Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26184894-20150414180515/@comment-5106672-20150414205119

I don't know how they could have pulled it out in a satisfactory way, to be honest. The arc forwarded enormously the character development, and the writers chose to focus on character-specific flashbacks to enhance that plot point, but that came at the detriment of the overall Neverland plot. To have enough time to both develop the characters and tell a more detailed story of Neverland, they would have needed to spend a whole season on that. But, as you pointed out, spending more time than they did on dark and virtually identical sets would have been underwhelming, not to mention that most of the time the gang spent an episode running around in circles without getting anything out of it.

Yet, I would have preferred a rushed Neverland mythology than the virtually nothing we got. They could have done so by tying in more flashbacks to Neverland:


 * I'm okay with Lost Girl, it showed a good parallel with present day.


 * I'm okay with Quite A Common Fairy, it provided enough of a backstory of Tinker Bell.


 * Replace the Pied Piper flashback in Nasty Habits with one of Neal as a Lost Boy in Neverland with Pan terrorising him.


 * Shorten the Liam flashback in Good Form and provide more insight of Hook's time in Neverland with Pan terrorising him.


 * I understand the purpose of Ariel's flashback, but the Little Mermaid tale was poorly squeezed in, so I'd rather have had, I don't know, a Tinker Bell flashback (with Pan terrorising her) and her making friends with Ariel (so she can pop up and help in the present), with the promise of telling Ariel's story another time.


 * Dark Hollow was enough packed with no flashbacks.


 * Think Lovely Thoughs has the only flashback directly relevant to explain Neverland, so I'm okay with it.


 * Save Henry is okay, he's supposed to be the protagonist of the arc anyway.


 * The New Neverland is The Most Useless Flashback Ever In The Series and GOSH, that is all wasted time that could have been devoted to Neverland.


 * Going Home could have focussed on Neverland too, but I'm okay with the sense of closure the flashbacks give.

So, it might have been rushed, but at least this way we would have had a satisfactory combination of character growth and actual story.