Episode Discussion 2x04: The Crocodile

[jadestrick.livejournal.com]

Episode Discussion 2x04: The Crocodile

Belle's disgust over Mr. Gold's continuing thirst for power comes to a head, and she threatens to leave him if he can't change his evil ways; the dwarves pick up their axes and try to find fairy dust in the Storybrooke mine; and a reunion with an old acquaintance could prove to be Belle's undoing. Meanwhile, back in the fairytale land that was, Rumplestiltskin attempts to save his wife, Milah, from being kidnapped by a band of cutthroat pirates.

P.S. Phew! Barely made it. Sorry for the delay. Wal-Mart had no less than 15 people in all 5/600 of its lines.

P.P.S. You all know it's really paining me to not use the picture I want up here. *meeps!!!*

Comments

[paulownia.livejournal.com]

I can't muster any like for Rumple's first wife. I have no sympathy for her choice to leave her son. Honestly, I did not care when she died and as a result, I had a hard time with Hook and his whole revenge motivation.

I honestly would have preferred Hook without the baggage. While this complication gives him a reason to ally with Cora, it set him up to be another quasi-baddie in a very "grey" field of 'villains' .

My biggest fear is we're heading towards another LOST ending where even the worst guys are really not bad. They're just complicated.

I want to see some real evil. Just unapologetic evil.

[bloodysuicide69.livejournal.com]

I never finished Lost, so I don't know annoying that might be...

That said: I always figured an evil person with a complicated reason for being evil is more realistic than an unapologetic, heartless, ruthless, no remorse, no reason, just pure evil person. Sure they are easier to hate, but that's what makes an evil person with complications so amazing. ITS HARD to hate them. You can imagine yourself in their shoes. You can SEE their reasons and feel they COULD be justified. I'm not giving alls and nones here. Everyone has a breaking point.

It makes them real. That's how I feel anyway.

[koloagirl.livejournal.com]

I'll echo this. The nuances and complexities are more authentic, they illustrate the journey a 'villain' takes to reach his / her breaking point, and offer a means for characters to take new paths. Rumplestiltskin, ex., would not be as enjoyable to watch were it not for gradually learning more about how he reached this point or the rhyme behind his reasoning. It's what makes it possible to understand the moments when he deviates from the expected, as with Belle.

[paulownia.livejournal.com]

I agree that it's good to have complex human villains, but my fear is this show is going to make everyone equally complex and sympathetic. The danger is that this becomes a predictable trend. I want Cora to remain kind of twisted just as Barbara Hershey has stated she is playing her. If she gets reformed, I would find it unrealistic. This world is full of plenty of psychopaths. I'd like OUAT to have at least one :)

[sukybarbossa.livejournal.com]

*echo echo echo* ;) Yeah, there do need to be some unapologetic villains on the show. I want Cora to stay evil and Regina too.

I've never seen Rumple as a villain though, not even from the first episode, where we first glimpsed him inside a cage. His ambiguity (and as we've come to find out, depth) is what I love so much about him. He's really not good or evil; he's (as Michael Emerson referred to Ben Linus) "damaged and dangerous," yet highly entertaining, and last season, it seemed almost everybody's gone to him for help and gotten it.

Even from the beginning, he was willing to help Snow and Charming save their baby, and Snow was right to see through his crazy act and trust him. I've always seen him as a character who sees through people into their motives, and if he believes in them (like he did with Charming and Snow), he'll end up doing good for them. When he threatened to take Cinderella's child, I think he was testing her to see how far she'd go just to attend a ball, and her mistake was not even reading the contract.

He may be the "Dark One," but he's made the best of his curse, and all for the sake of his son. And he'd do anything for Belle. What makes him not a villain is that he's thoroughly capable of True Love. He just got unlucky by being duped into the Dark One curse thinking it would protect his son. (So the question in the back of my head is, who is he going to pass it on to and how? And will he have to die to do it? That's my biggest fear. The cascade of tears in the series finale! Which absolutely MUST be written by Jane Espenson, who understands him so well.)

[rodlox.livejournal.com]

>This world is full of plenty of psychopaths
but not so many in the stories we pass from generation to generation.

[koloagirl.livejournal.com]

I think you've landed on the one we've been given so far. Cora doesn't show any signs anything but twisted, single-minded selfishness. She's driven and resolved to one purpose, and I'm not convinced we know what that is yet.

Suspecting we will see Cora's eventually, everyone has an "origin" story. The recent ep was Hook's. Even if Hook (ex.) is motivated by avenging true love, it doesn't necessarily make his goal, methods, or motivation sympathetic. He clearly was not sympathetic to Rumpelstiltskin's plight from the start.

Together, he and Cora will serve as foils for Rumpel and Regina, which will give the audience more reason to cheer for characters who, despite being villains, already are fan favorites.

[bloodysuicide69.livejournal.com]

PS: I hate Rumple's wife. No one leaves their child for another man unless they are heartless. Sure she might have had true love, but even that shouldn't have stopped her from at least taking Baelfire with her. Most women who want to be out of a relationship at least take their children with them, and those that don't.... well I consider them to be damaged somehow. Perhaps she was damaged.

I loved how they said that Hook was able to travel between realms with his ship... and that he got to go to Neverland with the bean. Doesn't that mean that it probably wasn't the bean Rumple was looking for anyway?

