When Once Upon a Time debuted, I wound up rather pleasantly surprised with it all. Leaving me pleasantly optimistic on what looked like it could be excessively cheesy, Once quickly embraced itself and made for a compelling program about fairy tale characters living in the real world. As a site we didn’t keep up with reviewing the series like we do with Game of Thrones or Walking Dead, but if we (or rather, I) had, the reviews would have been pretty positive across the board; it’s not the best show on television, but it’s definitely a good Sunday night show while waiting for things like Game of Thrones and Mad Men to air.
As the finale hit last night, it seems as good a time as any to reflect back on it. As a note, spoilers for the episode are certainly discussed.
So where were we? Ah yes: Henry, Emma’s biological son, had eaten a poisoned apple turnover meant for her from the evil queen/mayor of Storybrooke Regina. Falling into a more deadly version of a coma, Emma is forced to believe in magic and fairy tales in order to save him, and is put face to face with a dragon that has been living under the city in order to save her son’s life. It’s a great recipe for a finale, all things considered: a life-or-death situation, the pay-off to a series long set of whining, and a final twist that legitimately leaves you with no great idea as to what happened or, more specifically, why.
It would seem that Once Upon A Time has more of a plot than we realized, and its for the best. At its base element, it was a show about fictional characters in the real world, and that was certainly enough to carry it along for some time — but it is a wellspring that would’ve run creatively dry after a while. Oh, sure, it could’ve lasted a few seasons; The Killing is in its second season, and from what I understand nobody has any clue what thats about still. Once isn’t a show that could’ve survived on its characters alone, however. While the characters are endearing enough the shows draw was its story, and that’s arguably the point when you take a collection of recognizable characters and put them in a somewhat new situation — we want to know the hows and whys of it all, and if the show doesn’t get to its own point it loses the audience. (I can’t think of a single Disney movie, for example, that just featured fairy tale characters sitting around and talking about feelings for an hour and a half before ending on a weak metaphor.)
Look at what is assumedly one of its inspirations, Fables: for about 75 issues, this was a book that was unparalleled on the comic stands, with a truly compelling epic that reveled in its conceptual glory. It was by far and large the one book you should’ve been reading if you weren’t already. Yet, as we hit issue #75, a great change came with it that put the book on a strikingly different path, and to this day the book is often hit or miss with its story. With no central thread tying it all together anymore (or rather, nothing I can discern from it all), the book just carries on. New issues come out and we enjoy them enough, but the previous hook that drew us in issue by issue is, for all intents and purposes, just gone.
There was also a fear at one point that the show could be like How I Met Your Mother: a show whose concept is so clearly defined by its title, yet even after seven seasons it has a hard time saying “Anyways, kids, we met through a mutual friend.” Talk about dragging on.
Yet as Once’s first season draws to a close, so do a few of the larger questions about the series: will the characters remember who they are? Can the curse be lifted? Is there some sort of way to bridge Storybrooke and where these characters really come from? Does good really win? The answers are here — yes, yes, yes, and yes. But where the show excels is in answering these questions and providing new ones: what is Mr. Gold/Rumplestiltskin’s endgame? Why has he been manipulating events since before we realized? What is the Mad Hatter up to, and what is Regina going to do now? What happens in a land without magic when you bring magic in? For fans of the show, this is more than enough reason to tune in again whenever the show comes back.
Continued belowOnce came from a very humble place, but it managed to develop itself quite well by the end of the series. It never fell into overly formulaic crutches as time went on; while it drew very heavily from LOST in terms of its execution, it owned the “borrowed” styles quite quickly, morphing it into its own style of execution. Truth be told, the series has really managed to forge its own path in its oddly self-aware nature. It’s cheesy where it counts, offering up callbacks to more familiar Disney variations of stories, and it remains serious when it needs to be, offering up a good deal of tension and dread as various plot threads begin to collapse on one another. Even the cast have wound up fulling owning both versions of their characters at this point, making the eventual combination of the two realities that much more of a satisfying close to the fist chapter of this story.
Really, the only detrimental quality Once has is its assumedly low budget, which keeps the show from ever looking truly great. While this is probably par for course for a show on ABC and not, say, HBO, the show’s reliance on poorly done CGI is a burden on itself. You can somewhat get over the fact that the actors spend all of their flashback time on a green screen instead of a set, but at the point where your lead heroine tosses a sword and it somehow flies like an arrow, that’s when you know you need a few new animators on the team. It’s never bad enough to completely remove you from watching it, but it essentially makes the difference between taking the show really seriously and just enjoying it as a lark. (Well, that and Jennifer Morrison’s apparent inability to smile for even a minute.)
Then again, you’d be hard pressed to find a show that realizes it only has so much money to put into CGI that it saves up a good portion for not one, but two fights with a dragon. As far as “big” finales go, fighting dragons is certainly near the top of the list.
Once Upon A Time is very much the surprise show of the past season. It made it through the ratings gauntlet alive unlike other recently launched longform mysteries, and it’s even done better in terms of quality over established shows. It is very much “the little show that could,” and the show stands at a point where it is up for literally anything to happen. Here’s hoping that they can pull of a strong second season, perhaps one with a bigger budget for sets and CGI.
