Once Upon a Time 4x20 Lily

I don’t think that, in my history as a TV-watcher, there ever was another episode that so perfectly embodied the phrase ’mixed feelings’ as this one. On one hand, the flashbacks were wonderful, which is always a big plus when a show is so heavily relying on them as OUAT does. But on the other hand, the present day storyline was nothing but a long series of eyerolling, „what the fuck?” lines, and frustration, topped off with the biggest ever „OH MY FUCKING GOD WHAT?????” moment that I’ve ever experienced watching this show. Which I’m not entirely sure IS a bad thing, I mean, that kind of burst of emotion is pretty freaking rare for me in this age of behind the scenes spoilers and predictable plot twists, so I really am impressed that the writers managed to pull off something that I don’t think anyone expected... and basically this is what I meant by mixed feelings. Honestly, I’m not even sure how I feel about this episode anymore. It was miles ahead of pretty much everything in this halfseason, but much worse than the previous, wonderfully twisted episode... so yeah. Mixed. Let’s dissect it a little bit, shall we?

Once Upon a Time 4x19 Sympathy for the De Vil

If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you might have stumbled upon half-sentences here and there, mentioning my favourite series of them all, Once Upon a Time. Now that I actually get to write a proper review for one of its episodes, I need to mention just two things real quick: 1. I’m super excited about this, and 2. Just because this show means more to me than most other things in my life, it doesn’t mean that I’m not super critical of it and acknowledge when it fucks up. This is important because, unfortunately, OUAT has been doing a lot of fucking up during its current season. The first half wasn’t so bad. I thoroughly enjoyed all the Frozen characters and their corresponding story, the Snow Queen was as cool a villain as any – no pun intended – and if you don’t count the fact that it contained what’s probably my all time least favourite episode (4x05 Breaking Glass, also known as The One Where Regina Verbally Abuses Emma For 40 Minutes and Emma Never Gets to Fight Back), most episodes were actually pretty solid. Then season 4B happened, and... holy shit, where do I even start

There’s this whole mess with the Author who supposedly controls everything in the story, which is in direct contradiction with previously established canon but hey, it’s okay, the writers had a last-minute explanation for that so we’re all supposed to be cool with it now! In connection with it there’s all of our main characters tripping over themselves to help Regina get her happy ending, conveniently forgetting that she’s the reason for pretty much all the terrible things that have happened in their lives, and also that happy endings are not supposed to work that way (see previous sentence). Then there’s the fact that there’s little to zero focus on Emma, the main character of the show, and her basically non-existent relationship with her parents, if you don’t count the fact that the writers have managed to come up with a truly terrible way to make her angry at them, which also involves fundamentally changing some of the characters’ pasts, which we’re also supposed to be okay with because it apparently proves that not everyone is truly good or bad... which is something we’ve all been aware of for the past four seasons but whatever, let’s just make the heroes of the story into secretly horrible people to make the villains look that much better. And finally, speaking of villains, Emma and Regina are apparently best friends now, which we’re supposed to not question even a little bit, because a lot could have happened in that six weeks we’ve conveniently skipped, right? Well yeah, but this is kind of a huge deal because it wasn’t that long ago when Regina only reluctantly admitted that she doesn’t want to kill Emma, shortly followed by the revelation that what she actually feels for her is nothing less than the polar opposite of True Love, aka probably the most passionate hatred you can ever feel for a person... but it’s all cool, they’re friends now. So that’s about all my problems with season 4B that I could come up with on a whim, but I’m sure I could think of more if I actually took the time to do so.

Now, remember that I’m being 100% subjective here. This is my opinion, you don’t have to agree with any of it, but I’m pretty active in this fandom to know that at least I’m definitely not alone in thinking that this whole „let’s help the villains get their happy endings even though they did squat to deserve it”plot is the dumbest thing to ever happen on this show. Hell, you only have to look at the ratings to see that the numbers are steadily declining as more and more people lose faith that things will ever get back to how they used to be. As for me, I still watch every episode, but I no longer stay up until 3am just so I can see them live – what used to be the highlight of my week slowly turned into „I’m just gonna watch it when I get back from school on Monday”.

Taking all this into account, it’s probably not that surprising that I wasn’t all that excited for this week’s episode either. True, Cruella’s origin story was definitely more promising than most things that we’ve had to look forward to this season. Cruella herself has been my favourite of the three Queens of Darkness basically since the moment we first saw them all together, and the last one to get her own flashback episode. I had all the reasons to be hopeful about this one because while Maleficent’s backstory was pretty much a disappointment in that it gave us nothing of her actual origin as an evil sorceress, the episode which featured Ursula’s past is easily my favourite episode of the season. Yes, I am a little bit tired of almost all the villains having sad pasts that are supposed to explain their actions, but at least Ursula’s was truly touching and emotional, plus, if we’re being really honest, she wasn’t even that much of a villain to begin with: all we ever saw her do was choke people lightly with her tentacles. Not that the other two Queens were any more frightening, mind you. Maleficent’s dragon powers were severely underused, and Cruella’s only magical talent seemed to be... controlling dogs? Yes, sadly the much-anticipated, all-powerful Queens of Darkness turned out to be surprisingly mild as far as villains go, and looking at the big picture of the season, things wouldn’t really be any different if they weren’t there at all. Ursula was needed so she could help out the heroes a little bit, and then, having served her purpose, was quickly whisked out of the picture. Maleficent was needed to give Snow and Charming that completely unnecessary „terrible secret” storyline which would distance them from Emma, as well as to somehow connect Lily to the main cast, and Cruella was needed... well, that’s not entirely clear to me, not even after having watched her centric episode. But at least her backstory was super entertaining, probably one of the best I’ve ever seen on this show, so let’s get right into it, shall we?