What Happened to my Once Upon a Time Posts??

I get a lot of emails from people who read my blog (and thanks to everyone who takes the time to do so!) And in the past three weeks, my blog-related emails have probably quadrupled. Has there suddenly been a run on my Finding Lost books? (No, but you can make that happen… go here!) Has Joss Whedon cited me as his critical inspiration when working on The Avengers? (Well, not out loud, but…) No.

I stopped blogging about Once Upon a Time. And people kinda noticed.

So, I should have just come here and explained why I stopped instead of answering that question individually over and over and over again in emails, but I didn’t. And so here I am, explaining to all of you. Don’t worry… there’s no sinister reason why I didn’t blog on it.

I last blogged on the show with “Red-Handed,” written by the wonderful Jane Espenson. The following week was “Heart of Darkness.” I was out that night with my family, and the next night running around with all of the children’s extracurricular activities. I finally watched it Tuesday night, I think, and it was really late at night and I had come down with the office cold (that has officially gone around the office 42 times now, and made everyone sick numerous times as it just keeps evolving and changing), so I figured I’d do it the following night.

But then, I completely forgot. Because, as those who follow me on Facebook know, my family left for the Dominican for a week-long (much-needed) vacation on March 23, and we were packing and getting things ready for that every evening, and it just fell by the wayside.

And… there’s the reason why I missed the March 25 episode: I was in the Dominican. So, with the conviction that upon my return on March 30 I’d watch the episode from the 25th and do a quick blog on both, I sat back and enjoyed my vacation, even though — sadly, this is absolutely true — the Kardashians showed up the last day we were there because they’re filming the next season of the show at the resort we were staying at. Their production team was there the previous day, swarming the poolside and flicking their cigarette butts all around while little children were playing in the pools. It made for a good story after, but I honestly thought our timing couldn’t have been better. We checked out as they were checking in.

ANYWAY. So then we came home, very tired, put the kids to bed, and then we passed out in our own bed, not even turning on the TV. (You know Nikki’s tired when…)

The next morning I flipped on the TV and clicked on the PVR button, and it wouldn’t show the PVR guide for some reason. I reset the PVR, and when everything was back up and working I clicked again, and there it was. Everything seemed to be in order – the last things recorded were The Soup and Fringe, which should be the last things recorded on a Friday night. (Yes, I know The Soup moved to Wednesdays but because it’s been a Friday night tradition for so long, we still record it then.) But then I paused, and felt a cold shiver go down my spine. “Why is there only one Fringe??” I asked my husband. The panic began rising as I clicked on it and realized it was dated the week before. As was The Soup. And Community and 30 Rock and OH MY GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING??

I’ll tell ya what happened. Bell PVRs (this is Canadian speak for DVRs or TiVOs) have a very limited shelf life. Our last one pooped out one day after our two-year agreement ended. This one has apparently given up a week after the warranty ended. Well played, Bell. Well played. Maybe I should look into Rogers.

Anyway, sure enough, it appeared the last things my PVR had recorded were on March 23rd – the day we left – and (HORRORS!!) it had just shut itself down. For the week. It wasn’t full – despite my copious TV viewing, it’s a 200-hour hard drive and still had a good 50 hours open on it – it just turned itself off. And now I have to manually update it once a week so the guide keeps going forward. But long story short, everything I had set to record that week was gone. The new Fringe. Downton Abbey. 30 Rock. Modern Family. The freakin’ season opener of Mad Men. The Big Bang Theory. Saturday Night Live. Awake. South Park. Canada's Got Talent. The season finale of Alcatraz. Community. Ringer. Grimm. (Behold all the TV I watch and don’t have any time to blog about… it’s because I’m always about 2 weeks behind on everything and then it’s too late to write about it. Since then I've added about five new things to it.)

And… Once Upon a Time. Sigh.

This past weekend I finally sat down with my daughter and watched the magnificent “Hat Trick,” with the two of us throwing out guesses of who the guy was (I guessed Mad Hatter as soon as he was holding tea and we were both squealing when it turned out to be him – I’ve passed on my love of Alice in Wonderland to her) by streaming it on the network’s site, and then flipped back over to the TV to see “The Stable Boy.”

So, I’m finally caught up. And while I’m actually out of town again this weekend (I’m giving a paper at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College on Saturday on Lost and issues of faith on the show), I’m hoping to be able to post something on Once Upon a Time soon after, and finally be back up to date with everything. But very, very briefly:



“Heart of Darkness” :
• I loved the idea that the one thing Rumpel can’t bottle is love, but that he manages to do it with Snow and Charming.
• The image of Snow White singing to the bird like in the Disney movie, only to try to kill it, was hilarious.
• If that height chart in the police station is correct, Ginnifer Goodwin is taller than me! But she looks so tiny…
• I was surprised to see Jiminy Cricket; we haven’t seen that guy in AGES and I’d like him to come back more regularly. I’m hoping in S2 we get a backstory of his life with Geppetto.
• The writer comes to Henry and tells him he’s here to try to show other people the light. Intriguing!
• He tells Henry that people like us go on faith; others need proof. He and Henry are the Lockes… they need to convert the Jacks.



“Hat Trick”
• Holy hotness, Mad Hatter. Desmond, you may have been replaced. (I laughed out loud when my 7yo daughter said, “Mommy… don’t you think he’s kind of ugly?” with her nose all wrinkled up in disgust. I said, "Actually, I think he's quite handsome!" She looked at me like I had the Worst. Taste. Ever.)
• Those hats were divine.
• This episode was intriguing because of the fact the fairytale being referenced wasn’t clear, and the guessing game took much longer. What a WONDERFUL way to retell the Wonderland story.
• Wonderland!!!! Fantastic. PLEASE have more of that.
• Why the veil over the queen? What could be hiding there?
• How did the Hatter disappear? (Did he just vanish and reappear in his hat-making room again?) Please please please please be back.



“The Stable Boy”
• Could someone just give an Emmy to the casting agent who discovered a little girl who not only looks exactly like a young Ginnifer Goodwin, but talks like her, too? That girl was brilliant.
• The actress who plays Regina has a very mature look about her (and her deep voice always makes her seem older) but I was entirely convinced when she was playing the younger version of herself.
• We finally discover that what she hates about Snow is that she caused her to leave behind her one true love and marry Snow’s father. I actually thought in the scene in the barn that it would be more than that. I thought the queen would watch her mother kill her lover, and then her own magic would bubble up so strongly in her that she’d turn and kill her mother. Then she would blame Snow for both deaths. (The constant mention of how important a woman’s mother is in her life really felt like it was leading to that.)
• Kathryn’s alive! I guess this helps Mary get out of jail free, but what happened to Kathryn, what will she tell everyone, will the curse lift, and how the heck could Kathryn’s DNA be on that heart if it turned out not to be hers? Did Regina fix the records?

I can’t wait until this week!

Coming soon: My apologies for not covering Fringe. ;)

Once Upon a Time: Red-Handed

“… So your granny’s kind of intense.”

Best line of the night!

This week’s episode was the long-awaited backstory of Red Riding Hood, who is also our favourite waitress in Storybrooke, Ruby. We all know the traditional story: Little Red Riding Hood went out into the woods to take some baked goods to Grandmother’s house. Along the way she meets the Big Bad Wolf, and he finds out where she’s going. He overtakes her, gets to the grandmother’s house and eats Granny, then dresses like her. RRH comes into the house, eventually surmises that that’s not Granny (mostly because of her overly large facial features, which she slowly details one… by… one…) and the wolf leaps out of the bed and eats her, too. Just then a woodsman comes along and slices the wolf open, and Granny and Red emerge unscathed (as you do).

Or there’s the version where Red runs around the room as the wolf chases her and the woodsman gets the wolf and cuts him open and Granny comes out. Or there’s the version where Red discovers the wolf, the woodsman arrives, and they find Granny tied up in the closet (later generations of children have the cleaned-up versions of fairytales). Or there’s the version in Hoodwinked where a bunch of cops catch everyone in the act and take each of the four people in for questioning to get to the bottom of what the bloody hell was happening at Granny’s house, considering there’s a tarted-up little girl, a caustic Granny, an “evil” wolf and a crazed woodsman.

