Board Thread:Rant and Rave/@comment-25733960-20170508011247/@comment-5106672-20170511141832

Mmh… again, tricky. When she was with Neal the first time around, she did have walls, but not as thick as they'd become after he left her to go to prison. Same with Ingrid. As for Henry, in S1 he was kind of a troubled kid with a hard time coping with reality (except he was right all along), so even if Emma wasn't into singing because of that bullying episode, it would have made sense for her to try something that would give her solace when she was a child herself, long ago.

Then again, this is in-universe thing, and I'm mostly talking off-unverse here. With the musical episode being nowhere in sight or even thought out of league due to budget reasons, there was no need to plant a long lost / repressed interest in singing of Emma's. That's not really the writers' fault, they simply didn't know it would become a thing.

What I think IS the writers' fault, though, is not to have planted at least a part of the bullying flashback sooner. Like, as soon as they decided to go for the musical episode.

Okay, I'll try to explain. Following the show's unfolding, Emma's deadly destiny as the Saviour felt thrown in just for drama in the S6 finale: why? We did have foreshadowing of Emma not always being happy with her role, that it prevented her from making a happy einding of her own, but the whole "shaky hands / certain death sentence" angle came out of the blue and fell a bit flat until they elaborated more on it. On the contrary, the final battle with the Black Fairy blended smoothly into the show because it was planted from the very beginning: it feels like it was the writers' idea all along and it's finally paying off.

With "the song", it felt a bit like the former: they made it up specifically for the episode. It had no foreshadowing, no connection to other episodes, nothing, and that's bound to bug the more attentive viewers. If they had planted it a few episode in advance, that would have worked better, imo. Like, we had a glimpse of Regina's skeleton keys when she used them to steal Kathryn's letter, and they would go on playing a huge role in the framing of Mary Margaret: that showed there was much thought put into that detail and was like, whoa, they know what they're writing, they didn't make it up on the spot because it'd be convenient for that one plotline.

If, for instance, in Awake the Charmings had opened the door to see Emma sitting in her bed singing to herself as a child (not just passively listening to music while reading), that scene would have looked like an inconsequential child thing until, WHOA, it had some meaning! Or if they had opened the door to find Emma about to try and record her song in the very seme scene in The Song In Your Heart, then closed it before we saw the bullying part so we didn't catch its actual meaning there and then. Again, it would have looked like nothing particular, until it connected with a key plot point. The fact that the planting and pay off happened all in the same episode, especially given that it's a) a key plot point, and b) such a peculiar episode, makes it feel like a bit of a "Big-lipped Alligator Moment" that will die there and then without having much ties to the rest of the show. And that's a pity, because it was a charming little idea that gave us a really charming episode.