Once Upon a Time & Satisfying Mysteries

Camp NaNoWriMo is over; the novel is not, but it’s very close. Without that chart and daily updates on the NaNoWriMo website, I struggle with keeping up momentum. All the same, maybe I can wrap up an epilogue, and then go back to the text. Quick aside: are any of you interested in my NaNoWriMo playlist? It’s mostly game (ie, Assassin’s Creed) soundtracks.

The past week was much less rainy than the week before, which is nice.

Presently re-reading Soul Music!

Once Upon a Time & Satisfying Mysteries

One of the selling points of Once Upon a Time, back before it became known as just ‘That show where they put Disney animated characters in live-action,’ was that its two showrunners were veteran writers of the hit TV series Lost. I believe (though I am not sure; I have maybe seen a single episode of Lost my freshman year) that the show features a similar episode structure. Most episodes focus on a single character, and the present day story is interspersed with flashback sequences that show the audience who this character was before the Plot, and as you go on, each episode’s flashbacks gives you pieces of how it’s all going to fit together.

I just rewatched season one of this show–you know, the good season. I have no plans to go further; I don’t think it’ll be worth anyone’s time, much less my own, to rewatch the rest of the seasons. I’ll only get frustrated. I had many thoughts this time through, though for this Note, I’ll only focus on one: the lack of Mystery Boxes. Lost, and one of its co-creators (J.J. Abrams), made the idea popular. Abrams gave a TED Talk about Mystery Boxes and why he thinks they’re great.

And this Plot-heavy series with a massive cast, which has a winding story involving big reveals, with the pedigree of being created by Lost writers… doesn’t have it.

We’ve talked about Mystery Boxes before, but! In case you haven’t been here, or you’ve forgotten because you have a life, we’ll go again. The Mystery Box, as defined by J.J. Abrams, is a storytelling device in which you introduce a mystery that the story emphasizes, in order to build audience engagement. You don’t have an answer to that mystery in mind, you just have a mystery; this way, if you see fan discussions getting too close to the answer you thought of down the line, you can change it. Mysteries are a great way to make people talk about a show, because they’re going to keep wondering what happens next.

[Again, while doing research, I came across someone’s blog post in which he defined Mystery Boxes as ‘storytelling elements that confuse me’, and listed Christopher Nolan’s tendency to play with the timeline. Yeah, no, that’s not a Mystery Box.]

The problem, of course, is that you’re now building stories with key questions that don’t have answers, and so the answers you eventually provide (if you provide them at all) don’t feel rewarding. There are no real clues, and very often with a long-running series, the answers to the really big questions keep getting pushed back. After all, if we’re trying to get people to stick around, bait them and keep them strung along as long as you can.

Once Upon a Time’s first season doesn’t do that.

There are a number of characters who are introduced, but kept mysterious until they get their full episode with a backstory; the main ones are all given backstories, though. As you watch the first few episodes, you realize that Rumplestiltskin keeps appearing in seemingly everyone’s life; you learn why he’s pulling the strings in the back half of the season. It’s teased that there’s more to the feud between Regina and Snow White than ‘Who’s the fairest?’; we find out precisely what it is almost at the end of season one. In short, there are a lot of questions in the Plot, and the story rewards the viewer in the first season by answering them, in ways that are clearly set up by what’s shown and spoken about beforehand.

Now, not everything gets an answer. I remember how we were all driving ourselves insane trying to figure out who the eff Dr. Whale was (that’s revealed in season two: he’s Victor Frankenstein). Precisely what happened to Rump’s son Baelfire isn’t made clear until the next season, nor is what happened to August after the Curse is broken.

I think the only one that’s really an issue here is Baelfire, and even that doesn’t feel too egregious because, given everything else, it seems a good bet that we were going to get that in due time. At that point, we, the audience, have been rewarded not just for watching, but for paying attention. In many cases, our theories were either fully or partially vindicated, and if it hadn’t, we could look back at all the information we had been given and see how it all fits together; not just as a twist, but as a natural outcome of what came before. Watching it was exciting, because what we thought about the story we watched unfolded actually mattered.

And I hate to always bring up the Sequel Trilogy of Star Wars, but it’s a fantastic example of the problems of Abrams’s approach and the Mystery Box: it’s a movie series that does the opposite. It doesn’t reward the viewer for paying attention, because every major revelation and Plot beat comes out of the need to relate a reaction, whether that’s shock or delight (supposedly Abrams approached The Force Awakens by trying to make every scene saying, “Isn’t this delightful?”). It’s not about building a story, it’s about making a sequence of surprises. And in the end, it doesn’t work.

Season one of Once Upon a Time does work. It works really well. It’s surprisingly good television writing, and I’m both shocked at how good it turned out, and incredibly disappointed in how badly the following seasons squandered their potential by not having any long-term planning at all.

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