TV Series Review: Elementary (season two)

As readers of this blog already know, back when I started working full time in the spring my watching took a hit and once Agents of SHIELD really picked up I ended up having to put Elementary to the side for a while, even though I had really really enjoyed the first season and this season was just as good. It certainly doesn't help that the only (legal) way I can watch the series online is to do it through CBS's website which only has the last five aired-on-tv episodes and my god the most annoying ads ever. I know some people complain about hulu's ads but here they have four or five commercial breaks and five to seven ads each, all 15-30 seconds long. "So, it's basically just like cable tv then?" Pretty much and it is terrible, please put this show on Netflix streaming so I can recommend it more easily!

Elementary (season two)

TV Series Review: Almost Human

I've gotten so used to watching American tv shows that are 22 episodes long that I had forgotten that a lot of them actually start out shorter and more episodes are ordered part-way through the run (I think it's called a back-end 8 or something). So that's why I was a bit surprised when I was catching up with Almost Human and realized that the next episode was going to be the last for this season at least, I wonder if the writers were as surprised as I was! Actually, I was looking through wikipedia when writing this (to see if there was any news on a second season yet, there's not) and remembered that not only had this show started up weeks after it was supposed to (in late November of all times) but apparently one of the showrunner's left the series for creative differences and Fox actually aired the episodes in a different order than the remaining showrunner intended, that's never a good sign when a developing relationship between two of the characters is supposed to be at the heart of the show. Or when the show is heavily plot based so really, don't do that guys!

Almost Human

Documentary Review: An Adventure in Space and Time

For Doctor Who's 50th Anniversary they really went all out and had a big special, screenings in theaters, and honest to goodness simulcast in the US and they also had this little thing, a nearly 90 minute dramatization of the situation surrounding Doctor Who as it just started and how it succeeded. I think that, almost more than anything, shows just how big this show has become, can anyone else think of any other show which has had a documentary on the making of it? I'm sure there might be a few others but I can't think of any at the moment, especially considering just how niche the audience for something like this must be.

An Adventure in Space and Time

TV Series Review: The Time of the Doctor (Doctor Who 2013 Christmas Special)

Wow, I thought I would have this up last night guys except 1) I was on a train which did not have wi-fi which caught me off guard 2) I got in amazingly late due to what shall now be referred to as The Great Virginia Manhunt. Sorry about that, my anime review for the week is already up and my end of year wrap up should be up later as well, although I always intended to publish that one on the 31st.

Here we are, it's been an odd ride but it's time once again for the Doctor to regenerate and, oh wait, Moffat is still the series runner too? I'm actually hoping he steps down soon in the next year or two as well not only because it's time for some new blood working on the show but also because this special in some ways summed up all of Matt Smith's tenure on Doctor Who: good parts and bad parts side by side in a single episode.

The Time of the Doctor

TV Review: The Day of the Doctor: The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special

As long time readers of the blog probably already know, my feelings towards Doctor Who are mixed. At times I love it and at other times I grumble with my friends over what the show is doing and a lot of the news about the 50th had me grumbling. There were two ways they could have done this, one would have been a silly thing that was more about celebrating the show itself and the other was using the 50th as a chance to have a big story that would affect the entire show. Given the fact that the pre-revivial Doctors were saying that they hadn't been invited, and the news that they were suddenly adding in another Doctor, which really messed with the "mythology" of the show, it was clear they were taking the second route and I was getting rather nervous about it. I felt a bit reassured when they put out the Night of the Doctor short just before, and interested to see that in doing so they seem to have canonized a lot of the Big Finnish radio dramas (which I still really need to get around to listening to), but I was still a bit nervous going into the simulcast, who knew what was going to happen!

The Day of the Doctor (Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special)

Summary: The Doctor has just been summoned to UNIT (with Clara in tow, having just picked her up for another round of adventures) where he runs into a series of curious things, a painting of Gallifrey as it burned, pictures with their frames broken from the inside and missing figures, and a time vortex which seems to lead him to a past self we never knew of who is just about the destroy his home planet. Wait huh?!

