It’s back, after a brief hiatus. Big spoilers below!
Cora and Hook have arrived in Storybrooke, and Cora begins making trouble straightaway, mostly for Regina. Cora poses as Regina and kills Archie. She killed Jiminy Cricket! Makes the episode title a little morbid, doesn’t it? Except it’s all a ruse!
I like how the writers turned the situation around on Regina. She’s seemingly making an honest effort to reform, but now everyone thinks she killed Archie. She knows now that they’ll never believe her again, so she has no reason to try to be good anymore (except for Henry). It will be interesting to see if she really reverts to full evil, or tries to clear her name. (BTW, I like that this show is not afraid to be whimsical and magical, but using a dreamcatcher to read a dog’s memories had me rolling my eyes a little bit.)
The opening scenes were great and funny. Henry and Emma walking in on Snow and Charming in bed. “I’m glad at our age we can still create some traumatic experiences for our child.” And when Regina showed up at the party and Snow objects: “But Emma, she tried to kill us! Yesterday!!” And when Regina says that she brought lasagna, Grumpy responds, “What’s the secret ingredient? Poison?”
Anyway, all in all a good episode about forgiveness and redemption and how hard it is to regain trust once you’ve lost it. The flashbacks did a good job of expounding on the history of the clashes between Regina and Snow in HEAL.
I liked it. I was so happy to see Archie in the hold of Hook’s ship. And because I have a hard time telling one person from another, I thought the person turned into the fish was Grumpy. I wonder if they’ll ever turn him back?
I don’t think we’d seen the fish shack owner before. I don’t know how he’ll ever get back to being human, since nobody reported him missing and neither Hook nor Cora have any interest in helping the useless. Hopefully there’s a happy world in the lake for him to live in.
I’m finding Cora more and more boring and I wish she had stayed back in the other world. She’s just a by-the-book nasty villain and far less interesting than any of the characters. This current plotline is just a reworking of the “Frame Mary Margaret” plot from last year (a point acknowledged by the writers) and it’s no better the second time around.
Yeah, this was a truly bad episode. I laughed outloud during the “big reveal” when Cora said she didn’t know who she killed in Archie’s office, which seems like a gigantic plot hole to me (how did she abduct Archie in the first place? Guess “magic” covers a lot of sins). And why show us the ‘murder’ at all? Why not just have someone discover ‘Archie’ and have the audience see the murder for the first time when Emma et al. view it in the dreamcatcher, and save the fact that it’s a frame-up for the big reveal? This, IMO, would have made the earlier scene where Regina confronts Archie far more relevant to the story (as it stands, it’s basically there merely to justify the characters’ later suspicions that she committed a murder we already know she didn’t commit) and made the dreamcatcher sequence more of a revealation (rather than just waiting for the characters to discover a lie in a way we already expected).
Next week might be an improvement, as I think the Belle/Rumple relationship with Captain Hook as a new antagonist has far better dramatic opportunities. But this show is starting to bore and may be off my Tivo soon…
I had hoped they would use pogo as a ‘lie detector’ somehow - showing "regina’in the dreamcatcher but ‘oddly’ - or that pogo still saw regina as a friend…
as it was - I have to agree that it could have been so much better and was a bit of a letdown overall.
I was hoping they would go back to the invisible ship and find it had been sunk after being repaeatedly hit by other boats attempting to dock there.
I dunno. By the end of the first season I was really tired of the moustache-twirling villain routine. The woman is a good actor; I’m glad they’re letting her do something other than smirk and glare.
Because the whole point of the story line is that Regina is really trying to change and her Mother is ruining it. You are supposed to feel for Regina. If the audience doesn’t know she is innocent from the start, you lose that.
You can achieve the same effect by leaving the audience in as much doubt about Regina as the characters (at least until the end of the episode). Of course that would also entail keeping Barbara Hershey out of the spotlight for awhile.
The arc also critically depends on no one figuring out Cora is in Storybrooke; once that’s known, Emma and Snow will immediately conclude Regina is telling the truth, since Cora deceived them in a similar way at least once (twice if you count her heart-based control of Aurora). That also means Captain Hook will have to stay hidden, and IMO that’s more problematic given his emnity of Rumple and his non-magical options for revenge.
I think the “Regina trying to change” storyline had potential, but it would have been far more interesting to see the obstacles for her change coming from people and things we already knew about and her own past, rather than intoducing a cartoonish big-bad as her secret antagonist. I also think that storyline will dissolve the instant Cora is revealed, and the series will shift to G. vs. E. battle mode–something I personally would find pretty boring.
AFTER the dog in 101 Dalmatians? The way this show works, I’ve been under the impression he IS the dog in 101 Dalmatians ever since he first showed up.
I kept wondering why Pongo would identify Regina in his “memory,” too. Don’t dogs rely mainly on smell for identification? Since he’d never met Cora before, he wouldn’t know who she was, but he certainly wouldn’t identify her as Regina.