And then… there’s this version, the most sinister of them all, and one that FINALLY made the Little Red Riding Hood story interesting again. For… what if the wolf – who always seemed man-like, walking on two legs with his little smoking jacket and hat – wasn’t really a wolf? (I recommended the book The Book of Lost Things a few weeks ago, and in it the wolves of the fairytales are becoming human and beginning to walk on their back legs like men and talking.) In the original version the wolf seems almost sexualized, as if he’s after Red not just to eat her, but because he’s attracted to her, and Red talks to him in a way she shouldn’t and tells him too much.

Kind of like if a boy came up to Red’s window and began smooth-talking her through the shutters. Setting up Peter (get it? Peter and the Wolf?) to be the Big Bad was brilliant, but there was something about him that I thought was innocent the whole time. I had my money on Granny, but I didn’t see the Red thing coming. What a great twist.

This episode was written by the luminous Jane Espenson (another one of that small group of TV writers whose name appearing at the beginning of an episode generally makes me squeal with delight) and while some of the overall plot was a little predictable, the unpredictable twists were wonderful.

I couldn’t help but think of my other favourite werewolves – and no, Jake isn’t one of them… thank god THIS werewolf doesn’t run around topless – namely Oz from Buffy and George from Being Human. As soon as Red was chaining Peter to the tree I thought, OMG, she’s not protecting others from him; she’s leashing him to one place where he can’t move (and yes, I realize she did this entirely not knowing what she was getting into). And I remembered how both Oz and George put themselves into cages for a couple of days every month. And, like Red, how Oz has absolutely no memory of anything he’s done while he’s wolfy.

What was interesting, too, about this take on the Red story is that in the original, a male wolf overpowers the wolf and a male lumberjack saves their lives. In this one, Granny is anything but a delicate sort, and Red is quite sure of herself and is absolutely fearless.

Over in Storybrooke, Henry has figured out exactly who Ruby is (of course), even goading her into asking if she might want to work as a courier taking things in baskets to people on foot, and Emma invites her to come work as an assistant at the station. While the fairytale world flashback is showing Snow and Red tracking the Big Bad, in Storybrooke Emma, Mary Margaret, and Ruby are all tracking a different kind of Big Bad: they all think Katharine disappeared under suspicious circumstances and are combing the woods for any clues. Meanwhile, David loses his mind for about 24 hours and can’t remember where he was or what he was doing during that time, and suspicion has firmly been planted on him.

While Ruby’s not a wolf in Storybrooke, notice how she’s still always on the hunt, flirting with every person who comes through the diner and always knowing where everyone is – whenever Emma says someone’s gone missing, Ruby’s always known exactly where that person is. Now, she uses those superior tracking skills to hunt for anything remiss in the woods, and immediately finds a box that contains a human heart. (I called it the moment she uncovered it.)

Now. Who keeps boxes of human hearts? We’ve all seen Regina’s crypt full of ’em. And how is it possible Mary Margaret’s fingerprints are on it? My theory at this point is that it’s not actually Katharine’s heart (Emma said they’ve sent it out for tests) but someone from the fairytale world, and the box was handled by Snow White somehow – maybe she found it in Regina’s care and took it and buried it somewhere. Maybe it’s her father’s heart. Maybe it’s the heart of someone else – remember how the Evil Queen keeps saying Snow took someone who mattered more than anything to her? And that’s how Mary Margaret’s fingerprints are on it.

But time will tell. I just hope that look on David’s face was disbelief that someone would set up Mary Margaret, and not a look that he actually thinks she did it. I would stop liking him immediately if that were the case.

I thought this was a really good episode. Meghan Ory, who plays Red, put in a great performance (like Lee Arenberg’s Grumpy last week, I’m thrilled by the side players stepping up and giving fantastic performances) and the scene where she discovers that she is the wolf actually had my 7-year-old daughter moaning with sadness, she was so taken by Ory’s devastated performance.

Speaking of which, I was thinking I should probably include my daughter’s review of the episode, since her take on it is very different from mine. (I forget that she doesn’t have the TV viewing experience I do, and the twists each week BLOW HER LITTLE MIND because she’s never seen anything like it.) She summed up this week’s episode with “scary,” and her favourite line was Snow’s understatement that I quoted at the top (probably because I laughed out loud when Snow said it... it was such an Espenson line). But don’t worry, dear readers: as a seasoned TV viewer I could tell when the big scary moments were going to come, and covered her eyes (and she let me, thank goodness).

And finally, I’ve mentioned in previous posts that the colour red is really prominent in Storybrooke and in the fairytale world. I wonder if the red is some subconscious way that these characters help prevent their monster side from coming out? Could that be the reason Ruby is such a sweet character? Have we ever seen her NOT wearing red?

Once Upon a Time: Dreamy

What an episode! I’d heard that Amy Acker was going to be on Once Upon a Time this week and I was definitely looking forward to it, and while she was great, Lee Arenberg as Dreamy/Grumpy was truly extraordinary. We’ve seen him throughout the season, grumbling about one thing or another, but nothing could have prepared us for the backstory and performance we saw this week. I’m going to focus on the Dreamy/Grumpy story and leave the Katharine/Emma/David story behind this week. We’ll be able to pick it up next week when it becomes more focal again.

This episode was wonderfully written by Kitsis & Horowitz, and it showed (it’s like when you used to see the “written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse” tag at the beginning of Lost, or saw Joss Whedon’s name at the beginning of Buffy). Not only did it create a great standalone story about Grumpy, but it tied in other stories (Belle and Rumpelstiltskin, Snow and Charming, the Blue Fairy who we’d previously seen talking to Jiminy Cricket) and pulled in the key symbols of the series.

As I mentioned several weeks back, one of those symbols is stars. Emma has a star on her keychain, you can always see stars on buildings or painted onto walls or made of construction paper. Until now the episode that had the most prominent display was the Jiminy Cricket one, which is still one of my faves, but this week outdid that one. For this episode was about dreams. And if a dream is a wish, you make it upon a star.

In the fairytale world, we meet Nova (Amy Acker, who has not aged a day since Angel), who is a fairy godmother wannabe who is currently schlepping around fairy dust for the other fairy godmothers, but she’s a klutz who tends to make a mess of things. And what is fairy dust? It’s ground-up diamonds. And where do the diamonds come from? The diamond mines where the dwarfs work, happily because they believe they have no other purpose in life. And where do dwarfs come from? Eggs.

Didn’t see that one coming. Brilliant.

But one egg is different; one egg accidentally had fairy dust spilled on it (by Nova) and therefore the dwarf inside it isn’t like the other kids. One of these kids is doin’ his own thing. And that thing is dreaming; dreaming of a life outside the mines, desiring more than what is his purpose in life.

And so, when he picks up his axe and watches the handle for his name, it comes as no surprise that he’s Dreamy. The axe, we’re told, never lies, making it a dwarf version of a Sorting Hat. (But seriously… poor Dopey! Then again, he doesn’t seem to mind… because, you know, the dopiness and all…) And with that he begins longing for something more.

When he crosses paths with Nova he recognizes her instantly as the one he’d seen before his hatching, and she tells him to come up on the hill to watch fireflies. That scene was written and shot just for the dreamers in the audience. Who among us wouldn’t want to sit on a hill at midnight, with the moon lighting our way as the lights of the kingdom twinkle below us as fireflies light up the skies around us? That image was glorious. I’m sure other people will call it cheesy; I loved it.

On that hill, he and Nova declare their love for one another, and both decide to follow their dreams: they’ll find a boat and sail around the world together, finding it and being together.

And just as that happened in the fairy tale world, over in Storybrooke we find Leroy, the town drunk who long ago gave up on his dreams and found solace at the bottom of a glass of scotch. He has no time for anyone… until he meets Astrid, a nun prone to mistakes that have cost the convent dearly, and who, for some reason even he can’t explain, brings out the best in him. (Notice that both “Nova” and “Astrid” are named related to stars; they make one think of supernova or astral.) He falls for her, and tells her about his pipe dream of sailing around the world in a boat. Astrid giddily replies, “You can do anything as long as you can dream it,” the very same thing Dreamy had said to Nova in the fairytale world (FTW) when she said she wanted to be a fairy godmother. So, in order to find a way to be close to her, he agrees to sell candles… which happen to be sources of light, little twinkling stars/fireflies/diamonds of light. He does this with Mary Margaret, the other town pariah. And, of course, they don’t sell a single thing. (Interestingly, the candle stand is part of a fair to support local miners, and not only was Leroy a diamond miner in the FTW, but Mary Margaret lived with… seven of them.)

