and quite a bit of “not so subtle” (2 unwed mothers and adoption issues, political intrigue and conspiracy, car accidents, explosions, and don’t forget Red…)
Does anyone else like the flashback stuff a lot more than the “real world” stuff?
Regina, you witch!!!
Okay, I usually am clueless about this sort of thing, but what was Gold “gardening”? What was he doing out in the woods with a shovel? For a while there, I was afraid he’d killed the wolf and buried it, but it was frisking around later.
Yeah, that was unusual. Maybe the sheriff should look into that…oops.
too soon! too soon!
Damn good stuff here -
Poor huntsman! Well, that episode should put to rest any lingering doubts anyone had about whether the Mayor knows the truth. I mean, it should have been obvious before now, but this removes any wiggle room for the opposing view.
So a kiss from Emma can make someone remember their true selves?
I forget—do we know who the doctor is in HEAL?
I’ve only really watched this episode, but I have read this thread from time to time, and I just want to know, what is HEAL? I’ve tried Googling it but have come up with nothing.
Happy Ever After Land, from this post:
I forget from time to time and have to search the thread to remind myself. : )
The conversation between Mary Margaret and the sheriff was interesting as they were trying to remember when they met - when they met anyone. Makes Oy!'s time proposal the leading candidate for what the producers intended.
Also nice to see that the producers releasing the spoiler was a very short lived spoiler. They could have waited a week but then they wouldn’t have sounded so wise and in the know 
Ok, this was an episode of some fair degree of importance, huh?
[spoiler]As Tangent pointed out, this settles the Regina issue for once and for all. It also confirms beyond any reasonable doubt that HEAL constitutes an objective reality; the Huntsman recovered his full memory before he died. I don’t know if he really managed to get that across to Emma before he kicked it, but it gives us, the viewers, certainty that Henry is sane and correct.
It also, IMO, establishes yet again that Rumpelstiltskin/Mr. Gold makes this a three-way game. He wanted Graham to realize that he was remembering, not dreaming. I don’t know what he was doing with a shovel, although it seems likely that it wasn’t something that we’d approve of. If it wasn’t for the fact that he is so very attached to the concept of contracts, I’d think he was a Chaos figure, like Loki, a merry prankster caring nothing for good or evil. But he is attached to contracts, which is almost by definition a Lawful characteristic. For now, I think we have to accept that we simply lack sufficient info to know what he’s after.
Regina/Evil Queen is an interesting character. She seems to want to be a true Evil Queen, sternly pursuing her own evil goals unswayed by human emotion, but it seems possible that she’s just not very good at it. She appears to have too much in the way of real human feeling in her. She seems to love despite herself, and many if not all of her truly evil acts appear to be wildly striking back at what she sees as betrayals. By which I mean that she acts more out of emotion than design. She seems to genuinely love Henry. I think she may have genuinely loved Snow’s father, and she certainly genuinely loved her own father. She also seems to have had genuine feeling for Graham, and to have killed him because of her hurt at his “betrayal.” She does everything in her power to alienate people, and then becomes enraged if they are, in fact, alienated.
Snow, on the other hand, is also interesting. Despite ourselves, we have a tendency to equate ‘kindness’ or ‘goodness’ with ‘naivete’, ‘blindness’ and/or ‘passivity.’ Snow appears to be genuinely kind, without being at all imperceptive or inactive. Or, just maybe, she’s a much better, albeit far more subtle, Evil person than Regina. That letter she sent to the Evil Queen was about as good a way of hurting her as I can possibly imagine, and it did in fact utterly enrage her.
If this were Babylon 5, I’d be looking at Snow’s track record and thinking that for all her apparent goodness, her actual actions are not necessarily all that great. We don’t know all that much about her, but we do know that she was in some way responsible for her stepmother’s loss of some one/thing that was extremely important to her, talked her way out of being killed by the Huntsman and sent a letter back to her stepmother that resulted in the stepmother being probably very hurt, definitely extremely angry, and as a result taking this rage out on the Huntman. It then appears that Snow became a highway robber, until she met Prince Charming, whom she promptly charmed away from his fiance/wife.
But this isn’t Babylon 5, and while the writers of this show seem to have rather twisty minds, they don’t seem to be quite twisty enough to have Snow turn out to be a villain. But they’ve certainly left room for some moral ambiguity on both sides.[/spoiler]
Moonlitherial, I’ve got to admit that when I saw that scene, I almost sprained my arm patting myself on the back. Thanks for helping me out. 
