Tag: Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time: “Going Home”

After weeks of tedious Neverland episodes, Once Upon a Time has finally emerged from the doldrums. Last Sunday’s mid-season finale, “Going Home,” closed the book on the Peter Pan storyline and sent the plot off in new and unexpected directions.

At the end of the previous episode, Pan!Henry stole The Curse from Regina in a bid to turn Storybrooke into the new Neverland. I’d been wondering how he was going to cast it since it has a rather nasty material component (the heart of the thing you love most). As far as I can tell, Pan never loved anyone except himself, and ripping out his own heart to cast The Curse would be rather counterproductive.

But, as Pan!Henry helpfully explains to Felix, love isn’t just romance or a familial bond. It can also be loyal friendship, and Felix has always been devoted to Pan. Sadly, Pan repays this loyalty by ripping out Felix’s heart and crushing it to dust before dropping it into the magic wishing well along with the other ingredients for The Curse. Great clouds of green smoke start billowing out of the well, letting us know that something wicked is coming to Storybrooke.

Naturally, the only way to stop The Curse is with the aid of a magical MacGuffin: the wand of the never-before-mentioned ‘Black Fairy.’  Apparently, the Blue Fairy/Mother Superior had it stashed in the convent, and Hook, Charming, Neal, and Tinkerbell rush off to find it. They go to the chapel, where the Blue Fairy is apparently lying in state after being killed in the previous episode, only to run into Pan’s shadow. There’s a CGI fight and Tinkerbell ends up trapping the shadow in Neal’s coconut nightlight thingy before throwing it onto a very conveniently located fire. Once the shadow is dead, the Blue Fairy springs back to life and hands over the wand. Oddly enough, the other townspeople seem pretty blase about her sudden revivification.

Fun fact: evil magical shadows can't penetrate wooden pews.
Photo Credit: ABC/Jack Rowand

Stopping The Curse will also require the destruction of the scroll on which it was written. In order to get it, the townspeople decide to pull a reverse Freaky Friday and switch Pan and Henry back into their proper bodies. As a precaution, Rumple decides to slap Greg and Tamara’s (remember them?) anti-magic bracelet on Pan’s arm so that he’ll be powerless when he returns to his body.

The body-switch spell works perfectly, but alas, Rumple forgot that Pan was Greg and Tamara’s boss, so the cuff doesn’t work on him. Pan promptly transfers the cuff to Rumple’s arm, divesting the Dark One of all his tricks. Pan also takes the opportunity to rub salt into the wound by telling his son that he never loved him, not even for a moment. Ouch. He leaves Rumple on the floor, confident that his father will revert to his cowardly nature now that he can’t hide behind his magic.

I really like the following scene where Rumple struggles to get the cuff off. For a moment, it looks like he might hack off his hand with a cutlass, which is a nice little callback to how he deliberately injured himself in order to get out of fighting in the Ogre Wars.

Meanwhile, Henry is reunited with his body and has a nice group hug with his family. Regina takes The Curse and immediately collapses. When she wakes up, Pan arrives and freezes everyone as he tries to figure out who to kill first. But he’s stopped by Rumple (who didn’t cut off his hand after all), who reminds Pan that he isn’t the only one with a detachable shadow. Rumple’s shadow returns with the Dark One dagger that Rumple hid when he was in Neverland, which Rumple uses to skewer his dad.. Pan transforms back into a middle-aged man, and there’s a sweet little moment as Rumple kisses his dad right before they poof away in a cloud of smoke. It’s hard to believe that Rumple is actually gone for good when a tertiary character like the Blue Fairy didn’t even stay dead for an entire episode, but it was still a very touching scene. It was also a nice way for the writers to fulfill the longstanding prophecy that “the boy” would be Rumple’s undoing.

The rest of the episode is pretty much a conga line of sadness. Regina says that the only way to save everyone from The Curse is to transport them back to the Enchanted Forest, but Henry, having been born in the Land Without Magic, won’t be able to come, though Emma can stay with him because she’s the Savior. As always, magic comes with a price, and Regina’s price is that she’ll never be able to see her beloved son again. Emma and Henry will also lose all their memories of Storybrooke and its inhabitants.