Storybrooke is a very, VERY judgmental place. They have no time for Leroy, but that’s because he’s been biting their heads off for the past who-knows-how-many years. But now they have no time for Mary Margaret, despite the fact she was the town sweetheart for so many years. It seems a little cruel, but then again, we can’t forget these are fairytale creatures, and in the FTW, there are good guys and bad guys, and very few in between. In the Grimm fairytales, there were no uncertain characters with complex backstories that made you think. They were either evil or pure. So, these people have no middle ground. Mary Margaret was pure a few days ago. Now she’s not, and since they don’t understand anything that’s not black and white, she is evil. But looking at the actual FTW, we’re starting to see there was a lot more grey there than in the storybooks we read as kids.

For just as Dreamy is sneaking off, the other dwarfs catch him, and remind him that he has a responsibility. Then the Blue Fairy tells him that if Nova leaves with him, she’ll lose her wings. Together, they’ll be happy, but separately, they’ll do a lot of good for the world. And so, he tells Nova he can’t be with her, sending her off to a life of sadness, as he returns to the mines. Where, when he’s handed a new axe, it reads Grumpy. And with that, his fate is sealed.

As I mentioned, this episode brought in other stories that didn’t at first seem connected to Grumpy’s backstory, but actually fit in perfectly. We get a surprise reappearance of Belle, still wearing the same dress she’d been in when she said goodbye to Rumpelstiltskin. She’s either stopped at a tavern on her way home (probably just before the queen kidnapped her), or she’s working as a bar wench. She acts as the catalyst for Dreamy, urging him to go find Nova, and it’s because of her that he had his moment on the hill. She’s loved (Rumpel) and lost, and doesn’t want him to make the same mistake. Over in Storybrooke, it’s Gold — the other half of that couple — who refuses to buy Leroy’s boat and help him make the money for the nuns. Of course, if Gold hadn’t done that, Leroy wouldn’t have been forced to take matters into his own hands.

This episode was about dreams, and showed the two sides of a dream: the good kind – the kind where you wish upon a star and set a goal and go for it, living out your dream and becoming a happier person for it; and the negative kind, the “pipe dream” that it outside your reach, a goal that’s created a false hope you can never quite reach. Dreamy has wonderful dreams, as does Nova, but the reality of the world won’t allow them to live them out. Dreams are things that you can wish upon a star for; it’s other people who usually tell you what you’re following is nothing better than a useless pipe dream. People try to hold them down, but in Storybrooke they fight back.

When Leroy can’t sell his candles, he takes matters into his own hands, finding a way to make candles a necessity. And just as he fulfills his promise to Astrid, once again becoming her hero as he’d been in the FTW, the camera pulls back to reveal the town walking around with their candles, lights twinkling against the sky the same way they had one magical night in the fairytale world.

Dreams can come true, after all. You can do whatever you want, if you can just dream it.

Once Upon a Time: "What Happened to Frederick"

When we last left Prince Charming, he was leaving the castle on the morn of his wedding, determined to find Snow White and convince her that he’s the one for her. What he doesn’t know is that she already believes that, but the king had threatened to hurt Charming if she didn’t tell him to buzz off and convince him that she didn’t love him. And so, with Abigail on her way to marry a prince, we begin this week’s story.

I’m not sure if it was always the writers’ intention to make Katherine/Abigail a really good person, or if the fan reaction to her was so positive they had to turn Abigail around, but I’m thinking the former. Katherine was always likeable from the start, but Abigail came off as cold and distant. Now we know why: she was in love with Frederick, who died saving her father’s life and was turned into a gold statue. I was a little worried that she was actually tricking Charming somehow, asking him to complete an impossible task knowing he would die doing it, but it was good to see that she wasn’t tricking him at all.

The Guardian of the Lake was a cross between the Lady of the Lake of King Arthur legend (a woman that would rise up out of the lake, although she was a good entity in that story, if I recall correctly, and was usually just an arm holding a sword aloft), and a Siren, which is what Charming eventually surmises she is. But he defeats her by knowing that her fake love isn’t the real thing, and only a man who has experienced true love can spot the phony one.

Over in Storybrooke, the same thing is happening. Katherine is at first upset that David has been with Mary behind her back, until she looks hard at the photo of the two of them together. Like Charming, she can spot true love, and knows that hers was the fake one. She wants the real thing, and is willing to let him go. Just as Abigail wished Charming the best, she wishes David the best… but the mayor won’t have THAT, and steals the letter that she leaves behind. But when Regina burns the letter, what exactly does that do? Did it actually erase Katherine somehow? When Storybrooke Frederick reaches the car (which, expectedly, had ended up in a ditch just short of the town sign), she’s gone. What happened?

Meanwhile, we see the new stranger in town a little more. He manages to put Henry’s book back together and get it back over to him, and he has a name: August W. Booth. (The W = Wayne.) I checked the Brothers Grimm page on Wikipedia and did a quick search for August, thinking that was a secret name for one of them, and while it wasn’t, there was indeed an August connection: The Brothers Grimm had collected up the various stories for their legendary collection from local oral histories and stories, and were helped along by their friend, August von Hauxthausen, with whom Jacob Grimm had gone to law school. Fans speculated when he first showed up that perhaps he was actually one of the Grimm brothers, but perhaps he’s someone who simply helps the process along by collecting the stories and seeing that it stays in one piece, without actually being the author of the tales. I know I’m intrigued. In his scene with Emma at the wishing well he expounded on the magical properties of water, and how the water will always lead you back to what you’d lost. Interestingly, we saw him washing the pages of Henry’s book… was he dousing each page in the water of the well that appears to be drawn from the fairytale world itself?

And then there’s poor David and Mary Margaret. That particular storyline was heartbreaking (my 7-year-old daughter, new to such things, gasped audibly when Mary said, “We can’t be together” and said, “I’m gonna die, Mummy, I’m gonna die…” as she clutched her chest dramatically). I was so sad to see it happen that way, but we know they will find their way back to one another. (But honestly, GRANNY telling her she should be ashamed of herself? Harsh… and so sad…)

Another great episode. What I love most about Once Upon a Time is that it’s slowly putting the fairytale world story together, but trusts that we’re willing to be patient and wait it out (hence the Belle story being introduced and then left, as they do every week). We know where the Snow White/Charming story ends up – they get married and live happily ever after… for a year – so we know he won’t be killed by the king. Knowing that, we can simply sit back and enjoy the story as it unfolds.

But as for Storybrooke, that’s not a story that’s been told in the pages of a book; it’s still unfolding. OUAT continues to be a show that gives us stories of the week, but ones that are inextricably linked to one another.

Once Upon a Time: "Skin Deep"

In this week’s wonderful episode, “Skin Deep,” we get the long-awaited appearance of Emilie de Ravin, still curiously using her Australian accent (but considering the vast number of accents in the fairytale world, perhaps it’s appropriate she should bring a new one to the mix). In case you’re thinking she can’t actually do an American accent, check out Roswell, where she played the annoying Tess, who spoke with a perfect American accent, if I recall correctly.

Written by Jane Espenson, “Skin Deep” was a very well-wrought retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Originally a French fairytale, in the original a young girl lives with her father and two wicked sisters, and the father loses his wealth to bad debts, until he hears that one of his ships has returned and he might still have some assets on it. He travels to find the ship, and his two older daughters tell him they want lavish gifts, but Belle, his youngest, only wants a single rose. The ship isn’t what he thought it was, and he stays at a castle on the way home and picks a rose from a garden that belongs to the Beast. The Beast says he can give the rose to Belle, but he must return as the Beast’s servant. The man goes home, and his daughter decides to go to the castle in his place. She loves the Beast as a friend, but dreams at night of a handsome prince. Eventually the Beast lets her go home to her family to visit them but when she returns, he’s lying near death from grief over losing her, and as she cries over him, her tears fall on him and he’s transformed into the handsome prince. In the Disney version many of us are familiar with, the story is altered to remove the sisters and add a jealous suitor, Gaston, who tries to kill the Beast.

This version pays homage to the others. The father’s name is originally Maurice. In this one, in Storybrooke, he’s Moe French (Moe being short for Maurice, and French alluding to the language it was originally written in). He sells roses, which is what got him into trouble in the first place (just as it gets him into trouble here), and Gaston is turned into a rose when he dares to challenge Rumpelstiltskin.

