“A wizard did it.”
More new characters, and a future problem.
[spoiler]So tonight we get to meet Cinderella, and see how Rumply has his finger in yet another pie. I could just about see Ella being desperate enough to sign a contract without reading it first. But Emma making a verbal agreement to owe a favour, without setting limitations on it? An open-ended favour? She’s supposed to be a tough, practical, woman, and she has some familiarity with the legal system. She *knows *better! Or she should, at least.
On the one hand, we seem to have an at least semi-happy ending for Ella, Thomas, and Alexandra. On the other hand, we have Rumply intruding in yet another fairy tale. He seems to have a real fixation on taking away the thing/person that people love most in every deal he makes. [/spoiler]
I chuckled at Cinderella = Ashley.
Ok, it looks as if Cinderella/Ashley was pregnant for 28 years. :eek:
I think the way time stopped in this town is that the people have a memory of today, yesterday, maybe the day before, and then “ago.” They know things happened in the past, they even have some idea of sequence and duration (Henry has been seeing the therapist for ‘some time,’ before which he had been not getting along with his mother), but the townspeople in general didn’t notice that years were elapsing and nothing was changing. Except that Henry, being outside of the curse, has actually aged and seems to have a normal sense of time (this may be why he’s so convinced of the curse). And of course, Madam Mayor and Mr. Gold both know, although the Mayor sometimes seems to be a tad fuzzy about the details too. BUt now time is moving again, people are waking up out of their haze, and their world is no longer completely static.
We still have no idea of Rumpelstiltskin’s agenda here. The fact that he seems to have gone to some trouble to find and bring Henry to Storybrook certainly indicates that his ends are other than the Queen’s. But nothing we’ve seen suggests that he is in any way good, just other.
And the Sheriff is still an enigma. We still don’t know if he’s the huntsman from Red Riding Hood or not, and we also don’t know what he’s after.
This reminds me of Babylon 5. The questions “Who are you?” and “What do you want?” permeate everything.
I can’t take this thing the slightest bit seriously anymore. I swear the dialogue is getting worse, and the show is still full of people doing things for no discernable reason except the writers need them to do it. The big one in Sunday’s episode was Emma agreeing to track down Ashley to retrieve the “item” Mr. Gold said he was so interested in… without asking him what the item was. I think any normal human being in her situation would ask what the thing is, and particularly Emma since it’s an important part of doing her job. What’s her reasoning for not asking? What if she finds Ashley and brings her back, and she doesn’t have the item because she lost it or sold it or it just wasn’t on her at the time? The implication was that she’d stolen something and I’m pretty sure Gold mentioned she broke into his shop; if someone steals jewels it’s likely because they plan to sell them, so why wouldn’t Emma want a description?
The sheriff sleeping with the mayor was a little less than surprising.
Marley - Emma did ask what the “item” was, and Gold told her the nice thing about hiring a private contractor is that he wasn’t required to divulge that information. Basically he said, “if you want the job, you’ll stop asking questions”. And she doesn’t have the preconcieved idea that everyone else has, that Gold is a naster deal-maker.
I wonder if she agreed to the stupid open-ended favor because of what Henry said about her being the only person who could leave Storybrooke. She knows she has an out.
StG
I know they’re not hewing that close to the original stories, but I’m really bothered that everyone in HEAL knows Rumplestiltskin’s name. Keeping his name a secret was his whole gimmick in the story that bears that name. In this episode, he even introduces himself to Cinderella, proudly giving away his name.
It really seems like they could have gotten a lot of story mileage in both worlds by keeping his name a mystery for a while.
Though Henry hasn’t figured out Mr. Gold yet, so maybe they will make his name important, at least in Storybrooke.
By the way, it seems clear to me that Cinderella’s friend from the cafe is Red Riding Hood.
To me, the biggest plot hole was that Ashley tried to steal the contract back in the first place. If she had just skipped town, Mr. Gold would have had no leverage over her.
That threw me, too. As I’m a little uncomfortable pointing this out, but I think the fairy godmother was the first nonwhite character in the series, and they blew her up four seconds after introducing her. I’m not saying it’s offensive, but they did sort of fall into that old horror movie trope about the black character dying first.
They’ve been pretty obvious about her identity from the very beginning, though. At least I thought it was obvious, anyway.
True, and I am really not liking the whole Red-Riding-Hood-is-a-skank thing. I mean, the whole metaphor behind the story is a pure girl being led astray and devoured/deflowered by a “wolf”. This Red looks like she enjoys being devoured every chance she gets. She reminds me of those Red Hot Red Riding Hood costumes at Halloween.
Probably nitpicking, but it seems like everyone else has maintained most of the character traits in Storybrook. Red in the stories was gullible and naive.
Henry mentioned that one of the things that makes Emma special is that she can leave (then the writers promptly threw a lampshade on the fact that Henry left to get Emma). I’m guessing that the residents of Storybrooke are, for the most part, stuck in Storybrooke.
Ruby
Theory about the Sheriff:
Evil Queen said that she lost her love because of Snow White - not that Snow White killed him which would be out of character for her . What if “lost” means missing or moved or something else because of something Snow did (even indirectly). Now the Lover is affected by The Curse and because of it, Mayor McQueen remembers the relationship but he does not.
Well, of course, that’s not his real name. Everyone who’s ever played the original King’s Quest knows that his name is actually Ifnkovhgroghprm! 
The clergyman performing Snow White and James’ marriage ceremony was also black. But all in all, this is a pretty bleached show. Not all that surprising given that the fairy tales that are the source are mostly western European in origin, I guess.
Giancarlo Esposito made a brief appearance too as the editor of the newspaper, The Mirror.
That’s true. I forgot about Esposito because we haven’t seen him in a few episodes and I didn’t notice the clergyman. This seems like it would be a difficult area for anybody doing a story based on European folk tales, but if they’re looking for places to add some diversity to the cast, I don’t think that was an effective way to do it.
I must admit that my first two thoughts when Cindy’s Fairy Godmother showed up were “Oh, just Whitney Huston in that fairly recent remake of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella” and “Oh, dear, a Magical Negro.” Which was unfortunate, because I don’t think there is so much a Magical Negro is there is a Magical Other, or a Magical Exotic, if you prefer. The character with special powers is often differentiated from the (within the specific fiction) mainstream by age, culture, ancestry, whatever. So for a predominantly Anglo culture, it may be black, or, more common these days, “the Ancient Mysteries of the East,” used to sell everything from life philosophy to beauty products. The old horror movie trope of “kill the black character off first” never occurred to me, largely, I imagine, because I’m not a fan of horror movies.