With Green Clouds of Doom rushing across town, Henry and Emma say their goodbyes, and I loved how Henry finally told Regina that he was wrong about her: she wasn’t a villain after all, and he loved her. As a final gift to Emma and Henry, Regina gives them false memories of a happy life together, one where Emma never gave Henry up for adoption. Regina re-casts The Curse to send everyone back to the Enchanted Forest, and her Purple Clouds of Doom envelop everyone just as Emma and Henry cross the town line in her trusty yellow Beetle.

We then jump ahead a year and see Emma and Henry going about their usual morning routine in New York City. It’s all very happy and domestic, but then there’s a knock at the door. When Emma goes to answer it, there’s a hunky pirate on her doorstep who breathlessly tells her that her parents are in trouble. She’s like “WTF?” and Hook tries to make her remember using True Love’s Kiss (TM), but she responds by kneeing him in his treasure chest before slamming the door in his stubbly face.

I swear I don't just watch the show for the eye candy.
Gratuitous Captain Hook pic. You’re welcome. Photo Credit: ABC/Jack Rowand

Although there were some uneven moments (Felix being the thing that Pan loved most seemed like a bit of an asspull, as did the Black Fairy’s wand) and the repeated bits about hope and happy endings got a bit saccharine, the final moments more than make up for those deficiencies. Even though we viewers know that the Storybrookers aren’t saying goodbye for realz (this is a mid-season finale, not a series finale!), the scenes between Rumple and Pan and Regina, Emma, and Henry still tugged at the heartstrings. I also liked how the episode contributed to Rumple and Regina’s character development. Regina finally shed her villain persona, while Rumple showed once and for all that he’s not a coward.

The only bad news is that the show is on hiatus until the spring premiere on March 9. The promos suggest that the Wicked Witch of the West will become the new Big Bad. It will be interesting to see her as a villain again after Gregory Maguire rehabilitated her in Wicked.

Once Upon a Time: “Save Henry”

I’ll be honest, I have mixed feelings about season 3 of Once Upon a Time. The Neverland plot has been plodding along at a glacial pace, and the persistent relegation of Regina to the background is rather annoying (seriously, taking one of the most interesting characters in the show and giving her one or two lines an episode doesn’t make for compelling TV). But in last Sunday’s episode, “Save Henry,” Regina finally gets to do something beyond occasional snark AND we finally get to leave Neverland behind. That’s definitely a win-win situation.

The flashback portion of the episode seems to answer one of the core mysteries of the show: why the hell did Regina decide to adopt Henry in the first place? To some extent, it’s always felt like something of an ass pull since the Regina we saw in the Enchanted Forest wasn’t exactly agonizing over the ticking of her biological clock, though season 2’s “Welcome to Storybrooke” helped lay the groundwork for the explanation by showing us how Regina bonded with Owen.

Maybe if I cast "Silence" on him...
Photo credit: ABC/Jack Rowland.

In “Save Henry,” we learn that Regina’s desire for a child is shown to be a side-effect of her decision to commit patricide in order to cast the Curse. That left her with a hole in her own heart, though it can’t be too vexing since she waits 18 years before deciding that a child might help fill the void. Rather than jump through the hoops of the standard adoption process, Regina decides to ask Mr. Gold for help (I have to admit that I snickered when he thought that Regina was asking him for some, ahem, biological help with obtaining a baby). Since this is Mr. Gold, he has no problem sourcing a baby in Boston.

After agreeing to a closed adoption, Regina now has her very own bouncing bundle of pain-in-the-ass, but it isn’t long until little Henry’s incessant crying is driving her up the fucking wall. She takes Henry to Dr. Whale, who suggests that it’s vaguely possible that Henry has some sort of genetic problem, which seems like a naked plot contrivance designed to give Regina a reason to send her lackey Sydney (remember him?) on a hunt for the identity of Henry’s birth mother.

