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On Sunday, ABC aired the second-season finale of its popular series Once upon a Time<\/em><\/a>, with a third season confirmed<\/a> for Fall 2013.\u00a0 Capitalizing on the recent vogue for updated fairy tale treatments, Once upon a Time<\/em> is set in the quaint town of Storybrooke, Maine, a town with a curious secret: it is populated by residents of other fantastic realms who were transplanted into our world as part of a curse by the wicked queen, who rules the town as the ruthless Mayor Regina Mills (Lana Parrilla).\u00a0 She is opposed by Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), along with their daughter, Emma (Jennifer Morrison) and her son Henry (Jared S. Gilmore), while the manipulative Rumplestiltskin (Robert Carlyle) is always lurking in the corner, waiting to make a deal.\u00a0 In the first season, most residents could not remember their lives in fairy tale land, settling into mundane \u201creal-world\u201d lives (though never aging).\u00a0 In the second season, the dynamics have changed somewhat, and characters\u2019 memories have been restored.\u00a0 Once upon a Time<\/em> was created by the team of Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, former staff writers of Lost<\/em>, and along with casting several Lost<\/em> alums <\/em>and inserting in-jokes referencing that series, the show also follows an overall similar format: the main action occurs in our world, while we learn more about the characters\u2019 true identities through flashbacks into fairyland.<\/p>\n Commenting on fairy tales in his essay \u201cOn Household Gods and Goblins<\/a>,\u201d G. K. Chesterton famously contends that \u201cchildren are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.\u201d\u00a0 In The Uses of Enchantment<\/em><\/a>, Bruno Bettelheim picks up on this thought and adds, \u201cOne may rightly question Chesterton\u2019s belief in the innocence of children, but he is absolutely correct in observing that the appreciation of mercy for the unjust, while characteristic of a mature mind, baffles the child.\u201d\u00a0 What Chesterton and Bettelheim both aptly note is that relatively few fairy tales are redemptive<\/em> in nature.\u00a0 In the stark world of the traditional fairy tale, good and evil are clearly and sharply delineated categories.\u00a0 Cinderella is good and the wicked stepmother is\u2026well, wicked<\/em>.\u00a0 Snow White is good and the Evil Queen is\u2026you guessed it, evil<\/em>.\u00a0 Virtue is rewarded and vice is punished, and virtuous characters are basically intrinsically virtuous, identified as such even before their actual actions can manifest those qualities.<\/p>\n This binary pattern derives from the essential functions of most fairy tales.\u00a0 They can, for instance, serve as exemplary narratives, as ways for children to see virtue embodied, giving them a pattern to follow.\u00a0 Such stories provide a rubric according to which they can measure their own progress.\u00a0 Fairy tales also introduce children to a stable world, one in which evil is every bit as evident as in the real world but is consistently defeated by good.\u00a0 This stability creates a sense of peacefulness, of shalom<\/em> (as the Old Testament would say), that may in turn allow them to develop in better psychic and spiritual health; it produces a foundational security to bulwark against the vicissitudes of seemingly arbitrary life.<\/p>\n All of which presents a striking conundrum to writers who seeks to produce an adult series about fairy tales: how do you create a compelling and mature narrative about stories whose characters are really types?\u00a0 Fairy tale heroes, heroines, and villains incarnate their roles perfectly, and yet in adult fiction, perfect characters are flat and uninteresting because we cannot relate to them.\u00a0 We are, as Chesterton noted, wicked, and our own narratives reflect that fact.<\/p>\n The writers of Once upon a Time<\/em> circumvent this dilemma in several intriguing ways.\u00a0 One is by focusing attention on those fairy tale characters who do<\/em> illustrate redemptive arcs.\u00a0 The first season and (briefly) the second season, for instance, involve the character of Pinocchio, one of the few \u201cfairy tale\u201d characters who begins wicked and is at last redeemed; indeed, those familiar with Carlo Collodi\u2019s original 1883 The Adventures of Pinocchio<\/em> know just how vile Pinocchio is until he gets to his happily-ever-after.\u00a0 Once upon a Time<\/em> acknowledges Pinocchio\u2019s dissolute youth, crafting a character who is haunted by his past failings and seeking to make amends, while sometimes prepared to adopt questionable means to do so.