Since this is the end of this season of Once Upon a Time, I just wanted to thank all of you for reading these reviews every week and for sharing your thoughts so enthusiastically in the comments. It’s been a true pleasure reviewing this show this season, and no small part of that has come from those of you who read and comment on these posts.

Title Snow Drifts/There’s No Place Like Home (3.21/3.22)

Written By David H. Goodman & Robert Hull/Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz

What Happens? After Hook inadvertently hints to Henry (and Regina by proxy) that Emma is thinking of going back to New York, Emma tells Hook that she runs away because she believes that home is a place you miss, and she’ll keep running until she finds a place she misses. She believes she can’t relate to her parents or to life in Storybrooke because, to her, they’re still fairytale characters, and she’ll never feel like the princess she was supposed to be.

As Emma and Hook talk, they notice a light coming from Zelena’s time portal, which was activated by her death, a death Rumplestiltskin fixes to look like a suicide. When Emma is sucked into the portal, Hook dives in after her. They land in the Enchanted Forest, and a wanted poster for Snow White (and a close encounter with the Evil Queen) reveals to them exactly where in the past they landed.

When Emma breaks a twig and accidentally disrupts her parents’ first meeting, she and Hook seek out Rumplestiltskin’s help to set things right. After a tense first meeting with the Dark One (since he and Hook were still mortal enemies at this point), he agrees to help them because Emma tells him they need to survive so he can get back to his son.

Emma and Hook realize that they need to get Snow to still steal Charming’s ring, since that was the key to their love story. To do that, Hook offers Snow passage on his ship in exchange for the ring (as Emma occupies Hook from the past). Snow decides to steal the ring during Charming and Abigail’s engagement party, which Hook and Emma crash in magical disguises (courtesy of Rumplestiltskin). As “Prince Charles and Princess Leia” dance, Snow breaks into the castle, only to be caught by Charming in a similar way to their original first meeting.

When it’s discovered that Snow lost the ring in her escape, things look bleak for Emma and Hook, but they look bleaker when Regina captures Emma for helping Snow White. As Emma bonds with a woman in her cell, Hook and Charming (with some help from his patented net trap) enlist Snow’s help to break into the castle to find her. Emma escapes by picking the locks as Neal taught her (which we’re shown through flashbacks), and she takes the unnamed woman with her. But as Hook and Charming reach them, the realize Snow left them to try to kill Regina, which she’s unable to do. Instead, they watch from afar in horror as Regina appears to burn Snow at the stake.

However, Emma’s existence proves Snow to still be alive, and they discover she used her dark fairy dust to turn herself into a bug and escape. Emma is elated to see her mother alive, but Snow seems unmoved by Emma’s reaction, since she’s simply Princess Leia to her mother. As Snow and Charming move on to other parts of their adventures, Emma is able to watch her parents fall in love.

When Emma and Hook return to Rumplestiltskin looking for a way home, they find he doesn’t have one for them; he only has a forgetting potion for himself. Instead, he locks them in his vault with a wand that can open the portal only with Emma’s magic, which she no longer has. But Emma’s encounter with her mother helped open her eyes to the fact that she misses her parents; she misses them in a way that she knows can only come from knowing they’re her home. Her desire to go home to Storybrooke reawakens her magic, allowing her to open the portal, which Hook takes the woman they saved through first. Rumplestilstkin won’t let Emma leave before she tells him what happens to Bae, and she’s forced to tell him of his death. But he chooses to let her go after she begs him to let his death not be in vain, and he takes the potion.

Back in Storyrbooke, Emma reunites with her parents, telling them she’s finally home (and calling them mom and dad). Later, she goes out to find Hook, ready to thank him for bringing her back from New York. When he reveals that he gave up the Jolly Roger for a way to get back to her, she finally lets herself believe in his love, and they kiss.

Happy endings seem to be prevalent in the episode’s final moments, with Rumplestiltskin marrying Belle (despite her not knowing what he really did to Zelena) and Regina happily kissing Robin. But the woman Emma and Hook brought back turns out to be Robin’s wife, Marian, leaving Regina heartbroken. As Regina tells Emma she hopes she didn’t bring anything else back, a look at the portal reveals that a stowaway from Rumplestiltskin’s vault made the journey too: Princess (or Queen) Elsa has arrived with her freezing powers at the ready.

Game-Changing Moment Emma had no idea how much she changed the game by deciding to do the honorable thing—the Charming Family thing—in bringing back the woman she shared a cell with in Regina’s dungeon. By bringing Marian back to Storybrooke, Emma unknowingly gave Regina a whole new set of conflicts—both internal and external—to be worked through next season. Regina was understandably angry in the moment, but how will she deal with her emotions going forward? It’s that question that will really keep me thinking all summer.

But of course, Emma also brought back someone else, and that’s the real game-changer on a plot level. Will Elsa freeze Storyrbooke? Will the group have to travel to Arendelle? Is she going to be a villain or something closer to her role in Frozen? No matter the answers to these questions, what’s certain is that the show is heading in a new direction once again, and that new direction is going to generate plenty of hiatus buzz.

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