Board Thread:Rant and Rave/@comment-25733960-20170508011247/@comment-5106672-20170508191753

I'm not a big fan of musical episodes in non-musical series, but I'm not complaining here. I mean, once you roll with the idea of how they integrated it into the plot, it's not a big deal.

There is one thing that bothered me, though, and it's the opening sequence. I can dig Emma mumbling to the tape and that turning from a moment of despair into one of strength, but the planting should have occurred much sooner. We never had any indications that she liked singing, or that it could be a KEY plot point.

I mean, they could have shown her singing something as a youngster with Neal. They could have shown her singing at some point with Ingrid. They could have shown her singing with Henry when they were bonding. They could have thrown the tape recorder into the bunch of her old stuff along with the camera recorder and stuff. I mean, I know the key writing of this episode, especially how to integrate the musical into the narrative, was a very recent idea, but they could have left the door open for that.

Speaking of doors, they knew they were doing this by the time they were writing and filming S6: they could have very well shown the scene of Emma singing to the tape recorder (or part of it) in Awake instead of the random reading / listenig to music thing: they wouldn't have spoiled the idea for the musical episode because we would have been focussed on Snow and Charming's emotional dilemma, but they would have planted the idea in advance. Having that singing flashback in the very same episode makes it look like they just made it up as they went along with no foreshadowing at all.

That's the only complaint I have with this episode.