TV Review: Once Upon A Time S3, Ep 16
So for various reasons I have missed reviewing the past three episodes of Once Upon A Time. I keep saying "I'm going to catch up in order," and then I fall another week behind. So tonight, I'm jumping to review the current episode, in which we find out exactly how Zelena got to be Wicked. If I have time this week, I'll go back and fill in thoughts on the missing three eps. We'll see.
I thought this was perhaps the tightest episode of this half-season so far: a villain-centric episode that didn't attempt to make the Big Bad more sympathetic than the heroes. Needless to say, if you haven't watched the episode, don't click through the cut.
Okay, so obvious things first: The explanation that it's Zelena's jealousy of Regina that turns her green is just too simple, and not really congruous with the way we've seen magic work throughout the series. No-one else is transformed from beautiful to "ugly" by their emotions -- if they were, wouldn't Regina/Cora be some hideous shade due to their blackened hearts? Rumplestiltskin is the odd color he is because every Dark One is that color. I think there's more to Zelena's background that will reveal why her jealousy is manifesting through her skin. And I think that background is going to be the reveal that Rumple really is her father.
When Zelena let the comment drop several episodes ago that she used to shave her drunken father all the time, many of us (myself included) took that at face value to mean that Zelena grew up with her birth father but without her birth mother (Cora). We see at the very start of this episode that is not true, that Cora sent Zelena through a portal for reasons largely unknown (but presumptively that the baby was a hindrance in Cora marrying into royalty). The small glimpse of Cora with the baby implies that she summons the "tornado" that drops Zelena into Oz; this means Zelena is born after Cora learns magic. So I'm back to considering the theory (as I'm sure many others are) that Zelena is actually Rumple and Cora's love-child. I'm not a big fan of this theory because it creates problems for what we know about Rumple and for the Redemption Path he's been on since the series started. But right now, it's the theory that makes the most sense within the context of what we've seen, and it would explain Zelena's magical aptitude being so much stronger than Regina's.
The problem I see is that everything Rumple did -- training Cora, training Regina, attempting to train Zelena -- was to get back to Bae. Confronted with a daughter Cora hid from him, would Rumple (even the Pre-Curse Rumple who was manipulating everyone) have been so callous in his treatment of her? No, more than callous -- downright gleeful in his enjoyment of her skin changing green. I don't think even CrazyRumple would have treated her quite like that in light of already having lost one child. Now, the argument could be made that his little "Are You Really Cora's Daughter" magic trick might not have revealed to him that he was dealing with his own daughter, but the look on his face when the glass turns green certainly registered to me as more than just "oh, you really are Cora's kid." So IF this is what the writers are going for, that Zelena is Rumple's daughter and Cora hid the child away from him for various reasons, they've written themselves into an interesting place with Rumple: will we, the viewers, accept a Rumple who, before meeting Belle, would have been so callous in his quest to find Bae that he'd throw aside another child of his own? I'm interested to see how this plays out. And of course, there's always the possibility that we'll find out Zelena's father was someone completely different.
The view of Oz was less detailed than I'd hoped, but we know we're going to be meeting Glinda the Good Witch later in the season, so I presume we'll see more of how Oz works. I am glad that they did not make The Great And Powerful Wizard anyone we've already seen (and especially glad that he wasn't Rumple). I'd noticed Christopher Gorham's name in the Guest Credits, so I assumed we'd be getting the origin of the Flying Monkey, but I really didn't expect him to also be The Wizard. I thought that was nicely played.
We also now know what Zelena is really up to: a curse that will re-set time so that Cora didn't give her up and so that Regina never existed, "forcing" everyone to love Zelena. The mechanics of this new curse involve a dollop of Courage (Charming's), presumably a dollop of Brains (Rumple's) and a heaping helping of Heart (Regina's), but that's about all we know. We also have no clue why Zelena bothered, after a year, to bring everyone to Storybrooke and wipe their memories if she was just going to allow herself to be discovered so quickly. My theory is that she'd attempted, in the Enchanted Forest, to steal Courage, Brains and Heart and was thwarted, and so gave herself another chance by wiping out everyone's memories of that attempt while she gathered herself to try again.
The "big" fight scene was more a war of words than it was a magic-fight, and I was actually okay with that. I think the Big Final Showdown between Evil and Wicked must happen at the end of the season, as the "big" (that might be overstating it) Pan-Rumple fight had to come at the end of the previous half-season. There was just enough magic tossed around, but the interplay between all of the characters was more important at this point.
Full credit to Rebecca Mader, as well. She's been impressive as the Witch throughout this run, but tonight's Zelena-centric episode really showed her range. While the individual beats of character transformation felt a bit clunky (especially the scene with her adoptive father), that was more on the writers and perhaps the editing than it was on the actress. (I also like that she's interacted more with Emilie deRavin here on ONCE than they ever got to on LOST, but that's beside the point.)
