Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-11058666-20150819040345/@comment-24950802-20150827022939

You make a great point about how the centric episodes can harm the characters they focus on, because it's very clear that the only necessary flashbacks we got to properly flesh out these characters and their background, their motivations and roots, were planned solely for the first two seasons. Eventually, they ran out of stories to tell, EVEN THOUGH we still have so many unanswered questions and things we wanna see, like Snow and Charming taking back the kingdom. The writers seem to be in no hurry to show us any of that. Heck, maybe they think they already have?

Every flashback in season 4A catered to the Frozen arc with the exception of 4.05 and 4.11, which had flashes that would become important for the arc of S4B. They are actually forcing flashbacks for these characters in a way that services the ongoing arcs du jour and only helps to make them awful, the biggest examples of which being Belle trying to find out what happened to her mother, a person I honestly never wondered about, and the Charmings stealing a damn baby when there'd been no hint at that awful, awful thing prior to the beginning of that arc (Regina said at one point that Mary Margaret's talk to her in 4.08 was about that too, but I think that's a stretch...). I was honestly surprised by the randomness of the flashbacks in 4.20, since they barely related to the ongoing arc, but also how pertinent they were. We found out that Regina made herself barren, which would turn out to be a driving force for her to want to adopt (I now sort of believe she probably would have convinced Graham to father her child during the curse if she wasn't sterile), and we were offered a window of opportunity for Cora to take Henry Sr. to Wonderland. I think that that episode's flashbacks maybe could have taken place in any season (with some alterations), so that leads me to believe they always had that story backed up, which gives me hope for the future. Like, I have no doubt in my mind that, at some point in time, maybe during season 2, they intended to show Snow and Red living in a cabin in the woods, akin to the story of "Snow-White and Rose-Red" (the cabin was mentioned a lot in 2.07's flashes). Maybe someday down the line we'll get that? Perhaps that's much too wishful thinking on my part though...