I thought this show was going to be stupid, but I finally gave it a chance this weekend and it is soooo GOOD! I’m hooked!
If you possibly can, go back and watch the ealier episodes (maybe on abc.com?). This show is largely a serial, rather than episodic. I’m really surprised you could come in at this point and follow it pleasurably, because, believe me, it is being presented as a cumulative tale. Every episode is building on the preceding episodes. A small point on a earlier episode may turn out to be a major plot point later on. Or it may not. At this stage, it’s difficult to know what will end up being important, so ideally, you want to notice everything you can.
For example, in the first episode, there was some strange writing on the door of Emma’s Boston apartment, that no one in the show seemed to take notice of (they may not even have been able to see it). I noted it down and posted it pretty early in this thread. I still have no idea whatsoever what it meant. But someone went to quite a bit of trouble to put it there and make sure it was on camera briefly. There’s no way it was a production error - those words that were legible related to magic, not show biz mechanics. It meant something, probably something pretty important. If nothing else, it meant that Henry wasn’t the first person to identify Emma as important in the Storybrooke/magic scheme of things, because Henry couldn’t have written on the door.
In a subsequent episode, we found out that Mr. Gold (Rumpelstiltskin in HEAL) arranged the Mayor (Regina, Evil Queen in HEAL)'s adoption of Henry, and that she doesn’t know who Emma is, other than the unfortunate, inconvenient birth mother of her adopted son. We know that Emma was in Arizona at the time of Henry’s birth, so it seems apparent that Mr. Gold went to some trouble to get that particular child. We also know that, in HEAL, Rumpelstiltskin made deals with just about everyone, including giving the Evil Queen the curse that made Storybrooke happen, and that he exacted a price from her for it, but that she believed he would be as subject to the curse as everyone else (i.e. remembering nothing of HEAL) except herself. We also have been given good reason to believe that she was wrong about that, and that Mr. Gold may be to some degree immune to the curse.
So Mr. Gold seems a good candidate for having written on Emma’s door. But that tells us very little, since Mr. Gold/Rumpelstiltskin is a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in an enigma - we truly have no idea what he is or what his agenda is.
But in last night’s episode, he was just a slightly lame man with a shovel, claiming to have been gardening in a wood, and suggesting that Graham’s dream might have been a memory. You need the back-story for him to have had much of any significance.
So find a way to see the earlier episodes, slm2955. Then come back and tell us what you think.
Thanks for catching me up & I WILL watch starting from the first episode, luckily abc has all of them up:). But do any of you know what secret the evil queen and snow white shared that she wants her dead so bad? And please tell me graham is coming back to life:(
Last night was the first mention of that secret - and from what I remember of the fairy tale it wasn’t mentioned there so it’s new to the show.
I seriously doubt we’ll see Graham again unless undoing the curse reverts them all to the point they were when it took effect. That would really suck for Emma and even more so for Henry.
Hard to say. At a totally meta level, Jamie Dornan appears to have been a main character, i.e. a series regular rather than a guest star. While not unprecedented, it is highly unusual for a series regular to be killed off mid-season. Typically they wait until the last few episodes. Some kind of union thing, maybe? I seem to remember reading that a series regular had to be in at least 13 episodes of a given series, otherwise they were a recurring character and were billed differently in the credits. Is there someone who knows more about this who can contribute? I am going on some vary vague memories here, relating to a totally different program/people.
Damn it, I liked Graham 
But likeOy!, I’m not sure he’s really gone.
We could still see the huntsman in the HEAL flashbacks. He is now the queen’s pet.
If I understood and am remembering correctly, he became the Queen’s pet when she took his heart. He appears now to be her ex-pet. To quote the beloved poet:
[QUOTE=John Cleese]
He has ceased to be! 'E’s expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed 'im to the perch 'e’d be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E’s off the twig! 'E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile!! He’s fuckin’ SNUFFED IT!
[/QUOTE]
Or, at least, so it appears.
But, yes, flashbacks could allow him to appear enough times in the remainder of the season to qualify as a series regular. He could, in subsequent seasons, be a recurring character as needed.
The ‘secret’ was mentioned before - when Snow was talking with Charming on their first meeting -
Charming - “Why does she want you dead”
Snow - “She blames me for ruining her life”
Charming - “Well, did you”
Snow - “yes”
We still don’t know what that is, unless it somehow led to the death of Snow’s Dad/Queen’s Husband - or anyother number of things - possibly she ruined the queen’s life simply by being born.
Damn -this show has really turned a corner.