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Banishment to a place like this is the supposed horrible unhappy ending for the people of the Enchanted Forest
The second episode of “Once Upon A Time” aired on Sunday. I don’t know if I’ll do weekly recaps or reviews, but I wanted to revisit the show on my blog because last week and this week raised interesting themes I didn’t have time to explore in my first overview.
The crux of the conflict of “Once Upon A Time” revolves around the fact that the curse–which took the fairy tale inhabitants of the Enchanted Forest and trapped them in modern America with no memory of their prior lives–is evil. Time and again the pilot of the show repeated the idea that the effects of the curse will ruin everyone’s happy ending.
That’s expanded in the second episode. We’re told that “the dark curse” is the most evil of all curses, and that she who unleashes it can never return from the dark path on which it will set her. When the Evil Queen visits Maleficent (ABC is making good use of the original Disney characters it has the ability to employ) to retrieve the curse, even Maleficent is afraid of casting it. She warns against such an action, and claims that whoever created the curse must be even more evil than her and the Queen.
Just what are the show creators trying to say about modern America? I know that many fairy tales were created for escapism, to imagine better lives for those reading and listening, especially in a time when many people didn’t have stable sources of food or income. But those fairy tales never left their own worlds, and they certainly never name-checked the world of the readers as a horrible place. The denizens of Storybrooke, Maine aren’t suffering. They’re not starving, freezing, or refugees of war. They’re living the average American life.
That’s not to say that our average life doesn’t contain things from which we’d want to escape, situations that need improvement, or that imagination can’t serve a vital role in our emotional and mental well-being (a point raised by the Jiminy Cricket character). But when the likes of Maleficent is quaking in her boots about the darkness of a spell, and when the Evil Queen must make an abhorrent sacrifice, all in the service of this curse, I’m expecting something really bad. I cut my eyeteeth on the fantasy genre and I can imagine some rather apocalyptic consequences.
Instead, everyone just lives simple lives in a small American town. All right, everyone seems a bit wistful for something they can’t quite bring to mind, they have a scary mayor and an even scarier town-owning businessman in Mr. Gold. But still, what, exactly, is “Once Upon A Time” trying to say? Are they making a commentary on the American lifestyle, or is this just an instance of shoddy writing with an ultimately lame big bad?
Of course we’re only two episodes into the season. This week revealed that perhaps the biggest character to fear isn’t the Evil Queen, but Rumplestiltskin. He seems to have tricked the Queen, or at least knows more than she does, and he clearly has his own agenda. Perhaps we’ve yet to see the worst of the curse.
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*(This image by jesiehart is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.)
