In Which I Review Once Upon a Time (7x19)

I have to confess: this week's episode "Flower Child" took a hard left turn in the last few minutes of the show and suddenly everything I thought I wanted to discuss--repetition of villain backstories--went up in a poof of smoke. I guess if the writers are going for broke, you can't do more than presenting the idea that God is an angry woman who's really pissed off at mankind because they killed her whole family and burned her magical grove to the ground because her magic frightened them. Yes, I really just wrote that sentence and to be perfectly honest, I'm still surprised that at the (almost literal) eleventh hour the writers decided that this entire world--this Land Without Magic--is the result of a high school temper tantrum. God as a gardener is a long standing metaphor and given that Gothel has been linked to plants all season, it's not a bad metaphor to explore with her character. But it's a whole other thing to use Gothel as a gardener who wants to exterminate weeds--humans--to create her magic-user exclusive Eden versus making Gothel a literal god who created our entire world. I'm going to try to puzzle this out but the baby and the bathwater and the bathbomb and, hell, the whole damn bathtub just got thrown sideways out of a window. 

God Is A Really Pissed Off Druid 

So, I play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons (cue shocked gasp here) and as someone who is currently playing a Druid, I have a certain amount of appreciation for magic wielding creatures, in a fantasy story--particularly when their magic is rooted in Nature. Nature is often romanticized as something that has a magic all its own, a magic that humans cannot tap into because Nature and Natural magic (capital N because this isn't your standard everyday nature, but a cosmic archetypal Nature) transcends human understanding. Nature is otherworldly, someplace where there are nymphs and dryads and and fairies. Cities, civilizations, and humans stand opposed to this, going through life with an axe or a blowtorch, destroying Nature and its magics for their own selfish reasons--think paving paradise to put in a parking lot. Up until this point, most--if not all--of the villains of OUAT have come from the human side of things. They might have grown up poor and abused, but they grew up in the human world of cities and technology (if low grade technology) and not as a child of Nature. The fact that Gothel is a child of Nature--and indeed is destined to become the Mother of All Magic (magic, which apparently in the OUAT cosmos, derives directly from Nature)--sets her apart from the other villains in OUAT, from Rumple to Regina to Cora to Pan to Zelena and so forth and so on. I do have to appreciate this uniqueness because other parts of her story--the boiler plate parts--are awfully familiar. Gothel wants to be part of a world that she is not particularly meant to be in. In this case, Gothel wants to be a part of the human world. This is perfectly in line with other villains; Rumple wanted to be part of those in power who have control over their lives; Regina wanted nothing to do with her royal lineage instead wanted to be a simple stable girl; Cora wanted a life that was more than just the Miller's Daughter. Villainy in OUAT seems to come down to not being able to accept the life you have and instead wanting a life that is out of your reach. Gothel cannot be part of the human world because she is antithetical to humankind. They are steel and iron and she is dirt, trees, flowers, and roots. In this regard, Gothel's villainy is a shade more interesting than others in the past. Her goal isn't the dagger or revenge on a singular person who denied her the life she wanted, but instead to take back Earth from humanity for Nature. She wants to cover the earth in flowers again and pluck the weedy humans who keep interfering in the universe's garden. It's heady and it's deep and, most importantly, it requires more than just one damn episode of backstory to detail this kind of dynamic. Gothel's family was destroyed as was her home and that's certainly reason for her to move against humanity but I deeply wish it had been a slow destruction, not because of one night in which about five people were mean to teenage Gothel and she went on a mass genocide (and I do mean mass genocide) spree. Because, my dear readers, here's where the episode took a left turn into crazy town.

I'm okay with the idea of Gothel representing Nature and wanting to preserve the magic that is inherent in the natural world, but this episode took this all a bit to far by making her God. Not lower case metaphorical god, but actual "created our world and is responsible for everything in it and why it is the way it is" God. The land of Storybrooke and Hyperion Heights exist in the Land Without Magic; up until now, there's been no explanation for why this land doesn't have magic expect that it just doesn't. Perhaps it was the lack of belief or random chance but it made a certain amount of sense that for as many realms and places in the universe that have magic, there must be at least one place that does not. For how can we truly appreciate magic if its so commonplace and ubiquitous? You need one place that lacks it in order for us to appreciate those that have it. But it turns out that thousands and thousands of years ago, Gothel became so disenchanted with humankind after a chance encounter with one bad seed that she wiped out all of creation (not exaggerating!) and destroyed all the magic that once existed in this now magicless Land and then left for greener pastures, knowing that humankind would evolve back into themselves someday because slimy creatures always find a way. Where do I even begin with how crazy this is? First, humankind might be new in terms of cosmic history but we're a bit older than a few thousand years. Second, I'm all for the idea that God is a woman but does it have to be a woman who became godly after a less than desirable violation of her personhood? And that's the real catch here, right? The idea that God can be vengeful is certainly Biblical but the idea that Gothel became this God-figure after she was humiliated at a party is deeply annoying. And the fact that it was a bunch of petty Regina George type girls who set Gothel down this path? How incredibly offensive to womankind. High school is rough and, yeah, you might get some Carrie White's in a group every so often but the idea that one mean girl can push someone to destroy an entire race, species, and kill all the magic in that world is so utterly bizarre and (not so) borderline misogynistic that it actually, somehow, manages to fit perfectly inside OUAT's less than ideal stance of women as mothers, saints and sinners. Backwards compliment disguised as an insult, but there you have it.

Miscellaneous Notes on Flower Child

--Lucy clearly follows in her father’s footsteps by making really bad choices when it comes to interacting with villains.

--So Henry's cured? It was that simple? What about the 1000s of different types of moss Regina had to study?

--It’s hard to feel sympathy for Gothel when she says stuff like this: “I never would have left you alone in that tower if I knew you have magic.”

--Smurfs. Smurfs everywhere, complete with plastic dollar store butterflies in their hair.

--“The world was cruel to me. And I became cruel too."

--Henry built an entire crazy board–complete with pictures of people–in less than a day. Where’d you get the pictures, Henry?

--Did Lucy really pull out Cinderella’s glass slipper from a paper bag from Granny’s? Why in all of sanity is it there?

--Henry and Jacinda finally kissed but no curse was broken. I find I don't even care.