The Good: I really did like about 2/3rds of this story (the part I liked the least was of course the ending so I can't really talk about it here) and the story was a far better one than I expected. The story was a large enough one that it made sense that there were multiple Doctors involved and it was fun to see Smith and Tennant bounce off of each other (and the show did a good job at keeping the side characters involved but without dominating the story and detracting from that interaction, I feel like the writers have finally hit their groove for how to balance Clara into the story and I like that). Really that's what made it for me, the UNIT side of the story would have been a pretty good episode if it had been just a regular tv one and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's just the other half of the story, dealing with the impending blowing-up of Gallifrey, that I had some problems with.

The Bad: I'm still confused as to what the purpose of the UNIT lab assistant wearing a homemade version of the Doctor's scarf was, I've seen people say she was supposed to be a stand in for the fans (and the show has done that several times since the revival) but I'm still rather confused about it. Minor quibbles aside, it's been two weeks and I'm still a bit torn on how I feel about how the story ended. On the one hand it does neatly tie up a problem that the story has had since the revival and gives the Doctor new purpose again, on the other hand I feel like it cheapens some of the emotions the Doctor went through and considering that the current doctor is going to regenerate in his next appearance, well, I feel like that quest just won't have the same emotional punch as it could have been. So I am left with the same feeling I have had after many an episode of the show, while I really did like parts of it I can't help but feel like they tried to write a "cleverer" story than needed and in the process made it weaker instead. I know that a lot of people liked John Hurt in this as the War Doctor but honestly I never warmed up to him, I can see they were trying to imitate the dynamic that The Three Doctors had but for one it just didn't work since we didn't have that connection to him (I saw a lot of people saying that you could tell the lines were written for Nine and, while I didn't feel that way when watching the show itself, I have to admit it would have worked so much better if he had consented to come back*). Two, you have to be a broken person to truly believe that eliminating every man, woman, and child of two races is the best solution to an unwinnable problem and Hurt didn't seem that broken to me, I just had a hard time believing that this character was supposed to have already been pushed to that point which made a lot of the conflict feel rather flat. Finally, I also feel like the plotline with Queen Elizabeth I was just odd, yes I know it culminates in a call-back (multiple ones actually!) but her acting just felt odd to me the entire time.

The Production Values: I guess the BBC realized they needed to give the show a larger budget than usual considering how many sets the characters go through. I thought everything looked fine, the zygons didn't quite work but having seen some 3rd/4th Doctor stories with some terrible alien costumes I'm just thankful it wasn't worse. Honestly I don't have much to say on it other than the fact that I really did like how the story had so many different sets and all the visual bonuses in them, that should make rewatching it with friends sometime rather fun.


Despite how lengthy that bad section is I did enjoy this way more than I expected and even if my expectations hadn't been super low I feel like I would have said the same thing. In many ways the ending is fitting but if it had just been a bit different, if it had been Nine's struggle, a character whom we've already seen deal with the fall-out, and knowing that Eleven would be the one to deal with a different kind of fall-out from the event, then I think I would have been much more satisfied with the event.

For those who have already seen the series and need more to watch, or haven't and want more to watch anyway, in addition to the short mentioned earlier I recommend The Five(ish) Doctors for people who are fans of the original show (in short, the fifth, sixth, and seventh Doctor's all team up to try and appear on the finale with a heck of a lot of in jokes and shout-outs for classic fans) and I still need to see An Adventure in Time and Space, a documentary on making the show, myself. Sadly it looks like neither of those are legally available online at the moment but since Netflix currently has all of NuWho streaming I bet both of them will pop up in the next few months or so, just when we need something to tide us over between the Christmas Special and whenever the next season starts!




*and from what I've read I understand why he didn't, sounds like the tensions were high when he had to leave and it has to do with the particular set of classism that still exists in Britain and not quite anywhere else.

TV Series Review: Heroes of Cosplay

Back when Syfy announced two new, nerdy reality shows I wasn't that interested in Fangasm (it sounded like a terrible idea and sounds like it's turning out to be pretty bad) but this one did catch by attention since, well, I like looking at pretty cosplays and seeing how people make them. I follow a number of cosplay fanpages on facebook, watch cosplay video compilations on youtube, I just love seeing how other people make these crazy ideas happen and it makes me want to do even more myself so it's pretty awesome motivation as well. And honestly that's why I kept watching this show, at least I was getting to see pretty costumes on screen for at least half of the time and I didn't have to do any kind of work to find them.

Heroes of Cosplay

Summary: Almost a dozen different cosplayers with different skills compete in different cosplay competitions around the country.