Claire Bear Belle delivers a wonderful speech about how she sacrificed herself because it’s so rare in the fairytale world that any woman is given the opportunity to be the hero (which is the case), where Mr. Gold tells Emma that bad things happen to bad people, also something that’s common in fairytales but more ambiguous in Storybrooke.

In this episode we get the revelation many of us have suspected since Mr Gold first walked into the mayor’s apple orchard – that he knows exactly who he is, and like the mayor, remembers the fairytale world. Where he’s wrong is in thinking he’s the one with all the power, for once again, despite him being the man who can find a price for everything, she is the one who knows everything, and is keeping Belle captive in Storybrooke when he thinks she’s actually dead.

Robert Carlyle put in a brilliant performance, both as the grieving Mr Gold who shows up the mayor, beats the local florist, deals out of anguish, and then finally reveals himself to get back his one token to remember Belle; and as Rumpelstiltskin, who starts off as his gleefully mischievous and evil self and begins to fall under the thrall of the lovely Belle, finding love where he didn’t expect to, and then going mad with fury when he thinks she’s betrayed him. The scene where she defiantly tells him that all he’ll end up with is an empty heart and a chipped cup (which is actually the case now) is beautifully done, both by de Ravin and Carlyle. This is the second episode where the writers have humanized Rumpelstiltskin, and both have been highlights of the season.

Highlight: Belle: “Why do you spin so much?”
Rumpel: “I like to watch the wheel. Helps me forget.”
Belle: “Forget what?”
Rumpel: “Guess it worked.”
LOL!

Did You Notice:
• The homage to Game of Thrones? Not only does the episode open with the camera panning over maps of the kingdom and music that’s very similar to GoT’s opening theme, but it immediately cuts to Storybrooke, where the florist is called Game of Thorns. Haha!
• David is reading Anna Karenina, which [spoiler alert] not only plays into his own situation – Anna is torn between two men and eventually one of them convinces him to leave her husband and run away with him, a twist on what’s happening with David and Mary Margaret – but it also plays into the story the Queen tells Rumpel at the end, since when Anna runs away with the Count she is shunned by society (the way the queen says Belle’s father shunned her), and she kills herself, just as the queen says Belle did.
• At the beginning when Belle’s father was scared of the ogre, was anyone expecting Shrek to be standing on the other side of the door? No? Just me?
• Just as Rumpelstiltskin takes Belle (which means beauty) away from her father in the fairytale world, he takes away Mr French’s beautiful things (his roses) in Storybrooke.
• Geppetto’s parents hang in Rumpelstiltskin’s dining room.
• I couldn’t help but wonder if Mr French’s roses were the offspring of Gaston.
• I also can’t help looking around scenes like where Ruby, Mary, and Ashley go to the bar and wonder who the fairytale creatures are around them.
• Sneezy is running the convenience store. We last saw him busting Henry when Hansel and Gretel set him up.
• The queen’s umbrella is divine. Seriously, I want to know the Goth clothing and accessories website she uses. It was like a creepy spiderweb.
• The rectangular windows in the jail were like the ones in the castle.
• The queen refers to “a certain mermaid,” hinting at an Ariel story to come.
• I loved the title of this episode, and the play on words it created.

Once Upon a Time: "7:15 AM" and "Food of the Poisonous Tree"

I feel like I start every blog with an apology these days, but this week has been a particular whirlwind, and I've sort of taken the week off. Hence nothing on Once Upon a Time, Alcatraz, or Fringe (the Angel posts were something I did altogether at the beginning of January and just post-dated them to go live one at a time). I've been out of town for part of this week, and then returned home and my husband went away (we actually just missed each other at the airport) so it's been a very busy week for me.

But this afternoon I sat down and caught up on Once Upon a Time with my daughter (she hadn't seen the Hansel and Gretel one, so I showed her, and at the beginning I said, "I can't figure out why the shopkeeper who busts Henry is sneezing like that's significant, yet they never say why..." and no sooner were the words out of my mouth than I realized, "It's Sneezy!" How did I not catch that the first time around?)

We both loved "7:15 AM." It's the first time we watched one together where I hadn't seen it in advance (I like to vet them first) and so both of us were chanting, "Kiss him... kiss him..." every time Mary saw David, and when they finally DID kiss, we were cheering like hopeless romantics on the couch. You know, I've said this before, but for as much as we all loved the mysteries and science of Lost, every time there was a tragically romantic scene on that show (think Penny and Desmond) I was head over heels in love with the show. It just hits you in a different spot. We can follow all the twists and turns of Season 6, but nothing touched me like Ab Aeterno, where we saw Richard Alpert's backstory. The Constant was a mindbending work of genius, but my favourite part was the phone call at the end.

So watching this episode was so much fun, so joyful, and so rewarding because of how much heart it had, I truly loved it. We were both excited to see Red in the other world (that's the first time we've seen her over there) and can I just say that without the Amy Winehouse hair and makeup, she's quite beautiful. And Stealthy the dwarf! As soon as Grumpy said, "Stealthy!" I thought, "Uh oh... that's not one we know..." To think, Snow White was almost living with eight of them. Seven always did seem like a strange number.

But then there's that stranger in town. That mysterious, writerly stranger. As soon as he opened his wooden box to reveal an old manual typewriter, I was smitten. A man who carries a typewriter everywhere with him? Swoon...

Which brings us to this week's episode, and WHY is that guy here? How could someone outside have found out about Storybrooke? He's somehow obtained Henry's book, and he's not of the world of Storybrooke, yet seems to know something about the other world. Emma escaped that world as a baby; is it possible someone else escaped it, too? Is there another portal in another story where he perhaps made it out of the fairytale land before the curse was enacted, but he was given some memory of it? Something has brought this man here, and he seems to have glommed onto Henry right away.

In the other world, we watch a replay of Aladdin, one of my kids' favourite films. This genie runs through all the same rules as Robin Williams' genie does, though much quicker and with less pizzazz and rhyming. (I would have loved to see him break out into, "You ain't never had a friend like me!") And just as [spoiler alert for the one person who hasn't seen it] Aladdin grants his final wish to the genie by freeing him, this king does the same thing.

This, of course, is a much darker story. This genie doesn't grab a travel bag, honk the king's nose and head off to great adventures, but sticks around and becomes part of a much larger master plan. He tells the king when he first meets him that he's granted 1001 wishes, and watched 1001 of them go wrong, and that happens again here. First, the king frees him, and in doing so secures his own death. Second, he wishes that the third wish could be transferred to the genie, and thus allows the genie to make the horrible mistake with the third wish, trapping himself in something much worse than a gold lamp. It was a fantastic story, melding together two parts, and I didn't see any of that coming.

As Sidney and Emma work together in Storybrooke to "find who [the mayor] really is], looking for the crack in the mirror, as they put it, once again we're being tricked into thinking this is Sidney finding revenge in this world (albeit subconsciously) for what happened to him in the fairytale world, but instead he's as much in the thrall of the queen here as he is there (notice above the Mayor's door it says MAGISTER, which sounds a lot like MAJESTY, a nice touch). I love that the breakfast finer doubles as a pub -- there are no nighttime bars in Storybrooke (is there a curfew there or something?) It seems that while the Mayor sleeps, NOTHING happens.

But back over in the fairytale world, I was very intrigued by the pain the Queen was in (even if some of it was put on). It was a hint of why stepmothers are always evil in the books -- maybe they didn't want to be, but they could never live up to the perfection of the first wife. They lived under the constant judgment of their husband, who married them out of convenience so they could be around in bed and to help raise a child, and when their husband died, they finally were free, and had very little sympathy for this rugrat who was the apple of their husband's eye, and who clearly paid them no attention (did Snow actually have any relationship with her stepmother? She doesn't seem to think anything her father says is out of line as he's addressing her at his birthday party). We're to believe the king is benevolent, but he says thoughtless things in front of a crowd, doesn't notice his wife's presence, and READS HER DIARY. (??) Which, of course, we know she meant for him to read, but still... I loved the little details of this episode, like the genie *almost* eating the apple but not (is the tree poisonous?) or the skeleton key of the queen's literally being a skeleton key, complete with skull (does the mayor's key ring open every little lock in the kingdom?)

I think this show is getting better and better every week.

Once Upon a Time: True North

As I mentioned on my Facebook wall earlier today, I've been really sick this past week, and in between not sleeping because of the cold and not sleeping because my kids have decided to suddenly start routinely getting up at 2am for an hour or two (how do children always manage to know exactly when you need sleep the most and THAT is when they decide you can't have it?) and also working until late every night on a paper I'm giving at Wesleyan University in Nebraska next Tuesday, I didn't manage to post on either Once Upon a Time or Alcatraz. But I want to post on both, so I'm going to write up two very quick posts tonight.

