OUAT...

[shadowkat]

So, I got curious about why the writers chose to get rid of a character I liked and found fascinating in the third season, who I felt needed to be explored in greater depth and how lots of potential.

Thought it would be covered in the OUAT S3 DVD commentaries - but it doesn't appear to be, since neither of the head writers appears to be doing a major commentary on the character.

I googled it. And this is what I found:




Go here : For full article

Apparently Michael Raymond-James who portrayed Baelfire/Neal Cassidy went on twitter to kill rumors that he'd been fired or quit. Neither was the case. It was a bold story-telling decision on the part of the writers. I do wish they'd stop killing off interesting male characters (Sheriff Graheam and Baelfire), who are Emma's romantic interest. It's getting to the point that you almost want to warn people not to get involved with Emma. Another tv series that had this tendency was Buffy. What is it with television serial writers and romantic relationships?

TVLINE | When in mapping out Season 3 did you decide upon Neal’s fate?
ADAM HOROWITZ | It was pretty early on. And as soon as we realized where it was going to go — and it was not a decision that was made lightly — we talked to Michael and we all kind of huddled together to come up with the best way to do it.
EDDY KITSIS | We kind of started setting it up in Neverland; watching his father sacrifice his life had a profound effect on Neal. And what we really wanted to tell is: What happens when the kid who was always the moral compass loses his father [Rumplestiltskin], they make up and then he finds himself, like father like son, repeating that same obsessive quest to get back? But when [Neal] realized there was a price to be paid, he didn’t run from it, he did it, so that his son [Henry] would see him as a hero the way that he eventually came to see his father.

TVLINE | Moving forward, what storytelling pros outweighed the cons?
KITSIS | The biggest con for us was we love Michael Raymond-James and we love that character. For us, it was a creative decision and it was an evolution in the character.
HOROWITZ | It was a storytelling choice but one that was made in the context of the larger story we’re trying to tell. When you’re telling a serialized show, you reach a point where you see the avenue it’s leading you towards and what’s going to happen there. You then have a choice — you can try to resist it and do something that doesn’t feel organic, or you can be true to it, even if it’s painful. And that’s what we did. We leave it to you and the audience to judge how you feel about it, but for us as storytellers, that was where it felt like it had to go. We didn’t want it to be exploitative, we didn’t want it to be about shock, that’s why it wasnt in the promos…. It was something we wanted to be emotional and real.

TVLINE | Will Neal’s death spark additional motivation for everyone, in the battle with the Wicked Witch?
HOROWITZ | It will. It will raise the stakes for the characters with regards to the Wicked Witch and what’s going on in Storybrooke, but even more importantly, on the larger canvas of how these characters are growing and interacting, for the story beyond this, this is a pivotal moment for many of them.

TVLINE | Best case scenario, would you have liked to shoehorn in a final scene between Henry and his father?
KITSIS | Of course.
HOROWITZ | In the sense of for the character, yes, that would have been great. But for the storytelling, this is the way we wanted to do it. That’s the tragedy of it, and that’s something they’re all going to have to deal with. But yes, I wish Neal could have had an emotional farewell with his son, like his father did with him, but that’s not how it played out.

TVLINE | Of course, some are choosing to see this as your endorsement of the Emma/Hook ‘ship as canon….
KITSIS | The thing is that with us, we ‘ship Once. We don’t take a particular side.
HOROWITZ | The truth is, we love the passion behind ‘shippers, behind what’s canon or not canon, what could be canon…. It’s fantastic. But the thing that’s sometimes hard to understand is that from our perspective, we’re looking at the show from a story we’re trying to tell.
KITSIS | We look at it as: In Emma, you have a character very similar to Regina. These are two characters with walls up, and the only one who got beneath them was Henry. So it’s about their pursuit of allowing love to come in again. They’re both very scarred by it and frightened of it, so for us it’s about watching Emma make a natural evolution to when she does decide to act upon it.

TVLINE | And, as you told me previously, Michael could come back for a flashback down the line….
KITSIS | Absolutely. We would love that.

TVLINE | But this is the last we’ve seen of him this season?
KITSIS | Oh, you never know…!

One of my issues with OUAT is the writers have limited imaginations when it comes to the emotional relationships between characters and their psychological makeup. There was so much they could have done with Baelfire - that they didn't choose to do.
Biggest waste of an interesting character I've seen to date, the last one was Dr. River Song on Doctor Who - who I wanted more of, instead I got a lot of the same companion arcs, to the point in which I'm wondering about genre writers imaginations when it comes to emotional human relationships. And it makes me want to seek out fanfic.