The Good: Despite everything this show is a pretty good example of why I don't compete in cosplay competitions that often. No not because people are crazy and there's drama, that's actually a bit unusual, but because every single person who enters is skilled and if you want to win you have to be amazing. I was actually surprised that so many people on the show entered so many outfits they had spent only a week or less working on, it's no coincidence that a lot of people who win costume competitions have spent months perfecting every last detail on theirs. Heck, I saw some people speculating, and I agree with them, that the reason Syfy had the big "two episode finale" at a relatively small con (I can't find the actual attendance for Planet ComicCon but it was projected at 4000 people which in the world of San Diego Comic Cons and Japan Expos is tiny) was so that their contestants would have an easier time winning and nope, there were still awesome local cosplayers there who won most of the awards instead. 

The Bad: Oh lord where to begin. Well, the most serious accusation is that Syfy has committed copyright violation by using photos which a photographer didn't license to them. For anyone who might be reading and going "but!" no, I've actually studied copyright law as it relates to photographs and the law is completely on the photographers side with decades of court cases to back it up. It might seem weird that the cosplayers technically have no rights to the photograph beyond what the photographer gives them (or any contract they might sign) but actually if I was to do a photoshoot for a large company tomorrow, say Pringles, at the end of the day I would own the images, not Pringles, even though it's their product unless we set up a very specific kind of contract*. The show isn't completely honest or even mostly honest in a number of other ways as well, such as the first episode which shows people scrambling to finish cosplays for their con, cosplays that were finished for Katsucon over a month earlier and there's photographic evidence to prove it. I feel like HoC was trying to use this as a way to create character arcs, the character who is always pushed to do something new lest she is forgotten and the character who struggles a lot but eventually succeeds and the way the show presents those arcs is so clumsy as well. I'm used to Project Runway which I think is the show HoC was trying to be in many ways but that show has years of experience (and more contestants) so they know how to edit the footage and put together an "arc" for each designer and make the viewers care about them by the end. HoC showed just about every character talking behind at least one other person's back (as far as I can remember Chloe was the only one who didn't and maybe she was just smart enough to not give them any of footage of it) so of course I didn't care about them by the end, it was like they completely forgot that to create characters on a show like that you have to redeem them later and that never happened. I also have issues with the way they portrayed the contests which I'm just going to give it's own footnote since that's a pretty lengthy grievance of it's own**. I've seen complaints from people at the conventions (not being notified of changes to the competition beforehand but the Syfy people did so everyone was out classed, etc) so it sounds like all in all this was a trainwreck through and through

The Production Values: There were a few weird moments on the show, one of which is that even though the show never goes to Anime Expo they used quite a bit of B-roll from it, I wonder why they spent the time and effort getting it from a completely different con instead of just the ones they actually filmed at. Also, at one of the conventions, I believe Anime Matsuri, the contestants had skits in front of screens which would light up and show images or videos they had chosen and for some reason Syfy the footage of the characters against the screens looked terrible, I have no idea why Syfy put them in the show anyway since if you're trying to produce a professional show you just don't put in something that looks awful!


In the end I'm giving this show a 1.5 out of 5, only redeemed since I didn't like a couple of the cosplayers and I liked seeing all the cosplays, both those made by people on the show and off. For people who are thinking of watching this, don't, I instead recommend this mini-documentary on cosplayers (centered around Dragon*Con, from the same people as Four Days at Dragon*Con) or Cosplay in America has recently changed his convention format to follow some people around before/during the con which I think gives a really nice perspective on how most people do cosplay. And he even follows some of the people who are going to be competing for Team USA in the World Cosplay Summit, yes there is an actual world-wide cosplay contest (based on craftsmanship and skits) which some people like and some people don't, there are some legitimate complaints out there (namely, to win you need to do something Japan currently likes/has nostalgia for, hence why you see a lot of the same cosplays over the years, plus if you don't have the money to ship a lot of props from far away you're a bit screwed) but it's at the very least more honest than this show was.

