Once Upon a Time - "What You Love The Most"

Season 1, Episode 2

More like TWICE Upon a Time, am I right?

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised given the breakdown of the pilot – what with everything past the 15 minute park feeling wholly perfunctory – that the second episode would essentially repeat everything that we learned in the pilot, spending very little time advancing the story at all. But I will have to give the show props for hiding it well enough.

Last week, I mentioned that I didn’t feel like the show putting a large enough of its own twist on the fairy tales that it was co-opting, but this week it seems to have almost the opposite problem. A good chunk of the running time of “The Thing You Love Most” was filled with yet more time in Fairy Tale Land, but it wasn’t about showing how the curse brought them all to reality or how the town of Storybrooke was created. No, instead the show went backwards on the timeline in order to fill in the show’s backstory, once again answering more questions that really didn’t need answering right now.

I get why the show would want to fill in backstory; it’s one of the many ways that shows can go about some effective world building, and Once Upon a Time definitely needs to make world building one of its priorities in the early run of its show if it plans on being surviving in the long run. But for now the show only seems interested in world building, and that leave very little room for the episode to get some actual plot in – you know, that thing that show progress and keeps the audience coming back for more.

Now I recognize that this episode was trying to use the backstory to setup some future possible plots – most notably with how Rumplestiltskin became Mr. Gold and how he’s using his powerful position to usurp her power, especially by causing the whole chain of events that leads to Emma coming to the town – but I think it relies too much on the backstory to pull the narrative weight instead of coming up with an actual plot. Mr. Gold/Rumpy is an interesting figure given how mischievous he can be, and I do want to see what comes of his power play, but very little in this episode intrigued me.

To that end, absolutely nothing changed on the Reality side of thing. Regina tried to get Emma to leave a few times, and each time that just made her more determined to stay. She had some interactions with Dr. Hopper (really?) and Sister Blanchard, both of whom said that Henry is a bit delusional, but not dangerously so. Emma gets arrested, again. All of this is just retreads of what we saw in the pilot, and apart from learning the extent of Regina’s reach in terms of the town, nothing new was introduced here tonight, and the show was mostly stuck spinning its wheels.

I’ll admit to the interesting conceit that the show is trying to pull by making Regina/The Evil Queen into less of a straight-up evil character and more of a sympathetic personality who lost both the lover of her life, and her father, the latter of which fills her with guilt, to the extent that her adopted son became his namesake. Much like with world-building, fleshing out your characters is another essential step in the early stages of any show, but I have to wonder why they chose to work on the queen first. Why not say Emma, who’s both our main character and still something of a cipher?

I know that Snow White/Prince Charming’s character-building episode is going to air next week, and I guess that the show is going to take each character’s backstory in time, which is interesting for the reasons that I listed above, but also boring for the other ones I mentioned. Once Upon a Time is going about this narrative the wrong way; I’m not saying that the writers need to have a full-out game plane, but they should probably raise the stakes a bit by having things actually happen. It’s a good idea to have us care about the characters, but they need to be in some sort of turmoil – be it physical or emotional – for those feelings to have any utility.

But hey, at least we got to see Jennifer Morrison in a white tank top. That’s got to count for something, right?

Other Thoughts:

If this was in anyway a darker show, I would start taking bets that Henry really is crazy, and that the Fairy Tale Land is all in his head. Alas, this is not that show, and I doubt anybody would be stupid enough to pull a St. Elsewhere.

Oh, some time’s just completely back to running normally? Just like that? Okay then.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t buy Giancarlo Esposito as somebody’s lackey. That’s just a bad casting call right there.