Once Upon A Time – Recap: Mr. Gold Doesn’t Bother Me Anyway, As a series that keeps much of its focus on magic, Once Upon A Time often explores what makes a person special. To what extent does magic make someone who they are? And can a magically-inclined person ever truly be accepted? “Smash the Mirror” explores acceptance: how some will stop at nothing to find it, and how some find it in themselves.
For a two-hour episode, this was kind of breezy and well-paced, thanks to the strong story at its center. All the drama is organized under the main objective of the episode: find Emma (Jennifer Morrison) before she allows Gold (Robert Carlyle) to remove her powers.
It’s all part of Gold’s plan to free himself from the dagger, since he needs someone with Emma’s level of magic. Simultaneously, we get the flashback that tells us how Anna (Elizabeth Lail) came to trap Elsa (Georgina Haig) in the magical urn, how Rumplestiltskin came to possess it, and how Ingrid (Elizabeth Mitchell) ended up in our world. Both stories work off of one another in impressive fashion, due to the shared theme of acceptance that exists between them.
In the present story, Emma fears she’s a danger to the ones she loves after accidentally zapping Henry (Jared S. Gilmore). She feels she’ll never find acceptance among those she loves unless she has her powers taken away, so she makes a deal with Gold to have them stripped away. However, once Hook (Colin O’Donoghue) learns the truth, he realizes Gold plans on trapping her in the Sorcerer’s hat.
But Emma isn’t the only one making deals: In attempting to find a third magical sister to accept her and complete her trio with Elsa, Ingrid makes a deal with the Sorcerer (through the Sorcerer’s Apprentice). But she ultimately loses Elsa in the process after Anna traps her sister in the magical urn. Of course, she only does this because Ingrid places her under The Spell of Shattered Sight, a curse that forces a person see the worst in others.
All of Anna’s resentment over being ignored by Elsa all these years comes to the surface, and into the urn goes Elsa. In retaliation, Ingrid freezes Anna and Kristoff (Scott Michael Foster), but loses the magical urn to Rumplestiltskin, who holds it hostage in exchange for the Sorcerer’s Hat. When Ingrid goes to recover the hat, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice tells Ingrid about Emma, and how she will complete Ingrid’s sisterly trio…once she’s born. And so Ingrid is sent to our world so she can be there to watch over Emma when the time comes.
The present story and the flashback story are linked not only by the search for acceptance, but by the desperation of its respective protagonists, as both women will make any deal they need to make in order to achieve the happy ending they see for themselves. It’s a character-driven story that is among the best the show has done, since the flashbacks don’t always have apparent relevance to the present tale. Granted, the two-hour runtime of tonight’s episode has something to do with how effective this ends up being, since the show has the time to allow these respective parallel storylines to develop organically. Both stories were helped by not being rushed through.
However, the episode isn’t without its problems. Gold’s inexplicable turn towards villainy feels random and arbitrary, even while the show has been building towards it for weeks now. It undoes much of the progress Gold/Rumplestiltskin has made as a character, as he’s no longer a character with shades of grey.
There appears to be no immediate reason for why he needs to be released from the dagger’s power, since it isn’t as if anyone is trying to use it against him right now. It feels so sudden, and I’m not sure why the show is moving in this direction, other than that we seemingly can’t have a magical villain who isn’t an old enemy of Gold/Rumplestiltskin. Whether Regina, Cora, Zelena, or now Ingrid, every magical villain has to be an opposing force with Gold, as if the show needs to have season-long snark conversations between Gold and the villain du jour. My issue has always been that Gold doesn’t really need to be a big threat, when each season already has a perfectly good villain (once again, like Zelena or Ingrid).
It can sometimes be nice to have an ancillary villain stirring up trouble, but this feels like a major step back for Gold. To have him steal Hook’s heart and use it to force him to find a magical being to replace Emma? And for Hook to THEN not immediately tell Emma what Gold is making him do? It just smacks of forced drama, since there really is no good reason for Hook to keep this to himself beyond the nebulous idea that he’s somehow protecting Emma by keeping her in the dark. It does a disservice to an episode built on organic, character-driven drama to have such a contrived plot development occur.
It’s almost as bad as Ingrid’s big plan to cast The Spell of Shattered Sight on a grand scale, to force the citizens of Storybrooke to tear themselves apart, leaving just herself, Elsa, and Emma. What is actually accomplished if you force two unwilling participants to be your sisters? Ingrid comes across as a nonsensical villain if she isn’t able to see that Emma and Elsa won’t accept her any more than her original sisters did. I suppose having her cast the Spell of Shattered Sight works as a revenge motive, but having the ribbons bind her magic to Elsa and Emma doesn’t accomplish much beyond compromising her abilities by linking them to people with opposite goals. It’s just weirdly ineffectual.
But the episode does have some solid scenes to offset these misses. Elsa convincing Emma that the only way to get her powers under control is to accept herself is a beautiful moment that brings the entire two-hour story full circle. When Elsa declares that the responsibility of acceptance “on us too,” it felt like an earned moment, as Elsa recognizes what Ingrid didn’t: that you can’t just keep passing the buck for why you’re viewed as a monster. Yes, accidents happen and misunderstandings abound. But if you accept that you’re seen as a monster — as Ingrid does towards the end of the flashback story — then you’re really no better than the monster they see you as. It’s a lovely conclusion, and it’s among the more heartening scenes of the episode, alongside the ongoing romance between Regina (Lana Parrilla) and Robin Hood (Sean Maguire), who discovers a missing page from the Storybook.
It was apparently placed in his jacket without his knowledge, and its page number is the same as the page in the book that depicts Regina walking away from the tavern where she was destined to meet Robin Hood. In essence, it portrays a different side of the same choice, with the missing page depicting what would have happened had Regina listened to Tinkerbell and gone to the tavern: she and Robin Hood are embraced in a kiss, with a happily ever after seeming like a sure-thing. This tells both Robin and Regina that a happy ending is possible, and that nothing is set in stone. However, this does open the question of who left the page for Robin Hood to find and why. Also, why was it not in the original storybook? Is there another storybook out there that depicts a different set of choices for each character? This is among the most intriguing storyline possibilities of the season, and I’m excited to see where it goes, even if I do feel kind of bad for how poor, frozen Marian has been all but cast aside.
This was an engrossing episode that makes me wish the show would attempt a two-hour episode every year, if only because of the freedom it provides the narrative. Stories are allowed to breathe, to have room to grow and progress organically, without feeling rushed. “Smash the Mirror” isn’t a perfect episode, but nothing this ambitious was ever going to be without flaw. But the attempt is a worthy one, and it’s one of the best episodes of Once Upon A Time so far this season.
