Once Upon a Time: Season 4, Episodes 22-23 – “Operation Mongoose”

Other than Who, I don’t do many episode reviews, but Once Upon a Time just finished its fourth season, and I have lots of opinions.  Plenty of “This show – I tell ya” opinions that make me shake my head a lot, but also “Aw, show – you got me” opinions that remind me why I keep watching.  There be spoilers ahead!

First of all, while I was never too sold on the whole “get the Author to write me a happy ending” arc, I’m annoyed with how it culminates in these episodes, because it doesn’t actually do what it claims.  The big premise earlier in the season is that the baddies (and reformed baddies like Regina) decide it’s time for the villains to get their happy endings and circumvent the apparent interference of the book.  It’s what brought Rumpel and the “Queens of Darkness” back to Storybrooke this spring, and it’s been Regina’s main goal for a while.  However, in the alternate universe we get of the Author’s new book, we don’t see villains getting happy endings.  Rather, we see villains transposed into heroes.  Rumpel is an honest-to-goodness white knight (complete with an over-the-top “hero” voice that cracks me up,) and Regina essentially just trades Enchanted Forest plots with Snow, with a little Emma thrown in for good measure.  And for the most part, that’s not what the Author quest was about.  The villains don’t want to be heroes, they just want the heroes’ endings.  Rumpel is the perfect example – he could have had a life with Belle, but he wanted to be blissfully in love and be evil with impunity.  He didn’t want to give up the perks of his villainy, and he didn’t want to put in the work toward redemption.  Almost all of his story here flies in the face of his actual goal.  (The scenario is maybe a bit closer to what Regina wanted, a little cosmic acknowledgment of how far she’s come and a right to happiness, but her storyline in the book isn’t that happy, so it’s not fulfilling its promise on any level.)

Meanwhile, most of the heroes are flipped to the opposite of who they really are – Hook is a coward and a bit of dweeb, and Snow swaps roles with Regina, complete with sorcery, a magically brain-washed boy-toy/slave in Charming, and a league of nasty dwarves to do her bidding.  By positioning Snow as the main antagonist, the story is still following its backwards thinking.  It’s not a world where the villains win; it’s just a world where the heroes have the names of the old villains and vice versa.  I was hoping for something dark and cool, kind of like the Angelus/Darla/Spike/Dru flashbacks on Buffy.  But this doesn’t even seem to understand what it set out to do.  That said, Ginnifer Goodwin’s performance as evil Snow White is spectacular, and her hair is fabulous.  I especially love that, despite all the character similarities, she really doesn’t act like Regina.  In fact, the soft, gentle voice she uses is the closest she’s ever sounded to the movie version of Snow White, and that sweetly false innocence makes it all the more demented and awesome.  For the record, I also love Emma with Deckhand!Hook; the sword-training scene is great, and it’s great that she believes in him even when he’s not him.

I’m apprehensive about the ending.  Emma becoming the Dark One could be an amazing story, something dark and intense, an excellent plot for Jennifer Morrison.  It could also be very easy to completely botch, and I’m not sure how much confidence I have that the show can tip the scales the right way.  However, whatever comes next, that final scene is so Emma.  Emma frakking Swan, people – when an insidious force of evil is released into the world, she lets it bind itself to her so it can’t take any of her family or friends, filling with evil so they won’t have to.  Next time you’re wondering, show, that’s what a hero looks like.