What Happened:
The Fairytale Land
- Emma and the rest of the Disney Princess Brigade, along with the forcibly-inducted Hook, arrive at the beanstalk. Hook explains that he has magic bracelets which will allow him and one other to climb up to the Treehouse of Doom.
- After some arguing and weak reasoning on the DPB's part, Emma decides to go with Hook. I was QUITE excited at the thought of these two spending precious bonding time together.
- Hook and Emma pass the halfway point on the beanstalk, and he's bored, so he asks Emma if she's got any good awful-ex stories. She calms him down firmly, insisting she has never been in love. He knows this is ridiculous, because Regina texted him these pictures:
- The three founding members of the DPB chill at the bottom of the beanstalk. Turns out Emma instructed Mulan to chop down the beanstalk if she's not back in ten hours. When she finds out the depressed princess is having bad dreams and doesn't sleep as a result, Snow gives Aurora terrible advice.
"Having nightmares? Best way to get rid of those is to go to sleep again!"
and Mulan's all
while she just casually invents the sundial.
- Emma and Hook arrive at the top of the beanstalk. Emma finds out about Hook and Mila(Rumpelstiltskin's wife), and then reflects that perhaps she was in love..."once."
- Aurora wakes up, stressed out, and tells Snow she had a dream: "I was in a red room...with burning curtains. There were no doors or windows, and I was sitting in a corner...and HE was looking at me..."
- Emma and Hook then use a bag of magic powder (courtesy of the extremely-practical Mulan) to knock out the giant at the top of the beanstalk.(although Hook winds up under a pile of rocks which he quickly escapes) They then explore, looking for the compass.
- The pair finds the corpse of Jack the Giant-Slayer, who apparently fought the giants in several wars. Hook plays history buff and Emma is all "That's boring" before she spots a trapwire and grabs Hook to pull him out of the way.
"And you assume I care about the giant wars...why?"- They end up in a hug. Hook has the exact same action the audience has ("OMG Emma and Hook are TOTALLY meant to be together YOLO") before Emma is all denying ("OMG Hook, I was just saving your life GOD can't two people just have a near-death experience without romantic tension I mean REALLY")
- The giant wakes up and Hook gets buried by a pile of rocks...again.
- Emma manages to trap the poor giant and takes the compass. Because she spared his life, he allows her to leave, but not before she convinces him to keep Hook imprisoned for ten hours.
- Hook is noticeably and understandably distressed that Emma is doing this to him. She explains that she can't take the chance that Hook will turn on them, and needs the ten hours as a head start (and Hook looks so hurt and rejected and he's all "I helped you find the compass, we had a good thing going!!!" with sad watery puppy eyes :( )
- Meanwhile, there is TENSION amongst the Disney Princess Brigade. Mulan wants to start chopping down the beanstalk, and Snow is naturally upset. But luckily Emma arrives, leaping down from the beanstalk epically but landing not-so-epically. (Somebody needs to make a gif of her amazing jump/fall/trip thing...teehee.)
- The DPB, now testosterone-free once more, heads off to see where the compass leads them.
Our World (But Not Storybrooke...)
- Twelve years ago (to long-time fans of the show, this number will be significant- we know Henry was born ten years ago, in a prison...) Emma is working giant Eighties glasses even though it was only 2000. C'mon, Emma, it's the Twenty-First Century, you survived Y2K, you can play with fashion a bit now.
- Emma carjacks her famed yellow beetle (the car she's been driving since the show began), but it's already stolen by another thief named Neil.
- More than a year later, Emma and Neil are the Bonnie and Clyde of the Twenty-First Century, robbing convenience stores and loving every second of it. The two are very much in love, but Neil proposes that they settle down somewhere, and Emma randomly picks Tallahassee on a map.
- Unfortunately, an old robbery of Neil's comes back to haunt him, putting him back on the law's radar. Emma proposes they make new identities for themselves by selling stolen watches.
- After getting the watches from a locker in a train station, Emma and Neil split up, agreeing to meet the next day after selling the watches. Neil is then chased down by none other than...
- AUGUST! He hasn't been around much this season, so you newbies will be confused, but for everyone else, he's Pinocchio grown up, and he's the only other person who escaped the curse besides Emma.
