Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1333438-20150514015210/@comment-24674051-20150521143609

GL089 wrote: I got feeling the darkness suddenly being alive crap was a sad attempt of a plot device to justify Gold should get another chance and them trying to pin everything that happened this season on the darkness. I hope not because it negates a lot of what makes Gold/Rumple a great character. I disagree. I have always felt that the DO was, in some way, a living entity that was trapped by/in the dagger. That part of the finale, attempting to suck the darkness out of Rumple and confine it, and having that backfire, actually did not feel contrived to me. And having Emma sacrifice herself to contain the now-released darkness felt like a natural move on her part. (Probably one of the few this season).

Also, the Operation Mongoose portions of the season actually felt more planned, as I think there were references and setup to someone that wrote the storybook in previous seasons. It was a little rushed, since there were other active plotlines parallelling the OM line.

Now, Frozen momentarily derailed a lot of the plans, and the QOD were a train wreck as well. The arcs weren't necessarily bad, but Frozen felt stiff, and while I enjoy Ingrid, I think I would have enjoyed her more apart from the Frozenness. They completely misused the QOD, and have left us with 1 dead villian, one redeemed was-she-really-a-villian, and one "Scary Dragon" that is is some indeterminate state. They could have done so much more with the villians had they not jam-packed them together in one arc.

As for Rumple (getting back on topic), I think the plan has always been to seperate him from the Dark One so that it could inhabit Emma. I think the Means to that end were messier than originally planned. and I'm not sure that what they have now was their original destination. So I'm going to be interested to see what happens next.