Title Second Star to the Right
Two-Sentence Summary After Regina is kidnapped by Tamara and Greg, Emma, Neal, Snow, and Charming begin searching for her—and discover the truth about Tamara in the process. In flashbacks to Bae’s life after falling through the portal, we see him living with the Darling family and allowing himself to be kidnapped and taken to Neverland in the place of one of the Darling boys—a sacrifice later paralleled by his descent into a portal Tamara created after shooting him in order to keep Henry from losing both his mother and father.
Favorite Line
“Henry needs you. He can’t lose both of us. Don’t make him grow up like we did.” (Neal)
My Thoughts When I first started watching Once Upon a Time, I fell in love with the creative twists on fairytales that I grew up with, the emotional moments that built characters and relationships better than any other show I was watching, and the gorgeously complicated dynamics between characters who were family even though they didn’t know that yet. Somewhere along the way, those things got lost this season with the introduction of more new characters than the show knew what to do with, a revolving door of villains, and a plot-heavy/emotionally-lacking style of storytelling. Thankfully, “Second Star to the Right” proved to be a return to many of those first-season elements that made the show so compelling and moving. This episode was an excellent setup for next week’s season finale because it proved that the stakes aren’t just high in terms of the plot; they’re high for almost every character on an emotional level.
Before I go any further into my review, I have to ask: Is this the darkest and scariest episode this show has ever aired? For being an 8 p.m. network drama often billed as a family show, this episode was quite disturbing—from the “death” of a major character to the decision to turn Peter Pan into a child-stealing shadow to Regina’s electroshock torture. I know that you have to sometimes go to a very bleak place in order to set up a season finale (like Henry eating the turnover last season), but this was almost oppressively bleak at times.
One of my favorite parts of this episode was the flashback storyline. I find young Bae incredibly compelling as a character because he’s so earnest and yet so broken at such a young age. The actor who plays him really does a fantastic job. I thought his rapport with Wendy was adorable, and his panic in the face of magic was heartbreakingly believable. I really enjoyed the darker take on the Peter Pan story that was told here because there really is something unsettling under the innocence of the original story. Not growing up may seem like a fun concept for a little while, but being stuck in a world without your family where you never mature or grow doesn’t exactly sound like a fate I’d want for myself. And that’s what made Bae’s sacrifice all the more noble. To willingly go back to a world ruled by (presumably) dark magic when you’ve lost everything trying to escape that fate just to save a family from being torn apart is a heroic act of the highest degree.
Seeing young Bae be so selfless, brave, and true (pun intended) made all of Neal’s big moments in this episode (and there were several) feel like they were coming from a genuine place. This is a man who has always wanted to do the right thing, but it keeps costing him. He’s been through so much and has been broken and emotionally damaged in ways not even Emma can comprehend. But in this episode we see him trying to right his wrongs, and I found myself rooting for him more than ever before (and I say that as someone who’s loved Neal since “Tallahassee”—before we even knew who he really was).
When Neal apologized to Emma, I truly believed that he spent every day regretting what he did to her—and so much of that comes from the raw and real chemistry between Jennifer Morrison and Michael Raymond-James. What I love about their scenes is that it always feels like two real adults interacting—theirs is a very messy, very damaged love story in a world where they’re surrounded by magical examples of “true love.” But their love has never felt any less true than Snow and Charming’s or Rumplestiltskin and Belle’s—at least not to me. It’s true in a way that’s right for the world they grew up and fell in love in: a world without magic. It’s true in a way that hurts, but this episode showed that it’s also true in a way that heals.
Emma and Neal have always represented human drama in the midst of the supernatural—that’s why I loved “Manhattan” so deeply. They’re two people whose lives were destroyed by dark magic but somehow found in each other a very human and very tangible kind of magic. These are two characters who have suffered so much. All magic comes with a price, and too often that price has been their happiness. That’s what hurt so much about this episode. Once again, Neal is faced with sacrificing himself to the whims of dark magic, but this time it’s to save his own family. And once again, Emma has someone she loves—some hope for happiness and family—ripped away because of magic. Neal has spent so much of his life trying to keep himself from committing the sins of his father, so he chose to be brave and fall through the portal to keep his son from growing up an orphan. But that choice came with its own price, which was reflected so heartbreakingly on Emma’s face after the portal closed. Each one of her sobs hit me like a punch to the gut. These two characters have been through so much already: their profession of love as Neal prepared to fall to his (believed) demise was one of the most heartbreaking moments in a show full of heartbreaking moments.
Nerdy Girl Notes 