Before I get started on this week’s post, I wanted to take a moment to offer my condolences to the family and friends of a fellow Oncer who passed away over the weekend. Adri, you are loved and you will be missed. 

Source: mashable.com

Title The Price

Two-Sentence Summary As flashbacks to Camelot reveal that Regina pretended to be the Savior for Emma’s safety, Emma in all her Dark One glory puts the full pressure of being the Savior on Regina in Storybrooke. This involves coming up with a plan to save Robin from being taken to the underworld after Regina asked Emma to save his life using her new dark magic in Camelot.

Favorite Line “I spent over a century trying to kill the bloody Crocodile. I can spend at least that long trying to save the woman I love.” (Hook)

My Thoughts “All magic comes with a price.” This is one of the founding principles of Once Upon a Time. But like all good fairytales, this theme is actually about so much more than magic. All actions have consequences. All choices have ramifications. And the question becomes, what price can we live with?

There’s a defining line on Once Upon a Time between the heroes and the villains in terms of how they handle people who make choices that hurt them. The heroes choose to forgive and to move on. Villains revel in doling out punishment, in making people pay for their choices. There’s a reason “All magic comes with a price” is attributed to Rumplestiltskin at his darkest. And whether it was Regina’s desire to ruin Snow’s life after Snow told the secret that got Daniel killed, or Hook’s quest to seek vengeance for Milah’s death (which led to him trying to kill Belle), we’ve seen time and again that darkness often manifests itself in a desire to hurt those who hurt you. We even saw that last season with Emma, who turned her back on her parents as a way to punish them after learning that they transferred her darkness onto Lily before the girls were born.

Thematic continuity is a beautiful thing, so I’ve loved that Emma’s version of the Dark One is an extension of the darkness we saw in her when she learned her parents’ secret last season. Emma is the most empathetic character on Once Upon a Time; at her best, she understands the reasons people made the choices they did, and she doesn’t hold those choices against them. But at her darkest, Emma wants to make the people who’ve let her down pay. There’s a righteous anger to this version of Emma that’s fascinating. And that righteous anger is allowing those who love her to confront their own missteps and become better versions of themselves in the process, as they work to rectify the mistakes they made in the past—even if they can’t remember exactly what those mistakes were.

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Source: spoilertv.com

Title Mother

Two-Sentence Summary When Emma and Regina return to Storybrooke with Lily and Zelena (and Robin and Roland), Regina makes a decision to team up with the Author to finally get him to write her a happy ending, but she first needs to get blood filled with the savior’s darkness to activate the magical ink. In flashbacks, we see another attempt by Regina to control how her story ends after Cora returns to the Enchanted Forest with plans to help her find love.

Favorite Lines
Zelena: Another woman defining her happiness relative to the love of a man—sad, really.
Regina: Robin isn’t my happy ending. My happy ending is finally feeling at home in the world. Robin’s just a part of that world.

My Thoughts One of my favorite things about Once Upon a Time is that it’s a story primarily about women. It’s a show where the women are heroes, villains, rulers, and saviors. And it’s also a show where almost all of these fierce, flawed, interesting women are also mothers. On so many shows, motherhood seems to render characters less interesting than they were before. On Once Upon a Time, the opposite is true. Motherhood adds even more layers, nuances, strengths, and weaknesses to these female characters. As such, it seems fitting that an episode entitled “Mother” would be one of the most satisfying episodes of the season (and perhaps the series) in terms of the growth and depth shown by Once Upon a Time’s impressive variety of female characters.

It’s also fitting that this episode was written by Jane Espenson, whose ability to weave a cohesive theme through multiple storylines has made her one of my personal favorite Once Upon a Time writers. “Mother” benefitted strongly from Espenson’s sense of thematic cohesion. Not only did each storyline (except Rumplestiltskin’s) deal with the relationships between mothers and daughters, they also all explored the idea that happy endings can be achieved by choosing to be happy with what you have and letting go of anger and resentment. As such, this episode gave me exactly what I’d been hoping to see since this “Operation Mongoose” storyline began: the realization that you don’t need an Author to write your happy ending for you; you have the power to create your own happiness. A “happy ending” isn’t a “perfect ending.” It’s simply a decision to let yourself be happy instead of focusing on emotions that make you feel miserable and dark. Emma, Regina, and Lily spent so long blocking their own paths to happiness by letting themselves believe they were destined to be unhappy. And in this episode, all three women took huge strides toward their own happy endings by letting love fill their hearts instead of hopelessness. It takes real maturity to move beyond wanting to hurt those who hurt you, and all three women grew up in a big way in “Mother.”

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