Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25926288-20160926013536/@comment-5106672-20160926173831

Hmcooper4 wrote: The show could go ever on and on. there is plenty of source material to keep it going.

BUT....

The show, with the current cast and story arcs, is stagnating, and really has been since the end of season 3.

What the show needs is an influx of new characters, and something that allows the current cast to step into the background gracefully, with their stories complete. Hyde and Jekyll, and Dorothy for that matter, are steps in the right direction. And if they used Al and Jas as the power TL couple to replace David and Snow, then we might be getting somewhere.

Point of all of this is that, if they stay with this cast, then this should be their last season, because I don't see that they have anywhere else to go with this set of characters. If they can start swapping out characters, then there might be a chance. Well, this is exactly what has been happening for the past couple of seasons, and what has turned off many viewers.

See, what was OUAT's premise? "It's a small world, after all". Few key locations with few core characters and some entertwining extras. Everything happened among a few scarcely-populated neighbouring kingdoms, and X from fairy tale Y was also Z from fairy tale K because of close proximity. Then there were far-off parallel worlds reaching which was very difficult, but bar those exceptions, basically everything was within reach of the Dark Curse.

Then they started expanding the cast left, right and centre and the show drifted off its basic premise. Off-universe, the more prominent new one-hit-wonder characters they brought in, the less space was there for older supporting characters to return, which scattered the cast among other series and made them unavailable for comebacks.

In universe… they keep drifting away from the above premise by bringing in tons of previously unseen characters and locations, and come up with the flimsiest ways to tie them in with the core cast. Which would be okay, as you said they could let the core cast step back and fade away… but this process has wrecked the very fabric of the show.

Two examples? We got Arendelle, and Agrabah, and Camelot, and DunBroch. All within the same realm as the Enchanted Forest, but somehow untouched by the Curse. It took Regina nine months to make good on her promise, didn't anyone think of just boarding a ship and outsailing the Curse muuuuch sooner for good measure? And of course, you need to let all those previously unseen characters come, and then get rid of them when their arc is over, so portals to and from Storybrooke kept popping up like they were on sale. Wasn't Rumple being unable to rach the Land Without Magic the show's whole premise? You could handwave it and say that before the Curse created Storybrooke and Rumple unleashed magic onto it, it wasn't possible to access the LWM except with very specific ways (Dark Curse, Pan's Shadow, Silver Slippers), and now it's easier because Storybrooke is a "magical enclave" in the LWM, but then Henry opened a freaking portal in Downtown NYC like it wasn't a big deal just because the plot and yeat another cast expansion required it, so what gives? Couldn't Rumple hitch a ride by a mermaid? WISH HARD to get to his son?

So, to me the problem of the show was that at some point (coughFROZENcough) they decided to just thow in whatever they could and lost focus. Even if S5B was a really nice return to the old formula, the show is so tired by now that I don't think they could save even with a Season 1-style narrative focussing on the Untold Tale characters. Cutting ties with the Charmillstiltskin clan could work… for some spin-offs, but Wonderland burned that bridge, too.