Elsewhere in the episode, we got some nice character relationship moments.
I'm actually becoming a fan of the Regina-Robin relationship. I feel like in the past two episodes we've seen that the actors have some solid chemistry between them, and that while the initial "Regina has a soul-mate" concept felt like a clunky way to give her a connection to Tinkerbell, they've cast the right guy to play off of Lana Parilla and make it work. The three scenes they shared in this episode built nicely on each other and felt much less contrived than the whiskey scene from last week. I suspect the whiskey will now be a running joke between them until Regina really does finally share that drink with Robin, which will be when she finally tells him why his lion tattoo affects her so much.
In fact, I think Lana Parilla was fantastic this episode. We still got the snarky, condescending Regina we love in her scenes with Tinkerbell and especially with Zelena, but we got to see the softer side of Regina that we've only really ever fully seen in the flashbacks to when she met Snow, and Lana made it all believable. I absolutely buy Regina's Redemption Path arc (not that I don't buy Rumple's, mind you) because of how solid Parilla is in almost everything the writers ask of her. Even though tonight was not a Regina-centric episode, she stole every scene she was in.
I also liked the Hook-Henry moment. I've already seen enough commentary on TVLine's episode recap from people who hated it, and I think after my extreme reaction to Neal's death last week people probably expected me to hate it too. But it worked for me as much as the Neal-Hook hug in the hospital last week worked for me. We know that Hook had genuinely paternal feelings for Young Bae (the fact that those feelings were tied to his hatred of Rumple and wanting to rescue Bae from his coward/evil father doesn't lessen the potency of those feelings); it makes sense that Hook would want to do right by Bae's son in a way he couldn't for Bae. And I thought one of the strongest points of this episode was the repetition that we can't have feelings about the death of someone we knew nothing about in life. Zelena deals with that by imagining a life for herself where she wasn't given up. Henry deals with it by saying "tell me something about my father that doesn't sound made up just to get me to like the guy now that he's dead." And the one person Henry has already encountered in Storybrooke who can give the kid that type of information is Hook, because Hook had the best relationship with Bae in the past, such as it was.
Speaking of Neal. It's interesting that the opening scene of the episode, Neal's funeral, felt like an afterthought in some respects. It was short, it lacked any dialogue, it felt more like a necessity than a vital part of the episode. But it also moved me. I think any speech, from any character other than perhaps Emma, would have felt even more forced than the simple scene of a coffin being lowered into the ground and those who knew Neal dropping a shovelful of dirt on his grave in respect. I liked that Hook was the first to shovel (a position that I believe normally would be the parent of the deceased) and Emma was last, and that they did intercut to Rumple physically reacting to the shovels of dirt falling on Bae's coffin.
I know the show also gets a lot of knocks for its portrayal of adoption, that it tends towards the negative (ie the implication that Henry belongs with his birth mother rather than the Evil Queen who adopted him for her own selfish reasons, negating how much Regina loves Henry despite her Evilness). I wonder how many of those folks picked up on Rumple's dialogue tonight where he revealed that his happiest memories come from the spinsters who adopted him when his father abandoned him? I thought it was a wonderfully underplayed scene by Robert Carlyle, and definitely spoke to adoption as a Good Thing.
A couple of things about the crowd scenes this episode stuck out at me, too. First, I've been operating under the theory that Zelena's curse didn't bring the Fairies to Storybrooke because we hadn't seen Blue or Tinkerbell in any of the "present day" group scenes, and I was hoping there was a cool story-reason for that. This episode knocked that theory out as we got a quick glimpse of Blue at the funeral and then a nice Regina-Tinkerbell scene in Granny's (over the "soul-mate" issue). Second, there were a number of very young-looking male faces behind the regulars at Bae's funeral ... were those supposed to be the Lost Boys (who would have known and bonded with Bae during his original time in Neverland)? I think so, although I haven't been able to get Adam Horowitz or any of the cast to confirm it via Twitter. Until and if they say otherwise, I'm going to assume those Lost Boys are still among the Storybrooke residents and they did indeed show up to pay tribute to Bae.
I also noticed that both Grumpy and Happy were missing from the group scenes tonight, although both Sneezy and Doc got good one-liners in. It's not jarring when we see Grumpy without the other Dwarves, but it is jarring when we see them without him. He wasn't at the funeral, in Granny's or at the Big Confrontation. I wonder if Lee Arenberg was filming something else, or if bringing Chris Gorham and Rose McIver in meant one of the other higher-paid semi-regulars had to be removed from the script.
