was featured in the previous season. The intersection of the Frozen world (Arendelle) with the current characters is creative story-telling in some instances, and in other cases feels forced or contrived.

The second half of the season is where things start to fall apart story-wise. While the intrigue of finding the Author kept me watching, when he is finally revealed and plays his magical hand (or uses his pen), I was unimpressed. Two new witches are introduced (Ursula and Cruella) each with their own back-story episodes, and Maleficent gets resurrected. Not to mention Zelena shows up. August returns. Lily comes back. The plot feels way too contrived as the prior entanglement stories are stretched to the point of weak credibility. There is something particularly compelling about fiction that rings true. It’s magical in a way I don’t know how to explain, and maybe that’s the point! Great stories or great literature share this in common. In contrast, many other fictional stories feel contrived and dragged out. The longer they get, the more difficult it is to “get the story right”. I think this is a growing problem with the Once Upon A Time series - the piling on of backstory entanglements weakens the pleasure of the overall story. In the first season, there were fewer entanglements and backstories mainly focused on character development rather than entanglement of different characters from different worlds.

Three magic-related things I pondered while watching Season 4:

(1) Magic-wielding folks seem to have good ways of resurrecting or reincarnating themselves. However for non-magical folks, dead is dead. This makes the world outside Storybrooke interesting because without the ability to wield magic, sorceresses (and most of the magic-users in Once Upon A Time are women) cannot easily protect themselves or reassemble themselves.

(2) The pen is mightier than the sword, at least in the case of the Author – but that can only impact those “authored” in the enchanted or magical worlds. Henry, for example, is unaffected when Heroes & Villains gets written. Oddly, the Author himself seems not to have come from a magical world. It’s entirely possible he might given the way Once Upon A Time springs new back stories on characters. The concept or the idea of an Author (or multiple authors) writing things into reality and who can impose a will on the outcome is interesting, but I felt it was used in a rather one-dimensional way. Maybe later seasons will fix this.

(3) Things get interesting when the world outside Storybrooke intersects with the enchanted world. The use of magical objects is still permitted outside of Storybrooke, i.e., one could enchant an object for a specific task but not be able to channel that magic in any other way. Thus, the necklace Zelena wears allows her to take the form of another (sort of like Polyjuice Potion). Also, magical scrolls (we never see what’s written in them) allow one to recognize and re-enter Storybrooke. This reminds me of 12 Grimmauld Place. Perhaps the writers got this idea from the Harry Potter books.

I will probably watch Season 5 when the DVD is released, although my interest started to wane two seasons ago. I don’t see how the storyline can get better with the new Emma the Dark One trajectory. However, I have gotten more interested in the nature of story-telling that involves magic and also magical story-telling, so this will have to do – until something else more engaging comes along. I’m looking forward to Fantastic Beasts, but my expectations are not all that high. Prequels can be done well or they could be done poorly even if the movie special effects have improved. So can sequels.