Once Upon A Time was one of the 2011-2012’s most pleasant surprises, melding fantasy with character drama, all wrapped in a Mickey Mouse-shaped bow. The series returns to ABC this Fall, and things will pick up where things left off in the season finale.
In the Comic-Con Once press room, we spoke with the show’s creators, Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, about what will come next. Please do not repost this onto other websites/Tumblr blogs/etc. Instead, just link to KSiteTV! Thanks!
“At the end of the season, we saw a lot of stuff happen. We saw characters wake up. we saw the curse broken,” Adam Horowitz recalls. “We saw Mr. Gold bringing magic to Storybrooke. We wanted to finish telling a complete story for Season 1, that was part of a larger story, so we felt like hopefully the curse breaking would end that story of Season 1, but these new threads would open that we could now explore. I think hopefully when you see the premiere for Season 2, you’ll see we’ll start to go down the rabbit hole of following these different strands,” he explains about the story possibilities for the second season of Once Upon A Time.
Will the magic affect the outside world; i.e., the places outside of Storybrooke, now that the curse has been broken? “I think the best way to answer it for us, not necessarily you, is to say that that will be explicated rather quickly in Season 2,” Horowitz confirms.
Season 2 will also see new characters added to the Once mix, including Mulan and Princess Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. “We are very, very excited,” Kitsis says. “We think they come into the show in a very surprising and unique way, and because of that, we don’t want to talk much about it, but we’re really excited because, like everything we’ve done, we’re not interested in retelling or showing you the version that you’re used to. We feel like we have great spins on both characters, and what we love is how they’ll interact with the people that we already know and love.” They wouldn’t confirm when exactly we will be seeing Mulan and Aurora, but Horowitz did reveal that it will be “relatively early on in the season,” and that “the situation with which we meet Mulan and with which we meet Aurora, is something that is a surprise. I hope the audience likes it.” They also will not reveal if these characters will make their first appearances in Storybrooke, or if it will be in the fairy tale world. On the subject of those two realities, even with the lifting of the curse, the storytelling format will continue – but things may change a little now that characters have their memories back. “We feel like it’s opened up some cool storytelling avenues for ourselves,” Horowitz says.
When asked about the fact that both Regina and the Queen of Hearts have connections of… well… hearts, Kitsis responds with “that was not an accident,” declining to say more. When asked if Sheriff Graham could back, Kitsis confirmed “he’s dead,” and Horowitz reminded that “you can’t kill Jamie Dornan.”
“We saw him in the finale,” Kitsis says. “He’s still alive in the Huntsman, but we miss Jamie as much as the rest of you. It’s interesting. We designed the character, always for the arc, because we thought ‘well, Henry says in the pilot ‘the battle will begin,’ and if no one died, there’s no stakes. So we designed it, with Jamie, to do the first seven episodes and then we were going off into winter break and killing him. And the amount of death threats that the two of us have received…!”
“As far as we’re concerned, Jamie is part of the DNA of the show,” Adam adds. We love him, and that character was a huge part of the foundation of Once. Does that mean he can come back in some form? You never know.” Could the return of magic mean he has a better chance of returning to the land of the living? “Bringing someone back from the dead would be a kind of dark magic I’ve never seen before,” Kitsis says.
Kitsis was also asked if there was any hope for Emma’s other scruffy friend, August. “There’s hope for everyone,” he says. “Whether or not they make it, is another thing. For August, we’re going to definitely tell what happened to Pinnochio. The last we saw, he was wood.”
Finally, the reporters around the table asked if Snow and Charming will still have drama now that they remember who they are. “What relationship doesn’t have problems?” Kitsis points out, before getting some expansion from Adam Horowitz.
“It would be awfully cruel to torture them continually, but on the same respect, there’s drama in every relationship,” Adam says. “What I can say is that the drama that they experienced in Season 1 is not the same drama we want to put them through in Season 2. We want to take that relationship to a different place.”
“As you know, Emma is a character who, her entire life, wanted to meet her parents,” Kitsis adds. “And she’s met them, but this isn’t exactly how she pictured it. That’s not an easy thing to deal with.”
Once Upon A Time Season 2 airs Sunday this fall on ABC. Come by KSiteTV’s Once forum!
1 Comment
soo happy can wait to see it!! mulan and aurora *-*