- August is then a manipulative jerk:
"Um, yeah, you gotta stay away from Emma. She's kinda like my surrogate sister who I ditched and just now am feeling slightly guilty for and you need to go and dump her so that she can go and save the world in ten years."
To convince Neil he's telling the truth, August shows him something in a box that, eleven years later, will contain a typewriter. Whatever's in the box now, though, is enough to make Neil instantly believe stories of magic and listen to August's explanation of the curse that Emma was prophesied to save Storybrooke at age twenty-eight.
- Emma is arrested at her meeting spot: August convinced Neil to call in a tip on Emma before fleeing to Canada. Leave it to Pinocchio to encourage using lies to solve problems...
- Two months later, Emma is in prison, serving out an eleven-month term. Henry has just been born, and she receives the key to her yellow car from an anonymous sender...
- ...which turns out to be Neil. Neil and August are in Vancouver, where Neil expresses his undying love for Emma, along with his guilt over Emma's incarceration for a crime he committed. August assures him that her prison term will help her clean up her act, and promises to send Neil a post-card when Emma has completed her destiny. (Remember at the start of the season, we saw a man in a business suiting getting a Storybrooke post-card?)
"Ooooooooooh...I get it."
Storybrooke (now)
- Henry wakes up. David rushes in, thinking, "Oh, God, it better not be bed bugs, Sydney Glass told me all about those."
- Turns out Henry just had the exact same dream as Aurora, Red Room, Burning Curtains, Creepy Stare and all.
What I Thought:
There are certain differences between the Fairytale Land (and by extension, Storybrooke) and the world that us viewers inhabit and call "real." Some are blatant (I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone who can stick their hand in somebody else's chest cavity and magically extract their heart while keeping them alive) while others are subtle. Whether or not you think the difference that this episode focuses on to be great or small is a matter of opinion.
One of my friends and fellow OUAT-fanatic told me that Lana Parilla- the actress who plays Regina- said in an interview that the inhabitants of the Fairytale Land only have one true love. Now, granted, she's not one of the show's writers, but given her big role, her opinion on the matter still has a lot of weight.
By contrast, on our Earth, people have many loves. They can start as early as elementary school with playground blushes and handholding, which in turn grows into the drama and hormone-filled high school experience that every teenager across the world knows to well. The romance continues to grow throughout the rest of our lives, but the one constant is that love has many forms and even more incarnations. People have unrequited affections, they have mutual crushes that go unacted on for one reason or another; if they're lucky (or not- again, depends on your view) they enter into a relationship, which more often than not eventually ends to give way to a new one. Half of all marriages end in divorce (which means half don't ;) ). The point is, love in our world is far more complicated than in the Fairytale Land, where Lana Parilla's words have thus far stood true: every character has only had one love story involving one other person.
This episode intrigued me because Emma- the child of two worlds, born in one but raised in another- is quite possibly the perfect person to break this pattern. She had difficulty admitting it, but we the audience could clearly tell Emma was in love with Neil (and he with her.) The pain she felt after he left her (and the guilt he felt for doing it) proved to us that they cared about each other immensely. At the same time, Emma appeared to be not entirely unreceptive to Hook's flirting, and looked rather distressed when she thought he had been crushed by a pile of rocks (how he wasn't is beyond me.) Regardless of my personal desire that Emma and Hook get together, there were sparks on both sides.
Emma might just fall in love again. She showed signs of it with Graham, but that got cut short. Emma might fall in love with a man who himself is a rulebreaker in more than one way: Hook is a pirate who has already lost his "one true love," but seems very interested in Emma. With the potential of Neil returning, a love triangle may be in bloom. And that is a very un-"Fairytale Land" concept that I am excited to see Emma bring about.
My Score:
9/10
An intriguing concept coupled with an exciting adventure and a romantic flashback makes Emma's backstory incredibly interesting, giving us an all-around fantastic episode.
My Questions:
-How mad is Hook at Emma???
-What is this freaky Red Room thing? Could there be a villain besides Cora?
-Will Mulan put a patent on her sundial?
Next Week:
Red Riding Hood has to deal with the consequences of eating her boyfriend, both social and digestive!
(As always, I use a lot of gifs and pictures. Most of them I get from Tumblr or other various websites. If they are yours or belong to someone you know, and you don't think I should be/have the right to be using them, let me know in the comments and I will take them down. I own nothing!)
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