Or does the bean go wherever you want to? And Hook wanted it to go somewhere where he would be immortal?

I really hope they bring Peter Pan into this... at least eventually.

[philstar22.livejournal.com]

But that would be taking him away from his father. Why is him being with his mother any better than being with his father?

Not that I think that abandoning children is okay, but I don't think taking him away from his father is the right decision either.

[sukybarbossa.livejournal.com]

Ah, now Rumple's wife I think is yet another unapologetically evil character, as paulownia should be pleased about! (I personally know women who have done the same thing. Actually, <lj user="philstar22", I agree with you. Bae was better off with his father.)

[bloodysuicide69.livejournal.com]

Nope, that's not how I meant it at all. Mothers have an inseparable bond with their children. And someone who can just sever that connection has some sort of damage involved within them.

Taking a child away from a father is not what I meant at all. In this specific case I suppose it was what she would have done, but it isn't what I meant. She left her son, and that's not normal mother behavior. Totally irrelevant of the father. If she cared about her son she would have taken the father into account maybe they could have all traveled together if she really cared about anyone but herself.

Without getting into a parenting debate.... what I was simply saying was that I have no remorse for her. I didn't like her character at all. I actually was hoping Rumple would kill her off so I wouldn't have to see her face again.

[tony-roxy.livejournal.com]

I asked the same question about the bean. My husband says it's like you were saying. The bean goes wherever the person who has it wants. Barlfire desired a place free of magic, so he was taken to (we presume) our world. Hook desired a place where he would not age (or like you said, be immortal) so he was taken to neverland. Still, I wonder how he knew of the place/ had been there before if magic beans were supposedly so rare.

[rodlox.livejournal.com]

>Still, I wonder how he knew of the place/ had been there before if magic beans were supposedly so rare.
maybe that's the story that goes with them...or that's what Smee told them when he was a captive.

[rodlox.livejournal.com]

was there a way to take Bae with her, without Rumplestiltskin catching wind of it?

...though to be honest, I'm not sure which would be a worse childhood: being raised by a vengeful god, or being raised on a pirate ship.

Up until that near-final scene, I thought Smee was Pan.

[litlover12.livejournal.com]

Funny, I was just giving a talk last night where I said that if nothing is truly evil or forbidden anymore, then things start to get flat and boring. :-) Not that the show is flat and boring. But as you say, I think sometimes people start to get a little tired of "He's not evil, he's just misunderstood!"

[paulownia.livejournal.com]

agree. I think you articulated my concern much better than I had.

[maidenjedi]

I think Cora is evil. Pure evil. But...who knows where they'll go with that.

[lorelaisquared.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Since we already know she's the Miller's Daughter, presumably she's the one from Rumpel's traditional tale, in which case, we've only seen the beginnings of her story.

[paulownia.livejournal.com]

I'll accept psychopath with little chance for changing. Good, without a contrast of evil, can get boring really fast.

[sukybarbossa.livejournal.com]

Well, so far at least Cora is just unapologetic evil, and I'm loving it. While I do love the complicated, "grey" villains, as you put it, I actually would like to see a Regina embrace her bad side and put a bit more cackle in her evil. Her "greyness" annoys me in a way no one else's on the show does. (I honestly think she would have been better cast as Snow White. I think she's a ringer for the Disney cartoon version.)

PS: I loved the ending of Lost! Michael Emerson started me off on a cascade of tears for the whole last 20 minutes of that episode ... and beyond. Ironically, I absolutely hated Ben Linus with a passion until that jaw-dropping moment in Season 4 when I wanted to jump inside my TV set and hug him. Going back and rewatching all the episodes before shed a whole new light on him, and I fell madly in love with his ambiguous snarkiness. It's a thin line, and I loved it because I was so ready to stop watching after they got rid of Charlie! Yet another 20 minutes of uncontrollable sobbing. (And the irony is who ordered him to be killed--and who was supposed to carry it out!)

[rodlox.livejournal.com]

well, what makes the best bad guy?...
a) someone with a good reason for wanting to kill the other guy.
b) someone who throws a dart at a board and fights against whomever's name the dart hit.
c) someone just following orders.
d) someone forced (by magic or other means) to fight and kill the other guy.

the only one of those we haven't seen in OUAT is b.

[sunnytyler001.livejournal.com]

Well, you can't say Killian Jones was a nice guy before meeting Milha & Rumple. I mean, he was a pirate, most likely ruthless, stealing other men's wives, scaring poor Rumpel...
Losing Milha & his hand just gave him a goal and a worst nemesis

[mirasango.livejournal.com]

Fancy meeting you here :D

[sunnytyler001.livejournal.com]

Hello :)
Killian Jones is a Greyjoy. It is known XDXDXD

[mirasango.livejournal.com]

I'm having a hard time feeling any sympathy as well for his wife. We don't know the whole story but he did seem to be trying to make it work. She seemed more concerned she was stuck with a loser and didn't give one thought to her son.

I probably would have felt something more for her if they had handled it differntly like she was kidnapped by the pirates and Hook found her on the ship after the fact and they fell in love or something.

As it stands now Hook is handsome, but eh. When she died I was like eh

Still Team Rumple.