Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-11464223-20150724034444/@comment-26159109-20150725194327

Arctucrus wrote: Eskaver wrote: Arctucrus wrote: Eskaver wrote: Well, when you shrink things down to an 11 epsiode arc of course it would seem rushed (especially with the many subplots).

One cannot simply compare it to season 1 because it changed dramas pretty much in season 2. Season 1 was a small town fantasy mystery type thing. Season 2 and onwards were action-oriented fantasy drama. Fair enough.

Not quite what I meant, though - I was referring to the extensiveness and intricacy of the backstories - I feel like they've gotten lazier since seasons 1 and maybe 2 and 3. Oz was pretty fine but like... with the Frozen arc and then the QoD, I just felt like the quality in terms of extensiveness and intricacy of the backstories went down.

As far as what you said though... fair enough, but that doesn't change that I wish some of these half-season arcs had been done in a full season, for better quality storytelling (just my opinion of course) (Neverland, QoD...). Neverland couldn't ba a full season and work well as it was because even though I didn't mind, you can only have people walk by the same set a number of times before people grow tired of the Dark potted plants.

See Seasson 2. Season two was great but it had some filler that didn't work out. During the half seasons, filler really doesn't work well because you don't have much time for it and they still do filler anyways.

So length isn't an issue. The QOD worked fine if they would have planned it better and didn't have Frozen delaying it and may have worked, but we know QOD were just distractions from much of the main plot.

Some plots don't work with being longer aka Neverland or Season 4b, which could have been a bit longer I'll agree, but it definitely doesn't need a season. The half season works when there is a reason to make it smaller and if the storytelling is clear and have wonderful connections. Like instead of Greg and Tamara, you could have had John and Michael and maybe Greg and Tamara doing some grunt work all in season 2 as a precursor to season 3.

SO, I'd agree with longer plot arc, but the half season arcs just need fine tuning. Eample, the Author arc lasted much of the whole season, but wasn't the one upfront in our face, like Frozen and QoD plots. Just an observation, but you state your opinions as if they were fact, with definitives.

I honestly feel like that's a very lazy, very terrible reason for you to give up on Neverland having been a full season. Imagine all the possibilities they could've done. If they could've spent the entire season's budget on Neverland instead of half, I'm sure the scenery would've been a little more diverse. Plus, if they had had a full season, we could've seen flashbacks of Baelfire as Curly, we could've seen flashbacks of how Tink arrived in Neverland, inclusion of the Native Americans (although admittedly doing them would've been a risk), what happened to the Darlings, etc. Neverland just felt so incomplete to me, compared to the first two seasons. They didn't explore every nook and cranny like they did with the first two seasons, and they didn't elaborate on everything. They left us with unanswered questions that will now probably never be answered. I don't like that. :|

Again, with the QoD, with an entire season's budget to spend on them, they would've been able to do much more with them. I feel like the QoD backstory episodes were lazily written at best, and were a far cry, a shadow of what backstory episodes once were. With an entire season, they could've fleshed these characters out more and done more with them, even if they did write some of them off halfway through the way they ended up doing. There's stuff missing, you can't deny. There was no backstory between Ursula and Ariel shown, there was virtually no backstory shown between Maleficent and Sleeping Beauty - that was a big disappointment, and Cruella's backstory/story in general was at least moderately interesting, it barely explored what could've been a great sub-plot with Pongo.

I disagree completely. They would've worked great longer, as entire seasons. I couldn't disagree more about Neverland. Yes, we could have seen many pointless flashbacks about Bae, Tink, Hook and Pan that won't tell us anything really important. The main story (the present) would have dragged too much. I can't see them doing that for 22 episodes.

The problem with 4B is that they didn't know how to focus the story which resulted in a big mess. They could have done it in one season and perhaps it would have been better, but if they had decided to do 11 episodes, they should have cut characters. Ursula and Cruella were redundant and weren't important to the main story and just took screentime and 2 whole episodes while they could have establish more on this author, his powers and his limit, more time on the characters that matter and will stay on after the plot ends, more thought on how to explain things instead of dropping something that will resolve everything, the background of Maleficent and Aurora, or having a better connection to Snow and Charming backstories that would actually fit them and what we knew about them.

One option would have been to have the Frozen plot entwined with the Author plot without having useless QoD.