Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-25926288-20170110155747/@comment-5106672-20170303025511

Emillian Swanones wrote: CoolDudeAl wrote: JMsapphireZ wrote: Emillian Swanones wrote: Wicked Wizard of the West wrote: 1-3B: Once Upon A Time.

3B is great, I even consider it the best arc by far, both for the tension, the story, the villain, and the visual effects. It even ended with one of the best finale of OUAT, and the ending is near-perfect. 3A and Going Home is no-way the ending the show deserves. Going Home is great, but only There's No Place Like Home brought the FIRST storyline full circle (except for the Marian and Elsa part, which could be eliminated easily) 3B is also one of my favorite arcs. I completely agree that Going Home would have been a bad ending. There were too many things left open and besides, what sort of happy ending is being separated from and forgetting the family you just found? Not all stories and series have a happy ending. We need to take off out of our minds that everything need to end happy. Life is not happy. Our ending is not happy, we end dying. Is that happy? I would agree with you if this was almost any other show. However, this show is primarily based on fairy tales, which literally end with "and they lived happily ever after". So yeah, if this show ends on a "bad" note, it would be a bad ending for the show, because of the premise of the show. THIS^ The point is not about happy or unhappy endings, it is about narratively good or bad endings: is the whole story wrapped up by the end of Going Home? Ngh… sorta – Rumple's arc is done, Emma kind-ish, Regina's has reached a point – but a lot of threads are still hanging there. It was a very emotional moment, but a rushed, incomplete ending.

On a side note, I think some people tae umbrage with S3B and see it as the “beginning of the decline” because it did kick-start the formula that swamped Once for the next couple of seasons, enem though it wasn't affected itself.

Namely, S3B saw the rise of half-seasonal arcs, very fast-paced action and condensed timeframe (even more so than S2 and 3A), flashbacks that were “fill-in-the-gaps-ish” (they served to demistify the present-day mystery rather than provide insight to the characters) and not fairy tale renditions (while set in fantasy realms, they consisted of fairy tale characters acting out an all new story, rather than direct twists on said fairy tales), veeeeeery liberal and abundant use of magic in Storybrooke, quests for spells and magic macguffins, and so on. This formula was well-integrated and very functional to S3B, and the arc itself came off as strong. But then it was taken and re-used over again in subsequent seasons to mixed-to-bad results – most notably that hot mess which was S5A.

TL;DR, basically, it's easy to "blame" S3B for ruining the show, even though it worked well and the error was on the writers' part to think its formula would work for anything that came after. Fortunately, theu caught and started rectifying the mistake by S5B…