When Regina finds out that Henry’s mother was discovered outside Storybrooke just after the Curse struck, she yells at Mr. Gold, accusing him of playing his own game. Although he feigns confusion, the show definitely gives the impression that he knows more than he lets on. If that is indeed the case, the writers have a problem on their hands. Previously, they said in an interview that Mr. Gold didn’t remember that he was Rumpelstiltskin until Emma came to Storybrooke. Although this has never been explicitly stated in the show itself, it’s been heavily implied.[end]Mr. Gold has an obvious reaction when learning Emma’s name in the first episode, and when Regina goes to see him in “Welcome to Storybrooke,” he seems oblivious to his past life as the Dark One.[/end] At this point, it’s hard to say whether this is a retcon or just careless writing.

Speaking of retcons, there’s an unambiguous one later on in this episode. After flirting with the idea of handing Henry back to the adoption agency, Regina decides that the best thing for her to do is take a magic roofie potion that will make her forget about Henry’s birth mother as well as Mr. Gold’s shady baby-procurement methods. But this causes all sorts of plot problems, since in the first season it’s clear that Regina remembers how she got Henry, and it’s also strongly implied that she knew who Emma was the moment she showed up in Storybrooke. So what happened to the magic roofie? Did it wear off? Did Emma’s arrival nullify it? It’s not at all clear, and the writers appear have created a rather nasty plot hole.

The present-time storyline is focused, as the title of the episode suggests, on saving Henry, who is now comatose after giving his heart to Peter Pan (literally) in the previous episode. They can’t revive him, so Regina casts a preservation spell on him to keep him fresh while they go after Pan. For some reason, this preservation spell will only last an hour even though Regina used a similar spell to keep her dead boyfriend on ice for years.

Although Regina wants to extract Pan’s whereabouts from the Lost Boys through torture, Emma manages to get them to spill the beans with nothing more than a liberal application of maternal love. Apparently, he’s at the “Thinking Tree” (which sounds like it’s the Giving Tree‘s more intellectual sibling). Emma, Regina, and Snow White go hunting for Pan and find Pandora’s Box waiting for them in a clearing. Because Snow is kind of an idiot, she immediately grabs it. Obviously, it’s a trap, and the three ladies are tied to the tree by CGI vines. Pan comes down to snark at them, telling them that the tree will feed off their regrets. At this point, I was afraid the show would give us a long, angsty scene where the three of them come to terms with their regrets, but instead, Regina points out that she doesn’t regret anything she’s done and bursts through the vines. She rips Henry’s heart out of Pan’s chest without further ado, and I rejoice at the welcome acceleration of the plot.

After Henry gets his heart back, everyone piles on board the Jolly Roger to go home. Rumpelstiltskin is reunited with his son (aww!) and good vibes abound. Regina is somehow able to tether the Evil Shadow that serves as the genus loci of Neverland to the Jolly Roger‘s sail (they trapped it in Neal’s coconut nightlight earlier in the season), which allows them to fly away. However, they inexplicably left Henry unguarded down below, and he’s attacked by Peter Pan. Pan can’t re-take Henry’s heart since Regina at least had the foresight to put the magical version of The Club on it, so he tries to tear Henry’s shadow away instead.

Up above, Rumpelstiltskin realizes that something’s wrong and runs downstairs to trap Pan in Pandora’s Box (turnabout is fair play, after all). But while Pan is struggling against the pull of the box, Henry’s eyes flash, which kind of telegraphs the last-minute plot twist. Pan and Henry have done a Freaky Friday, so Henry’s now trapped in the box and Pan is free to cause more mischief. The episode ends with Pan!Henry telling chief Lost Boy Felix that it’s “time to play.” Dun dun duuuuun…

Despite the retconning and some shaky aspects of the Henry Adoption Plot,[end]I find it a little hard to believe that the adoption agency would just let Regina change her mind about giving Henry back at the last minute, considering they already had another placement lined up. Speaking of which, the other placement turned out to be Wendy’s brothers, who wanted to hand Henry over to Pan. Somehow, I’m not sure that an adoption agency would see two seemingly college-aged brothers as ideal candidates for a baby’s new parents![/end] I liked this episode. I’m so glad to be out of Neverland at last. This season’s episodes have crawled along at a snail’s pace, and having everyone team up to search for Henry has really thrown the show’s dynamic off.