First, Once Upon a Time (which I actually watched TWICE before it had even finished airing in the US and STILL didn't manage to get a post up!) I loved this episode. I don't know what others thought, but I've always loved the Hansel and Gretel story, and from that gorgeous gingerbread house set to the great acting from Gretel especially, this episode was a lot of fun to watch.

And I know I've mentioned it before, but I really do adore the Evil Queen's wardrobe? How fabulous was that black hat?!

In the original story, the part that's always bugged me most is that the pathetic father leaves the children in the woods (in some versions of the story; in others he's let off the hook when the stepmother leaves them) and then when they eventually find their way back he hugs them and apologizes and says She made me do it! How spineless can one person be? (Unless he'd been really ill and maybe the kids were waking up for a couple of hours every night; in that case perhaps leaving them in the woods is justified... hehehe...) So I felt that in this episode they paid homage to that useless excuse for fatherhood through Michael, the mechanic who is the biological father of the two kids, and the way he looks at the compass, sees that those are definitely his kids, and says, "Nope, sorry, can't do it." Like the father of the fairytale, he doesn't have the guts or strength to fight for his kids.

But... he does. Unlike the father in the story, this guy eventually steps up and decides to give these two kids a chance. Who could watch that final scene of the father slowly walking toward the two confused children in the car, knowing the huge responsibility he is walking towards? I do hope we see more of this family and how it works out.

I hope everyone who joined in the Buffy Rewatch immediately recognized our Anya in the Blind Witch! I shrieked when I realized who it was; my husband, on the other hand, despite my, "Oh come ON you have to know who that is" prodding, had no clue. I promptly took away his Buffy fandom card.

I was amused that one thing this episode seemed to suggest is that fairytales are not just full of evil stepmothers, but annoying younger siblings. How useless was Hansel, really?? However, it's actually flipped the original story, where Hansel is the older sibling (the one who leaves the trail that helps them find their way home), the one who outsmarts the witch, and Gretel, though younger, is still helpful and does what he says. She's the one outside the cage who helps get Hansel out, and Hansel is the one who pushes the witch into the fire. Interesting they did a gender switch on these two.

I thought the Storybrooke story was good, too. At first, when Emma left the kids on the doorstep I thought, "What kind of detective IS she? Everyone knows you never pull away until the kids are in the house." So I was very happy she immediately redeemed herself in the next episode.

What did you think?

Once Upon a Time Ep 8: Desperate Souls

Before I begin this week’s writeup, I just wanted to mention a book I read in the fall called The Book of Lost Things. If you enjoy fairytale stories for adults (the same way OUAT is twisting the stories) I think you’ll really like this. A boy crawls through a hole in his garden and enters a fairytale world, where he is met with familiar creatures from the storybooks (and followed everywhere by the person who is the main character of this OUAT episode) only to find they’re not what they seemed in his books. Definitely check it out… it’s a great story.

The writers of Once Upon a Time have said one of their missions with this show is to show the other side of fairytales, to lead us along with the notion that what we’ve always known to be true (bad guys are bad, good guys are good, happy endings are always forthcoming and evil gets it in the end) is true, only to pull the carpet out from under us and show us the opposite. Evil can prevail, good guys aren’t all good, but bad guys are actually sympathetic. What made the Evil Queen evil? What turned Rumpelstiltskin into a trickster? Why are there so many people in storybook land who have a bug up their arse and are always plotting other people’s revenge?

And so, in the 2012 return of the show, we go back to the origins of Rumpelstiltskin, the man who is quick to make a bargain, and just as quick to turn it around on people and trick them into having to hand over more than they thought they’d bargained for. Rumpelstiltskin was a loving father who would do anything to keep his son out of the hands of the conscriptors who mercilessly pulled children into the ogre war when they turned 14. His boy is a couple of days away from that fateful birthday, so he attempts to escape from the men, until they’re caught on the road. The men taunt Rumpelstiltskin and tell the boy that his father was a coward who ran away from the ogre war and left the others behind to be slaughtered, and his wife couldn’t bear the sight of him when he returned from the war. He humiliates Rumpelstiltskin in front of his son, no doubt making him son see him as less than he once thought, and another man, disguised as a poor man looking for alms, takes him under his wing. He convinces him to go after the Dark One, and once he discovers that man’s name, he would be able to control him. He tells Rumpelstiltskin to steal the Dark One’s dagger, which has the Dark One’s name written on it, and he will call him forth by saying his name, and then he has to kill him. Rumpelstiltskin does that, and when he kills the Dark One he realizes he’s been tricked… the Dark One is in fact the poor man, and now Rumpelstiltskin will succeed him. Upon the man’s death, Rumpel’s skin begins to turn greenish-gold, his teeth rot, and he is all-powerful. He returns to his home to slaughter the men who threatened him, but instead of awe in the eyes of his son, he sees nothing but fear.

Meanwhile back in Storybrooke, another succession is taking place – Graham is died and Emma assumes she’ll take the mantle of sheriff. But, no surprise, Regina has other ideas and puts Sidney in place of Emma, until Emma challenges the appointment and demands an election. Mr. Gold tells Emma he’s on her side, and burns down the mayor’s office. Emma realizes what he’s done, and announces at the debate that he’s committed a crime on her behalf, but everyone in Storybrooke is thrilled that they have someone in town who’s actually honest, and Emma wins. In the storybook world, Rumpelstiltskin has had a role thrust upon him; in Storybrooke, Emma has reached for that role and earned it. But in both cases, they have taken on a dangerous power that, on the one hand, should make everyone respect them, but instead, they’ve adopted a whole new crop of enemies.

Highlights:
• Emma yelling to find out if Mr. Gold is in the store, and him muttering, It IS my store…
• Emma telling Henry to read something more reliable, like the Internet.
• Regina asking if Henry now knows that Emma cut his cord with a shiv. Haha!
• Archie’s stammering introduction of Glass… Swan…

Did You Notice?:
• Emma’s actually not one of my favourite characters on the show – she’s unnecessarily harsh at times and I just don’t like her that much – but I’ll have to rethink that after hearing her blaring Sonic Youth’s Kool Thing.
• In Mr. Gold’s shop, you can always prominently see a mobile of glass unicorns hanging near the cash register. I wonder if those unicorns were magically turned to glass. I don’t trust anything in that shop – I’m assuming everything in it is a result of dark magic.
• There’s a Mickey Mouse figurine in Mr. Gold’s cabinet. OMG, did he attack Mickey Mouse, too?
• There’s also a chess set… I’ve wondered if that’s a subtle Alice in Wonderland reference.
• When Mr. Gold said, “I don’t know… be a hero in a fire?” he flicks his fingers in the air the same way Rumpelstiltskin always did.
• The talks between Emma and Mary Margaret are very mother-daughter.
• When he sees his name on the dagger, it’s misspelled as Rumplestiltskin. (Rumple instead of the far more common Rumpel…) Rumplestiltskin is used on occasion, but Rumpelstiltskin is the far more acceptable spelling of the name.

Lost references:
• Emma still drinks the McCutcheon.

Ruby Red:
• Mr. Gold wears all black except for a tie patterned with red.
• Henry’s scarf has red stripes.

Any Questions?:
• I’m still wondering what Rumpelstiltskin had been gardening in the forest in the previous episode…
• How did Rumpelstiltskin go from being a fearsome Dark One to a cackling crazy person who hopped around and taunted everyone around him with an odd shake of his head and a flourish of his fingers whenever he talked?
• In the original fairytale, no one knew Rumpelstiltskin’s name – that was his power (just as the Dark One in this episode has a secret name, and the way to get power over him is to find it out). But in previous episodes, everyone knows Rumpelstiltskin’s name… he doesn’t try to hide it at all. Why the change? Especially when Rumpelstiltskin is still caught up in knowing names (remember him asking Snow White what her baby will be named?)

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?