The preview for next week gave us a look at a Hook-centric episode, which I've largely enjoyed. I suppose we can hold out hope that we'll see some interaction with Young Baelfire, but then again the snippets seemed to take place between Killian deciding to be a pirate and losing his hand to Rumple so probably not.
I thought this was perhaps the tightest episode of this half-season so far: a villain-centric episode that didn't attempt to make the Big Bad more sympathetic than the heroes. Needless to say, if you haven't watched the episode, don't click through the cut.
Okay, so obvious things first: The explanation that it's Zelena's jealousy of Regina that turns her green is just too simple, and not really congruous with the way we've seen magic work throughout the series. No-one else is transformed from beautiful to "ugly" by their emotions -- if they were, wouldn't Regina/Cora be some hideous shade due to their blackened hearts? Rumplestiltskin is the odd color he is because every Dark One is that color. I think there's more to Zelena's background that will reveal why her jealousy is manifesting through her skin. And I think that background is going to be the reveal that Rumple really is her father.
When Zelena let the comment drop several episodes ago that she used to shave her drunken father all the time, many of us (myself included) took that at face value to mean that Zelena grew up with her birth father but without her birth mother (Cora). We see at the very start of this episode that is not true, that Cora sent Zelena through a portal for reasons largely unknown (but presumptively that the baby was a hindrance in Cora marrying into royalty). The small glimpse of Cora with the baby implies that she summons the "tornado" that drops Zelena into Oz; this means Zelena is born after Cora learns magic. So I'm back to considering the theory (as I'm sure many others are) that Zelena is actually Rumple and Cora's love-child. I'm not a big fan of this theory because it creates problems for what we know about Rumple and for the Redemption Path he's been on since the series started. But right now, it's the theory that makes the most sense within the context of what we've seen, and it would explain Zelena's magical aptitude being so much stronger than Regina's.
The problem I see is that everything Rumple did -- training Cora, training Regina, attempting to train Zelena -- was to get back to Bae. Confronted with a daughter Cora hid from him, would Rumple (even the Pre-Curse Rumple who was manipulating everyone) have been so callous in his treatment of her? No, more than callous -- downright gleeful in his enjoyment of her skin changing green. I don't think even CrazyRumple would have treated her quite like that in light of already having lost one child. Now, the argument could be made that his little "Are You Really Cora's Daughter" magic trick might not have revealed to him that he was dealing with his own daughter, but the look on his face when the glass turns green certainly registered to me as more than just "oh, you really are Cora's kid." So IF this is what the writers are going for, that Zelena is Rumple's daughter and Cora hid the child away from him for various reasons, they've written themselves into an interesting place with Rumple: will we, the viewers, accept a Rumple who, before meeting Belle, would have been so callous in his quest to find Bae that he'd throw aside another child of his own? I'm interested to see how this plays out. And of course, there's always the possibility that we'll find out Zelena's father was someone completely different.
The view of Oz was less detailed than I'd hoped, but we know we're going to be meeting Glinda the Good Witch later in the season, so I presume we'll see more of how Oz works. I am glad that they did not make The Great And Powerful Wizard anyone we've already seen (and especially glad that he wasn't Rumple). I'd noticed Christopher Gorham's name in the Guest Credits, so I assumed we'd be getting the origin of the Flying Monkey, but I really didn't expect him to also be The Wizard. I thought that was nicely played.
We also now know what Zelena is really up to: a curse that will re-set time so that Cora didn't give her up and so that Regina never existed, "forcing" everyone to love Zelena. The mechanics of this new curse involve a dollop of Courage (Charming's), presumably a dollop of Brains (Rumple's) and a heaping helping of Heart (Regina's), but that's about all we know. We also have no clue why Zelena bothered, after a year, to bring everyone to Storybrooke and wipe their memories if she was just going to allow herself to be discovered so quickly. My theory is that she'd attempted, in the Enchanted Forest, to steal Courage, Brains and Heart and was thwarted, and so gave herself another chance by wiping out everyone's memories of that attempt while she gathered herself to try again.
The "big" fight scene was more a war of words than it was a magic-fight, and I was actually okay with that. I think the Big Final Showdown between Evil and Wicked must happen at the end of the season, as the "big" (that might be overstating it) Pan-Rumple fight had to come at the end of the previous half-season. There was just enough magic tossed around, but the interplay between all of the characters was more important at this point.
Full credit to Rebecca Mader, as well. She's been impressive as the Witch throughout this run, but tonight's Zelena-centric episode really showed her range. While the individual beats of character transformation felt a bit clunky (especially the scene with her adoptive father), that was more on the writers and perhaps the editing than it was on the actress. (I also like that she's interacted more with Emilie deRavin here on ONCE than they ever got to on LOST, but that's beside the point.)
Elsewhere in the episode, we got some nice character relationship moments.
