What We’ve Been Watching pt 1

I’ve talked occasionally on here about TV shows we watch. I don’t really have a full blog post worth of thoughts on several that we’ve watched recently so I’m lumping a bunch of random shows together.

Once Upon a Time

We’re a little more than half way through season 2 and that’s where we’ve remained for more than a month now. I really liked the first season. The Lost format of flashbacks mixed with present events is good when done right. They provided good snippets of background and some fun twists on fairy tale stories.

This second season started out okay. The whole concept of pulling Emma and Snow into the fairy tale world was kind of fun. The barrier to the town forcing everyone to stay there worked well enough as an excuse to keep the story in one place.

But toward the end of the middle it started to show signs of cracking. It simultaneous took to long to bring them back to the real world and happened to quickly. I guess it was more that they spent all that time in the fairy world trying to get back that the process felt like it was dragging. Instead, it would have been better if they had told some stories about being over there, with no idea how to get back, and then compressed the quest to return into 2-3 episodes max.

Likewise the story in the real world worked pretty good , until they made contact in the fire world. That was an interesting concept, sure, but it happened to soon, because once it did, the stories became entirely focused on getting them home. There were even episodes without flashbacks.

All that said, had the season ended with them getting home, it would have been an okay season. Not the high of season 1 but not a complete let down like Heroes season 2. But the trouble really comes with the second half of the season.

Now, granted I haven’t see the whole season so I can’t say if it improves, but its telling when I don’t feel a desire to finish a season of TV. The whole waffling of whose a good guy, whose a bad guy really reminds of the bad part of Heroes. Hook, Regina and Gold all change sides so often its dizzying.

You can have a character switch sides. You can have them do that as a ruse and switch back. But you can only do that once. Even if you don’t change a characters motivations but just how they’re framed in the story, going back and forth between the other characters trusting them and mistrusting them is annoying.

If they’d gone with the route that now Gold and Regina are mistrusted but on the side of the townspeople in order to combat the new big bad guy, okay. If they were still their evilselves, working on their own plot and still a villian, sure. You can’t do both and waffling between that in every episode.

All of that started to get annoying. Then I heard some snippets of what happens in the rest of the season. We put the show aside at that point. We’ll probably finish it at some point but it was to much all at once.

Well, it looks like I do have enough to say about this for an entire blog post. I’ll return later with a look at “Mad Men” and “How I Met Your Mother”.

Sidenote: We’ve just started watching “Cover Affairs”. We’re only a few episodes in so not much to say yet beyond enjoying it so far. But in just those episodes it has a had a few guest appearances from “Once Upon a Time”. Seeing Pinocchio as a bad ass spy is a little weird.