Once Upon a Time, Ep 6: The Shepherd

In this week’s episode we return to Prince Charming, and see what happened to him right before that first encounter with Snow White. Turns out… he’s not actually the prince, but the prince’s twin brother. The prince was given to the king by Rumpelstiltskin when the prince was just a baby, and Thomas’s parents desperately needed the money. Then he’s killed in battle, and the king gets Rumpelstiltskin to bring the other boy to him so he can slay King Midas’s dragon and bring untold riches to his land. Thomas actually DOES slay the dragon (in a rather lame battle), and Midas wants him to marry his daughter, the very woman we saw riding in the carriage with him when Snow first ambushed him. He has to leave his beloved mother (played by the wonderful Canadian character actress, Gabrielle Rose) and go be with her instead or his “dad” will destroy everything he loves.

Meanwhile, in Storybrooke, it’s a Henry-lite week where John Doe (actually David Nolan) comes home, but he doesn’t know his wife Kathryn or anything about this life. Nothing feels right except for Mary, and so he leaves his wife and tells Mary to meet him at the toll bridge so they can begin a new life together. Mary tries to convince herself not to do it, but she’s so drawn to him she goes down there. He, on the other hand, is ambushed by the Mayor and Mr. Gold, and they make him remember his previous life and the fact he actually did love Kathryn.

Did he really remember his real life? Or … is it possible that David has a twin brother in this world, too? Could Kathryn have actually been married to the twin, which is how it doesn’t feel right to David no matter how sure Kathryn is of him? Could he have memories of his twin’s? (You know that whole telepathy thing twins claim they have?) Or is he really meant to be with Kathryn? And how will things play out between Thomas and his betrothed? She looked about as thrilled to be with him as he was with her. Will she gladly be on her way so he can be with Snow?

Lost References:
• Widmore!! Charles returns as yet another powerful father, and while he seems kinder at the beginning, turns out he’s just as ruthless and cunning as the other one. And what would an episode with Widmore be without…
• McCutcheon whisky! If a mouthful of that is worth more than Desmond makes in a month, how the HELL Mary Margaret could afford it is beyond me.

Did You Notice?:
• I meant to mention this earlier, but the opening credits on Once Upon a Time are a lot like the ones on Lost. They alternate sides of the screen, and are in the same font. And I LOVE the end logo, with the little Space Invaders guy shooting the Kitsis/Horowitz names. ;)
• In the Nolan house, they have flowers on the walls but no trees.
• “The love I lost, there’s no bringing him back.” That sentence was vague enough that I think it once again suggests she lost a child.
• When Mary’s reading the newspaper, the headline is “Welcome home, John Doe!” and it reads: The as yet unidentified man in his early 30s who has become known only bye the moniker, John Doe, has finally gone home directly to a house right here in Storybrooke. “It is truly a miracle that he had survived at all,” said hospital volunteer and local schoolteacher, Mary Margaret Blanchard, on the day of his initial admittance to the Storybrooke Hospital. “It has been interesting nursing him back to health and we at [sic] all so glad he has pulled through. It is incredible to think how far he has progressed. Not only is he conscious, but he now he [sic] has a whole new life to live.” Two problems with that story (aside from the typos): Was Mary really at the hospital when he was first admitted? And how would they have had a quote from her from that long ago? Hasn’t he been there a bazillion years? And also, why does it say he’s “as yet unidentified?” He was identified as David Nolan as soon as he woke up.
• The stories across the top are: Comet Marley Makes Debut Appearance; Destinations (with a pic of what appears to be Notre Dame), Lyme Disease: A New Understanding; Capsaicin. I wonder if these will have any meaning in future episodes (capsaicin is the component in chili peppers that creates the burning sensation when you eat them). The other headline beside the John Doe one is “Remnants of Seventeeth Century Colonial Settlement Uncovered at Harestock Bridge.”
• The walls of Mary’s classroom are different than they were when we first saw them. They have trees, too, but they’re all dead with no foliage on them.
• The CGI in this episode isn’t as good as it’s been in previous episodes – when the giant falls at the beginning at Thomas’s twin’s hand, you can see he’s not even with the ground. When Midas’s daughter walks up to join him, you can see the green screen shimmer around her head as she takes his hand.
• The ring that Thomas’s mother gives him is the one he went to the troll bridge with Snow White to find.

Ruby Red: More red in this episode:
• Thomas’s father wears a scarlet velvet robe.
• Thomas’s blood on the sword.
• The places at the round table.
• Mary’s sweater when she’s at Granny’s diner.
• Regina’s blouse under her jacket.

Any Questions?:
• Why didn’t the dragon breathe fire on Thomas when he cornered it and it couldn’t reach him?
• Why would you ask someone to meet you for a romantic rendezvous at a place if you didn’t know its location?! David’s a bit of a dumbass.
• Will the unicorn mobile make its way into the fairytale stories? Was it the Evil Queen’s mobile for her baby? Or did a bunch of unicorns get turned into glass?
• Did you guys check out that VERY spoilery preview for next week?? Now I know who the sheriff was, and I’m assuming that’s supposed to be a big reveal next week.

Once Upon a Time Ep 5: That Still Small Voice

Or should this episode be called… the return of the Apollo bar! Oh, how I love these little nods to Lost. ;)

“You are who you are and there’s no changing it, right?”

This week’s episode was written by Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Jane Espenson, and there was some dialogue that was so typical of her brilliance. Tonight we focus on Jiminy Cricket, and finding out how he became a cricket, and a conscience. From the time he was a young lad, Jiminy – who was raised as a pickpocket and a thief by his two uncouth gypsy parents – longed to be good. We see him stealing for them, while asking repeatedly why they can’t try to go another way. Despite being the voice of reason in their small group, his pleas simply don’t reach his parents. Where he was a good conscience for Pinocchio, he failed miserably as a conscience for his parents. But that’s because he felt helpless under their control. As he grew, his misery grew also as he continued to do bad things for them (and for Rumpelstiltskin, to whom they were clearly “pawning” their things for gold thread). He longed for his freedom, and was willing to destroy them as his final bad act before becoming good. But when something terrible happens, Jiminy finds another way to escape: he becomes a cricket.

Meanwhile, in Storybrooke, Mary continues to get to know John Doe, Emma becomes Deputy, and when there’s a sinkhole near an abandoned mine, the town goes nuts. The Mayor decides she’s sick of being the bad guy, and she threatens Archie Hopper that if he doesn’t convince her son once and for all that the fairytale theory is just a theory, she’ll ruin him. “I will cut you down to size until you’re a tiny shrunken creature and THIS [holds up umbrella] will be the only roof over your damn head… You take that delusion out of my son’s head and you will CRUSH it…” Archie goes against his conscience (for the second time – recall back in episode 2 he called the cops and said Emma stole his files because the Mayor asked him to) and tells Henry that he’s crazy and if he doesn’t stop this foolishness, he’ll end up in a psych ward. Henry, devastated that Archie would say this to him, decides to prove himself and heads down into the mine, putting his life (and Archie’s, when Archie follows him) in danger. Henry is convinced something is important down in those mines, and the reason they collapsed is because Emma showed up and the mines are trying to alert them to something.

In several scenes reminiscent of Jack and Charlie being trapped in the cave in “The Moth,” Archie talks to Henry while they sit in the mineshaft, and realizes that maybe Henry’s not completely crazy, and Henry realizes Archie is sympathetic to him. Archie doesn’t believe that he was Jiminy Cricket, but he’s like Jiminy in that he really wanted to be a certain person, and needs to work hard to stay on that path.

In the lovely ending to this episode, Archie and Henry are saved by Emma (I seriously thought Archie was going down with the mineshaft and was SO happy when he was holding on by his umbrella!), while we see how Jiminy was turned into a cricket so he could become the conscience to the little boy whose parents Jiminy had wronged: Geppetto. Tears!!

Highlight: The parents telling Jiminy he needs to stay with him by convincing him how old and infirm they are. Dad: “I’ve got lumps in strange places.” Mom: “I’ve got burning sensations.” Hahaha…

Did You Notice?:
• In the little puppet show at the beginning, the woman says, “I wish… I wish… but nothing changes. I wish I was better at wishing!” The puppet show not only anticipates Jiminy’s wish at the end, but that Geppetto’s parents will be turned into wooden marionettes themselves.
• The Mayor!! I was so glad to see Harry Groener as Jiminy’s parents.
• The first time Geppetto shows up at the traveling show and talks to Jiminy, he says, “Puppets! What a great job you have!” We can already see why he would grow up to make little wooden creatures.
• John Doe and Mary play Hangman… the first time they had a conversation, Snow White was hanging from a tree in a net.
• The floor of Rumpelstiltskin’s place is an outline of a spinning wheel.
• The moment Rumpelstiltskin gave Jiminy the potion, I wrote in my notes, “Are his parents the two little dolls in Mr. Gold’s pawn shop?” I KNEW those dolls would turn out to be something, as I mentioned in my previous post!
• I love the special effects on this show. It’s everything Lost didn’t have.