I'm actually becoming a fan of the Regina-Robin relationship. I feel like in the past two episodes we've seen that the actors have some solid chemistry between them, and that while the initial "Regina has a soul-mate" concept felt like a clunky way to give her a connection to Tinkerbell, they've cast the right guy to play off of Lana Parilla and make it work. The three scenes they shared in this episode built nicely on each other and felt much less contrived than the whiskey scene from last week. I suspect the whiskey will now be a running joke between them until Regina really does finally share that drink with Robin, which will be when she finally tells him why his lion tattoo affects her so much.
In fact, I think Lana Parilla was fantastic this episode. We still got the snarky, condescending Regina we love in her scenes with Tinkerbell and especially with Zelena, but we got to see the softer side of Regina that we've only really ever fully seen in the flashbacks to when she met Snow, and Lana made it all believable. I absolutely buy Regina's Redemption Path arc (not that I don't buy Rumple's, mind you) because of how solid Parilla is in almost everything the writers ask of her. Even though tonight was not a Regina-centric episode, she stole every scene she was in.
I also liked the Hook-Henry moment. I've already seen enough commentary on TVLine's episode recap from people who hated it, and I think after my extreme reaction to Neal's death last week people probably expected me to hate it too. But it worked for me as much as the Neal-Hook hug in the hospital last week worked for me. We know that Hook had genuinely paternal feelings for Young Bae (the fact that those feelings were tied to his hatred of Rumple and wanting to rescue Bae from his coward/evil father doesn't lessen the potency of those feelings); it makes sense that Hook would want to do right by Bae's son in a way he couldn't for Bae. And I thought one of the strongest points of this episode was the repetition that we can't have feelings about the death of someone we knew nothing about in life. Zelena deals with that by imagining a life for herself where she wasn't given up. Henry deals with it by saying "tell me something about my father that doesn't sound made up just to get me to like the guy now that he's dead." And the one person Henry has already encountered in Storybrooke who can give the kid that type of information is Hook, because Hook had the best relationship with Bae in the past, such as it was.
Speaking of Neal. It's interesting that the opening scene of the episode, Neal's funeral, felt like an afterthought in some respects. It was short, it lacked any dialogue, it felt more like a necessity than a vital part of the episode. But it also moved me. I think any speech, from any character other than perhaps Emma, would have felt even more forced than the simple scene of a coffin being lowered into the ground and those who knew Neal dropping a shovelful of dirt on his grave in respect. I liked that Hook was the first to shovel (a position that I believe normally would be the parent of the deceased) and Emma was last, and that they did intercut to Rumple physically reacting to the shovels of dirt falling on Bae's coffin.
I know the show also gets a lot of knocks for its portrayal of adoption, that it tends towards the negative (ie the implication that Henry belongs with his birth mother rather than the Evil Queen who adopted him for her own selfish reasons, negating how much Regina loves Henry despite her Evilness). I wonder how many of those folks picked up on Rumple's dialogue tonight where he revealed that his happiest memories come from the spinsters who adopted him when his father abandoned him? I thought it was a wonderfully underplayed scene by Robert Carlyle, and definitely spoke to adoption as a Good Thing.
A couple of things about the crowd scenes this episode stuck out at me, too. First, I've been operating under the theory that Zelena's curse didn't bring the Fairies to Storybrooke because we hadn't seen Blue or Tinkerbell in any of the "present day" group scenes, and I was hoping there was a cool story-reason for that. This episode knocked that theory out as we got a quick glimpse of Blue at the funeral and then a nice Regina-Tinkerbell scene in Granny's (over the "soul-mate" issue). Second, there were a number of very young-looking male faces behind the regulars at Bae's funeral ... were those supposed to be the Lost Boys (who would have known and bonded with Bae during his original time in Neverland)? I think so, although I haven't been able to get Adam Horowitz or any of the cast to confirm it via Twitter. Until and if they say otherwise, I'm going to assume those Lost Boys are still among the Storybrooke residents and they did indeed show up to pay tribute to Bae.
I also noticed that both Grumpy and Happy were missing from the group scenes tonight, although both Sneezy and Doc got good one-liners in. It's not jarring when we see Grumpy without the other Dwarves, but it is jarring when we see them without him. He wasn't at the funeral, in Granny's or at the Big Confrontation. I wonder if Lee Arenberg was filming something else, or if bringing Chris Gorham and Rose McIver in meant one of the other higher-paid semi-regulars had to be removed from the script.
The preview for next week gave us a look at a Hook-centric episode, which I've largely enjoyed. I suppose we can hold out hope that we'll see some interaction with Young Baelfire, but then again the snippets seemed to take place between Killian deciding to be a pirate and losing his hand to Rumple so probably not.