Crimes against Will Scarlet (Once Upon a Time)

To be fair, I should have tempered my expectations in this case, since I know screentime and characterization for Once Upon a Time’s supporting players can be spotty.  However, the Knave was easily my favorite part of Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, and I was delighted to hear he’d been snatched up by the main show.  His opening scene on the show, wherein he remarks that Emma doesn’t “seem the type to shoot a man in the back” and waits just long enough for her to make a “what are you talking about – you’re facing me” face before turning tail and running off, is terrific, and pure Knave.  Unfortunately, season 4 majorly squandered Will, almost exclusively giving him inconsistent scraps in other people’s plots.  Will-related spoilers for season 4, as well as relevant Once Upon a Time in Wonderland stuff.  (Note:  I’ll mostly call him “Will” instead of “the Knave of Hearts,” since that’s how the show has been referring to him.)

First, I know Once Upon a Time likes its shiny new character toys, and they had some enticing ones last season:  getting the Frozen gang in the fall was an enormous coup, and the back half of the season had so many villains, there wasn’t time for much else.  Still, what’s the point of bringing Will over from Wonderland if they weren’t going to do anything with him?  I could see keeping him an ice for a bit – like I said, tons going on, and I imagine Frozen was an unexpected acquisition – but a whole season?  That’s just irresponsible storytelling, and unfair to the actor.

Last season, Will had shockingly little to do.  The first half largely has him playing comic relief or acting as a sounding board for Robin Hood.  Even more bizarrely, the second half pairs him with Belle as a midgame roadblock for her and Rumpel.  This latest development is a giant waste of time, since he’s clearly just a footnote in Belle and Rumpel’s story.  Worse, the relationship is revealed as a twist, so we have no idea how or why it started.  I can’t figure out what led to Belle’s interest in Will, and plot-wise, I couldn’t begin to tell you what Will is doing with her.

This leads to to my next gripe:  there’s been nothing to explain why Will is in Storybrooke, how he got there, and where Ana is while he’s cozying up to Belle.  Did the Rabbit open a portal?  Was it something curse-related?  Was it an accident or a punishment, or did he mean to come here?  Does he have a plan?  Is he trying to get back to Wonderland?  Where’s Ana, and why is he seeing someone else?  The first half of the season dropped a few mysterious hints – digging up the beach to retrieve something he’d previously hidden, breaking into the library looking for something about the Red Queen – but there’s been nothing for over 15 episodes.

He might as well be a new character with some similar traits.  Not only does the show seem disinterested in answering these questions, it also wastes well-established facets of his character that relate to the current goings-on.  Twice in the season, a major character has their heart stolen, something Will knows an awful lot about – on and before the events of Wonderland, he spent a long time without his heart, and I’d say he has the best “heartless” characterization of anyone on either series.  However, he has no insight into either event.  I’ll give him a pass on Hook, since they’re not well acquainted and aren’t fans of each other, but what about new squeeze Belle?  This man knows exactly what it’s like to be without one’s heart, and he didn’t notice any change in the woman he’s dating?  No, he needs Rumpel to tell him, and while his reaction does indicate his familiarity with the experience, I’m putting that down to the actor.  God bless Michael Socha, who does what he can with the dregs he’s given, because the writing not helping him at all.

Relationship Spotlight: The Knave of Hearts & the Red Queen (Once Upon a Time in Wonderland)

In light of recent aggravating plots on Once Upon a Time, I’ve been reassessing its spin-off.  I don’t know that Once Upon a Time in Wonderland’s best matches that of the main show, but its lows aren’t exactly in a league of their own.  At any rate, Wonderland has definite qualities, one of which is this relationship (Knave/Red Queen spoilers to follow.)

With the Knave and the Red Queen, there are a few permutations to explore.  There’s Will and Ana, the original Enchanted Forest couple.  Rich in love and not much else, Ana dreamed of better things, and her dreams grew so large, her love for Will couldn’t anchor them.  Her dreams made them cross worlds, and when Wonderland wasn’t everything it promised, dreaming soured into wanting.  She couldn’t bear to lack what others had; in her quest, her fury to have, a king offered her wants and dreams, a whole world of having, and all it cost her was her love.  Will couldn’t stand being bartered away, discarded for courts and courtiers and baubles.  His pain tore him to so many shreds, he couldn’t see how quickly and completely she regretted her decision.  He couldn’t live with the wound, and he couldn’t live with how much he still loved her in spite of everything, so he made a bargain with a monarch of his own, a queen who offered him oblivion.  And all it cost him was his heart.  She pulled it from his chest, separating him from his love, his anguish, and his free will.  As long as she own his heart, she commanded him, but even when Alice recovered it for him, he couldn’t carry it within him.  He remembered the pain, and he preferred the empty place where it ought to be.

