Once Upon a Time "Unforgiven" Review: Feeling Rattled

Once Upon a Time S04E14: "Unforgiven"

"Unforgiven," my goodness, what is Once Upon a Time DOING?!? WHAT IS OUAT PLAYING AT?!? Are you shocked and rocked by the possibility that Snow and Prince Charming are a pair of stone-cold baby killers? Apparently this age-old secret has troubled Snow literally zero percent of the time... except two people who knew about it showed up in town and then she had a horrible nightmare that Maleficent broke into her apartment and snatched her baby. But luckily it was just a dream, and she awoke to the real nightmare of her life and realized that her baby was still there, though Charming was not. He was up late, out of bed, throwing back Scotch and surfing Grindr.

"Our secret. We must make sure no one knows our secret. We must make sure these evil women don't tell everyone about our secret," they both agreed. "Thank goodness we control the law in this town. Let's manipulate it to protect our secret," they decided.

Meanwhile Ursula and Cruella were trying their best to exchange money for goods and services, but apparently Granny's only serves heroes and their spoiled-ass children.

Or maybe Granny tries not to interact with people who have eyebrows drawn on with a Sharpie? It's not a bad life policy.

Charming and Snow walked in and demanded that Regina follow the Mean Awful Women around town 24 hours a day, but Regina was like, "I'm busy pursuing a weird existential metaphor, y'all sheriffs can handle this." And Cruella and Ursula had already slunk out of Granny's to try to have a civil conversation at a nearby store. Alas, it was not to be.

Good thing they weren't secret-shopping the Pawn Shoppe, or that would've been a HELL of a Yelp review! No, Cruella was just distracting Belle while Ursula sent her endless tentacle down the hall and around the corner to somehow see and snag a Maleficent box. This trick must be VERY fun at parties and/or adult erotic filmmaking sessions.

With the box stolen, the Evil Queens of Darkness text-messaged on their flip-phones to Rumple on his flip-phone that they had obtained the box, and Rumple knelt beside a pile of ashes and told them their long slumber was over. Then he scooped up some of those ashes with his hand to, I don't know, strain for chunks of kitty poop? I don't know.

The idea that a character who has been both killed and then burnt into ash can be reconstituted with a little spell goes against the internal rules of magic that are in place to add stakes to things like death and love in this universe, but whatever.

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Back in Fairy Tale land, we learned that the three Queens of Darkness had teamed up to ask Snow and Charming, fresh off their honeymoon, to help them consult a Tree of Wisdom to figure out how to counteract Regina's dark curse. They explained that this Tree of Wisdom functioned like a hyper-judgemental Wikipedia, and that it would answer any question asked of it, but only if the knowledge-seeker was a valiant hero. Snow and Charming were like, "Oh, so you need us obviously we're super valiant and awesome heroes," and the three she-witches were like, "Sigh."

Meanwhile in the here and now, Emma and Charming, not in uniform and without warrants, pulled over Ursula and Cruella and searched their car. Hahaha Storybrooke is the worst.

David found the box that Ursula had stolen from Belle but smoothly pretended he hadn't. Instead, he pocketed the little dragon claw they had stored inside the Maleficent box and shuffled Emma back to the sheriff's station. Which, just in the nick of time, because Hook was just hurrying in with lunch: Emma's usual, a grilled cheese and onion rings. HAHAHA RIGHT. Everyone talks a big game about comfort food onscreen, but I don't see anybody chewing. It's like those reedy women who like to Instagram themselves with their mouth hovering over a double cheeseburger and you know that the second they choose the filter and post, that shit is headed straight for the trash. Anyway, when Emma mentioned pulling over the No-Good New Women in Town, Hook got REALLY cagey about his apparently VERY shady past with Ursula.

All kinds of alarm bells were ringing in Emma's head about what he did that was so horrible that he couldn't so much as mention it.

Back in the fairy-tale flashback, Maleficent killed some guards who wouldn't let them through a short cut by turning into a dragon and burning them alive with her dragon breath.

Villains, man! They DGAF. Snow and Charming were like, "Uncouth!"

Back in Storybrooke, Henry and Regina had decided to interrogate a child about the Author. Yes, Fun-sized August finally made the OUAT call sheet after a season and a half! He didn't remember shit, so Regina summonsed Emma and things were kind of weird because, let's be real, at one point August was teased as a potential love interest for Emma, just like every other person on this show with a dick and a leather jacket, so her sitting down and talking child talk with his child-version to trigger his old memories of his adult life was sort of unsettling. ALSO: Regina remembers every single man Emma has talked to since she showed up in Storybrooke. And hates all of them. For some reason.

Gepetto got real mad at Regina and escorted his boy out of there.

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Back in the fairy-tale flashback, the Three Queens of Darkness woke up after a long day of travel with Snow and Charming to a moment of panic: Snow and Charming's tent had deflated in the night like a cheap airbed. Momentarily the Queens of Darkness worried that they had suffocated under the sagging mass of vinyl...

