Once Upon a Time: Season Four, Episode Ten

First Aired November 30th, 2014.

The Snow Queen/Ingrid (played by Elizabeth Mitchell) watches happily as her Shattered Sight spell forms over Storybrooke. However, it will take several hours for the spell to activate and Rumpelstiltskin/Mr. Gold (played by Robert Carlyle) plans to take advantage of that.

Gold tells Ingrid that, unless she wants him to make her life hell, she will let him escape town with his wife, Belle (played by Emilie de Ravin), and grandson, Henry (played by Jared Gilmore), and Ingrid agrees. Meanwhile, Emma (played by Jennifer Morrison) attempts to evacuate the town before the curse begins and everyone begins attacking each other. But the magical ice wall prevents anyone from tearing it down and spreads to keep anyone from sailing out of town. Belle does some research and discovers an antidote to the potion can be made from the hair of someone who was previously under the spell. In this case, it’s Elsa’s (played by Georgina Haig) missing sister, Anna (played by Elizabeth Lail), and upon finding Anna’s necklace they use a locator spell to find her. Unfortunately, it leads them to a caved-in passage in the tunnels underneath the library and the decision is made to use Anna’s necklace for the potion instead. Unwilling to lose her one shot at finding her sister, Elsa takes the necklace and continues the search. Emma catches up to her and they blast through the rocks to find themselves on the Storybrooke beach. The locator spell ends and Elsa assumes the worst, taking it as a sign that Anna is truly gone.

The Snow Queen must not be as strong as I thought. All the other curses on the show were immediate and hers is slower than a dial-up modem. Gold just keeps digging a deeper hole for himself and I can’t wait for the payoff of it blowing up in his face. Using Anna’s necklace to save the town and putting off saving her was the right call and I’m surprised how many people agreed to it. I especially liked the conversation between Snow White/Mary Margaret (played by Ginnifer Goodwin) and Regina (played by Lana Parilla). Mary Margaret always wants to save everyone. It’s nice to see her making the tough choices for a change. Of course by the next scene, she’s back to getting everyone to believe in hope and goodness again. I knew Anna wasn’t really dead because killing her off-screen like that would have had no payoff for viewers. But at least now it’s clear she’s somewhere in the real world, which means the search is thankfully almost over. Once Elsa and Anna are reunited, there can be less scenes of Elsa running around worried about her sister and all the focus can be directed to the Snow Queen.

Back in Arendelle, Anna, Kristoff (played by Scott Foster) and the rest of the kingdom are unfrozen. Unfortunately, the evil prince Hans (played by Tyler Jacob Moore) is also unfrozen and he attacks Anna and Kristoff, but they escape. Anna deduces that Rumpel has the urn containing Elsa but rather than take him on, they go do find the pirate, Blackbeard (played by Charles Mesure), who has something that may help. They offer to pay Blackbeard any price for something called the wishing star, which Anna hopes can lead her to Elsa. Blackbeard reveals that Anna’s parents bought the wishing star from him before they died and then Hans appears, having already bribed Blackbeard, and they are captured. Hans reveals that everyone was frozen for thirty years and that, with Elsa gone, he plans to take over Arendelle. Blackbeard orders Anna and Kristoff locked into a trunk and thrown overboard to drown. Before they drown, the trunk ends up teleported onto the Storybrooke beach and the sisters are finally reunited.

Until now, I had forgotten that Elsa technically traveled thirty years into the future when Emma brought the urn through the time portal. That freezing spell Arendelle was placed under became a godsend because otherwise Anna would be in a senior home long before Elsa. Hans has made some great plays against Elsa and Anna but he’s definitely the most incapable villain that has been on the show. People are more annoyed by him than anything else and even his own henchmen ridicule him and don’t take him seriously. I’m not sure if it was Elsa or Anna who made the wishing star bring them together, but really it’s the same thing either way so it doesn’t matter. Did anyone notice the message in a bottle that also came with Anna, the same one their mother wrote to them? She and Elsa already know one horrible family secret, I wonder what fresh drama that letter will bring.

They rush Anna to town so the fairies can make the antidote but Gold has other plans for them. After failing to capture Emma in the magical hat, Gold decides to absorb all of the fairies into it. Gold forces Hook (played by Colin O’Donogue) to ambush the fairies because he still has Hook’s heart and controls him. When Emma and the gang arrive, they assume the Snow Queen was responsible. While Emma, Elsa and Anna will be immune to the effects of the spell, everyone else will begin killing each other once it begins so the only option is for everyone to keep their distance from each other. Regina places Henry in a magically secured room before sealing herself in her underground vault, and Mary Margaret and Prince Charming/David (played by Josh Dallas) lock themselves in jail cells. Once the Shattered Sight spell hits, the loving looks in their eyes are replaced by cold steely glares.

Ending the episode with the subtle change of expression on David and Mary Margaret’s faces was a good visual setup to the upcoming conflicts between everyone. I’m particularly excited to see Regina revert to her full Evil Queen persona and embrace her over-the-top villainess role for a while. The Snow Queen was a valid suspect for attacking the fairies, although I would have thought the lack of ice at the scene might suggest otherwise. Now that Gold has all of this power, it looks like he’s practically invincible. If he were still a good guy, that’d be good news. I’m also questioning his logic on taking out the fairies BEFORE they completed the antidote because Belle and Henry will be affected by the spell. What good is it to build a life with them outside of town if they are magically induced to hate him and each other?

Quotes & Thoughts

“My brothers and I spent Wendesday rolling around in the money in your treasury.” “You rolled around in gold bars? Weird, and ouch.” “Figure of speech, we reveled in it.”

When the Shattered Sight spell hits, I imagine Storybrooke will look like a large-scale episode of Jerry Springer, lots of arguing and fighting, but probably nobody handing out beads.

“You’re more than heroes, you’re leaders, which means making the tough choice where someone has to lose and you have to say who.”

Mary Margaret looked so left out when David, Anna and Kristoff were all catching up after seeing each other again.

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