These are the flashbacks that unroll throughout the series.  They’re the characters we come to understand, but not the ones we meet.  We meet the jaded, sardonic Knave and the icy, aloof Red Queen.  The Knave is Alice’s ne’er-do-well comrade who only feels the surface of things (even now, his friend doesn’t know he’s still without his heart,) and the Red Queen is the cold ruler in league with a sorcerer to break the laws of magic, both relentless and ruthless in her pursuit of her goals.  But while Jafar wants the power of a genie without the rules that constrain them, there’s only one law of magic the Red Queen wants to break:  she wants to change the past.

Okay, so breaking the laws of magic isn’t cool (especially when your plan puts the same abilities in the hands of a dangerous megalomaniac with a grudge,) but it’s telling that the Red Queen isn’t seeking to force the Knave to love her, another piece of verboten magic she stands to gain.  She doesn’t want to negate her past actions – she wants to fix them, to keep herself from trading love for dreams.  Even though, as usual, she’s so blinded by what she wants that she can’t see the fallout (I repeat, breaking the laws of magic isn’t cool,) this distinction makes all the difference.  The Red Queen aims to return the days she spent without the Knave, to be Ana and Will again, to keep his heart from being broken so completely that he can’t bear to have it in his chest.  I know I quoted “Moments in the Woods” yesterday, but it still applies – she wants an “or,” not an “and,” and therein lies the hope for them.  It’s not wealth and power and position and Will, it’s just Will.  Not that I endorse living wholly for one other person (we’ve been over this,) but it’s not about the dreaming or the wanting.  It’s about realizing one wasn’t worth the other, and taking back her mistakes.  Although the revelation isn’t enough to make Will wipe the slate clean, I think it’s what makes the slightest crack in his walls, just enough to let a reconciliation in slowly, by degrees, as they both remember who they were and start to see who they can be now.

Relationship Spotlight: Alice & the Knave of Hearts (Once Upon a Time in Wonderland)

 

Though this short-lived spin-off of Once Upon a Time was quite a bit shakier than its parent show (and in later seasons, that’s saying something,) I grew to enjoy it.  The heavier reliance on CGI and talking animals gives it an inherently hokey quality, and the melding of fictional realms – chiefly Wonderland and Aladdin’s Agrabah – doesn’t feel as organic as it does in the original series.  Still, it has some interesting characters, intriguing ideas, and, best of all, the great relationship between heroine Alice and the contrary but loyal Knave of Hearts.

 

Quick background:  as in the Lewis Carroll stories, Alice travels from Victorian England to the fantastical Wonderland as a child.  When she returns home, however, her father thinks she’s pulling a Lucy Pevensie and is lying, crazy, or both, and she starts spending more and more time in Wonderland searching for proof she can bring back to her father.  The series’ main story begins with Alice as a young woman languishing in a sanatorium, when her old Wonderland buddy the Knave breaks her out.  Cyrus, her True Love back in Wonderland, presumed long dead, is alive and in trouble, and the Knave reluctantly agrees to help Alice rescue him.

 

We’re fairly dropped into the story, as well as into Alice and the Knave’s history together.  We know their paths crossed in the old days, and at some point, Alice recovered his heart for him (in the Once Upon a Time universe, hearts can be removed from their owners and used to control or kill them.)  Usually, she’s not one to hold anything over someone’s head, but the Knave’s cynicism about her True Love mission leads her to remind him how much he owes her.  Even then, she needs to sweeten the pot with some promised palm-greasing.  This gives them an amusing dynamic from the get-go, since Alice is fierce, determined, and earnest, and the Knave is a jaded rogue who just wants to go home.  Their light bickering is a lot of fun.

 

Yet, despite his complaints, the Knave is in it for the long haul.  He remains at Alice’s side as a friend and compatriot, helping whenever he can and offering his input where strategy is concerned.  Like I said, he’s not the believer in True Love that Alice is (once bitten, twice shy,) and he sometimes tries to hint that she should prepare herself for something less than a happily ever after.  It’s not to be a killjoy – he’s worried and wants her to steel herself against getting hurt.  Ultimately, though, he follows her lead regarding Cyrus and doesn’t begrudge her faith.

 

He gets the brunt of the friendship stuff, since it’s Alice’s story and she’s mainly focused on rescuing Cyrus, but she proves herself a true friend to the Knave as well.  To the extent that people other than Cyrus are on her radar, the Knave is on hers; they get to know each other much better over the course of their quest, and she learns more about the circumstances that caused him to lose his heart before they met.  She helps him out of scrapes, generally values his contributions, and encourages him not to give up on the idea of love.

 

It’s a close, significant, utterly platonic connection, and I love it.  They save one another’s lives, aren’t afraid to get in each other’s business, and also know when to give each other some space.  What’s more, the show itself doesn’t play up any sort of jealousy angle, there’s not even a hint of will-they-won’t-they, and it really recognizes the importance of the relationship – during the concluding scenes of the series, a gorgeous Alice-Knave moment takes pride of place.  I need duos like this every now and then, and these two gladly oblige.