<\/p>\n A more frequent way that Once upon a Time<\/em> creates redemptive character arcs is by introducing individuals who are not fairy tale characters.\u00a0 This is most obvious in Emma Swan.\u00a0 Though Emma is the daughter of Charming and Snow White, she has grown up since infancy alone in our world, and thus she has no conscious connection to the land of fairy.\u00a0 Her background gives the show\u2019s writers many opportunities to depict a person whose flaws need to be overcome.\u00a0 In the first season, she wrestled largely with a skepticism born out of her difficult upbringing (or lack thereof), denying the existence of magic to almost absurd degrees as strange occurrences clustered around her.\u00a0 The second season\u2014which has heavily emphasized themes related to family\u2014has explored her abandonment issues in greater depth, her struggles to be vulnerable in loving even when she might be hurt.\u00a0 The end of the second season has also occasioned the arrival of several other \u201coutside\u201d characters, all of whom wrestle with personal demons that they drag with them to Storybrooke.<\/p>\n But perhaps the most interesting way in which Once upon a Time<\/em> carves out room in the fairy tale tradition for the possibility of redemption comes in its treatment of the traditional heroes and villains.\u00a0 The show\u2019s flashbacks provide complex backstories to the characters that give them more texture as people and have consequences that follow them into Storybrooke, especially now that the town\u2019s residents all remember their original identities.\u00a0 Some \u201cgood\u201d characters (e.g. Snow White, Belle) seem poised to travel dark paths.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the possibility of redemption or restoration is persistently dangled before the villains, who are perhaps the most layered characters of the series.\u00a0 Regina, the evil queen, seems often poised to repent, only to turn back farther into wickedness and self-delusion.\u00a0 Her evil is definitely her own, yet it also owes its presence in part to the connivances of her own manipulative mother Cora (Barbara Hershey), who had removed her own heart to protect herself from harm.\u00a0 Rumplestiltskin\u2014known also as the Dark One in fairy tale land\u2014is also played as the Beast juxtaposed with the Beauty (Emilie de Ravin\u2019s Belle).\u00a0 By conflating those two fairy tale figures\u2014a crafty trickster and a monster who becomes a prince\u2014the show suggests that Rumplestiltskin may in fact be redeemed; yet like Regina, he resists virtue at the last minute in every case.\u00a0 The same is true of Captain Hook (Colin O\u2019Donoghue), who (like almost every other character) has been wounded by Rumplestiltskin in the past.\u00a0 Indeed, perhaps the greatest suspense of Once upon a Time<\/em> lies in wondering whether the malicious characters will remain wicked or at last be transformed.<\/p>\n For some avid Christian readers of fairy tales, this tweaking of the tradition may be off-putting, contending that the lines between good and evil characters in fairyland ought not be crossed, lest one violate their entire reason for being.\u00a0 Yet many of those same readers would commend the writings of Christian authors like George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, or J. R. R. Tolkien, all of whom penned works that fall within the faery tradition but feature morally ambivalent\u2014or at least imperfect\u2014characters.\u00a0 Exemplary writing may have its place in the instruction and upbringing of children, yet sooner or later, we must \u00a0become conscious that we are all wicked.\u00a0 We are not the princes or princesses; we are the villains who only enter the kingdom through an act of cosmic redemption.\u00a0 And surely there is room in fairyland for stories to remind us of that.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Sunday, ABC aired the second-season finale of its popular series Once upon a Time, with a third season confirmed for Fall 2013.\u00a0 Capitalizing on the recent vogue for updated fairy tale treatments, Once upon a Time is set in the quaint town of Storybrooke, Maine, a town with a curious secret: it is populated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1344,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1484,19],"tags":[1509],"class_list":["post-34168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-ofthemoment","category-television","tag-of-the-moment"],"yoast_head":"\n