Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26159109-20150722160646/@comment-5106672-20150722174010

To me, the show jumped the shark with the Neverland arc. There are so many things wrong both in-universe and off-universe with that arc and what led up to it that I don't even know where to begin.

1) They basically destroyed Rumple's characters. The introduction of "The boy will be your undoing" prophecy screwed things up big time. Before Manhattan, we saw him being unexpectedly kind to Henry (free of charge) and being fond of children in general (he ended the Ogre Wars so children could return home). Then, all of the sudden, he went on a homicidal rampage against him, spent lots of time in Neverland pondering whether to let him die and leave, threatened to harm the Lost Boys and Wendy and had to be stopped by Neal all the time… that's the moment when he started losing the thing that earned him the sypathy of the audience to become the unidimensional villain he turned out to be in S4. Given how the prophecy not only came out of the blue, but also kind of contraddicted his previous behaviour, I think that's very poor writing.

2) That's the moment when the show stopped being character-oriented and became excessively plot-driven. Both Season 1 and the first two thirds of Season 2 had a good balance of forwarding the plot and exploring the characters. For instance: while in present day Emma found the box with fake Kathryn's heart, the flashbacks focussed entirely on Red Riding Hood and explored her story in a very satisfying way. The Regina vs Snow feud was the framing that connected the Little Red Riding Hood retelling to the main plot, but the episode was actually about that fairytale. Same goes, for instance, with The Miller's Daughter: in present day we got the climax of the Cora arc, while in the flashbacks they actually retold the fairytale with Rumple's quest to find Baelfire as the framing. Conversely, since Season 3 both the present-day narration and the flashbacks came to focus excessively on the core cast, so there was little to no room left for retelling fairytales. The Little Mermaid got a flashback, but it wasn't framed by the Snow/Regina feud, it actually became an accessory to it with the main focus not being on Ariel, but on how she became collateral damage. Same goes with Rapunzel: the focus was not on Rapunzel's story, but on David quest which incidentally brought him to her tower. All the potential of introducing new fairy tales and telling them in depth has become Lost potential since Neverland and all side characters have become basically furniture.

3) Off-screen, it disgregated the cast. Of course, faced with the possibility of not having much to do for half a season, pretty much everyone outside the regulars went off to look for other jobs, which hindered their availability once the show returned to Storybrooke. And so the show had to focus even more on the core cast while extras became come-and-go characters that left a much smaller impact on the audience and the historical side characters were forgotten in the background.

4) Since its buildup in the second half of S2, it put on hold or relegated to the sidelines many key plot points. Rumple's quest for reuniting with Neal? It got in the background of the prophecy and his family drama with Malcom/Pan. Amnesiac Belle? We got Blue's deus ex machina potion because we didn't have time for that. Where the book came from? We had to wait until next season to get a decent answer. August's many pesky secrets? Yet TBA. The circumstances of Henry's adoption? Rushed in the middle of the Neverland chaos. Most of the things that helped the transition from the Breaking-the-Curse plot to the What-Now one lost all their potential.

5) The motherload of all plotholes, but that has a thread of its own so I'm not going to repeat that.

Now, with the Big Ctrl+Z of Season 3B they cleaned a bit of the mess they did and then, after they put on hold the show with the Frozen arc, they got mostly back on track with Season 4B. The problem is the show is still hellbent on the Plot Forward formula it inherited from Neverland, so all the new characters they introduce don't have time to tell their stories and pile up in the Lost potential department. I hope they get to balance things better between the two formulas in S5, but given the importance of the main character turning dark I think all the screentime will be devoted to that and even the Camelot mythology will be only skimmed over as an accessory to that. Which is sad, because we'll get even more Lost potential. :/