OUaT 4.8+9: Smash the Mirror, Manic Pixie Dust

Subtitle: Some things have been bothering me

This is the first episode where I found the Frozen stuff disruptive and only because I know Elsa’s leaving. If she were sticking around to be Emma’s new bestie I’d be okay with her being Emma’s new bestie but knowing she’s transient I find myself wishing Regina (or Henry or Hook or Snowing) gave Emma the speech Elsa did. It loses some poignance delivered by a secondary character. But let’s start at the beginning.

In the past Ingrid tries to set up Elsa and Anna but she’s blocked by True Love ™ and instead they plot to re-trap Ingrid in the urn. So they go on a hunt to find it. And here is where I have a lot of questions about Frozen and #OnceIsFrozen.

First of all, who was in charge of Arendelle for the three years in between the King’s death and Elsa’s coronation?
Did he or she know about Elsa’s condition?
Did ANYONE in Arendelle know about Elsa’s condition beyond her parents, herself, and the rock trolls?
(Unrelated aside: how many people know about the rock trolls? Are they a myth that’s true or an established avenue for Your Magic Needs?)
Presumably this person who was ruling the kingdom I guess (?) and training Elsa to take over (??) was also Anna’s guardian?
But still no one paid any attention to what she was doing ever?
Were they homeschooled at all?
Like, look, it’s just plain STUPID to leave the people entrusted with YOUR KINGDOM uneducated??
And basically completely left to their own devices???
Like one runs around the castle willy nilly and the other literally never leaves her suite???? And no one CARES????????

So, anyway, okay, Frozen establishes that no one cares. Okay. But then:

Elsa is crowned and after one little mishap everybody loves her and the city is reopened or something, right? And Elsa and Anna live happily in their castle and Anna gets engaged to Kristoff (who lives in their stable now?????) and they are all gonna live happily ever after and….they still keep a wing of the castle sectioned off?
Like, why??? Does that make any sense????
Anna decides to postpone her wedding and leave the realm to find her parents’ secrets but they don’t investigate their own castle until they need to find the magic box their evil aunt came out of and and and she hid the box in the abandoned wing because why?????
And if Anna’s mother forgot she had two sisters why did their bedroom have to be sectioned off and kept as a shrine anyway??????

tldr; I do not understand.

But! Ta-da, in the secret wing of the castle that Anna totally spent hours and days of her incredibly lonely and kind of horrific if you think too much about it childhood in but has not been explored since because reasons… they find the urn.

Also a frozen Hans.

And an evil mirror.

Anna gets back in her cell, prepared to catch Ingrid off guard and trap her in the urn, but Ingrid guessed that would happen and instead she casts the cracked mirror spell on Anna so Anna can only see the bad in people and despite it being established by both Frozen canon and Once canon that Anna is not actually capable of seeing bad in people it works and she breaks Elsa’s heart by throwing her snowflake necklace into the fire.

Elsa is sucked into the urn…

Anna and Kristoff are Frozen…

and Ingrid trades the magic hat to the sorcerer’s apprentice for a one way ticket to Minnesota.

Forward in Storybrooke, an even more unlikely plot.

Emma’s magic is so out of control she accidentally flings Henry through the air. It scares her so much she spends the rest of the day making one bad decision after another.

She decides to get rid of her magic forever.
She talks to no one about this. Okay, she’s scared to interact with Henry but why not Regina, who not only might understand how she feels but is also capable of both combatting and teaching magic? Maybe she’s worried Regina will be too concerned about Henry to help so, how about her new bestie Elsa? Who has the same problem and again, is magic so she can defend herself? No? How about Ruby, who knows about losing control? How about Archie the counselor? How about her reformed villain boyfriend Hook? Or her parents? She wouldn’t have to go to them if she was that worried, phones are a thing. How about ask ANYONE AT ALL for a second opinion before asking the Dark One for help deleting her powers?
She goes to the Dark One for help deleting her powers. Rumple is NOT the second opinion I’m talking about. One, he is a lying liar who lies literally every time they talk. Two, those are basically his own words, that he says, to Emma, point blank, in this episode: “I am a lying liar who lies literally every time we talk.” Three, when has he ever done anything that wasn’t in his best interests? Four, when have his best interests ever coincided with Emma’s or idk, anyone else’s? Five, WHY DOES ANYONE EVER GO TO RUMPLE?
She agrees to Rumple’s totally not suspicious plan to go to an abandoned mansion on a random side street far from town alone to delete her powers.
She believes every word Rumple says. Except when he says he’s a lying liar who lies and also a villain. He refutes that trying to get Neal back and his relationship with Belle are proof he’s not all bad and instead of taking that as a sign that maybe she shouldn’t trust his motives, Emma thanks him for his help.

Luckily Elsa shows up just in time to tell Emma it’s not just True Love™ that saves them but also Self Love. I would have liked the scene better if Regina was in Elsa’s place but I guess I just have to get over that.

Regina was distracted. First by sex and I’ll give it to Robin and Regina, they are super steamy.

They get it on in her secret vault and then have a conversation about how it should never happen again because Marian and Robin’s like I know, but… and Regina’s like the real problem is this book that says villains like me can’t have happy endings and instead of telling her that is actually crazy he decides to join Operation: Mongoose aka find the author and convince him to rewrite her story because then they can have sex again.

Then by Henry and I’ll say here that all the Regina scenes were my most favourite. Here, she notices Henry’s wound and instead of freaking out about Emma hurting her son (which I expected and which would even be reasonable as a gut reaction) she takes care of it with a wave of her hand. As a Mommy, I am so jealous. And so was Henry but Regina reminds him he has the Heart of the Truest Believer ™ and he used it to bring them all together to break the curse and create the magic and she’s proud of him and loves him and they are perfect.

Then she finds out about Emma’s magic deletion plan from Snowing and she yells that it is the Worst Idea Ever and they’re all but it’s her choice!

But Regina stands firm that it is the WRONG CHOICE and she should know because she has made many many Wrong Choices including trying to convince Henry he was crazy when in fact he was a) right and b) using his “truest believer” super power and can we just say it is AMAZING character growth to admit that? Regina is a wonderfully layered character. Anyway, Snowing realizes she’s right about Emma and they all head out to look for her – but without a locating spell because Elsa ran off with that already.

During the hunt for Emma, Snow asks Regina about her sexy times with Robin and Regina tells her about the whole “villains don’t get happy ending according to the book” rule but Snow, bless her, thinks that’s dumb. The rest of their conversation can be summed up as:

Regina: But–
Snow: No.

So, right, Regina was right there on the path to giving the “we have to love ourselves too”/save the magic speech that Elsa gives instead but she’s called back to town by Robin who’d roped Will into helping him research the book (I kind of love that Will spends so much time in the library?) and succeeded in finding a new page. Or rather, conjuring a new page out of hope, faith, love, trust, pixie dust, cliché.

No one asks what this all means for poor frozen Marian.

Meanwhile, Hook. Good news: he confesses his lies and his culpability in the whole magic hat vacuuming of Mickey Mouse to Emma. Bad news: he does so in a voicemail message that Rumple erases before she listens to it. Good news: Emma doesn’t give up her magic. Bad news: Rumple’s back-up plan is to take Hook’s heart and thus control of his mind, body and soul.