Board Thread:Rant and Rave/@comment-25733960-20171216035405/@comment-25926288-20171229173557

TheRose123 wrote:

The writers said that they learned from what worked and what didn’t in Season 7, I hope that means no more dark curses. Yep, I was just stressing how each time the DC or any curse/AR is used, it’s about the present stakes, the past costs, and the characters involved that keeps things going strong.

In this episode about the Dark Curse, the emotion meant to be invoked is “Henry is dying, Regina must do this.” (This is probably why they did it with these two characters that the audience is invested in.) That set-up isn’t that bad (might argue that it was a bit random) and would be solid if it wasn’t undercut by the present day where about 50% of the core cast is awake (Roni, Kelly, Weaver, Victoria, Ivy, Eloise, Ana versus Jace, Henry, Lucy, Sabine, Rogers, Tilly).

Like the DC in Season 5 was pretty “ugh”, but the preceding moments were “awesome, then meh” and the present day had intrigue.

It would have been a teeny bit better if Drizella looked at a completely new curse scroll and asked “What’s this?” This would create intrigue about this “unknown curse” which would be less undercut by all these aware people and more about “They still don’t know anything about this curse.”