Review:
Once Upon a Time-A review (With an attempt at minimal spoilers)
Searching for that happy ever after…
I recently found myself watching the opening few episodes of Once Upon a Time the highly anticipated (well for me anyway) American drama series.
The basic idea will possibly sound suspiciously familiar to anyone who has ever picked up an issue of Bill Willingham’s award winning Fables comic book: Story book characters travelling from their magical lands to live in our mundane world amongst us human beings, where we are unaware of their past, imagine if you will the likes of Red Riding Hood and Prince Charming living in America.
However that is where the comparison stops being of any real use. In Fables our childhood favourites have come to our world to escape an evil and all powerful conqueror (and if you haven’t read it I won’t spoil the surprise of who that is for you) and they are more than aware of their origins… In Once Upon a Time they’re not so well informed.
Here we join our characters at the end of the traditional telling of Snow White with the assumption of a happy ending but this is not to be. Over the course of the pilot episode we discovered the impending doom placed upon our heroes as well as the only possible way to save them all from an eternity cursed (apparently living in Maine is not the ideal existence!) never to know their true identities.
I will openly admit that I have seen some shocking pilot episodes in my time and I am pleased to say that this wasn’t one of them. Yes as a rule a first episode has a certain level of responsibility to ensure that the scene is set and this one managed to do so with minimum fuss, setting up both the fairy tale and the real life equivalent.
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