Once Upon a Time 4.02 Review: “White Out”

Last night’s Once Upon a Time was a phenomenal follow-up from its season premiere as the people of Storybrooke gets to meet Elsa.

The episode picks up right where we left off last week when Elsa found Anna’s necklace in Mr. Gold’s shop and in order to stop anyone from leaving the town, she puts up ice barriers around Storybrooke. Georgina Haig is continuously so great to follow in this story and I think the thing I love most about her is that even though she goes to some extreme measures, she never feels like the villain, just like in Frozen.

Her interaction with Emma was better than I expected because I never realized it until they were together: these are two characters that can actually relate to each other. When Emma gets trapped inside Elsa’s ice-barrier, she tells her that she also has magic that she can’t control either. This actually recharged my interest for Emma because finally she has someone that she can relate to and it should lead to some great scenes between them in these next couple of episodes.

In the flashbacks, we see Anna meeting a very long haired David and we learn that she is one of the major reasons why he became the man he is today. These are some of my favorite flashbacks of Once in a long time. The villain of that flashback was of a character named Bo Peep who I could have cared less for because she was just a typical mustache twirling villain. But the thing that was intriguing about this flashback is that we got to learn a lot more about Charming’s childhood with his problematic father.

I never imagined that his father had that kind of problem, but as far as I can remember, they have never featured him in an episode have they? It was still emotional to see how much it tortured Charming. It was fun to see Anna teach how to fight with a sword and actually man up a bit because the Charming we saw here was nowhere near the one in the present. I’m wondering at this point if we are going to see Anna affect the other characters in these flashbacks. If that’s where they are heading, that I’m perfectly OK with that because she is the kind of character that I can see having affected our main characters in the past.

Snow’s arc in this episode wasn’t a big part, but it was definitely comedic. When Elsa put up the ice barriers, she accidentally caused a blackout throughout Storybrooke and since Regina isn’t up for being the mayor anymore, it’s now all up to Snow. The scene where Leroy/Grumpy, Happy and Granny were complaining about not having electricity until Snow freaked out, was hilarious. I’m curious to see if she is actually going to full-in for mayor because right now, I’m not sure what her arc for the season is.

Let’s talk about that last scene with Elizabeth Mitchell, shall we? I had some crazy thoughts at first when she displayed her own ice powers, including the theory that maybe Mitchell was playing an older Elsa from the future, who had gone completely rogue. But it appears that she is The Snow Queen and the villain for this arc. Mitchell is a great actress who I have seen in multiple projects so it will be nice to see her take on a villainous role.

Overall, I was very happy about this episode as it was not only a great sequel to the premiere, it was also a strong step forwards for this season even though they took some pretty big ones last week.

Once Upon a Time airs on Sunday nights, 8/7c on ABC.

[Photo via ABC]