What the Hair

What the Hair is arguably the best written episode in the series. It’s not my personal favorite, that’s later on in the season, but from a pure structural stand point this episode manages to accomplish a lot while still being a self contained tale. 

It reintroduces the main characters and their conflicts again for those who missed out on the pilot. It reintroduces supporting characters like the pub thugs. It introduces Varian, an important secondary character, his father, and establishes their relationship. It continues the mystery of the rocks and gives us character building moments between the core cast. If you watched this episode first, it’d be easy to believe that the show was a solid ‘adventure of the week’ series. 

Boy, would you be wrong. 

Summary: Nearly a week after her coronation, Rapunzel and Cassandra seek out an alchemist in their first attempt at solving the mystery as to how and why Rapunzel's 70-foot golden hair grew back. Eugene follows them, but things don't go quite as planned; they find Varian, a 14-year-old alchemist who agrees to help uncover the mystery of Rapunzel's hair. However, Varian had built some underground machines which run out of control and destroy the village.

Undermining Tension 

Cassandra fears that her part in bringing Rapnuzel’s hair back would be found out and she’d be punished. In the pilot it was just, ‘I’d be taken off princess duty.’ But here they up the ante to ‘I’d be sent away forever and forced to live in a horrible place’ with little given reason. 

Now normally in a show you do want to up the tension and at first this seems like a creditable threat that we should care about, until you watch the whole show and remember that subsequent seasons contradict this.  

There’s nothing that can ‘force’ Cassandra to stay at a convent. She might get in trouble and might be ordered to go there by the king or her dad, most likely by the king, but they have no way of enforcing that. 

Cass is a grown woman and S3 clearly states that she is able to quit and leave anytime she wants. She doesn’t have to follow their rules. Seasons two and three also showcases that she has opportunities available to her, so it’s not like she’d be homeless either if she left. Finally, through out season one, it’s established that Cass is the best fighter in the kingdom and not one to follow rules anyways. So there’s no one who could physically make her stay in one place if she didn’t want to. 

In order for the threat of being sent away to hold any weight, we have to believe that Cass would agree to it. But why would she? 

Well you could tie it into her validation issues and use the convent as an extension of her fears of disappointing her father and of ruining her reputation. But that reduces a physical threat into an emotional problem. 

Now emotional conflicts can be valid ways to progress a story and provide tension, but not at the expense of physical conflict. How much tension a conflict holds is directly proportional to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. 

The more immediate the need, i.e the more likely you are to die without it, the more tension that conflict holds. Cassandra's fear is retroactively reduced from being a ‘safety need’ to being a ‘love and esteem need’ because the writers don’t understand this basic universal truth. Ergo the tension driving the conflict in the episode is now being undermined. 

And this is not the last time the writers will undermine themselves in such a way. 

This is a Lie

Another problem in the show is that the main characters will supposedly learn a lesson that week only to keep on repeating the the same mistake over and over again anyways. 

I already pointed out that Rapunzel doesn’t learn in the last episode but, honestly neither does any of the other main characters. Even the most well developed ones, who show clear change, like Varian, tend to learn the wrong lessons and not the ones that were previously stated that they needed to grow past. 

Rapunzel is still going to keep secrets, even from Eugene. Varian is still going to keep taking on too much responsibility and not listen to the adults, even if he does learn better safety procedures as time goes on. And Cassandra will never ever learn to trust her friends as she regresses in season three. 

Not every character needs to improve or develop, you can have static characters or characters who fail to live up to their potential, but not if you state plainly in the show that they need to learn something and then fail to acknowledge that they haven’t followed through on it.  

Once again, it’s a lack of set up and resolve.    

Conclusion   

So that’s What the Hair. Like I said, it’s the best written episode so there’s not a whole lot to nitpick. Even the flaws I did point out are more problems with season three and the story arc as a whole then anything to do with the episode in particular. 

Tune in Sunday when we cover Rapunzel’s Enemy.