After one of heck of a run for Once Upon a Time’s fourth season with the world of Frozen coming to the show, tonight would have been the perfect opportunity to mark this episode as the winter finale, but more on that in a bit.
The episode continues right where we left off last week with Storybrooke getting attacked by the third curse in this one lifetime as everyone turns on each other. I know this was supposed to be a dark and gruesome story, but I couldn’t help but laugh most of the times when people were fighting. None of the arguments that were shown here were something that either intimidated me or actually made me concerned for any character. For example: the whole deal about Snow’s and Charming’s arguments was just completely silly because it was basically a replay of those two when they first met all those years ago.
I expected something new and dark to come out of their fight because based on that last scene in the previous episode where you saw the darkness in their eyes for each other, something really bad looked like it was about to happen. But what do we get instead? Heck, it wasn’t even remotely chilling when Kristoff was going bad on Anna. The only thing that I enjoyed about anything in the scenes at the police station before Regina showed up was seeing Snow White go all psycho on poor Anna.
I liked that she kind of made fun of the Disney classic version of Snow White because that’s what I’m always all about. Seeing Regina as evil again was actually more fun than I expected because at least it didn’t take away a whole redemption story that the character had gone through — cough Rumple cough — for over a whole season. She and Snow basically got to blow off some steam and throw all sorts of insults at each other. I couldn’t help but laugh both times when Regina said “what am I wearing” both when she was evil and then when she went back to normal.
“Shattered Sight” wrapped up the flashbacks of Ingrid/The Snow Queen and her relationship with young Emma as we get the complete explanation of how Emma ended up losing her memories. I really can’t stress how much I loved the actress who played young Emma because she was spot on with Morrison’s portrayal. Is it weird that I kind of wanted to see more flashbacks of Ingrid and Emma before everything turned terrible? The flashback where adult Emma runs into Ingrid after all those years hinted that she must have met her early in season 1 just a few weeks after she arrived there, so it was good to at least get that backstory.
We have had so many different forms of final battles against several big bads throughout this whole series from mind-blowing to action packed. This climatic battle was the emotional one as it was psychology that made Ingrid understand the things she had done when she read the letter from her sister. Once realizing that her sister did in fact love her, Ingrid decides to sacrifice herself to stop the curse and I will admit that the effects were a bit underwhelming, but I was busy crying my eyes out. Mitchell killed it in that performance, and even though she did start out as a villain when we first met her, she got to exit as a tragic hero.
So with a great wrap-up to the Snow Queen arc of the show, I thought for a second that this was the mid-season finale and I almost wish it had been the winter (no pun intended) finale. But with the Arendelle sisters and Kristoff still in Storybrooke and Rumple still being ridiculously evil and now aiming to go after the rest of the world, we still have one more episode to go. Without going into spoilers about what was shown in the 20-second promo tonight: next week’s episode looks like Once Upon a Time could be entering a horrible phase. Hopefully I’m absolutely dead wrong about it, but I don’t like the idea they are setting up for Season 4B in 2015.
Once Upon a Time airs their mid-season finale “Heroes and Villains” next Sunday, December 14, 8/7c on ABC.
Photo via ABC
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