So we’ve come to the end of the first season and I’m going to do a quick recap of the second half to summarize what went wrong; because each individual episode is a little too dense to get the full picture.
You can find the first half of S1 Recap here - https://rachelbethhines.tumblr.com/post/622132795910782976/tangled-salt-marathon-to-filler-or-not-to-filler
Episodes covered in the second half are..
- Queen for a Day Part 1
- Queen for a Day Part 2
- Painter’s Block
- Not in the Mood
- The Quest for Varian
- The Alchemist Returns
- Secret of the Sun Drop Part 1
- Secret of the Sun Drop Part 2
Lack of Context Leads to Confusion
The show doesn’t clearly communicate what’s going on. There’s a lot of reasons for this, episodes aired out of order, poor pacing, an over reliance on exposition, deliberately hiding information for ‘twists”, and trying to skew the audience to root for one character over another ect. The end result is that the audience is now left to piece together what actually happened to Varian through context clues, hints, and single lines of given info. It’s possible to do this, but it's not good writing.
You don’t need to spell everything out to your audience but you still have to keep in mind that an audience is comprised of various different people, with different ways of communicating and absorbing information, and you need to make your story accessible to a wide range of people on a single watch through. That means repeating information in a variety of ways, both visually and auditory.
Think of it like being a teacher in front of a class. You got to show your students more than once the information they need to know, and you gotta do it in different ways since people have different means of learning; visual, auditory, physical, ect.
I’m an auditory learner. I can remember what people say easily, so I can pick up on the one lines of exposition easier than say a visual learner who’s looking for visual cues, like a distinct change in seasons to show the passage of time or something. The fact that I and that visual learner can come to two completely different conclusions on basic information like, ‘how much time has passed’ or ‘why is Rapunzel suddenly not on board with stealing the flower’, is not a good thing. You need everyone on the same page when it comes to things like character motivation because such things drive your plot.
Missed Opportunities
I’ve talked about the poor pacing last time, but let's focus on how all that filler could have been used to actually enhance the story... Just a list of options here..minor tweeks..
- Combine Monty and Xavier into a single character and thereby giving Xavier’s presence in the plot heavier episodes more weight
- Make Max’s focus episode a Varian episode was well. Have Max be the one tasked with hunting him down for the scroll. This adds tension to the story, better explains Varian’s motivations, and gives Max an actual point of character development and a reason for his own episode.
- Have Not in the Mood set up more than just the truth serum; we could have had foreshadowing for season two’s quest, actual worldbuilding, foreshadowing for more Saporian/Zhan Tiri stuff and why Xavier is connected to both ect.
- Reorder the episodes back into their intended slots...
- Make Arianna’s and Willow’s episode a Lady Caine episode as well. More tension, more focus to three underserved female characters, give something other than a thin parallel to Raps and Cass, build up the Frederic and the royals are secretly awful plot that’s currently ongoing. ect.
And these are just a few suggestions, there’s a whole manner of ways to trim down and streamline the show without sacrificing the core story.
Lopsided Points of Views, Double Standards, and Mixed Messages
I’ve gone into this at great length so I’m just going to reiterate this real quick.
Varian is held to a different set of standards than the rest of the cast. Now, ignoring how questionably moral it is to hold a poor fourteen year old orphan accountable for his mistreatment by the hands of adults; from a storytelling point of view, it means that the show no longer has a clear theme. Whatever it’s trying to tell it’s audience is undermined by the mains contradicting themselves whenever it comes to the character of Varian.
- Stealing is wrong; unless you’re a king/father
- Drugging people is wrong; unless you’re besties with the mains
- Neglect is damaging to children; unless you’re a princess who’s sad about having responsibilities now, then by all means abuse the kid that’s now legally under your care.
There’s also the added problem of showing characters behaving out of character in order make this lopsided narrative work. Along with failing to let the characters admit their faults so that they can learn and grow from it afterwards.
Conclusion
Like I said before, Varian’s arc is the strongest arc in the show. Even with its problems, it’s still interesting enough to carry itself and it still had plenty of time to correct it’s failings in future seasons. But it didn’t, and here we are. So tune in next time in the salt marathon when we start in on season two.
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