Ruby Red:
I’m noticing there is a LOT of red in this show. I noticed it in the very first episode, but it was only because of the distinct lack of red on Snow’s lips (which in the fairytale were described as blood-red) and I realized that despite Snow’s lips not being red, the colour is certainly prevalent everywhere else. In this episode:
• Emma dissuades the sheriff from making her take off her rust-red coat
• Kathryn makes cranberry muffins (and the towel on top is red).
• At the rescue scene, both the fire truck and the tow truck are red.
• Ruby. She’s always dressed in scarlet red.
• The Mayor’s lipstick is always a burgundy colour.
• Jiminy’s vest.
• The blood on his forehead.

When You Wish Upon a Star:
I’ve said in the past that there are star references in every episode, and this one was no exception:
• Obviously, Jiminy wishes upon a star at the very end.
• Emma, the person who the star is usually associated with, is handed a star badge to designate her as deputy.

Any Questions?:
• If Rumpelstiltskin can spin straw into gold, why does he need people to steal things for him?
• Was Pinocchio really a wooden marionette that Geppetto made, or did Rumpelstiltskin turn a little boy into a marionette, and Geppetto loved him enough to turn him back into a little boy?
• How did Rumpelstiltskin become Rumpelstiltskin? That’s the story I’m looking forward to. And word on the street has it, we’ll see it soon.
• What’s with the flask party at the mineshaft? Does everyone in Storybrooke carry a flask of alcohol with them? (Except for Ruby, of course, who just has a beer bottle handy.)
• What is at the bottom of that mineshaft? Was it the Queen’s Mirror? Was it part of Snow’s castle? Is it possible there are remnants of the fairy-tale world under Storybrooke?

Once Upon a Time Ep 4: The Price of Gold

Sorry this has taken so long to get up. I usually aim for Sunday nights, but with so many shows on Sunday, well… hm, I think this is the opening of just about every blog entry I have these days. ;)

This week on Once Upon a Time we move to Cinderella, and once again we see a twist on the traditional story. We all know the story of Cinderella (played by Jessy Schram, who I remember from Veronica Mars, the little girl whose daddy died and who had married a hideous woman with two ugly stepdaughters (similar to Snow White’s dad marrying a terrible woman before dying) and who wanted to go to the prince’s ball (the one he held so he could choose a wife) and who sewed her own dress but the stepsisters ripped it to shreds before boarding their carriage and riding away. In this version, Cinderella seems to have skipped the whole dress-making venture, as she’s still dressed in her rags when her fairy godmother shows up, but rather than get everything her heart desires, she has to negotiate with Rumpelstiltskin after he obliterates the fairy godmother and then decides to teach Cinderella a little lesson about how terrible magic is.

Switching to the well-trodden ground of the miller’s daughter in the “Rumpelstiltskin” story, who makes him a deal and then has to give him her first-born, or in “Rapunzel,” where the mother eats the lettuce and then has to give away her first-born, here Rumpel makes Cinderella sign a long contract stating she’ll have to give the baby to him. She marries the prince, becomes pregnant, and then with the help of the prince and magical creatures, she attempts to trick him by imprisoning him, but Rumpel isn’t the least bit fazed, and tells her the magic will backfire. Moments after the trick lands him in a barred vehicle destined for the prison, her husband goes missing.

Back in our world, Ashley Boyd is a young pregnant maid with two stepsisters who has signed away her child to Mr. Gold, the local pawnbroker and Rumpel in the other world. She has a conversation with Emma in the Laundromat and Emma tells her you can’t rely on some mythical fairy godmother to take away the pain, that if you want your life to change, you have to seize it and make a change yourself. (♪She’s talking to the man in the mirror!♪) So she breaks into Mr. Gold’s pawnshop, beaning him in the head and knocking him unconscious, to steal back their (admittedly illegal) contract and she tries to leave town. But, as Henry has theorized, the people in Storybrooke can’t leave, and her car crashes at the town sign (another wolf in the road, perhaps?) and Ella finds her in time to get her to the hospital, where she barters with Mr. Gold and tells him in exchange for owing him a favour in the future (ack!) he’ll let Ashley go.

Written by Fringe writer David H. Goodman, it’s not the best episode we’ve seen so far, but it was intriguing and had a lot of fun elements in it. And, I found some Lost elements in it!

Highlight:
• Robert Carlyle. He’s fantastic in both roles. “Every story needs a memorable detail!”

Lost moments (mostly unintentional by the writers, methinks):
• For everyone who missed the Geromino Jackson sticker in the first week, if you look at the rear of her car in the scene where Henry has been hiding in the back seat, you can clearly see it in the back window.
• When Regina is looking at Emma’s past, she says she’s jumped to different locations seven times in the past few years, and never stays long anywhere, except for Tallahassee, where she was for two years. “What did you enjoy so much in Tallahassee?” Hahahaha! All I could think of was either Ella was working with the Others and managed to push Anthony Cooper’s car off the highway when he was captured and brought to the island, or that time Sawyer said he met a girl in Tallahassee and that “something was burnin’ and it wasn’t the sunshine,” maybe that’s why Emma doesn’t want to say. ;)
• When Emma and Henry found Ashley’s car and she’s in labour by the side of the road, all I could think of was, “No, don’t give birth there, or he’ll turn into Ben Linus!”

Did You Notice:
• In the little voiceover that introduces the episode, the narrator says, “Only one knows the truth” and it shows Regina, not Mr. Gold, yet they’d been playing it until then that Regina actually didn’t remember, and that Gold did. So I guess this means she really does know exactly what she’s doing.
• The cars parked along the street when Emma and Henry are walking to the car all appear to be from the late 70s and early 80s.
• Mr. Gold’s job is as a pawnbroker, someone who usually makes a deal with you rather than selling you something outright.
• When Ashley’s walking through the pawnshop, she passes two dolls that actually look like two mummified people. Could they be from a fairytale? Someone who didn’t quite make it in the end of their story? (I immediately thought Hansel and Gretel if they hadn’t made it away from the witch, but their clothes look like they were adults, not children.)
• Prince Charming and Snow White were supposed to be meant for each other, yet all this time she’s been visiting him in the hospital and not finding a connection. And yet, Thomas and Cinderella managed to find each other, even if he dropped her because Daddy told him to.
• When Emma’s in the diner talking to Ruby, there’s a Black Forest cake on the counter. Many of Grimm’s fairytales were set in the Black Forest.
• The dwarfs work underground, but it’s not a diamond mine.
• Those who have read my Finding Lost books probably know my reaction to this already, but oh how I loved Emma’s comment to Ashley when she said she wanted to give birth in Boston: “We don’t have four hours. TRUST ME, I know.” They left out the rest of the dialogue. “I know because I’ve watched a LOT of movies and television over the years, and despite first births having an average of 18 hours of labour attached to them in the real world, these babies always come flying out after three contractions and one push on television. Besides, you’re a fairytale creature, so you’re going to give birth like they do in the movies anyway!”
• Rumpelstiltskin says to Ella, “A little birdie told me you wanted to see me” and in this case, he was being literal! Haha!
• I’m starting to notice a lot of star references. Perhaps we should be watching for those the same way we watched for Hurley’s numbers. There’s a big star emblazoned on the floor of the ballroom at Ella’s wedding to Thomas, and Emma’s keychain has a star on it. I’ve pointed them out in other episodes just as a lark because Emma wished upon a star in the first episode, but I’m thinking they’re a recurring trope.

Questions:
• When are we going to see Ruby’s backstory? They play her as such a skank, which is in keeping with the versions of the story where the big bad wolf wasn’t actually preying on an innocent little girl, but an older girl who wanted to get caught, so to speak.
• Why oh why is the sheriff sleeping with Regina? I find him a very intriguing character, and I hope we get some more hints of who his storybook counterpart is.
• Is it possible Emma is based on a storybook character? Gold made a comment to her that she wasn’t ready to know who she was, yet Henry’s been telling her over and over again that she’s Snow’s daughter. Was she destined to stay in the fairytale world and grow up to be in one of the stories? Perhaps the princess who kissed the frog? Or, given her name, the ugly duckling who grew into a swan?

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.

