Monday, December 8, 2014

Once Upon a Time 4.11: "Shattered Sight"

“Long ago, a prophecy told me that you would lead me to just that, Emma and this is it. All I wanted was to have my sisters’ love and now I have it. Now I get to join them.”
- Ingrid

For an episode that was supposed to be all crazy with everyone hurting each other with their words and their fists, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed. I think it would have been better if some of the townsfolk besides the Charmings and Regina were able to have lines explaining the drama going on instead of just beating each other up. But, I can’t change that.

We got the rest of the Emma and Ingrid backstory this week, too. We find Ingrid in Boston in 1982 getting swindled by some fake fortune teller. She was hoping to find out more information about Emma. She’s got to wait until 2001 though to find her (the timing doesn’t quite work out for Emma to be 13 or 14 in 2001 if she’s 28 in 2011 but whatever. Emma is going to sneak out of Ingrid’s house because her new foster brother Jason is a dick but Ingrid is sitting on the couch and kind of says “go ahead and leave if you want but it’s a shame you can’t just prank your foster brother with this fear I know about”. Emma hangs around one more night which leads to at least six months as we know. Ingrid is going to adopt Emma and so she takes her to an arcade and they’re playing one of those games with the claw grip thing. The lights on the machine flicker before Emma gets a prize and Ingrid thinks she’s coming into her powers. Unfortunately, her idea is to test her theory by dragging Emma out into traffic. Emma understandably freaks out and takes off and that is likely when she jumps out of the system and eventually ends up with Neal. And we visit a bit of Storybrooke’s more recent past when Emma goes into Ingrid’s ice cream shop to get ice cream and recognizes her foster mom. Again, freak out. But this is also when Ingrid takes Emma’s memories.

In the Storybrooke of the present, people are starting to just beat the crap out of each other for no reason. We see most of the dwarves going at it and apparently Sneezy tires to kill Grumpy with a crossbow. Clearly, he fails. Amidst all this nonsense, Hook ends up in Gold’s shop, having likely been summoned. It seems he’s immune to the spell since his heart isn’t in his chest. Guess that’s handy. I don’t really fancy the sleazy pirate who enticed a married woman to leave her husband and child popping back up. Anyway, Gold tasks Hook with gathering Henry and taking him to the town line where Hook will meet them with Belle and then head to New York to start their new life. He’d been seen as the hero. Hooke’s endeavor to collect Henry fails though. Henry admits (under the spell of course) that he never liked Hook and he likes him even less now that he’s dating Emma. Thank you for saying what I feel kid! And he’s set a trap anyway. Hook gets into the mayor’s office and promptly falls flat on his ass thanks to a bunch of marbles. Brilliant! And then Hook is waylaid by Will Scarlet wanting round two from when he’d been trying to break into the library but Hook doesn’t have time for that.

At the sheriff’s station, Snow and Charming are going at each other over the violent beginning of their relationship and their less flattering character traits. Mary Margaret even got in digs about the way he swaddles baby Neal! Anna (who is put on babysitting duty by Emma while she and Elsa go off to confront Ingrid) tries to get them to see reason but even Kristoff is whining about her postponing their wedding and not wanting to get married if it’s all just sniping at each other. Speaking of Emma and Elsa, they find Ingrid in town and try to stop her with their magic but it’s not working thanks to the ribbons. Ingrid explains that the love contained in them has no equal. So Emma comes up with the brilliant plan to get Regina super pissed at her and let her hatred fuel magic to destroy them. And it works. Emma taunts Regina by saying she purposely brought Marian back to mess up Regina’s love life and that’s enough to get Regina (now in Evil Queen garb by the way) to blast the ribbons.

Free of her crypt now, Regina goes looking for Emma and finds the Charmings at the station. She poos Kristoff and Anna back to ‘where they came from” which in this case is the beach by the trunk and the bottle. Kristoff insists he’s going to swim back to Arendelle and Anna (out of love) conks him on the head with the bottle. It breaks and she finds the message from her mother which changes everything. As Anna is going off to find Emma, Elsa and Ingrid, Regina and Snow end up in a rather funny sword fight over Daniel (what else). Snow rightly remarks that she was ten when all this happened but she is totally besting Regina (who can’t use magic).

In the ice cave, Emma and Elsa are indeed having trouble defeating Ingrid (to break the spell they need to kill her). Ingrid produces the memory stones that she created with their memories and seems convinced that once she returns the good memories, they’ll be a weird happy family. Enter Anna with the scroll which she promptly reads out loud. Gerda has written that she wishes she could change what happened and that she needs Ingrid to know that she still loves her She wants to return all the memories of everyone in Arendelle so they can remember both Ingrid and Helga. Ingrid doesn’t believe it at first but she touches a memory rock and sees all of Gerda’s good memories of them growing up and she realizes that she’s been wrong and she needs to stop the spell. Everyone’s kind of not down with her sacrificing herself but she explains that she’s been waiting all this time for Emma to lead her to the love of her sisters and it’s finally happened. Before she disappears into snow she returns Emma and Elsa’s memories and the snow that falls saves everyone. It looks like not much harm has been done in the loss of life department anyway. Everyone’s happy to see each other which is nice. I do hope next week they touch on some of the things that were said, especially Henry’s feelings about Emma’s love life. Speaking of Hook, he pays Gold another visit who insists that even if Ingrid’s plan failed, his won’t and he’s still leaving town and he’s going to cleave himself from the dagger when the stars in the sky match the stars on the hat. So it looks like Hook may not be lasting too much longer anyway.

Overall, I thought this episode could have been a bit stronger but it did wrap things up pretty well so we can have one episode to set us up for the rest of the se3ason when it comes back in the spring. It seems we’re going to have a trio of (hopefully unrelated) witches to contend with (Maleficent, Ursula and Cruella).

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