Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-5899967-20150208192922/@comment-1916997-20150211032547

Rena Charming wrote: I try to think like that, in a "the more you know" kind of way. Or at least I did, before 4.06. Let me explain how. You see, there are many things about the characters that I still want to know. For example, I wanna see how Snowing and the others took back the kingdom, how Red and Granny reunited after the events of 2.07's flashes, what Frankenstein did after he couldn't kill his brother, how Will wound up in Storybrooke both times, how Tink ended up in Neverland in the first place, why the Blind Witch in the gingerbread house had the apple and why that apple was so special anyway... There are many unanswered questions in the series, some of whom I believe will never actually be answered, cos either the writers just forgot about them or they never meant to provide too much insight on them anyway. So it's disheartening for me when we get episodes that don't answer any actual questions, they just tell stories made up for that specific episode that don't feel like pieces of the puzzle, they're just there. Like Snow and Charming's run-in with Medusa in 3.10, or all of those episodes that show moments shared between Rumbelle that fit in the over-arching story of 1.12 (2.19, 3.11, and even 4.11). But before 4.06, I always thought, "hey, whatever, the more you know". Like, I never asked myself "how did Hook become a pirate?". I never wondered about that. We found that out, however, in 3.05, and I didn't mind knowing it. The more you know. But, thing is, I also never really wondered what happened to Belle's mother, especially since the character isn't known for having a mother in the traditional fairytale or in the Disney movie anyway. 4.06 explained what happened. And it sucked. The whole story was incredibly ridiculous. Belle loses her mother in the midst of an ogre attack, wakes up with no memory of it (probably because she was either knocked out or blocked out the trauma), and wonders what happened to her mother. Gee Belle, maybe she choked on a peanut! That's what killed her. All that the episode did was tell us a story we didn't need to know as a contrived way of mixing Belle up with the "Frozen" characters, it was a stupid, half-assed, poorly thought-out story that colorized Belle as extremely dumb when she's supposed to be a smart character, and on top of that, it gave us that infamous scene in which Belle chooses to preserve a rock - that gives her memories of what happened to her mother when she should already be able to deduce what happened - over a person's life. All in a superficial attempt to try and put the character in some sort of moral grey area. Cos that's what the show does all the time: OUaT really likes to drive the point home that no character is truly good or truly bad, so they make us try to sympathize with Regina even though she killed tons of people in the past and they try to shame Snow for killing Cora, which she did to protect her whole family. No, do not rub in my nose that the two characters are more alike than they initially thought. They're really, really not. I'm digressing a bit, I'm sorry. My point was, sometimes it's hard to think of the backstories they provide as smaller pieces of a large puzzle or just chapters in a big book that make up for a good, long story, when they keep throwing unneeded and uninteresting stories our way, more regularly now than ever before, just for the sake of mixing up the regulars with the VIP guests du jour.

Anywaaaaaaaay, back on track: yeah, Cruella de Vil seems interesting, I guess. Curious to see what her story is. I get it, and yes the Belle flashback in 406 was not the best, and Belle was a bit shoehorned in with the Frozen stuff. But I think we have to wait until the show is over to truly judge how important or unimportant this Belle flashback was. Many books, tv shows, and other serialized storytelling mediums, will plant something that seems unimportant at first, until something else is revealed later on. So I really think there is more to Belle's mother's death than what we think, and it may play into something else later on. Or it won't, and then you'd be right, it would be a pretty poor flashback. But we have to give this time, Maleficent was shown to be a friend of Regina in the 2nd episode of Season 1, and we are just now going to see how that happened in the 14th episode of Season 4.