Skip to main content

Once Upon A Time: Robert Carlysle Gets Cast As Rumplestilskin?


Okay, I mentioned this show way back when I was talking about how awful Grimm was. How time slips away!

So, this is the other "fairy tales are real!" show to hit the fall lineup, and it's corny, I'm not going to pretend that it's not, but corny can be good. There's been a "lot" of controversy over this show, saying that it's a rip off of the comic Fables, and why didn't they just do a serial adaptation of that? So, let me spell it out for you, other than there being fairy tale creatures in the real world, there's not much of a connection between the two.

In Fables, all of the fairy tale characters have fled their home lands, and they're hiding out in our world as refugees from some despot or another. In Once Upon a Time, the Evil Queen from Snow White has cursed everyone to live a life of tedium in our world, they are trapped in a podunk town where nothing changes and they have no memory of who they were. The only ones who seem to know are the Evil Queen who is now the Mayor, and Rumplestiltskin, who is now Mr Gold, owner of the pawnshop, as well as half the town.

Our hero in this tale is Emma, the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, who was hidden away in a capsule carved out of a special tree, in order to escape the curse unscathed. As a result she found on the side of the road, and put into our foster care system. 20-30 years later, she's all grown up and a bounty hunter, and she has the special power of detecting lies (odd, right?). Turns out at some point she had a son (Henry), and gave him up for adoption, and he was subsequently adopted by the Mayor/Evil Queen of Storybrook (that's the name of the town, very original). Henry knows something's up in Storybrook, and based on a fairy tale book he was given by his teacher (Snow White) he knows the whole story, and seeks out his bio mommy, because she's destined to break the curse.

It really is that silly, but at the same time, it's just kind of fun. Every week we get to visit a different fairy tale character, and see flashbacks to their life in the old world, and how it lines up with their new lives.

The best part of the whole thing is that while we've obviously got the Evil Queen as the big bad, we've also got Rumplestiltskin who's pretty damn evil himself, and it's kind of a toss up who has the most control in Storybrook. They're the only two that that Henry's got the truth of the situation (Emma's just indulging her psychotic long list child and trying to help him out.) It makes for a peculiar dynamic, and most of the characters are pretty likable.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

       I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week.        While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but the original Optimus Prime mig

Naked Heat: Reviewing this book makes my brain hurt

I finished the latest book by Richard Castle a few days ago, and I've been thinking about how I want to write this review ever since. You see, Richard Castle is a rock star amongst murder mystery novelists, he struck it big with his series of Derek Storm novels, but shocked the world by killing the character at the end of the last book in the series. After that, he found inspiration in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, and based his new character, Nikki Heat, off of her. Naked Heat is the second book in the Nikki Heat series. What's so weird about that? I'm sure all three of my regular readers already know, but none of these people are real, Rick Castle and Det. Beckett are both characters on ABC's crime/drama/comedy series Castle. Haven't watched Castle? For shame, I highly recommend it, it's a perfect guilty pleasure movie, a series of one and done murder mysteries, that are fairly light hearted, with a great comedy dynamic between the characters of Castle, Becket

What It's Like To Get Pipebombed

Well, I'm going to break with my rule of not actually mentioning anything about having a pipe thrown at you, but in celebration of the 6 month anniversary, I really wanted to write it up. So, without further ado, here's what happened on my Fourth of July 2009, and the six months since: So, it's the Fourth of July, 2009, about ten-ish or so at night. Being that we live in a condo, and our homeowner's association has prohibited fireworks being let off in our complex, we decided to take a walk around the neighborhood in order to better see the fireworks everyone else was letting off. We walked straight out the front gate, got about maybe 50 feet down the street, and a dark car with it's headlights on pulled out onto the street, about a block ahead of us a man with a white shirt was walking in the same direction as us, nothing noteworthy about either of those. However, upon passing us, something was tossed out of the passenger window and bounced off my chest, upon the g