My Thoughts On: Once Upon a Time S02E21 “Second Star to the Right”

SPOILER ALERT!

I am angry at this show. This show makes me angry.

Young Baelfire emerges from the portal created by the magic bean a half-foot taller and with a deeper voice. He is in 19th century London, England. He promptly decides to become a moppet, or a ragamuffin, or a 19th century cockney bootblack… or something. Anyway, it’s a job that doesn’t pay the bills. He takes to breaking into people’s houses and stealing food to survive.

Anyhoo… One of the houses he decides to rob happens to be the home of Wendy Moira Angela Darling (of Peter Pan fame) and she decides to take pity on Baelfire, the poor street urchin, and keep him in her crawlspace and feed him table scraps. This is the first instance of a person being kept in a crawlspace while not also being tortured and/or murdered that I have ever seen. Wendy’s parents discover this strange arrangement and, instead of being angry, decide that the best course of action is for this peripubescent boy to move out of the crawlspace and stay in their peripubescent daughter’s bedroom instead. Incidentally, in the olden days, when you found a parentless child, instead of having to report them to the authorities, you could just decide to keep them.

Alright, so Tamara’s grandmother isn’t Wendy. I am usually wrong most of the time, so you shouldn’t have believed me anyway. I don’t think this is the last we’re going to see of Wendy though.

a screencap of young baelfire (played by dylan schmid), wendy darling (played by freya tingley) and the shadow played by cgi
Hey! Dark Link wants to take me on an adventure and I’m going!

It turns out that Bae’s would-be girlfriend, Wendy, has been being visited in the middle of the night by a magic shadow. The shadow looks evil and acts ominous but Wendy thinks it’s wonderful. That is, until the shadow takes her to Neverland, which turns out to be a horrible place where children miss their parents for eternity and the shadow wants to take one of her brothers there. Bae ends up sacrificing himself and going to Neverland instead and that’s the reason why Baelfire isn’t 130 years old in present day on the show.

One thing I noticed is that although they say “Neverland” a lot in this episode, they never actually mention Peter Pan. I wonder if they are trying to weasel their way out of having to pay royalties to the Great Ormand Street Hospital who own the rights to Peter Pan?

Some other stuff that happened:

  • Lacey and Mr. Gold beat up Dr. Whale, because it is fun and also to remind the audience that Dr. Whale exists. I assume Dr. Whale will play some sort of important part in this season’s finale because of this.
  • Lacey is still an alcoholic.
  • Greg and Tamara are trying to murder magic because it’s unholy or something.
  • Greg and Tamara keep alluding to some worldwide anti-magic organization that they belong to without ever naming it. I bet the writers haven’t actually come up with what the organization is yet.
  • David gives his gun to Emma, but then in the next scene he points his gun at Greg. CONTINUITY ERROR!
  • Tamara shoots Neal and throws a magic bean at him. He falls through a portal AGAIN.
a screencap of emma swan (played by jennifer morrison) about to lose her grip on neal cassidy (played by michael raymond-james) over a portal to another world
WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING TO ME!?

Things that I think aren’t going to happen in the finale:

  • Sneezy getting his memory back
  • The big reveal of the secret organization that Tamara and Greg belong to
  • Dr. Frankentstein finding his brother
  • Finding out where Neal went when he fell through the portal this time around
  • Rumpelstiltskin’s undoing