Beware the woman bearing a freshly baked apple turnover, and, for that matter, shiny red apples, at least when you’re in Fairy Tale Land or Storybrooke. Problems stemming from apples didn’t just plague Eve in the Garden of Eden you know.
Once Upon a Time circled back to the classic poisoned apple tale, but, as they have been apt, the show’s writers put a tasty little twist on it. In this incarnation of the familiar yarn of The Evil Queen who tries to tempt the innocent Snow White with an apple, things didn’t go down the way we all read in our fairy tale books.
In this version, Snow White was given a choice by The Evil Queen: Eat the poisoned apple or else Prince Charming gets it (“it” being death). Of course Snow White had no way of knowing whether The Evil Queen would keep her word, but true love being true love, Snow fearlessly took a healthy bite of the fruit in order to spare her beloved’s life, rendering her a brave martyr to romantics everywhere. She’d do anything for Charming. (David in Storybrooke, however … a different story entirely.)
In Storybrooke, as The Evil Queen’s curse continued to lose its potency due to Emma “The Savior’s” decision to establish residency there, Regina decided she had to off Emma so the townspeople wouldn’t awaken from their stupors and realize what Regina had done to them. (Seeing Regina having nightmares of an angry mob and a sword-wielding Emma was a nice touch.) So Regina conned the Mad Hatter into using his moldy magic hat to literally reach into Fairy Tale Land and back through time to grab the very same poison apple that felled Snow White just seconds before. The apple in hand, Regina donned an apron that would make Bree Van De Kamp proud, and baked it into a turnover with plans to deliver it to Emma as a culinary peace offering, which Emma foolishly accepted. (Has the woman learned NOTHING?) However the dogged Henry, trying to persuade the stubborn Emma to realize that she’s his Obi Wan Kenobi (his only hope), knowingly bit into the poisoned turnover and keeled over.
Totally loved it, the imagery, the continuity of having the apple which poisoned the grandmother poisoning the grandson because the daughter wouldn’t believe. It all came back to that first scene in the pilot where Snow White was in her glass coffin and roused from the dead by true love’s kiss. Emma — Snow’s daughter and Henry’s mother — is the lady in the middle who must figure out how to save Henry and, he hopes, everybody else. All of it was satisfying.
I’m even willing to overlook the ridiculously flimsy “justification” for The Evil Queen/Regina’s rage at Snow White/Mary Margaret: That, as a child, with The Evil Queen’s best interests in mind, Snow told The Evil Queen’s mother about her love for Daniel. Seriously, carrying around a grudge against an unwitting child and condemning an entire land of fairy tale characters to suffer? A thoroughly extreme overreaction and dictionary definition of misplaced anger.
At this point, the pre-pubescent Snow “stealing” The Evil Queen’s happiness is beside the point. The two women loathe one another in Fairy Tale Land and The Evil Queen has evil magic, plus she has Charming locked up so, for the moment, she’s holding the winning hand. Watching Charming — whose Storybrooke alter ego has become an annoyance, not even a mere shadow of his Fairy Tale Land prince — shriek from behind bars and used as bait for Snow was fun to watch. Think Red Riding Hood and the gang will spring him from the clink so he can wake Snow White?
The Once Upon a Time writers have set the bar awfully high for the season finale. They’ve got a tricky job. They need to deliver a satisfying story with Emma struggling to save Henry, and maybe everyone in Storybrooke, and they’ve got to set up next season’s premise, which I’m hoping will not be a disappointment after the novelty of this freshman season.
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on May 07, 2012 @ 12:13 EST5EDT
During the dream sequence, all I could think was “Yep, I have no pity for her and her fears.”
Anyone else notice that Mary Margaret is finally starting to act like her fairy tale self? Plus, she gave her daughter very stern motherly advice there, didn’t she? I still think that once the townsfolk start to wake up, David’s going to get braver and less of a dolt.
Why do people keep thinking that Snow’s confession to Regina’s mother is the reason behind the Queen’s rage? Not only would that make an asinine bit of writing (which this show has proven more than twice that it tends to avoid), but it was even debunked in this episode.
Until this episode, Snow White thought Daniel ran away, yet before she found out that he was actually dead, she (twice that we know of) recognized that she did, in fact, cause the Queen’s misery.
I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the story of how Snow White met the Queen and I am genuinely looking forward to seeing the event that initiates the hatred of the latter for the former, but I have WAY too much faith in the writing crew of this show to confuse those two events as being one and the same.
Wasn’t the Hatter trapped in the other world by Regina?
and yet he was sent to Storybrook. However, he was trapped in the mansion he lived until Emma appeared in town. Maybe “trapped in Wonderland” translated to “trapped in the mansion” when the curse stroke. This would mean all Wonderland characters are also in Storybrook, which would be a fine addition.
Or he found a way to escape Wonderland! who knows. More interesting is the fact that he survived that fall from the mansion’s window in the end of his episode like nothing had happened. I was hoping he had been sent back to Fairytale-land through the hat as we had been led to believe.