|| Part I || Introduction
|| Part II || Dumb Positivity
|| Part III || Split yourself!
|| Part IV || The same… but different
|| Part V || The need to complete
|| Part VI || Know your ending
“Know your ending.” is what Syd Field keeps repeating in his books on screenwriting.
A lot of people don’t believe you need an ending before you start writing. I hear argument after argument , discussion after discussion, debate after debate. “My characters,” people say, “will determine the ending.” Or, “My ending grows out of my story. Or, “I’ll know my ending when I get to it.”
Bullshit!
Every book on screenwriting I’ve read so far talks about the link between the ending and the beginning of the story. You need to know where you’re going to end up in order to determine the beginning because we are going to want to see a change. A big one. So can we find anything in the Pilot that needs fixing? A lot of fixing. Six seasons of fixing so far, in fact. Anything like that? Let’s take a closer look. As far as I can tell, there are three important conflicts that jump out.
- The Evil Queen and Snow White & Prince Charming
The main conflict in the Enchanted Forest is the pre-established feud between the Evil Queen and Snow White & Prince Charming. Saying they don’t get along is a bit of an understatement, isn’t it?
- Real people with real problems
Meanwhile in our world, we’ve got three real people with real problems, as Emma puts it. Regina is a single mother with a demanding job, struggling to balance her professional life and motherhood. Emma has worked her way out of poverty, but now that she’s moving past survival, she finds that she’s still alone. She wishes for change. Henry is a boy who just found out he has been adopted and he is dealing with the emotional aftermath of that.
- The curse
The most obvious conflict when you start watching the show is, of course, the curse. It’s the biggest danger, the Big Bad Thing, it’s what our attention is drawn to. We are rooting for the curse to be broken. Incidentally, it’s also what causes the fairy tale world and the world without magic to start merging.
The opening image is also an opportunity to give us the starting point of the hero. It gives us a moment to see a “before” snapshot of the guy or gal or group of people we are about to follow on this adventure we’re all going to take. Presumably, if the screenwriter has done his job, there will also be an “after” snapshot to show how things have changed. Like many of the beats on the BS2, the opening image has a matching beat: the final image. These are bookends. And because a good screenplay is about change, these two scenes are a way to make clear how that change takes place in your movie. The opening and final images should be opposites, a plus and a minus, showing change so dramatic it documents the upheaval that the movie represents.
From: Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder
Even if Blake Snyder is talking about movies here, the same can apply to a serialized tv show. Except your entire pilot serves as an extended opening image, since you’ll have to delve into some more complex storytelling in order to - ideally - fill all of those future seasons with.
Interestingly the show starts on a bit of text. The focus is on the fairy tale characters being trapped in our world… and how that’s not a good thing because they can’t get their happy endings here. Have you noticed something about the characters from Our World lately? Doesn’t it seem like no matter how hard they fight, they can’t get their happy endings? Could it be because now they are trapped… in a fairy tale world?
Woah, wait, what? Let’s back up a little and focus on our main conflict introduced during the Pilot. The Curse. One of the very confusing things about Once Upon a Time is that… all the conflicts of the pilot I mentioned seem to be more or less resolved. Henry has both of his mothers, Emma isn’t alone anymore, Regina is almost happy. Snow & Charming and Regina are getting along and we’ve pretty much forgotten about the big bad curse, since it was broken in Season One.
The big bad curse was broken in season one. Weird, right? The main conflict of the show - the thing people were watching for - was completely solved at the end of the first season.
Isn’t that an odd decision? I know people who stopped watching after the curse was broken because what were the stakes after that? What were they rooting for? Where was the suspense?
Unless… it’s was a false solution all along.
“The pitch was it’s gonna take 6 years to break the curse.”
Jennifer Morrison at SiriusXM Radio during SDCC 2016 [x]
Interesting, right? Interesting how that bit of information is casually slipped into the PR before the start of - let me count - 1, 2, 3, 4, .. oh.. season 6?
Why is Emma still the Savior? What does it mean to be the Savior? That’s the question Emma is trying to deal with this season. It wouldn’t be a very good story if it was easy to predict, if it wasn’t potentially painful. If there were no stakes. What if the conclusion she needs to come to is that in essence, she is still the Savior, because her job isn’t done. The curse isn’t broken. Not completely.
This entire time we have been living in a compromise. The fairy tale world came to our world. Gold brought magic and now the rules of magic apply in Storybrooke. The stories we have been seeing have become increasingly fantastical and otherworldly. It’s more fairy tale than real world. Emma is looking increasingly tired from continuous battle. The compromise isn’t working anymore.
So what is the painful realization the Savior has to come to? That she still has not broken the Evil Queen’s curse? That no matter how much she - and all of us - don’t want it, to break the curse, Storybrooke and the Enchanted Forest have to become separate places again?
We were always meant to see the story from Emma’s perspective. She was from our world. She was amused every time she met someone she knew from a story. She voiced the absurdity of it all. Now, so many seasons later, we have lived in the fairy tale world along with her. We understand what is at stake, we understand that if it’s the Savior’s task to break the curse and restore the two worlds, then there are enormous stakes. What will happen with her parents? With everyone she knows? How can she live in the real world without her magic? Will Storybrooke be gone? What with the characters’ Storybrooke identities? Mary-Margaret? David? Leroy? Mother Superior? Will they just vanish?
We don’t know. Emma doesn’t know. Those are the stakes right now and along with Emma, I think we will slowly start to become aware of them.
Now let’s take a look at the two other conflicts set up during the Pilot. Emma, Henry & Regina and the Evil Queen and the Charmings. At first glance, it seems like those conflicts are pretty much resolved, right?
Here is the problem. It doesn’t quite work because the conflicts came into existence in separate worlds. They need to be resolved in the same worlds as they originated in. The larger than life conflict between the Evil Queen and Snow White can’t properly be resolved outside of the Enchanted Forest. A single mom in the real world can’t suddenly rely on magic to fix her problems. An orphan in the real world isn’t suddenly related to… well… absolutely everyone. We need solutions that we can believe in. That we can relate to. We need to see Emma, Regina and Henry face what it is we would have to face in the real world if we were them. We need to see the Royals clashing in their natural habitat.
Up until recently, there was one tiny little problem, though. Regina and the Evil Queen were one person. The common factor in both conflicts. We couldn’t possibly resolve our two first conflicts separately because Regina could only be in one place at the time. Back in the Enchanted Forest or in Storybrooke.
Enter split Queen. Suddenly the decision to split her in two makes perfect narrative sense. It’s an essential step and it ties in with the three main problems introduced in the beginning of the show. She’s the key to all of them. She was the only character we didn’t know in two versions yet. We know Mary Margaret and Snow White are different. We know David Nolan and Prince Charming aren’t the same people, but now we get to know Regina and the Evil Queen as two different entities. One belongs in the real world, one belongs in a fairy tale.
So let’s take another look at our beginning. Everything we’re seeing points to the fact they really are working towards resolving all the problems they’ve introduced in the first episode of Once Upon a Time. There are only three characters from our world whose happy endings we need to see. The boy who wasn’t sure he was loved. The woman who had never been allowed to make her own decisions and the one who feared she would forever be alone.
Yes. Those are the only three elements we have to work with. Why? This is a tv show. You want to be able to create a light version of the story you actually wanted to tell if you get canceled after season one. Any character of major importance would have been introduced in the Pilot or very soon after.
I think you can work this one out, can’t you?
Know your ending, people.
Know your ending.
|| Part VII || It’s a fairy tale
|| Part VIII || Ooh aah… just a little research
|| Part IX || Building blocks
|| Part X || Conclusion
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