After ignoring the show for two seasons, I decided to peek into Once Upon a Time and check in on how the real-life fairy tale drama was doing. The beginning of Season Three features Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison), Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin), Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), Regina (Lana Parrilla), and Hook (Colin O'Donoghue) searching for the lost Henry (Jared Gilmore) who was kidnapped and taken to Neverland where the devious Peter Pan (Robbie Kay) has plans for the "heart of the truest believer."
The show, at least these two episodes, focuses a little too much on pop psychology for my tastes while Emma struggles to accept and understand her true self in order to properly lead the odd collection of heroes and villains and find her son. The episodes also offer flashbacks to Snow White and Charming's battles with Regina back in the good old days, Rumpelstiltskin working alone to find his grandson while dealing with visions of Belle (Emilie de Ravin), and Neal (Michael Raymond-James) meeting Mulan (Jamie Chung) and Robin Hood (Sean Maguire) and traveling back to his father's broken kingdom to find a way to save his wife and son.
The devious nature of Pan, who it appears is far more a villain than Hook in this version of events, is intriguing. Aside from the early shipboard events in the first episode involving an attack of mermaids, or the various flashbacks, most of the events take place in Neverland including attacks on the group by the Lost Boys, and Pan teasing Emma specifically into playing his game by his rules if she wants to find her son.
Once Upon a Time may be the closest we ever get to an actual Fables television series. Given the show's marketing push and the launch of its new spinoff (Once Upon a Time in Wonderland) I decided to give the show a chance. It's certainly not perfect, and two episodes in I can already see an issue with the show drawing out storylines longer than necessary. I'm also not sold on the Lost-style flashbacks to various characters' pasts which may help fill-in their backstory but also continually gets in the way of the current storyline from moving forward at faster than a snail's pace. There's enough here that I may stick around for a few episodes and see if the positives and promise of the concept outweigh the pacing issues and pop psychology in order to do something interesting with this collection of fairy tale characters.
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