*Called work-for-hire and you'd have to pay me way more than usual to do that, a lot of the money in photography is made from licensing the images, not producing them.
**For all the anime cons I've been to that have had at least a few hundred cosplayers at it there have actually been two cosplay contests, one called the Hall Contest/Craftsmanship contest where you go before a panel of judges and they ask you about how you made every last detail (often you have a chance to do a walk-on on stage during the masquerade, strike a pose or two, and then walk off) and a Masquerade where a person or a group does a skit and they're judged more on the skit than their cosplays (usually you can't enter the same outfit in both but you can enter both contests with different cosplays).  I've never come across contests where you talk to the judges in front of a crowd, others have told me these really do exist like on the show, although I think that it sounds rather awkward since it must be boring for the audience not being able to see the outfit of close and neither can the judges really. In any case, accompanying video for skits is rather unusual, audio is not (that's actually one of the things you really need to do to have a good skit, pre-record all of it and then lip-sync, none of y'all can project nearly as much as you think you can), although it sounds like the one place where Syfy had skits like that, Planet Comicon, that wasn't the norm there which could mean that they're cosplay contest was more of a "people walk on, strike a pose, walk off" which is something I see more at smaller cons. In addition to all of this, most cons do not have cash prizes. I have a friend who was part of the Best in Show skit at Otakon this year which is a pretty big con, and they did not win money. They did win a ton of swag (I know at Anime Expo they try to get dealers to donate one or two things for the prizes which would be easier for the con and save them money, oh and if you want more drama than this show provided just read what was going on behind the scenes at their masquerade this year, oi) and free badges for next year but no cash prizes so the show's assertion that you can win enough money to pay back making your rather expensive outfit is also pretty much completely wrong.

TV Series Review: Doctor Who 7.2

And to wrap up the live action shows I was following live (as opposed to hearing about them years later and then scouring my libraries/Netflix for them), the latest half season of Doctor Who. Man, guys I hope we go back to full seasons soon, having only six or seven at a time just doesn't feel right, and since I see people talking about the 50th anniversary special in November but not about more episodes I guess we probably won't even get anymore this year beyond that and the Christmas special. 


Doctor Who

Summary: Still grieving after losing Amy and Rory and also Clara in the Christmas special the Doctor has become curious, why did he meet what seems to have been the same girl twice even though that should be impossible? So he tracks her down again, this time to contemporary England where the similarities between her and the others persist and she falls into adventuring with him while he tries to puzzle out this impossible girl. 

The Good: I was a fan who was already okay with Clara when the season started but I didn't have really high hopes for her. But lo and behold I ended up really liking her, more than I liked Amy at points but honestly Amy was never one of my favorite companions. And I seem to be in the minority here but I really liked all the individual episodes too, some of them had weird premises but everything actually managed to work for me. Best of all we got to really see the range of Matt Smith's acting this season, I find it hard whenever I watch something with an unfamiliar actor in it to always tell how much they're acting (especially since from the video interviews it seems like Matt is bit of a silly guy anyway) but here he had a great chance to show his range and now I want to see him play all kinds of different characters in future stories just to see what else he can really do.

The Bad: I think I've figured out why even though I like more of the individual episodes of Moffat's tenure more than RTD (or at least, with those episodes I tend to not remember half of them and when they come up in conversations they feel like something I fever-dreamed) but not the whole show, I just don't like how he structures overall story arcs. It's a bit frustrating how every time the companions are super-special-important people (which RTD didn't do as much, you could argue he did something similar with Donna in Turn Left but more or less Rose/Martha/Donna became special through their travels, Amy/Rory/Clara were already special because they were it feels like) and part of me always goes "how do you expect me to believe that this character is insanely special when we've only had a season or half a season to foreshadow that?" even if I know (logically) that few shows are even written out far enough in advance that they could sprinkle these clues to my satisfaction. And they did actually make an attempt to retcon part of Clara which I did like (although they revealed that at the completely wrong point of the episode, it just completely upset the feel to have the reveal at the very beginning but not get to the moment of the reveal until 3/4ths of the way through) but in any case, can we have some more characters who become awesome and amazing because of what they go through, not characters who start as mere plot devices to ignite a story and only later begin to feel real?

The Production Values: Gonna try renaming this section, in any case, this season looked pretty good, for once I have no complaints about how anything looked! Sure there were plenty of scenes where the effects weren't movie standard quality but nothing looked so off that I was drawn out of the show visual wise or sound wise, I'm a happy fan here!


