Since Season 3 of Once Upon A Time, the show has stuck to a unique format of telling stories that split seasons. As such, fans got a mini finale mid-season -- a winter finale -- and a season finale at the end of the 22 episodes. At the ATX Television Festival, co-creator Adam Horowitz revealed this format will change in Season 6.
The sixth season will have “a 22-episode story as opposed to breaking it up into two [11-episode] halves,” says Horowitz, according to Entertainment Weekly. This means that the show will focus on one longer story arc than two smaller sets of stories.
In the Season 5 finale, the ABC fairytale drama introduced two new faces: Sam Witwer as the evil warden and Hank Harris as the warden’s patient. The new paradigm of the show means the Hyde story will be told over the entire course of Season 6 instead of just the first 11 episodes.
“It’s not going to be ‘Hyde comes to town, we fight with him for 10 episodes, and then in the winter finale he dies and we move on,” says Horowitz to EW. “We are… going back to that Season 1 mentality of small-town stories and smaller arcs.”
As such, Season 6 will delve deeper into the characters portrayed by Harris and Witwer. “Where they’re from, who they are, and what they’re doing does tee up an element of what we’re doing for season 6,” Horowitz told EW. “It’s more like opening a door, rather than introducing the whole of what season 6 will be. Hopefully we’re giving you a little taste of what’s to come.”
Despite having a new structure, fans can still expect plenty of flashbacks to other realms. “The paradigm for what season six will be is a little bit different than what we've done the last few years, and we're very excited by it. It involves our core group of characters, Storybrooke and flashing back to other realms,” said Horowitz to The Hollywood Reporter. “It doesn't necessarily mean a journey to someplace else. I think at the end of the finale you'll get a little bit of a taste of how we're going to approach it — it's both a little something old and something new.”
Once Upon a Time Season 6 returns to ABC this fall.
