OUAT - S01E07 - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Aleki77

Posted on 13/12/2011, 18:37 by: Aleki77

User deleted

ONCE UPON A TIME Redux: Why Do TV Shows Have To Break Our Heart?

By Tiffany Vogt on December 12th, 2011

One of my favorite new shows just broke everyone’s heart. ONCE UPON A TIME is premised on the idea that Emma Swan is the key to breaking the Evil Queen’s curse and that she will bring back the “happy endings.” But if this most recent episode is any indication, the curse is still alive and well — for Storybrooke is still a place where “happy endings” die.

Coming from the creators and writers of the episode “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter,” Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis (both former writers of LOST), ONCE UPON A TIME took a page out of the LOST-playbook and killed off a beloved principal character. It was as if the one thing that we all dreaded the most has come back to haunt us – writers who dare to kill off characters. In the past decade, television has become more enamored with the idea of raising-the-stakes and making TV shows more unpredictable by killing key characters. Other shows have done it, but none more so and more heart-wrenchingly than LOST. It was a show that we all both loved and loathed for various reasons. But perhaps the greatest taboo that LOST ever broke was killing off beloved characters.

Alas, the lesson was not learned and Horowitz and Kitsis have brought that particular storytelling device into their new series ONCE UPON A TIME. But this time, it may backfire even more spectacularly. They have vastly underestimated their audience – those that watched LOST are a much different audience than those that currently watch ONCE UPON A TIME. LOST was never a family-show, it was a sci-fi show cloaked in mystery and drama. ONCE UPON A TIME, however, is a show that thrives off of its ability to draw in family viewers. There is a reason it was given the plumb timeslot of 8 p.m. on Sunday nights – the traditional family hour of television – ONCE UPON A TIME promised a modern look at classic fairytales. It is based on the idea of a young boy who goes in search of his birth mother in order to bring her to a town where time has stood still and everyone there is a fairytale character unable to remember who they really. The concept alone is meant to target younger viewers (children) and parents. So when you kill off one of the heroes by Episode 7, there is going to be a backlash.

If recent ratings are any indication, viewers have already become disenchanted. They were promised a story where happy-endings would become real again, but instead have suffered from a bait-and-switch: ONCE UPON A TIME is not giving us the “happy endings” we were hoping for.

The first episode did reunite Henry with his birth mother Emma, and he was successful in convincing her to stay in Storybrooke giving them hope of breaking the curse. But by the second episode we discovered that each story comes with a dark silver-lining. In “The Thing You Love The Most,” we learned that the Evil Queen had to sacrifice her father as the price to pay for the curse she so desperately wanted. Then in “Snow Falls,” we saw that Regina had schemed to keep Snow White and Prince Charming apart for eternity by having a long-lost wife of John Doe surface just as he revived and was falling in love with Mary-Margaret. Then in “The Price of Gold,” we watched Emma cornered into giving Mr. Gold a promise of a future favor to save Ashley’s daughter and how in the fairy-world, Rumpelstitskin planned against a double-crossed by arranging to have Cinderella’s husband kidnapped. Then in “That Still Small Voice” episode, we learned the disastrous fate of the couple caught in the cross-fire of Jiminy Cricket’s plan to escape his parents and how he agreed to live as a cricket to be spared any future pain. Then in “The Shepherd,” Prince Charming was forced to make a deal to save his mother’s farm, but it meant he cannot see her anymore and became engaged to a woman he did not love – and in our world, John Doe remembered his former life in Storybrooke and returned to his wife, breaking Mary-Margaret’s heart.

All of these episodes should have prepared us for yet another heart-breaking ending, but even as it happened before our eyes, we could not truly believe it. We never doubted that Regina would go to any lengths to preserve her “happily ever after” – but for her to kill Sheriff Graham felt devastating. As he died in Emma’s arms, our hearts broke. What was the point of introducing a character – a hero – that we could root for in both the real-world and the fairytale-world, and one which Emma could fall in love with, only to have him snatched away so suddenly?

Is this truly what ONCE UPON A TIME has to offer us? Is it all about the unhappy-endings and never the happy-endings? At least with the television series GRIMM, we knew that the stories were supposed to be dark, twisted and perhaps there will be days that evil triumphs over good. But with ONCE UPON A TIME, we feel sucker-punched. Isn’t the show supposed to be about the return of happy-endings? If so, then why do all the episodes end with sad-endings? Will we find out in the end that the curse was but illusory and that they were all dead all along? Given the history of LOST — the very footsteps in which ONCE UPON A TIME seems to be following — it is not inconceivable. But is that what viewers signed up for? When we heard about a show offering a modern-spin on fairytales and offering a promise to find the lost “happy endings,” we all tuned-in. But now that viewers are finding out that we are only being offered “unhappy endings,” viewers are slowly tuning out. It is not the family-show of good-triumphing-over-evil that we signed up for — all ONCE UPON A TIME is really giving us is a world where evil delights in killing all that the relationships and people we love.

Let’s not have a repeat of LOST where everyone dies in the end. We do not enjoy watching our heroes suffer. In ONCE UPON A TIME, they are already suffering and need to be rescued. It is time to see the promised “happy endings.” ONCE UPON A TIME should not be a sequel to LOST wrapped in sheep’s clothing. Be original, be bold, be the fairytale that everyone wants it to be. Give us a “happy ending.” (R.I.P Sheriff Graham – we are going to miss you terribly!)

http://www.thetvaddict.com/2011/12/12/once...reak-our-heart/

9 replies since 9/11/2011, 18:11 1386 views