... but thankfully our two Heroes had ditched the Very Bad Women and hurried off to the Tree of Wisdom on their own. The Tree of Wisdom was surrounded by a Rock Garden of Hasty Production Design. Snow and Charming put their hands in the gold-painted hand prints and asked the tree how to proceed, and the tree had the perfect response.

Hahaha is OUAT just openly trolling Snow and Charming now? Have they noticed a ratings spike that corresponds with every episode where Snow and Charming get face-slapped onto their backs?

The Three Women Who Have Too Much Power showed up and Maleficent was like, "Oh, I see what's going on... you're pregnant." And Charming was like, "Yay! We can still have sex though? Because our honeymoon was like 48 hours ago, not even." And Snow was like, "If you're not making babies you're making a mess." and the emptiness started to creep into Charming's eyes.

In Storybrooke, Snow and Charming were lying to Emma so they could go try to solve the Evil Queen situation by themselves. Because they've had so much success with that in the past, thwarting powerful witches with evil plans. They definitely don't rely on their daughter's all-powerful magic to help them with literally anything. And of course the second they were within tentacle-slapping range of Ursula, they were done. Sigh. It was sort of sad, how they came across those ashes and were like, "We did it! We actually did it! We solved our own problems!" and then immediately they were double-slapped by a slippery tentacle.

Regina, meanwhile, went down to Geppetto's house, which was under his very own personal rain cloud, and apologized for yelling at his little man-boy. Geppetto was so touched by this civility that he uncovered a motorcycle that had belonged to August and turned over to Regina all of August's book-related papers. Which, to be fair: Geppetto had totally been holding out on Regina all along! No wonder she's sick of these haters. But she was super psyched about having August's Harley saddle, because the longer her hair gets, the kinder she becomes.

Back under the library, Rumple was breaking all stated rules of magic by bringing Maleficent back to life. OUAT tried to lampshade the hell out of this by having all sorts of characters ask, "Can you even do that?" Yes. Yes, you can, if the writers need to bring back Maleficent because her property has achieved a financial renaissance. Maleficent was back! I honestly don't have a problem with this because I love Kristin Bauer, as well as the Angelina Jolie Maleficent, and I love how Bauer is doing this sort of understated girlish voice when she says the meanest things, and let's be fair if Regina isn't going to punish Snow White for merely existing, someone powerful and female has to pick up the slack. This plot hole is FULLY APPROVED.

Charming and Snow were like, "Whoops, we should have involved Emma like immediately with this, whoops," and hurried back to get her to use her magical powers to solve this new problem of theirs. But then they overheard Emma having a heart-to-heart with Hook.

She started laying it on pretty thick about how trusting her parents had helped her trust him, and as we all know, nothing is more important to Snow White than Emma meeting the man of her dreams, and there was no way in hell she was going to interfere with that by telling Emma that she and Charming were keeping secrets from her. Snow decided it would be much better for Emma if they wrapped their mystery in a cloak of deception and surrounded their daughter with a thick tapestry of lies. Anyway, she knew another competent person in town who could help her: Regina. And Regina is apparently always down to meet someone under cloak of darkness, because she's just cool like that.

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In the longest speech someone has ever delivered while standing in heavy rain, Snow asked Regina to help her by: A) infiltrating the clique of Evil Powerful Women and undermining their schemes, and B) preventing Emma from ever finding out that she had been born with the potential to be the darkest of all villains... and that Snow and Charming had gone to great lengths to make sure she would be a hero instead... and that somehow who had cost Maleficent her baby! Regina's reaction was pretty perfect.

Maleficent, meanwhile, had recovered that mysterious dragon claw bauble and check it, it was a rattle! Guys this almost made me tear up? I don't know. I went on a long hike this weekend so maybe it was sheer physical exhaustion, maybe it's the fact I legitimately love Kristin Bauer, or maybe it's just that I love glamorously evil novelty rattles? It's unclear.

I am sort of on board with Snow White and Charming being in the wrong for once? I mean, I still don't understand what the hell Cruella is doing here at all, but I do want to know what happened to that baby. And that final sequence with Snow's super long speech was peculiarly effective. And also the show dropped a GIANT bombshell:

WTF?! That looked like an actual kiss. Are they rehearsing for a play? You just know there's some weaksauce reason this kiss didn't count. Or maybe not? You'll remember that Will Scarlet picked up two coffees that morning. I was genuinely surprised by this moment, devastated on Rumple's behalf, sort of impressed by Belle's moxie, and just sort of pleased to be taken utterly by surprise by a character moment. WHAT DID YOU THINK?

QUESTIONS:

... Belle and the Knave: What is going on?!

... What happened with Maleficent's baby?

... Regina as a secret agent: Who would win in a hand-to-hand battle between her and Peggy Carter? Can we demand a crossover?

... Hook's shady Ursula past: What are your predictions?

... Is OUAT really going to act like there's any chance Emma would be a villain?