Salvaged Story / Once Upon a Time

• Toward the end of season 2, the crew got a lot of grief over Greg and Tamara's "anti-magic" gear, especially Tamara's taser incapacitating a wooden August. The season 3 premiere patches this up by revealing that unbeknownst to them, it all worked due to Peter Pan's magic.
• Ursula got a lot of flak in season 4 for being noticeably different to her original appearance. It was eventually revealed that she was only named after the goddess who appeared earlier in the show.
• The reveal that Marian has been Dead All Along and replaced by Zelena can be seen as this towards complaints of Regina and Robin sleeping together in 4A, while Marian was in a coma.
• For that matter, the fact that Zelena isn't dead, thus nullifying her seemingly-easy defeat and death and explaining why the Snow Queen's curse on Marian came back.
• Many viewers were furious how Gold went from being a Noble Demon to essentially being a caricature of himself in Season 4. Turns out his heart is being consumed by centuries of evil deeds to the point it would kill him, and also snuffing out what redeeming traits he had. It's up for debate how successful this went over.
• After many fans criticized how Regina’s happy ending has been revolving entirely around Robin Hood, the last couple episodes of Season 4 show her realizing that having the right man is far from the only thing her happy ending should be.
• Restoring Pinocchio to adult form in Season 4 seems like an apology to those who felt August got the shaft way back in Season 2. This time he remains an adult and reappears a lot more.
• Operation Mongoose seems like it was largely intended as a way for the writers to re-develop the Emma/Hook and Regina/Robin relationships, which were varying degrees of poorly developed the first time, in order to get more people behind them, probably based on the growing number of complaints that neither of them (especially Regina/Robin) make much sense. Regina and Robin were even developed in a much more condensed version of exactly how Snow and Charming were developed in season 1.
• In general, the fifth season appears to be addressing several of the complaints fans have made about the series, particularly the previous season.
  • A number of complaints about Robin's Angst? What Angst? attitude towards Zelena killing and impersonating his wife and essentially raping him were addressed in Season 5 — where Robin angrily chews out Zelena for what she did, as well as expressing some conflict about whether he should be happy or not that he has another child on the way.
  • Leroy's speech to Mary Margaret in the premiere about being sick of sitting on the sidelines was essentially the character acting as a mouth piece about fans' complaints about how Storybrooke characters have been pushed to the background to show off guest characters, except for the Charming clan and friends. To cap it off Belle, Granny, Leroy and his dwarfs accompany the Charmings to help save Emma from the Darkness. But ultimately subverted as Granny and the dwarfs barely appear in the arc at all.
  • Snow and Charming fans had felt that they have been losing more screen time, been stuck holding the Idiot Ball too much to move the plot, and feared their relationship with Emma was becoming overshadowed by Emma's relationships with Regina and Hook. The fifth season started with the couple asserting they would save their daughter no matter what. When the episode does not focus on them, it still shows them worrying over how they can save Emma. When many fans groaned that David seemingly fell for Arthur's con, the next episode showed him and Snow come up with a plan to reveal Arthur's true nature because they realized they needed to do what was best for Emma, which went a long way in counteracting the actions they took in 4B, which many of their fans found out of character and selfish.
  • While each new season introduces a new story and set of characters from fairy tales/literature/movies, there has been a growing number of fans who feel the new elements took over the plot and stole focus away from the core cast. However, when the King Arthur and Brave stories became big parts of the fifth season, the focus has so far stayed on the core cast, with King Arthur and Brave characters being used to further the core cast's development.
  • Belle, who had been getting more and more Out of Focus and becoming more of a Satellite Love Interest to Rumpelstiltskin/Mr. Gold as the series progressed, has been helping the rest of the cast save Emma, her budding friendship with Hook has given her another relationship outside of Gold for the first since probably Ruby, and she has so far been in most of the episodes in the fifth season, and actually had a speaking role in said episodes. And when her romance with Gold came back into the picture, she managed to hold her own with him as a character rather than just serve his purposes, making their relationship stronger than it has been in a long time, which is another saving throw for Rumbelle shippers.
  • "The Bear King" is mostly devoted to clearing up two infamous cases of What Happened to the Mouse? that the show had been suffering for a couple years, showing why Ruby disappeared and why Mulan wasn't with the Merry Men when they showed up again.
  • Likewise, the Season 5B premiere takes the opportunity to close a plot hole that had been dangling for almost the entire run of the show, revealing why Regina needed to rescue her father from Wonderland and got Jefferson trapped there.
  • "Labor of Love" takes on the long-standing fan complaint of the show inexplicably acting like "Mary Margaret" is Snow White's real name rather than just her identity under the Dark Curse, portraying her as feeling like that name belongs to a hero which she hasn't been in a while, and now takes up again.
  • "The Brothers Jones" wraps up another series-long plot hole: Henry didn't know the full story of the Evil Queen from the Once Upon a Time book because Regina had torn it out.
  • "Ruby Slippers" explains Toto's absence from the previous Oz flashbacks: in this version, Dorothy only got him after returning from her first trip there.
• "A Pirate's Life" addresses the reason why Hook is with Henry in Hyperion Heights and not with his new wife Emma, revealing that the Hook in HH is actually the version from the Wish Realm, who at first plots to kill the original Hook and replace him as Emma's husband, but then has a change of heart and decides to help Henry all the while looking for his long lost daughter.
• On a wider level, the fact that Seasons 6 and 7 seemed to be an attempt to return the show to something resembling the original premise was this for fans who felt that the show had strayed too far from what made it good in the first place.
• After the somewhat questionable decision to turn Lily's search for her father into an Aborted Arc at the end of Season 4 (due to the show-runners not being able to get the rights to the character they wanted, preventing him from appearing onscreen), the Season 7 finale does address the question in a line of dialogue, revealing his identity to be Zorro. Granted, how much of a saving throw this really is depends on how much you feel a line of dialogue works as a substitute for the Story Arc that could have spun out of that question.
• The lesbian romance between Robin and Alice in Season 7 was compared favorably with that between Ruby and Dorothy in one episode of Season 5, which had been criticized for being rushed, whereas Robin and Alice were given as much depth as heterosexual romances.
• The first hug between Emma and Regina in Season 6 was not well received by most fans, with many feeling that it was over too quickly and given very little importance by the episode, despite being a major steppingstone in the friendship between the two main leads. The fact that it was due to Regina finding out that Emma was engaged to Hook was also seen as cheapening what could have been a heartwarming moment. Their hug after reuniting in the Grand Finale was much better received, due to it feeling to many like a legit moment of friendship and being out of their joy at seeing each other again after years.