We arrive in Storybrooke, appropriately, in the dead of night. This plea, delivered as she is driving Henry back to his home in Storybrooke, fails to move our loner heroine. He says Emma has to help the people of Storybrooke find their way back to their true happy endings, whatever they are. Henry has a book of fairy stories with him, which he insists are real. We meet young Henry (Jared Gilmore, Wilfred), who has come all the way from the hamlet of Storybrooke, Maine, to claim Emma as his long-lost birth mother. When she gets home, she celebrates her birthday by making a wish before she blows out the candle on her cupcake-and the doorbell rings. In her first few minutes onscreen, she takes down a bail jumper while wearing a sprayed-on red dress that would have given Gregory House a heart attack. She’s a huntress in five-inch heels, and she’s pissed off because she has to work on her birthday. Jennifer Morrison ( House) plays bail bondsperson Emma Swan (heh), who chases down deadbeats, bail jumpers, and other minor scum. Henry: That’s exactly what makes it true.Īnd then it all ramps up by a factor of ten, when we switch to the present day. It’s a wash, frankly.Įmma: Just because you believe something doesn’t make it true. On the other hand, everyone dresses like a high school production of, well, Snow White. Like I said, not your usual fairy tale ending, but it’s an uneven experience: on the one hand, we have grim dungeons, wrath, terror, black magic, and heroic death. Even as the curse comes down, however, Snow White saves her newborn baby, Emma, even as she grieves over the body of her prince, who died to save the child. (Maine? Really? That’s the worst she can come up with?) As a bonus, she causes them all to forget who they are, who they love, who they mourn. Vowing vengeance on the entire kingdom, she sends them all to another, horrible place-Maine, in our modern world. Then the Evil Queen (Lana Parilla, Medium) arrives with a curse and ruins it all. For the next few minutes, we get the Happily Ever After: the declarations of love, the wedding, a baby girl. A handsome prince (Josh Dallas, Thor) arrives on a white horse, orders the coffin opened, and kisses Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin, Big Love) awake. We open on a scene that might come right out of Disney: a glass coffin enclosing a woman in white with raven-black hair, surrounded by seven grieving little men (not dwarves, but not NBA players, either). “Everything you love will be taken from you forever.” -Evil Queen Like Steven Spielberg, they cannot help themselves: all endings have to be “happy”, no matter how forced. On the other hand, I am deeply suspicious of the Disney franchise. On the one hand, I find it refreshing that these tales seem to hew closer than anything else I’ve ever seen to the actual tales from the too-aptly-named Grimm Brothers. People die, weep, lose everything they love-and there’s no guarantee good will triumph over evil. But there’s also lots of gritty realism, cynicism, and despair flavoring Once Upon a Time.
CGI? Lots of it, especially when we “flash back” to the fairy-tale setting of our pilot episode.
Animation? Only a few minor bits, like Jiminy Cricket. The trouble is that ABC does not appear to know what it wants to do with them. It’s no coincidence, I believe, that ABC is owned by Disney, and is now bringing a more or less live-action version of some of Disney’s most popular stories to the small screen. “What do you think stories are for?” -Mary Margaret
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