Once Upon a Time, Ep 7: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Last week’s episode of Once Upon a Time was a little slow, but they made up for it with a brilliant outing this week. We finally get to the bottom of who Sheriff Graham really was, and where many were suggesting that perhaps he was the Big Bad Wolf, he turned out to be the huntsman with a heart who spares Snow’s life when the queen hires him to find her and kill her.

Emma is ticked with Graham because she’s found out he’s sleeping with the mayor, and when he tries to tell her that he actually loves her instead, he skips the small talk and kisses her… and he suddenly sees flashes of the fairytale world. His glimpse leads to dreams where he starts to see even more, and when he wakes he wanders off and sees a white wolf that accompanies him in the fairy-tale world, one with a red eye and black eye. He turns to Mary, because he’d seen a flash of Snow White in the memory, and he recognizes her as Mary. Mary laughs it off and thinks he’s been talking to Henry, and tells him about the book. He goes to Henry and finds out more about the book, and Henry identifies him as the huntsman who spared Snow and had his heart ripped out by the queen. Graham follows the wolf to a crypt that’s pictured in the book, and with Emma, he enters the crypt to find his heart. Regina shows up and she and Emma have a fight before Graham declares he doesn’t need her, because he needs to feel something, and that’s not with her. Emma looks at him with new eyes, and where he went to the crypt to find an actual heart, he finds it metaphorically instead. And, for the first time, Emma sees his heart, too.

Meanwhile, in the fairytale world we see how the queen orchestrated the death of her husband and then finds a huntsman who cries over his kills to take out Snow. He can’t pull off the murder after he reads a note she’s written to the queen (where she says she’ll welcome her death if it means the queen will rule with compassion). He returns to the queen with the heart of a stag, and she catches him in the ruse and reaches into his chest and pulls out one glowing, ET-like, neon heart, and tells him that he’s now under her rule, and should he try anything, she just needs to squeeze his heart and she’ll kill him. She directs the guards to take him to her bedchamber. Clearly, he’s going to be a domestic pet.

In Storybrooke, after Emma and Graham walk away triumphantly, Regina enters the crypt and descends the stairs to find the very chamber of hearts that she kept in the fairytale world (another suggestion that the fairytale world exists in some way under Storybrooke). Realizing that through his self-emancipation Graham will no longer be in her mayoral bedchamber (and also piecing together that his link with Emma has allowed him to remember to fairytale world, and he’s not allowed to), she squeezes the heart, turning it to dust… and killing Graham in Emma’s arms.

Moments before Graham dies, he kisses Emma and she kisses him back, and he remembers absolutely everything EXACTLY the same way the sideways characters remembered everything in the sideways world about their real lives on Lost. It was in this moment that it became clear to me that Storybrooke is a sort of flash-sideways. This isn’t their real life; time doesn’t quite exist here and is fluid; the memories they all have seem to be generated in their own minds and don’t mesh with each other; the people they were in their former lives inform who they are in this one; when they remember everything, they die.

Perhaps Once Upon a Time is simply an extended explanation to Lost fans of what that sideways world was all along, to correct all those who thought THEY DIED IN THE PLANE CRASH. (They did not.)

And to think, I was actually going to stop with the Lost analogies this week.

Did You Notice?:
• The title of this episode is the same as a 1940 novel by Carson McCullers, considered one of the best books of the 20th century. The novel’s longevity and deserving title of “classic” is due to the voices she gives to the people who usually don’t have voices, those on the margins of 1930s society in Georgia. The book was written when she was only 23 years old.
• The Evil Queen lives in the Fortress of Solitude!!!
• Mary tells Emma that the flowers she just trashed are actually hers, and Emma doesn’t apologize or rush to take them out of the garbage. Maybe manners or etiquette or just plain human decency weren’t taught in her various foster homes.
• The camera lingers on the huntsman fashioning a whistle out of a reed and telling Snow to blow it should she ever be in trouble, so I’m assuming it actually calls the wolf to her. So we’ll probably see the wolf in a future flashback.

Lost references:
• See above.
• The horrible CGI on the deer was reminiscent of Lost
• Graham tells Mary that he knows her from “another life.” He didn’t add, “Bruh-thah.”

Ruby Red:
• Graham’s darts
• Ruby’s skirt
• Graham’s tie
• Red rose petals on Snow’s father’s grave
• Queen’s wine-coloured skirt on that FABULOUS outfit she was wearing (oh, if I had anything I could actually wear that to, what I would give for it…)
• One of the wolf’s eyes is red
• The queen’s full outfit when she’s talking to the huntsman, that I WISH I could wear. Her wardrobe was to die for in this episode.
• The door to Regina’s crypt
• Regina’s turtleneck when she shows up
• The huntsman’s very glowy heart

Any Questions?:
• What was the “spot of gardening” that Rumpelstitskin was doing? Is he secretly growing pot in the forest?
• In the letter, Snow recognizes that the queen is acting out of vengeance and says she knows the queen will never find other love because of her. What does that mean? (Still thinking it has something to do with a child…) The queen says, “I shared a secret with her, and she couldn’t keep it.” What does that mean? Did she tell Snow she was incapable of having children, and Snow said something to her father out of sympathy and her father denounced her to the kingdom or something, so now she’s untouchable?
• What are the other hearts the queen has in there? Does she have everyone’s? Can she kill anyone except for Emma?