Once Upon a Time- Episode Analysis (The Queen is Dead)

I’m sorry, I can’t let this slide.  How did Hook find Rumple and company in New York?  Yeah, I know he had a map and sailed there on the Jolly Roger.  I got that.  But how did he track them down to Neal’s apartment complex?  I somehow doubt his map pinpointed the exact location where he would find Rumpelstiltskin, and given what we saw in the last episode, I highly doubt he got any help from Cora and Regina.  It all comes down to the fact that New York’s a big city full of modern world charm and Hook is a man with an Old World mindset.  Unlike the people of Storybrooke, he doesn’t have cursed memories to help him acclimate himself to the modern world.  Future episodes even highlight the fact that modern things like computers and whatnot are completely foreign and alien to him.  Imagine someone like that trying to locate one person in Manhattan.  Even someone who has grown up in the Land Without Magic can have a hard time navigating the streets of New York, especially if they’ve never been there before.   But in spite of all that, he seems to find them without any effort.  The way he just charged right in indicated he knew for a fact that they would be there.  Was he just wandering through the city aimlessly and just happened to be on the street corner at the exact moment they came back to get Henry’s camera?  If that’s how it happened, that was incredibly good luck.  Now that I think about it, this isn’t the first time something like this happened.  Back in ‘Skin Deep,’  Emma somehow was able to arrive at the cabin just in time to stop Gold/Rumpelstiltskin from beating Belle’s father to death, but we never see how she figured out where they were.  I have heard that there was going to be a scene that explained this moment, but they had to cut out a few scenes from that episode for time constraints.  But in the case of Hook in New York, I don’t even know if a scene explaining his sudden appearance existed.  Even so, this does seem to be another underrated moment that indicates how similar Hook and Emma are.  They’ve now both had moments when they suddenly are able to figure out the exact location of Gold/Rumpelstiltskin, with no scene indicating precisely how they figured it out.  In both situations, we’re pretty much expected to just go with it.

Speaking of Hook, as it was pointed out to me in a Tumblr post, when he goes to retrieve his trademark hook from the sheriff station, we see Emma has also kept the scarf he’d used to bandage her hand back in ‘Tallahassee.’  Hmm.  I wonder what THAT was about.

So, the main point of this episode is showing how Snow lost her mother as a child.  It was all part of an elaborate plan of Cora’s to get Regina on the throne.   A plot that involved poisoning Snow’s mother and then ensuring Regina was in the position to save Snow’s life when her horse bolted.  Oh, and this plan also involved Cora impersonating the Blue Fairy to try and convince Snow to utilize Black Magic in order to save her mother’s life by taking someone else’s.  Given all that, I cannot fault Mary Margret/Snow in the slightest for wanting to kill Cora in the end, particularly after she murdered Johanna, her childhood nanny and only remaining connection to her lat mother.  Not only had Cora done a bang up job of making Snow’s childhood utter crap, the woman is beyond crazy!  She NEEDS to be taken down.

Regina really is losing my support now.  When she was trying to change her ways, I was willing to give her the benefit of a doubt.  When people still cast her aside even after she did the right thing in ‘Queen of Hearts,’ I felt bad for her.  But now, even after finding out all the underhanded methods Cora used to get her way, it still isn’t sinking into her skull that Cora’s promises of getting her back with Henry is nothing more than the old carrot on a stick ploy.  As for her whole ‘what did trying hard get me’ speech?  Lady, have you forgotten the ONLY reason your attempts at trying hard failed  was because Cora made everyone believe you’d killed Archie?  The key word in all this is Cora!  CORA is the reason why people stopped trusting you again.  What’s it going to take for you to figure it out?!  Also, they DID have dinner with you.  They might have been leery of you, but can you really blame them after all the stuff you did? At the end of the day, you do have quite a lot to make up for.  Expecting people to completely believe in your good intentions after one good deed is a bit unreasonable.  You have to continue making them believe you’re good.  You can’t just give up if the results aren’t immediate.

Oh, and there’s also the detail of Neal having a fiancée in New York.  This episode treats it like a throwaway line, but it will become quite the point of discussion in later episodes.  Plus, we get vague foreshadowing to an upcoming story arc (Neal knowing how to sail the Jolly Roger, the poison Hook used on Gold/Rumpelstiltskin, and Neal briefly hinting at why he’s not in the triple digits age-wise.)