Once Upon a Time Ep 3: Snow Falls

Sorry for the lateness of this; I was hoping to post my reviews of Once Upon a Time the night they aired, but I was away this weekend and didn’t get back home until late. We’ve had a lot of discussions this week, and I’ve received several notes on my Facebook page and personal emails, and a couple of things came up more than once: people wondered if the flashbacks would continue now that we’d caught up to the Queen’s curse, and one person mentioned that many websites were referring to Snow White’s alternate character as “Sister” Mary Margaret and he wondered if she was a nun.

I believe the flashbacks are essential to this show, and predicted they’d keep moving back and would begin to incorporate other characters so we could see simultaneous points of view, and it appears to be the way they’re going to do it. As to the second comment, that was answered this week when she said to Emma, “I’m a teacher, not a nun.” I don’t know where people got that idea from, other than the fact Mary Margaret has a very religious name, and was wearing a cross in her first episode (a fact that makes her religious in my books, not a nun). I’m also wondering if the fact she works at a Catholic school lends itself to her being called Sister (I didn’t attend a Catholic school but perhaps anyone who did could enlighten me: were the teachers all called “Sister” even if they weren’t nuns?)

Like many sci-fi/genre shows, Once Upon a Time is filmed in Vancouver and surrounding British Columbia. Usually that setting lends itself to the gloomy atmosphere that’s being generated for darker sci-fi shows, like Battlestar Galactica, Fringe, The X-Files, Supernatural, and many other shows that call BC home. But for Once Upon a Time, the bright, sunny forests in BC are transformed into a fairytale land, and it’s hard to believe these are the same rainy forests that Mulder and Scully were constantly running through, or that they doubled as other planets on BSG. That is one amazing province.

So! In this episode Mary Margaret is out on a date with SARK!! from Alias who, either because of his weird hair or because he’s playing a dick, didn’t seem as attractive to me as he was on Alias. As he stares at Ruby’s ass, Mary realizes that maybe he’s not the one. The poor girl comes off as a spinster simply because her soul is tied to one person and one person only, and until she finds him she’ll never find true love.

In the flashback, we see how Snow and Prince Charming (called so ironically by Snow… his real name is James) first met, when she was actually a roadside thief who was trying to steal enough things to barter her way to another realm and get away from the Evil Queen, who was trying to kill her. We see the two of them slowly learn to trust each other, while she forces him to rethink his contractual marriage to a royal dullard (played by Anastasia Griffith, who I knew as the sister from season 1’s Damages). He saves her from the Queen’s men, while she saves him from trolls. We all know how this will end, but it doesn’t stop the scenes from being suspenseful and electrifying.

Meanwhile, in the real world John Doe (Prince Charming) wakes up when Mary Margaret reads to him, and because of his amnesiatic state he moves instinctively through the forest to find the woman from his other life. It’s interesting that he’s the guy with amnesia who has enough trace memory to get himself to the toll bridge (as opposed to the troll bridge, ha!) yet everyone else in Storybrooke has amnesia that’s so bad they can’t remember anything.


Highlights:
• John Doe grabbing Mary Margaret’s hand.
• The trolls. CREEPY!!!
• Mary Margaret’s kiss bringing John Doe back to life.

Did You Notice?
• Sark’s name is Dr. Whale. In the other world, is he the whale who swallowed Pinocchio? If Jiminy Cricket can become a real person, couldn’t a whale?
• Snow White loves cinnamon in her hot chocolate. Cinnamon used to be a gift that would be brought overseas and given to monarchs. It’s taken from the bark of trees, which is interesting given Snow’s link to the forests.
• I’m not sure what accent David Anders (Dr. Whale) is going for here. He’s actually an American who often plays Brits, and he seems to be flipping back and forth from scene to scene.
• So, how many Lost fans snickered when Snow White got “caught in a net”? ;)
• I liked tough-chick Snow White a LOT, and it’s interesting how innocent and pure and chaste she is when the show opens and she’s in the coffin, as opposed to the opinionated badass she is in the woods.
• That forest wallpaper is in the diner, too. I think the local Far Far Away wallpaper store had a sale.
• On the walls in the hospital are the same butterflies and flowers that were in Hurley’s mental institution.
• Leroy, the angry bearded guy who is the janitor at the hospital, was Grumpy in the Fairy Tale World.
• Walter, the security guard at the hospital, was Sleepy in the FTW (hence the joke that he was sleeping on the job).
• When Snow White and Charming got to the troll bridge, I was really hoping someone would be standing there and would ask, “What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow??”
• The troll is clearly a Kenny Rogers fan: at one point he says, “The time for dealin’ is done.” Which means now it’s time for counting!
• Storybook James is Storybrooke David. Both are names of kings associated with the bible.

Questions:
• As we’ve been discussing, this show is clearly going to turn many of the traditional fairytales on their heads. What did Snow do to the Queen? As I said in the comments last week, I wonder if it had something to do with a child?
• The sheriff says “this is my world” when he’s in the forest. Is this a hint of who he could be in the other world? Is he the Big Bad Wolf? (He tracked Little Red Riding Hood in the forest.) Could he be the huntsman who spared Snow’s life? Was he a tree?
• I’m surprised more people aren’t questioning the weirdness of the Mayor’s actions… as Emma says, she just happened to find the wife at this very moment? And in a town where the population appears to be about 570, how is it possible that a man went “missing” for this long without his wife looking for him? She didn’t even THINK to look through hospitals in all that time? Sorry… I don’t buy that everyone else would buy that.