short OUAT thoughts
- I'm really loving to hate Cora. I'm doing YOU a favor by making you do what I want; my daughter needs me. The show tweaks the Evil Stepmother mythology in the tiniest way, in showing us that Regina got the way she was because she had the biological mother from HELL. Her plan was totally genius, though. Not so much about the ease with which Cora knew she could manipulate the townspeople by using Regina's history against her, but the way the plan messes with Regina's will in a way nothing else quite can. She knows it's her fault she doesn't have anyone's trust, but she can't even own it as something she's done, because it's something that's happening to her. And as long as she doesn't know Cora's back, she won't even have the strength of anger; there's just grief and powerlessness. Isolation; guilt; controlling her reality
- REGINA, you guys. All that rage and pride, and it might really be too late for her. GUYS LOOK AT HER
YOU MADE HER CRYYYYY, WHAT KIND OF MONSTER DOES THAT?!
- I love that Emma did the teenager thing of inviting Regina without telling Snow. I DO WHAT I WANT MOM!!
- I ended up pretty satisfied with the way everyone's attempt to moralize on whether or not Regina gets a chance...wasn't really answered in one way or another. Charming's been proven right that allowing her to live was extremely dangerous; Emma is right that everyone else who's gotten an undeserved second chance isn't any better than Regina (and her intuition regarding Regina is correct); flashback-Snow's POV that it's just asking too much to execute someone who's basically her sister is also given a fair airing. But all their juggling in the flashbacks leads to them making the tactically terrible choice of exiling her, and leaving her to plot outside their sphere of influence or even surveillance. This is also the problem in the present-day. Emma's insistence on "let her go and then find the truth" sounds like a security risk to everyone? I would go with at least taking a couple of hours to try to find the truth and then turning the crazy lady loose, but that's me.
- I like what's going on here with Regina and Rumple and the whole cycle of exclusion and stigma. They felt powerless and lashed out the way they could, and started these spirals, pulling themselves farther and farther out of their world, and the more isolated they were, the worse they became. But the insiders depend on the outsiders, even as they make with the shunning. Someone has to do the dirty work. The Charming court used Rumple to sniff out Regina, and then they excluded him from their wedding too. The Charming court assumed that there are insiders and then there are loners - not true. The people on the outside are perfectly capable of forming bonds with each other, and sharing the negative experience of being excluded gives them common cause to do so.
- I am not all that charmed by Charming. "That was an assassination. This is an execution." Charming's convinced that his decision of a death sentence is valid; Snow's wasn't. Which was bullshit, obviously, as he admits when he admits that it was all about his thing for Snow. I'm not really going anywhere with that.
- I do like that even Jiminy in the flashbacks was all about killing her, and even though she doesn't cause him any real harm in the present day the script still reminds us that maybe he wasn't wrong - she lets rip on him (for something he may not have done?) and then uses the curse that SHE put on him as a reason why he should do as she says now. It's totally the game she learned from Cora, but she's a little too alive to be as good at it as her mother.
- Let's talk about my thing for Hook, you guys. I love a man with more eyeliner than conscience. ....that's it. That's the story.
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