Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Once Upon a Time 6.17: “Awake”

“Well, even though I can’t be with her, I know she’s fighting for me just as much as I’m fighting for her.”
– David

This week’s episode of “Once Upon a Time” gave us a glimpse into the Charmings past that we haven’t seen before. At some point during the first curse, Mary Margaret finds a tiny flower growing in the sidewalk and she feels compelled to bring it to John Doe (Charming). He wakes up with his memories and shortly thereafter, she gets hers back too. David even manages to wake Rumple with a mention of Emma’s name. But there’s a hitch. They woke up 18 years too early. Emma isn’t ready to come find them and start on her path as the Savior. But the flower that woke the Charmings can reunite those with True Love and so they open a doorway to a 10-year-old Emma sitting in her room reading a book and listening to music. But Snow realizes that they can’t seek out their own happiness if it means condemning their friends to their awful Storybrooke lives (especially after Regina nearly blew up Archie to test Snow). So, they take the potion Rumple gave them to forget with the hopes that Emma would eventually find them.

In the present, things are getting somewhat complicated as well. Emma has been clued in on Henry’s glyph drawings and she’s also started having her hand tremors again. The Final Battle that’s coming is clearly on the horizon and it’s going to be bad. Also, Regina is still trying to find a way to break the sleeping curse. She and Zelena seem to have worked together to try a remedy but it only makes things worse. Instead of waking them up, it will put them both under permanently. Oops! But that flower from the past has been blooming (which according to Zelena happens when there’s a great evil coming). So, Emma and Snow go off to find them. They happen upon a field of them but then encounter the Black Fairy and Gideon (who destroys all but one). It seems the Rumple clan is having all kinds of drama of their own. The Black Fairy pops by the shop and tells her son that he will join her willingly when the time comes. Later, he confronts Mama about the fact she took Gideon’s heart. He’s going to get his son’s ticker back and he still refuses to join his mother’s cause. I have to wonder, if she gave him up (and didn’t name him) why would she want to align with him now, all these centuries later? I mean really, he did not get any luck in the parent department whatsoever. Also, I’d still like them to address whether Rumple had any innate magical ability on his mother’s side before taking up the dagger and if that’s part of what made him so dependent on it.

Speaking of the other half of Rumple’s parentage, Hook is still being chased by angry Lost Boys in Neverland. They aren’t too keen on Hook getting their boss killed. He tries to reason with them and offer them riches and alcohol but is sort of rescued by Tiger Lily who is not the Indian princess we know from the movie. She’s a resourceful, if kind of violent woman. Oh, and she wasn’t really saving Hook. She knocks him out with a dart too. When he wakes up, he wonders if she’s pissed about something that happened on Skull Rock. I know we’re nearing the end of the season (and possibly the series as a whole) but I kind of want to know that backstory. She wants him to deliver a piece of the wand that banished the Black Fairy to Emma. It’s apparently the only way to stop it. Tiger Lily also let slip that she used to be a fairy and when the Black Fairy got banished, Tiger gave up her own wings because she felt she’d failed her fairy friend and went to live in Neverland. I know it’s pretty late in the game to be introducing new characters like this but she seems interesting enough and not out of place in Hook’s past. Perhaps we’ll see more of her in the coming episodes.

Despite having the single flower to break Snow and David’s curse, Snow insists that Emma use it to find Hook. She arrives in Neverland just in time to rescue Hook. She was all freaked when his shadow showed up with the hook and the wand fragment. She kept asking where Hook was but um, it’s kind of obvious isn’t it? Anyway, the lovers are reunited and Hook does a proper proposal this time. But that still leaves the matter of a now-slumbering Charming couple. Regina has a plan but it’s risky. The sleeping curse was meant for one heart. So, if everyone that the Charmings have inspired or helped drinks a little of the potion, maybe it will dilute the spell enough to wake them. And lo and behold, it works! The Charmings and Emma can face whatever’s coming at them, knowing they have a found family at their side the whole way. I don’t know how much good it will do given I get the feeling the Black Fairy isn’t all that’s coming at Emma but hey, we’ll see what happens. Now we have to endure the Captain Swan wedding planning, ugh. Don’t expect a lot of coverage of that particular plotline in the coming recaps because as you should know by now, no matter how much the writers push the ship down my throat, I’m not getting on board. But I did think Regina’s way of saving Snow and David was pretty clever and I liked seeing that bit of the Charming past, even though I was little confused at first about where in the timeline it fell. I still have a lot of questions about the Black Fairy and how she got to be who she is but I believe those answers are coming in a couple weeks (if the spoilers and episode descriptions are to be believed).

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