Sooooo, I guess I'll give this a 3 or 3.5 out of 5 stars and again, in a bit of an unpopular opinion, I'm not looking forward to November for reasons that come up in the last few minutes of the last episode so it's too spoilerly to state. It shouldn't take most fans long to piece together what's going on but if you aren't sure talk to me and I can fill in some details that I read prior to that episode airing. In any case, now that there's no new Doctor Who for a while I'm going to try and watch some more Classic Who so if anyone has any suggestions for what serials to watch leave them in the comments/shoot them to me on twitter. Ideally I want to start with the First Doctor and work my way forwards but I'll take any suggestions people give me!

TV Series Review: Elementary

I have to admit, I'm really curious what must have been in the water a few years back when writers suddenly started going "you know what we haven't had in a while? SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES, we should make some!" I suspect that stuff like this is actually part of a cycle, which would also explain weird coincidences like having multiple films in one year based on a certain fairy tale that hasn't been on the silver screen in a number of years, although that didn't make me any less leary when it was announced that there was going to be another tv show based off of Sherlock Holmes, set in the US, and they were making Watson female ("oh great, romance ahoooooy!"). I did change my feelings a tiny bit when I heard that an Asian-American actress had been cast as Joan Watson, the fact that a show was willing to give a non-white actor a leading role gave me some hope that they actually knew what they were doing, and then the first episode leaked and tumblr adored it. Well, not some of the Sherlock fans, but a lot of people did and that sealed the deal, I was going to give this a chance after all and pray that it turned out amazing.


Elementary

Summary: Joan Watson is a sober companion in NYC who helps recovering addicts transistion back into everyday life and her latest client is a British man who is recovering from a heroin addiction, Sherlock Holmes. He's less than thrilled about having a sober companion especially since he's already come up with his own plan for how to transition back into everyday life and stay focused, by working as a consulting detective for the NYPD which means that Joan needs to tag along and in the process discovers that she has a talent for noticing the details and fitting them into the larger puzzle as well.

The Good: Well to cut to the chase, I loved this show. It completely avoided the biggest thing I was worried about, changing Watson to a woman in order to have a romance with Holmes, entirely and instead we got a really good series with a mixed gender leading couple that weren't a couple at all, I liked that! Plus it had a fairy diverse cast of returning characters AND even though things such as prostitution came up several times none of the characters ever made "prostitution is WRONG" comments, the characters just dealt with the cases making it one of the least problematic things I've seen in a long time. The show also managed to have a small overarching story that set everything in motion and ended the story but at the heart of the story it was about Sherlock and Joan and how the two of them grow which was pretty amazing. This is one of the most human versions of Sherlock I've seen, even if he makes a lot of misteps by the end he's apologizing when he realizes, or has it pointed out to him, what he's done wrong and from the first episode Joan is not afraid to call him out on it. Also, I think this is the first time I've seen a Sherlock Holmes story where Watson goes beyond being the audience's point of view character and rises to become a detective themselves, something that amazes me because it's so obvious in retrospect. It was a rather pleasant surprise to see that this series wasn't just about Sherlock getting over his addiction and becoming a better person at the same time but that it was also about Joan moving farther away from her own past and finding something she really took pleasure in.

The Bad: I am a little worried about what the series will do next, if it had ended her I think it would have had a perfectly fine ending and as such I wonder how they'll make the characters continue to change. I saw a snippet of an interview, I think with Lucy Lui (Joan) who said that they were trying/hoping to do more multi-parters in the second season which would be a great idea but I'm also worried that now that the show has proven to be successful more people will try to meddle with it (since I'm told that's what happens with successful shows, everyone wants a finger in the pie and then too many cooks ruin a good stew after all). But, even after being burned by Once Upon A Time's second season I'm going to remain optimistic that the show will continue to be as good and won't simply cover the same ideas over again.

The Audio/Visuals: This being a series that is a procedural crime drama in current day NYC means that there wasn't a lot that could go wrong with the look or sound of this show so I had no problems there. Although again, the show is so contemporary that as long as nothing looked like something I could never, ever theoretically see in the US I wasn't going to have a problem and nothing came even close to that.


So, giving this 4 out of 5 stars and heck yes I'm watching the second season. Unfortunately it's only sort of streaming online, much like certain deals on hulu, CBS only streams the last four episodes (to air) on their site (and none on hulu at all) so at this point I would recommend that people sit tight and hope that it shows up on Netflix soon. Heck, as soon as it does I am shoving several people I know to that page and having them watch it immediately, fingers crossed that this happens sooner rather than later.

