SPOILER ALERT! If you have seen episode 6 season 2 of Once Upon a Time, then you might not want to read this!
I don’t know, for an episode that was supposed to be some big revelation, I found this episode to be kind of “blah”.
So, anyway…
Yeehaw! It’s 1870!
Michael Raymond-James’ character, who we met way back in episode 1 of season 2, is a guy named “Neal Cassidy”. He was Emma’s boyfriend and he is probably Henry’s dad. Then again, we never saw a paternity test, so whoever fathered Henry is still up for grabs. My bet is on Henry having been conceived by THE FORCE and something something midi-chlorians.
A more important question, I think, is why does August Booth have Marsellus Wallace’s soul?
WHAT’S IN THE BOX!?
There was also some jazz in this episode about stealing a magical golden compass from the last big friendly giant in the world. Hey, a golden compass? Who owns the movie rights to the His Dark Materials movie series, now that New Line Cinema has gone belly up? If I recall correctly, there was travel between universes in His Dark Materials, just like in Once Upon a Time. They could totally do a crossover! I doubt ABC would want to anger the Catholic church though…
And, apparently, Captain Hook is in love with Emma, or something. LOVE TRIANGLE! DRAMA BOMB!
Also, Neal gave August a bunch of money to give to Emma, but August spent it all on hookers.
I think they need to make Mulan a little less angry all the time.
SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t seen Once Upon a Time episodes 2 through 5, you might not want to read this article.
Due to an illness and server troubles, I haven’t been keeping up with posting as many Once Upon a Time articles as I’d like to. So, here are some little summaries of my thoughts on episodes 2 through 5.
S02E02: We Are Both
Magic smells good!
Ugh. They’re making magic analogousness to drugs. So, does that only mean that evil magic is like drugs and good magic is like prescription drugs? Because, no one has any problem with the magic that the fairies use. Seems like a broken aesop to me.
Going over the town line means that you lose your fairy tale memories and are only left with your Storybrooke memories. Rumpelstiltskin never had any Storybrooke persona. Would he lose his entire memory or would he gain a Storybrooke persona, if he went over the town line? Also, who went over the town line to get Henry?
S02E03: Lady of the Lake
Emma smells good!
Charming’s mother dies needlessly in this episode! It’s a world full of magic! They most definitely could have found something other than the magic lake water to cure Snow White elsewhere.
“Hey, Emma, ogres hunt by sound!” Emma: “I’mma fire my gun for no good reason!”
An awul lot of the Enchanted Forest seems to exist still. I though most of it was supposed to be a void?
S02E04: The Crocodile
Rumpelstiltskin and Captain Hook smell good!
So, Rumpelstiltskin is now the Fairygodmother from Cinderella, the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, the Dark One and the crocodile from Peter Pan. They need to stop making Rumpelstiltskin every character from every book. I mean, I love watching Robert Carlyle chew the scenery, but, seriously, this is getting to be too much.
Sexy Captain Hook? EVERYTHING MUST BE SEXY!
How did Rumpelstiltskin get such a sexy wife in the first place?
S02E05: The Doctor
Sexy Igor smells good!
Regina had a whole vault full of hearts. Why couldn’t Victor Frankenstein just ask for an extra one? Why did he have to trick her out of a heart?
Sexy Igor? Well, at least it wasn’t angry teenage Igor.
Why isn’t Frankenstein black and white everywhere that he goes? (It’s definitely due to budgetary constraints, but still…)
SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t seen Broken, the first episode of the second season of Once Upon a Time, then you probably shouldn’t read this. I’m too lazy to provide the requisite expository text, for a person that hasn’t seen this episode, to understand this article, anyway.
I don’t really feel like running through the whole episode, so I’ll just go through my thoughts on a few things about it.
MYSTERIOUS MAN
At the start of the episode, we meet a new character and never learn who he is. Who he is ins’t really important, though, because he doesn’t actually do anything in the episode. Most people are going to say that he is Baelfire, but I think that would be too easy.
Here are some things around his apartment that may be clues to his identity.
MYSTERIOUS SHOP SIGN
He has a sign for a hatter’s shop. Was it from Jefferson, the mad hatter’s shop? Is our mystery man from Wonderland?
MYSTERIOUS SKATEBOARD DECK
He has a skateboard deck with the letters “NSNO” visible, or, since you can rotate these letters 180°, “ONSN”. So, it’s either a word ending with “NSNO”, or a word starting with “ONSN”. I couldn’t think of any. If you know anyway, please tell me in the comments.
