RumBelle

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.

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.

He has a sign for a hatter’s shop. Was it from Jefferson, the mad hatter’s shop? Is our mystery man from Wonderland?

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.

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.

There are some ballet slippers on his wall. Maybe, he’s one of the dancing hippos or gators from Fantasia.

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.

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.

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?

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.

We also have Mulan as a new character. She doesn’t really do much, except be a warrior and angry.

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”.

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 amulet has a different character on it. I couldn’t find any frames where it was clear, though.

This bugged me. Rumpelstiltskin/Mr. Gold kissed Belle, but his curse wasn’t broken. Are they not truly in love anymore?

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.

The domes on the roof make it look a bit like the palace in Agrabah, though.

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.