Wednesday 8 August 2012

Once Upon a Time: Pilot


This is my newest favourite show. Heroes and Heartbreakers do an episode-by-episode breakdown as the series runs in America and so while I've refrained from reading them, the show has been sitting on my to-be-watched list for a while. About a month ago, I was scrolling through the channel listings on the television and saw it on. There aren't words for how excited I got. Granted, it was two episodes in the middle of the first season (Red-Handed and Heart of Darkness) and while it's not the easiest show to get to grips with if you don't watch from the start, I had enough of the basic gist of the show to mostly understand everything.

I think it's something that I've said before, but I have a thing about re-tellings of fairytales. Beauty by Robin McKinley features somewhere in my top twenty books and Beauty and the Beast is definitely my favourite fairytale to read. I've recently read books two and three in Eloisa James' Happily Ever After series (reviews to come) and they were brilliant. So far, Ms James has covered Cinderella (A Kiss at Midnight), Beauty and the Beast (When Beauty Tamed the Beast), The Princess and the Pea (The Duke is Mine) and The Ugly Duckling (The Ugly Duchess). The last will be released in October and after reading books two and three, the fourth in the series has become one of my most highly anticipated books of 2012. Fairytales are just one of my things.




OUaT is brilliant because it's doesn't just revolve around one fairytale: it's got all of them. As we know it, the Evil Queen was jealous of Snow White and tried to kill her with a poisoned apple; Prince Charming brought Snow back to life and they got married and pregnant. The Evil Queen crashes their wedding and pronounces that she will curse the whole Kingdom. Snow is distraught and goes to Rumpelstiltskin (who can tell the future) to see what will become of her, Prince Charming and their unborn child. Rumpelstiltskin tells them that the whole Kingdom will be banished to a terrible world and only their daughter (Emma) will be able to save them once she reaches her twenty-eighth birthday. Just as the Evil Queen descends with her army on the palace, Charming manages to put baby Emma into the special tree designed by Gepetto and as soon as the door closes, she disappears.

Jump to modern day Boston, and Emma Swan is a bail bondswoman. It's the evening of her twenty-eighth birthday and once again, she's spending it alone. She's an orphan and lived her childhood in the foster system, under the belief that her parents didn't love her because she had been found abandoned on the side of the road. Just as she blows out the candle of her birthday cupcake, there's a knock on the door and there stands Henry, a ten-year-old boy who begs Emma to go back to Storybrooke with him.

The people of Storybrooke are the characters of Henry's book, Once Upon a Time. They've been trapped in this mortal world while time has been frozen, unable to leave and unable to remember their other lives. Only Emma can break the curse and for some reason that we've yet to discover, only Henry is aware of this.

There's a couple of points that I've deliberately not mentioned because it's just way too exciting to watch unfold for me to spoil it for you. With a rich cast of characters that promises to deliver with every episode, this is definitely a series to watch.

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