Disney has made television pilots for decades but never before have they created one that embodies all of the beauty and the magic from the fairytales their films have brought to life. Once Upon A Time takes the best characters from our childhood and not only shows them in all their glory but also gives us a look at what they would be if they just walked amongst us regular folk. By flipping back and forth between their fairytale world and their modern day town of Storybrooke we explore the beauty of who they should be and the darkness of who they have been cursed to be.
Once Upon A Time starts with Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) who marries her prince and is about to have her first child when the Evil Queen (the delightfully layered Lana Parrilla) casts a spell over the land. This story starts with what should have been a happy ending and turns it on its side, exploring a dark and deceitful world underneath that little girls never wanted to imagine. When the princess gets her guy, all should finally fall into place, right? Well, real life isn’t made of fluffy clouds and singing animals, and Once Upon A Time is a fairy tale made for the more mature young women all of those little girls who once just blindly hoped grew into.
Similarly, Snow White in this depiction is a woman we would have liked to imagine she grew into. She picks up a sword and fights where she once relied on a guy to save her; she makes the decisions for her family; she convinces others everything will be okay. She is innately maternal, but she still manages to keep her own kind of blind hope: getting through a Narnia-esque armoire to an assumed better world on the other side-- a world in which she would be free to fight back against the Queen and her spell and take back her town. After a harrowing swordfight, though, time appears to be running out, and only her baby can be tossed through, along with her hopes that one day the little girl will grow up and somehow know who she really is and come find her family.
Fast forwarding quite a few years, twenty-eight, to be exact, that baby has grown into a young woman who has had a child of her own (and equally given it up, albeit in a more traditional sense of adoption). Emma (a tough and extremely guarded Jennifer Morrison) was an orphan, growing up with no reason to believe in fairy tales or their characters. She has been on her own and managed to make a decent life for herself, but it all may be a lie. Her own son, a little boy named Henry (Jared Gilmore), comes to find her one evening, telling her tales of Storybrooke, the place into which he has been adopted-- the place where he believes fairy tale characters are trapped, doomed to live their lives stuck in time, in place, and without the true knowledge of who they even are. Naturally Emma doesn’t believe him, but she feels his pain nonetheless, and agrees to accompany him back there simply so he doesn’t have to be alone anymore. And once she arrives, the true story begins. Time even moves forward for the first time since the spell was cast. Somehow this precocious little boy found the key. But whether or not Emma will fight what is proven to be her destiny still remains to be seen.
So much of Once Upon A Time feels tailor-made just for us, so we know it won’t be for everyone else. The scenes in the fairy tale time truly transport you, immersing you in a magical world full of beautiful colors, larger than life imagery, and lush scenery. It’s enough to give you chills. And even in the modern Storybrooke, there are subtle allusions to what should still be. Those in and of themselves are fun almost Easter eggs to hunt down and pick out of even the most seemingly innocent of scenes. Characters are sleek and stylish in a new way-- in a way that fits with the way the world has moved-- but they hold onto an innate charm. Some audiences may click more with one side of the story than the other, but personally we were happy to travel back and forth. We never found ourselves thinking the “grass was greener” and simply wishing we were in the other from what was currently on screen.
Though the exploration of two separate and distinct worlds with variations on all of the characters in both might prove to be complex for some viewers, Once Upon A Time is not a show built on confusing its audience. There are a few mysteries already set up in the pilot episode, most notably how this kid got to Storybrooke in the first place, let alone find it in himself to find the truth once he was there. Additionally, how much his mother (the modern world’s mayor but the fairy tale world’s Evil Queen) may actually remember about the truth of Storybrooke, considering she was the one who made it this way. But the real power of Once Upon A Time is that it just makes you believe. And belief is the most magical thing of them all because it begets hope. As Snow/Sister Mary Margaret says in the right off the bat when meeting Emma: “Believing in even the possibility of a happy ending is a very powerful thing.”
And we can only hope it is going to be a long road before the characters within Storybrooke get their own happy ending because this show is so unique and charming we want to see it stick around for much more than just the thirteen episodes to which ABC has already committed.
Once Upon A Time premieres on October 23rd at 8pm, only on ABC.
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