Once Upon a Time 1.2: "The Thing You Love the Most"

I've been looking for a show that's excited me as much as Lost, in a similar way that Lost did. While there have been several shows that I've adored since the end of Lost -- Fringe, Breaking Bad -- they've done so in different ways. But finally, a show in the hands of Kitsis and Horowitz has me once again watching the walls in the backgrounds, looking for clues on signs and in the treetops, and in only its second week, this show somehow feels like home. So, I'm gonna do some old-fashioned Lost-like blogging with it.

In this week's episode, Emma still doesn't believe in the curse, but she believes in Henry, and it's keeping her in Storybrooke. Regina is stepping up her efforts to get this biological mom out of her way so she can keep her son to herself, and when you watch it from her point of view, she doesn't come off as being as soulless as Emma suggests she is. In last week's episode, she told Emma that while she'd dumped her son off at a hospital, Regina had changed every diaper, soothed every fever, and dealt with every tantrum. While she has the Evil Queen inside her, she doesn't actually remember BEING her, so none of her actions have been with any particularly evil motivation behind it. Turns out, by the end of the episode, it's good old Rumpelstiltskin -- he of the name obsession -- who seems to have retained some memory of things and is masterminding Henry coming to their town. After all, if he's the guy who created the curse in the first place, doesn't it make sense that it wouldn't have the same memory-wipe effect on him as it does everyone else?

Speaking of Rumpelstiltskin's obsession with names, let's look at some of the names in both universes:

Rumpelstiltskin = Mr. Gold
As the guy who became famous for spinning straw into gold, this seems very fitting.

Snow White = Mary Blanchard
In French, "white" is "blanc," so that's where we're getting that from. Perhaps Mary comes from the Virgin Mary, and since Snow White was seen as pure in every way, the name seems apt.

Evil queen = Regina
"Regina" means queen; Queen Victoria was often known as "Victoria Regina"

Jiminy Cricket = Archie Hopper
That just cracks me up. ;)

Granny and Little Red Riding Hood = Granny and Ruby
Duh.

Mirror = Gus Fring The editor of The Storybrooke Daily Mirror


Sheriff Graham is presumably also a fairytale character, but I think we've yet to see him in that world. It'll be fun to see who he ultimately turns out to be. We've seen Geppetto in Storybrooke, but I don't know if they said what his name was there.

As with Lost, time and memory become essential pieces. In Lost, characters flashed back to earlier points in their lives to reveal to the audience what their motivations were. But in Once Upon a Time, those flashbacks are presented as dramatic irony, in the sense that WE know what their pasts are, but none of them can remember it. If they could, it would give them a lot more power than they now have. Now, they're powerless pawns trapped in a town without realizing they're actually trapped. The clock hasn't moved in 28 years, and no one seems to have noticed they haven't aged one bit. Mary tells Emma in this episode that Regina has been mayor for as long as she can remember, but it never occurs to her that she herself has been perpetually 25 for the last 30 years; when time stood still, it prevented them from aging, but also prevented them from noticing that. With time COMES power, and now that the clock is moving forward, some of these people will move forward as well. Memories will now be retained, they will age, and they can vanquish the thing that has been keeping them trapped: the timeless curse.

The very nature of fairytales themselves will no doubt take centre stage as this series continues. As Mary tells Emma in the previous episodes, fairytales are a way for people to make sense of the cruel world they live in; a way to compartmentalize their own lack of happy endings and give them hope that those endings may exist somewhere. In Once Upon a Time, the writers explore this idea through Henry's therapy sessions. Just as many fairytales are parables that explore the human psyche, so are therapy sessions a way of getting into a person's mind by asking them to tell stories to the doctor. Only by telling these stories can the patient actually begin to see their troubles in the context of a larger picture, while allowing the doctor to get to the heart of the matter and attempt to help them through a particularly troublesome time.

I love the idea in this show that the world of fairytales could actually be a hell if you were the bad guy; baddies don’t get happy endings, they’re the ones being pushed off cliffs or dying or just slinking off into the dark while the good, pure people “live happily ever after.” What a great idea to turn that on its head and have the bad guys want to live in our world, where “happily ever after” simply doesn’t exist.

Highlights:
• Henry. I love the actor playing this kid. While there are times where he looks a little uncomfortable, glancing off-camera and not really looking at the person he’s acting against, he’s adorable, charming, and you just want to pick him up and hug him every time he’s on screen.
• Malificent on Snow White never being in pain: “It’s her wedding night. I bet she’s suffering right now.” Ack!
• The reason we have lawn gnomes! HAHAHA!!


Did You Notice?
• The episode opened with Cat Stevens’ “Don’t Be Shy”:

Don't be shy just let your feelings roll on by
Don't wear fear or nobody will know you're there
Just lift your head, and let your feelings out instead
And don't be shy, just let your feeling roll on by
On by

You know love is better than a song
Love is where all of us belong
So don't be shy just let your feelings roll on by
Don't wear fear or nobody will know you're there
You're there

Don't be shy just let your feelings roll on by
Don't wear fear or nobody will know you're there
Just lift your head, and let your feelings out instead
And don't be shy, just let your feeling roll on by

• Jane Espenson is a Consulting Producer! How did I not notice that before? Even MORE reason to love this show. ;)
• My mouth was literally watering every time we saw those apple trees. Poison be damned: I don’t think I would have been able to avoid the temptation to bite into each of those apples? Have you ever eaten a Honeycrisp apple? It’s exactly what the name says it is: one of the sweetest things you’ll ever taste. Damn, now I have a major craving for apples. Excuse me for a minute…
• The Mirror is Gus Fring!!!! Oh. My. God. Shivers went down my spine when I saw him.
• Malificent is Pam! I am loving the guest casting this week!
• I was so sad when Archie/Jiminy Cricket tricked Emma, because I really wanted to see these two join forces, so I was much happier at the end when he seemed sincerely sorry for having done that. After all, in the first episode, just before Henry appeared on her doorstep, Emma was blowing out a candle in the shape of a star on a cupcake and wishing that she wouldn’t be alone on her birthday. And it was Jiminy Cricket who sang that if you wished upon a star your dreams would come true.
• The queen throws a horse heart into the cauldron: was anyone else suddenly flashing to Game of Thrones in their heads?
• In Archie’s therapy office, the wallpaper border at the top is a forest at sunset. In Regina’s office, the wallpaper everywhere is covered in black and white trees that are rather frightening. Everything in her office is black and white, just as good and evil is always painted in polar opposition in fairytales.
• Archie’s office also had several toadstools and mushrooms around it.
• Emma and Regina keep saying, “Your move,” as if they’re playing a game of chess, which made me think of Through the Looking Glass (the Alice books also feature a queen who has trees with red objects hanging from them, though where Regina keeps possibly poisoned apples, the Red Queen has white roses that her pages paint red).
• Speaking of which, Regina has white roses in a vase that appear to be sitting in blood, not water (same paint that’s being used on the Red Queen’s roses, perhaps?)

Fairytale Allusions:
• The clock chiming and everyone looking up at it reminded me of the clock striking midnight for Cinderella.
• How wonderful to put two queens together in a room who both concocted a sleeping potion (on Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, respectively) and who both failed when their curse was broken by a curse by Prince Charming. (These “Charming” guys sure do get around!)
• When the Guild of Baddies gets together around the fire, there’s a blind witch whose eyes have been sewn together. I was thinking maybe it was one of the witches from Macbeth? The witch in Hansel and Gretel is blind, but when I did a quick search on “Hansel and Gretel blind witch” I saw a casting note that Emma Caulfield (aka the glorious Anya on Buffy) has been cast as that witch, to appear later in the season!! SO excited. So maybe the blind witch at the fire was just a token blind witch, just as the ogre and gnome were probably standing in for all ogres and gnomes in fairytales.
• The Evil Queen says that Snow White took everything from her. This could create a mystery for us if we didn’t already know the story, and know that what Snow White took from her was her certainty that she was the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. When Snow turned seven, the mirror finally told the queen that she was no longer the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, and that it was Snow White. After that the queen did everything she could to kill Snow White, and finally almost succeeded with the poisoned apple. But when she says it in the episode, she says it with such pathos we believe she’s lost so much more than just her sense of beauty.
• Jiminy Cricket was assigned to stick with Pinocchio and make sure the boy always had good morals; similarly, in Storybrooke, Archie is assigned to be Henry’s therapist, and watch this boy’s mind as closely as he had Pinocchio’s.