Once upon a Time Rewatch 1.2, "The Thing You Love Most"

Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series here.

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1.2, "The Thing You Love Most"

Written by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz
Directed by Greg Beeman

Synopsis

My heart...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

After a brief recap of the previous episode and the title sequence, the episode opens with Henry staring out over the town and smiling at the now-ticking library clock. The next day arrives and shows the reactions of several other characters to the new day and its bright morning. Regina pores over Henry's book, finding a number of pages torn out. She confronts him about them, only for him to deflect the questions posed and to capitalize on her distraction by the ringing clock bell.

I've seen that kind of smile before. It's never good.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Regina calls on Emma shortly thereafter, offering her fruit as she urges her to leave town. A flashback to the fairy-tale realm--the Enchanted Forest--serves to illustrate the point, with Regina threatening Snow White and Prince Charming before teleporting back to her chambers and consulting with attendants about retrieving a dark curse from a forbidden fortress.

The fortress looks forbidding enough...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Traveling thence, Regina meets with Maleficent, where a barbed conversation ensues in which Regina dickers to get the dark curse back, having previously traded it to Maleficent for a sleeping curse that seems not to have worked. Maleficent asks after its origins, and Regina demurs before a fight ensues. Regina emerges victorious, and Maleficent urges her, in vain, not to enact the curse.

Regina makes an attempt to enact that curse, one that fails due to insufficient sacrifice to fuel it. The death of what she loves most is required, and what she initially gives is not it; she is mocked for the failure.

Back in Maine, the local newspaper editor, Sidney, presents Regina with information about Emma, relating details of her past that Regina finds unsatisfactory; he returns to his investigations. Henry confronts Emma again, trying to press her into his work to lift the curse on the town, explaining the situation as he sees it and presenting her the pages torn from his storybook along with a warning about Regina. Emma follows up on it, which leads her to Henry's therapist; he is circumlocutive, although he flagrantly breaches professional ethics and patient confidentiality to help her--as he has been directed to do.

I'm...not sure how to feel about this.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Emma reviews the file until interrupted by the sheriff knocking on her door--with a claim that Henry's file has been stolen. Given the presence of the file in her room, he takes her into custody as Regina pulls her son aside at school to tell him of the arrest. He rejects her explanation and returns to his lessons. Emma and the sheriff confer until Henry and his teacher--Snow White, as it happens--arrive to make Emma's bail; she vandalizes Regina's property swiftly thereafter, provoking another confrontation.

In the Enchanted Forest, Regina confronts Rumpelstiltskin regarding the dark curse and its failure. He advises her that Snow White has called upon him and that there is a weakness in the curse. He also strikes a deal for his life in the new world in exchange for information about the demands of the curse--the heart of the thing she loves most.

In Maine, Emma finds herself turned out of her lodgings. The sheriff demurs in prosecuting Emma, and Regina rages at him. Emma and Regina confer, and Henry overhears the discussion--as Regina intended. And in the Enchanted Forest, Regina acts upon the information Rumpelstiltskin gave her; she rips her father's heart from his chest, ensuring that the curse will spread even as she is ill at ease with the price she has paid to enact it.

Emma calls on Henry's teacher, thanking her for posting her bail and repaying it; the teacher invites her in for cocoa and conversation. Emma affirms that she means to leave, citing the need to keep Henry from hurting; the teacher argues against it, citing the clear regard Emma has for Henry. And Henry sits silently in his therapist's office until Emma bursts in, apologizing to Henry and affirming her intent to remain in the town--and burning the pages torn from his book to keep them from Regina before they walk out into the town together.

Mr. Gold, Rumpelstiltskin's Maine persona, calls on Regina, informing her that Emma remains in town. He offers his services in eliminating her, for a price, and she rages against him.

Discussion

Henry's book is an interesting bit of medievalism in the present episode (and in future ones, as it happens). It is shown to have illuminated capitals and a number of illustrations, and while the latter is commonplace enough, the former is a deliberate nod back to medieval European manuscript production. The size of the volume is atypical, certainly but that is also somewhat reminiscent of parchment volumes, which were in some ways constrained by the dimensions of the animal from which they came. And it is notable subject to destruction and excision ("It's an old book; stuff's missing."), something that hurts me to see and which plagues studies of older literatures; much is unknown because the pages are simply not present. In some ways, then, the foundation of the series--Henry's book--is a playing with medievalist tropes, grounding the series as a whole in that medievalism even as there are...issues, as discussed previously.

The architecture on display in the episode also rings of the (Disneyfied) medievalist. Regina's chambers in the Enchanted Forest are overwrought Gothic, with vaulted arches and high ceilings in black; the Forbidden Fortress where she meets with Maleficent is very much in the fantastic castle tradition with its thrusting towers and crenellations rising from an impossibly-suspended stone formation, and its interiors seem in that same mode. There is, admittedly, no pretense of authenticity at work; the characters and their fantasy setting are explicitly noted to be fairy-tale constructions, and they are in some senses closer to their older sources that the Disney-working-from-Perrault versions familiar to the presumed audience of the series. (Again, being on a major broadcast network in the United States at prime time has...implications for who is watching.) But there is something to be noted in the carrying-forward of common tropes despite a prevailing informational context that ostensibly (inaccurately and ineffectively, perhaps, as Shiloh Carrol notes throughout her discussion of Martin in this webspace) traffics in a "realistic" medieval.