TV Series Review: Once Upon A Time (seasons 2)

While I've grown used to having 3/4ths of my anime ending in the same week I was a bit thrown when I realized that all three of the regular, American/British live action shows I was watching all ended the same week so bear with me for a few weeks guys as I sort them out. So, as per my usual strategy, first up is the first to end which was the second season of Once Upon A Time which I was super pumped up for when it started. The first season started weak but got better and ended really strongly and I was pretty curious to see where it was going next which are the best feelings to have when going into a new show/new seasons of a show. Also, something that seems to be happening more and more over here, I'll try to keep the bulk of the review as spoiler free as possible but if I really need to talk about something spoilerly in detail I'll do so in a footnote so read those at your own risk.



Once Upon A Time

Summary: Continuing from where the first season left off, Storybrooke is a little town in Maine entirely populated by fairy tale characters when their land was cursed and they were flung to Earth. For 28 long years nothing changed and they remembered nothing, until Emma, the daughter of the king and queen and the promised savior, returned and somehow lifted the curse. But the characters are confused why they are still in Maine and even though they have their memories back there are still dangers lurking around.

The Good: The show was able to flesh out a few characters which it didn't have a chance to in the first season and I liked that, rounder characters are always preferable to flat ones. And it was nice to see just how the Enchanted Forest has fared over the years, that wasn't something I expected to see nor was it something I especially wanted to see but it cleared up a few questions before I even had them which is a good thing. Oh and the show cleared up a lot of things about Henry's father, although it really had to work to make some things line up, but when it's all said and done I'm actually okay with what they came up with. Honestly it's a little hard for me to be specific for what I liked this season not because it's spoilerly but because most of this happened fairly early on in the run which was back in October. I know there are reasons for why American tv shows have such weird breaks but man it makes it harder to remember specific details when everything is all said and done. 

The Bad: Here's the non-spoilerely version, I disliked Regina's character arc*. In fact, I disliked an awful lot of things about this season. I disliked the fact that it seems like the writers are prolonging the character's stay in Maine (I'm guessing now that if the cast was to ever get back to their original world for good then the story would be over) with what feel like really contrived reasons. I like that the side cast has gotten a bit more fleshed out, I don't like how the core cast is left alone for episodes at a time, I liked this show because I liked the growing dynamic between Emma and Regina, don't cut that out! Also, guys there's a limit to how much backstory any individual character can have. Yes a lot of them have lived grand and exciting lives but you can't expect me to buy that they spent all their time having adventures of sort which have a clear influence on who they are now, somehow that breaks my suspension of disbelief even faster than the CGI does. Oh and they seemed to be trying to introduce some sort of Earth based, anti-magic agency in the last few episodes which came out of nowhere and was so sloppy I wasn't even sure that's what they meant until I talked with a few friends and found that they had come to the same conclusion I did.

The Audio/Visuals: I'm of two minds here. On the one hand, the wardrobe/costuming on this show is fantastic and I love a lot of what they do. On the other hand, it seems like they spent the show's entire budget on costumes and had to settle for less than polished CGI. I know that in this day and age, and considering that there have been fantasy movies with terrific special effects lately, but when it looks like you green-screened the actors in front of a fairly simple background for no reason then I'm going to get exasperated.


So I'm giving this just 2.5 out of 5 stars and I'm jumping ship now since, if the last few minutes meant what I think they did, we're about to get wibby-wobbly timey-wimey and that reminded me that this shares several important staff with Lost which is a phrase that fills me with trepidation. I do have a number of friends who plan on still watching the show so if they say that it fixes the problems I had then great, I'll come back. Until then however I'm going to spend my time watching tv shows that I'll hopefully enjoy more.


*and now for the spoilerly version, while I was initially hesitant to see her try and become good, considering how evil she's been, the idea grew on me and I felt like as soon as I started liking it the writers dropped that idea and instead had her revert back to her evil ways. I maintain that it was illogical for her to go and help her mother, considering how much pain her mother had caused for her and what she had done to Cora as retaliation, and just could not get behind that mini-arc. Finally, despite the fact that Regina hadn't changed by the end of the series, and had in some ways become worse since she showed that she couldn't really change, the writers still had her pull the line "I know I'm bad but I really tried to change" which had me wanting to flip tables into walls, when you're that inconsistent about character development trying to evoke sympathy for it seems like the dumbest thing you can do.