I feel mixed about this episode. Some of the dialogue was quite amusing, but plot-wise it was a bit of a mess
Liked:
“He’s producing Oxygen” LOL
Charming — we’re given some comments by Charming that lends his character much needed depth. He was a lot less milk toast than he usually is, with some occasional bits of unexpected wisdom. Good on him.
Dwarven proletariat beginning to articulate their class struggle. It’s about time.
Dark!Rumple is a trip. “You know, he doesn’t look so good. If I say so myself” and “Crushed his heart under your impractical boot” were some of the most hilarious pieces of dialogue I remember on OUAT. Actually, Hook had some pretty good lines too. “I know that look. The top button turns it on” — what is it with OUAT characters and phones?
Shady Arthur! I don’t think he’s an outright villain however — I suspect the set up here is more MacBeth like, with Guinevere pulling the strings behind the scenes.
Belle seems to be around and active more. Nice to see that.
Lancelot is back!
Mixed:
A fly agaric, really? Much heavy-handed shamanic journey symbolism?
The Dead Marsh and Charming as Frodo. The particular nature and aesthetics of that whole magic mushroom quest seemed completely random to me.
Idiot Squire — seriously, lets publicly run away from the test, and to make it easier to track you, lets wear a bright red cloak. What was that?
Rumple waking up via Hook’s cutlass. Everything that I dislike about the rewriting of the Rumple storyline to make it more Hook centric is captured right there. What about Neal’s blanket?
Disliked:
Regina going all EQ on Zelena. It seemed like a gratuitous regression for Regina’s character. She isn’t tested, she isn’t being put in an impossible situation that might trigger her to revert to her old ways. Sister Z is for all intents and purposes fangless at the moment. So why the gratuitous cruelty? While I strongly dislike Zelena as a character, that interaction seemed to me out of context and a bit OOC for Regina. Way to antagonize the expecting mother and push her over the edge, potentially. They’re setting some desperate gambit for a now “sympathetic” mommy-zeleny to save her baby, probably similarly to what they did with Mal. And for that, they need to make Regina bad again.
Other thoughts:
Hook and Emma’s interaction. I think Emma was actually telling Hook the truth — it seems to me that she is trying to trick the DO entity within her, pretending she is going along with the plan, but in fact playing her own game. So I think that she was being genuine when she was telling Hook she was an open book. Hook’s rejection — and especially the way that dialogue was written, seems to confirm that Hook’s love of Emma is rather, shall we say, conditional on his own sense of his conquest of her.