Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-26159109-20170115054549/@comment-5106672-20170303020708

MBrody wrote: GothicNarcissus wrote: Personal preferences and shipping notwithstanding, Once is fortunately enough of a "choral" show that it would allow it to continue even if it lost a core character or two. I, for one, think it would be harder for it to go on without Bobby than JMo: even if the present day storyline could do without both, Emma isn't needed for FTL flashbacks, while Rumple has been lurking and toying with pretty much everything that has happened in the past 200+ years of FTL history; how many flashback can you realistically write without needing for him to pop up at some point? I completely disagree. I think the show would be much harder to do without Jennifer Morrison. In my opinion, if Robert Carlyle left, it wouldn't affect the show much at all. I don't see Rumplestiltskin nearly as important as Emma. I still see Emma as the focal point of the story and the glue that holds all the other characters together. In the past, whenever Emma has vanished, the other characters have resorted to fighting amongst themselves - "The Dark Swan" and "Wish You Were Here" come to mind. On the same thread, when Rumple disappears for a while, I barely notice he is gone.

That's the problem with having a double narrative – past and present: Rumple and Emma have a different value relative to the two different narrations. And these two narrations have drastically different elasticity.

In the present, what you sau is true: Emma is the core and she balances the action, while when Rumple isn't there, that simply means fewer problems to deal with. BUT the thing with the present storyline is it can evolve. Part of the other characters' growth may include learning not to disband whenever Emma isn't around. The storyline might revolve around something else entirely: take S3B, which was entirely Regina's arc, in which Emma served two purposes – bringing Henry back to Storybrooke and kickstarting the next arc once the Wicked vs Evil was over – but other than that didn't do anything relevant. You could have omitted Emma completely and the basic storyline would have remained intact. True, while Emma does thing, Rumple is mostly a liability because he needs to be shady, otherwise he would solve the heroes' problems in no time at all, but that has really gotten tired…

…but then you have the flashbacks. The present, you can adjust to anything you like, but the past is fixed. If the show suddenly only focussed on Rumplestiltskin-free flashbacks, that would become conspicuous after a while. True, anyone could turn to any magical pratictioner for help, but how would that fit into the arefully masterminded timeline that produced the present day events? That's a much harder thing to pull off IMO.

Anyway, I guess we'll see.