'Once Upon A Time' Season 6 Spoilers: Co-Creators To Drop Half-Season Storyline Arcs

ABC's fairtytale drama "Once Upon a Time" will be moving away from its split-season storytelling template when it returns for its sixth season.

Co-creator Adam Horowitz shared the news at an ATX Television Festival panel for the coming Freeform series "Dead of Summer" saying Season 6 of "OUAT" will have "a 22-episode story as opposed to breaking it up into two [11-episode] halves."

Which means, as co-creator Edward Kitsis put it, "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.' We are… going back to that Season 1 mentality of small-town stories and smaller arcs."

The split-season storytelling template was introduced to the series back in its third season. The season opened with a trip to Neverland, while its second half focused on the Wicked Witch, Zelena (Rebecca Mader). It appeared again in Season 4 with "Frozen" as the introduction and then the Queens of Darkness, which included Maleficent (Kristin Bauer van Straten), Cruella (Victoria Smurfit) and Ursula (Merrin Dungey) in the next half. While Season 5 told the tale of Dark Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison), before traveling to the Underworld to battle it out with Hades (Greg Germann).

We have an idea of what the Season 6 plotline will be about based on the Season 5 finale, "Only You" and "An Untold Story." In the episodes, we saw the Charmings, Hook (Colin O'Donoghue) and Zelena accidentally travel to the realm of Untold Stories, where they run into Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll. Both characters find their way back to Storybrooke, with the former set to take Rumplestiltskin's (Robert Carlyle) place as this seasons bad boy.

Furthermore, Regina (Lana Parrilla) extracted and vanquished her evil side, which actually survived and is now existing separately from her. So in the coming season we will see Parrilla playing dual roles. It is a challenge that excites Parrilla, as she has to breathe life to two distinct characters — the Evil Queen and the more heroic Regina.

"So it's gonna be really fun to play both sides in a different way than I have in the previous five seasons 'cause I've always played two sides,"Parilla explained to Entertainment Weekly. "She's always been both, but she's never been split."