MYSTERIOUS MONOCLE & POCKET WATCH
He has a pocket watch and a monocle hanging on his wall. The white rabbit carries a pocket watch, re-enforcing my Wonderland theory. Multiple Disney characters have monocles. I’m not sure which monocle-wearing character would be most likely.
MYSTERIOUS BALLET SLIPPERS
There are some ballet slippers on his wall. Maybe, he’s one of the dancing hippos or gators from Fantasia.
MYSTERIOUS DREAMCATCHER
He also has a dreamcatcher. I don’t really know if he looks Native American, or not. It is possible that he is John Smith, or one of the other colonists.
What is broken?
Lot’s of people are going to assume that the “Broken” on this postcard mean that the curse has been broken. Lots of things could be broken. Maybe, the word “broken” here doesn’t even mean “broken”. Maybe, it’s code. You don’t know.
Storybrooke is broken?
Was this postcard actually sent from Storybrooke, or, was it sent from a different location with the Storybooke picture as a clue for our mystery gentleman?
Current “True Love’s Kiss” Tally: 1
Here are our new royals: Princess Aurora II Electric Boogaloo and Prince Phillip Neckerchief Hipster. I say Aurora II because this Aurora mentions that her mother had to deal with Maleficent as well.
Mulan
We also have Mulan as a new character. She doesn’t really do much, except be a warrior and angry.
It’s a dementor! No… It’s a ringwraith!
So, we have wraiths attacking people, now. I’m willing to bet that the wraiths are connected to my “bigger bad” they, where Regina and Rumpelstiltskin will have to join forces against and even bigger evil. I’m guessing that these wraiths are the minions of the “bigger bad”.
Spooky Amulet
The wraiths wear these amulets. If you touch one of these amulets, the wraiths will come after you and suck your soul out of your face à la Shang Tsung.
I tried to look up what this character was, but the closest I got was that it could be a stylized version of the Chinese character “wáng, which means “king”.
Heh. Stylized wang.
The Other Side of the Spooky Amulet
The other side of the amulet has a different character on it. I couldn’t find any frames where it was clear, though.
Why isn’t his curse being broken?
This bugged me. Rumpelstiltskin/Mr. Gold kissed Belle, but his curse wasn’t broken. Are they not truly in love anymore?
A Palace!
This is the beautiful palace that Aurora and Phillip were to live in, but that didn’t work out so well. We are never told where in the fairy tale world this palace is situated in.
Agrabah
The domes on the roof make it look a bit like the palace in Agrabah, though.
Why aren’t they dead?
So, Emma and Snow White fall through a magic portal to a fairy tale world and they bust a bunch of stuff up, but there’s not a scratch on them. It was a nice touch that they had Snow holding on to Emma’s jacket.
So, in Storybrooke, there are a bunch of nuns, who used to be fairies, in a fairy tale world that was polytheistic. In season 2 the nuns will have their memories of the fairy tale world and the memories of their old belief system back. Christianity, being a monotheistic “burn the witches” type of deal, doesn’t seem like it would gel very well with people from a magical world. The fairy-nuns, I assume, will promptly defrock themselves.
What about characters like the mad hatter? Technically, his god is Lewis Carroll and Lewis Carroll has been dead for quite a while. I imagine it would be devastating to find out that all the pain and suffering in your life was because a mere mortal thought it would make an interesting story, and, what’s more, this creator is dead so you can’t make them answer for it.
In the world of Once Upon a Time does every story written become a real world? Does this include internet fanfiction? What if a person wrote a story about themselves? Rumpelstiltskin could write 100 different versions of himself to create a clone army. Regina could write a story of a world where it was impossible to be defeated.
Oh, crud, this thing is going to turn out to be one of the ages of Myst, isn’t it?
Thinking about Once Upon a Time, I came to a conclusion: the fairy tale world sucks. Only a few people get to have magic powers or be a princess. Everyone else is a peasant, dying early of disease or malnutrition, while getting caught up in the schemes of those more powerful than they.
They probably wouldn’t want to leave the real world. In the real world: food is plentiful, we have medical science that curing new things all the time, and, most importantly, for a people that are used to an oppressive feudal society, there is democracy in the real world. No more being serfs for the citizens of Storybrooke.
So, what does this mean for a character like Snow White, who will probably need a lot of help to get back to Fairy Tale Land? Why should the peasants help a person that was busy wearing pretty dresses and holding royal balls every week, while they were toiling in the fields? Will the royalty and magic users return to Fairy Tale Land without the peasants then? Could a world function filled only with princesses and witches?
Of course, I doubt any of this will actually come up in the show. It’s just interesting, sometimes, to think about the characters on the periphery of a story.
