Once Upon a Time

I have nothing against fan fiction.  I grew up on the Star Wars movies and when I realized that there were several different authors writing in the Star Wars universe, I was snapping up as many novels as I could make time for.  Han and Leia’s three kids are just as much a part of the story in my mind as any other character, and Mara Jade remains the perfect girl for Luke.  (I am going to be heartbroken if in the next trilogy, they decide to leave the kids out.)

The thing about fan fiction, though, is that it’s a pretty exclusive club.  If you’re not a fan of the original works, you will find yourself very lost, very quickly.  It’s why I never read more than a couple Star Trek novels.  I was vaguely familiar with the characters, but they were all having adventures that I barely understood or related to.  Eventually, I left most fan fiction alone, including Star Wars.  See, the other thing about fan fiction is that there is little cohesion or connectedness between each author’s take on that universe.  They have their tale to tell about each character with little relation to another author’s story.  Each author can be telling an equally cool tale, but any character development one author gives can be completely forgotten by the next author’s story that takes place one year later.  It’s like having a permanent reset button for each tale.  Not ideal.

So I left it all alone: Star Wars, Star Trek, Forgotten Realms, Warhammer, StarCraft, Dungeons & Dragons, the whole shebang.  I’m only aware of these titles because of my work at Barnes & Noble; after shelving that many books daily, they start to stick in your mind.

I do make one exception: fairy tales.

Everybody grows up with fairy tales, and all these retellings of our favorite childhood stories are fan fiction, pure and simple.  And since there’s no copyright (as far as I’m aware) we’re allowed to enjoy these favorite characters and plots in as many varieties as we care to.

I haven’t just read or seen different fairy tales, one of my first short stories was a reboot of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”  (It’s still one I’m quite proud of, despite the warts in it.)

Cinderalla has hundreds of incarnations, and a couple of them start to reach towards my list of greats.  Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted and the movie Ever After feature prominently in my mind.

But perhaps the true creativity is explored in stories that bring the fairy tales into the modern world.  The TV miniseries The 10^th Kingdom was pretty cheesy but still a lot of fun, and despite the meandering through the middle, the plot was well-planned out and earned its climax.  I’ve written a couple times about how much I love the gritty and epic Fables comics.

With my penchant for the fairy re-tales, you’d think that I would have been one of the first to watch Once Upon a Time.  Instead, I waited until this Christmas; then I was on Netflix and for the next three days, I did nothing but watch that show until the second season’s finale.

I’m kicking myself for waiting this long because Once Upon a Time is making a bid to be the best of the fairy re-tales, if not ever, then definitely for the small screen.  The idea is simple: Regina (the evil queen who poisoned Snow White) placed a curse on all our traditional fairy tales.  The curse wiped out all of their memories and brought them to our world.  The now live in a town called Storybrooke that nobody can leave and time is frozen so that they don’t age and remain Regina’s blissfully unaware prisoners.

It’s the perfect except for one catch: Snow White and Prince Charming’s daughter, Emma, escaped the curse as an infant and she’s been brought to Storybrooke to break the spell and free everybody in town.

What shocked me is how horribly addicting this program is.  And perhaps I should amend this being a fairy re-tale; because ABC is this show’s station, Once Upon a Time is a Disney fairy re-tale.  The dwarfs are named Doc, Grumpy, etc., and Mulan shows up in season two.

I am a huge fan of the casting decisions: Lana Parilla as Regina is sheer perfection as the queen who has a concept of what good is but constantly lies to herself that her crimes are justified; Jennifer Morrison, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Josh Dallas convinced me as the family and individuals of Emma, Snow White, and Charming. 

But the true gem is Robert Carlyle as Rumplestiltskin.  Creepy and loveable do not belong in the same sentence, and yet that is how I feel about his character.  Unbeknownst to everyone, including Regina, he has pulled all the strings for his own selfish ends, ruined countless lives, and yet, as the series goes on, you find that all the double-dealing, crimes, and plots has all been to correct one mistake he made as a young father.  And thanks to Belle (played gorgeously by Emilie de Ravin) he starts on the path of redemption, and the shock for me is that I really believe that he might change to the good side.

(And when I say Belle loves him, you are to understand that Rumplestiltskin is the Beast of that fairy tale—and also, it turns out, the Crocodile who took Captain Hook’s hand.  That’s a fun story there.)

I can’t wait to start on the third season.  The heroes go to Neverland and have to deal the villainous Peter Pan; I am excited.

For all the praise, though, I have one serious complaint and it still may keep me from watching the rest.  Lana Parilla has done an amazing job with the character of Regina, but the writers have ruined her.  Regina is evil and manipulative, and despite her few attempts to change her nature, she never learns her lesson and plots to harm or kill everyone around her.  Despite all that, the good guys keep giving her another chance.  A chance she never asks for and spurns every time it’s offered.

This is completely influenced by Star Wars.  Darth Vader lives a life of murder and mayhem, but because in the end, he saves his son, that somehow redeems his soul to where he is on the same level as Yoda, Obi-Wan, and all the little children he sliced up in Revenge of the Sith.  I call bullsh—.  Regina is just the same as Vader, and she might be even worse.  She places curses, rips out hearts, falsely imprisons, wages war, and gives orders to kill entire towns in her own kingdom; yet when she’s finally caught and put on trial, Snow White lets her go because she believes Regina “still has good in her.”

I have a hard time believing that that’s true; actions are the fruit of what’s in our hearts.  Bad people can become good, but only when they replace what’s inside.  But assume Snow White is correct, so what?  At the end of the day, setting an unrepentant mass murderer free in your own country is so negligent in your responsibilities as a ruler that any crimes the murderer commits are now also on your hands.

This is such a black mark that if the writers don’t learn from their mistake and realize that Regina has worn out her welcome on this show, I may yet stop watching this show.  And that would be a shame because there is brilliance in this show that could make it one of the best stories of our decade.