Proposal: Kitsowitz and all writers leave the show. You are now in charge. How do you fix the show?
I mean all of it. Bring back the audience. Don’t just wish fulfill your OTP, design a show that will be popular and ongoing.
I explored a little bit of this in my alternate seasons six fanfic. Ultimately it comes down to three things in my opinion – consequences, continuity and expectations.
Under the cut for length.
There are things I would like to do e.g. bring Neal back because I do believe that Swanfire was true love. However, I wouldn’t do that, or bring in SwanQueen, or anything similar, because of expectations. The show has been selling CaptainSwan and to break that would be to hurt the fans that like that ship. There is an expectation that if the show sells something that hard, there isn’t going to be a bait and switch.
In the same way I wouldn’t kill off Zelena, even though I think the character deserves it, because she’s been kept around as a regular, and therefore deserves to be kept around and given her own story arcs etc.
To take season six as an example just because it’s easier to compare, rather than come up with a mythical season seven at this stage – Emma’s storyline as ‘the savior’. That is a completely new deal. If I was writing the show, rather than give Emma a new trauma to overcome, I would have brought up everything that she’d already gone through and built on that instead.
For example, how unreal her life feels. For 28 years she was like you or me, magic was a fairytale and now it’s her life. It must sometimes feel like she could do anything – a life without limits, because everything is just so crazy and if magic is real then anything is possible. Then there’s the losses she has suffered, and how they have impacted her relationship with Hook.
Like I said I wouldn’t break up CaptainSwan but Emma is broken down at this point. She hasn’t dealt with anything she’s been through and clinging to Hook is a symptom of that. Now Hook isn’t exactly my favorite character but if necessary I could write quite a positive essay about why he is, the way that he is. I think he could be be the man he wants to be, the man the show wants him to be, with the right sort of development arc.
There’s a lot of plotlines that have been left unresolved, or need expanding. Something like the split Queen arc works well, but only to provide development opportunities for what the characters are already struggling with. It turns a mirror on themselves and forces them to self-reflect and deal with past mistakes. They have to acknowledge the parts of themselves they don’t like on the journey towards self-acceptance because nobody is perfect. We all have regrets, we’ve all made mistakes.
One of the real things I would push, is to go back to the idea that there is no good or evil, no heroes or villains – we are both. I would end this black and white divide, and put forward the idea that “people make choices and then have to live with the consequences” – which is the direction I thought the show was taking in the early seasons.
It’s a really hard balancing act to give all characters the screentime, and the storylines that they deserve. Each episode is only 40 minutes long, and I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to design a series arc, that gave every character their time in the sun. However, I would certainly do my best because the show is an ensemble cast and should be treated as such.
So TLDR: I would keep with the expectations the show has built, and not alter the course that they have plotted. However, I would force the characters to confront the consequences of their actions, and I would draw heavily on the events of the past seasons (the continuity) to be the driving force behind the events in the present day.