Train Wrecks

We've been watching the TV show "Once Upon a Time." It has the wicked witch and snow white and other people cursed to be in our world. Not a bad idea but not a great treatment of it. I've been interested in how they handle the fairy tales. I was getting ready to hang it up but they started to do something interesting.

There are essentially these main characters: Regina, the evil witch, Snow White, Prince Charming, SW's daughter Emily and Emily's son Henry. Due to the nature of the curse Regina, Snow White and Emily are all roughly the same age. It's too detailed to go into it here.

The sole good thing Regina has done once she brought all of the fairy tale people to our world and made them lose their memories is to take care of Henry. She truly loves him as if he were her son. Eventually, she realizes this and decides she needs to redeem herself. Part of that is to let Henry find his own way.

For purposes of the story Henry finds out that Regina has (or may have) some magical artifacts. He calls Regina and asks her to come out for lunch. She is ecstatic and leaves the house to meet him. About seven seconds later Henry shows up in her house. He's lied to her to get her out of the house.

I stopped watching the show and I'm not sure I'm going back to it. The writers have deliberately created a train wreck. Henry is now party to deceit against someone who only wishes him good. Moreover, he's effectively fallen from grace in that he's now using evil methods-- that is, methods that do not take into account the other person. Further, he's now potentially compromising Regina's redemption.

That said, there are a lot of ways to play this. You can have it blow up in Henry's face that he's hurt someone that cares for him-- perhaps cares solely for him. He's hurt a broken person. That might work but it requires the writers to give Regina intelligence and maturity to recognize that Henry is only 10 and needs to be forgiven.

What I expect the writers to do is not confront Henry with what he's done and use Regina as purely his foil. Instead, they'll use it as an opportunity for Regina to give up on her own redemption and go full evil. Or some other silly move. I expect that the writers have just done this to get Regina back to being evil-- evil sells, right? The audience won't care, right? Henry's one of the good guys so it's okay for him to do a little evil once in a while.