2.21.2012

what happened to frederick (1:13)

This week, in disappointingly Kathryn-David-Mary-Margaret-heavy OUaT spoilers:




So we open on Midas' daughter showing up to get married, and apparently Charm has already flown the coop. Does he not realize he's destroying an entire country with his foolish boyish love? Doesn't matter. He got kidnapped. By ABIGAIL! Because she doesn't want to marry him, which makes sense, because Charming isn't really that interesting so much as he's handsome and... um... He seems like an idiot. I'm sorry.



So Fredrick (who is the soccer coach, WHICH I TOTALLY CALLED, by the way) from the title is Abigail's lost love, who was defending their coach from an attack or something, but then he fell into Midas, and turned into gold. This means all is not lost! They're really pushing this "all curses can be broken" business. Also, I really like how Charming's like, "Did you try true love's kiss?" And Abigail says, "Till my lips bled," and his response, which is really the kicker for me, was, "Argh, the GOLD got in the way!" And then NOBODY TRIES TO REMOVE THE FACEMASK. HOW DID NOBODY THINK OF THIS. All you need is a decent goldsmith to show up, do some tweaking, remove facemask. Everybody wins. Instead we've got to have this whole quest business with the lake and the monster and the enchanted water.

Oh hell yes! It turns out the MYSTERIOUS MONSTER THAT EATS EVERYONE is the Lady of the Lake! Or a siren! Whatever! She seems like the Lady of the Lake to me. Yeeeeeahhhhhhh! Hahahahahahaha, she just turned into Snow. Now he's going to die because he's an idiot who can't resist a watery tart. Or he can, but she's gonna kill him anyways. Why isn't she eating him? It seems pretty boring to just drag guys under a lake to have them turn to bones.

Meanwhile in the real world, Kathryn (real world Abigail) is finally having some interesting development, rather than being a sad sack waiting for her husband to love her again. She got into "some law school" in Boston - thanks for not pretending every TV character gets into Harvard, or even wants to go to there, OUaT! Some people go to other schools besides Ivies. I like it when TV shows remember that.

Also, David just said "I choose you" and I immediately thought of Pikachu, so there's that. So he's decided that he wants to leave Kathryn for MM, which will help everyone get back to fairytale land, but if I were any of the women on this show, I would opt for Storybrooke over weird medieval place where you can't wear pants but can get sold through marriage.



Oh no, David's actually a coward who didn't tell his wife he was having an affair! The extent to which I am unsurprised is incredible.



Oh no! Mary Margaret, homewrecker! And she's saaaaad. God, what a town of slut-shamers. David's an idiot. Why is he so dumb in all possible realities? Why is he ruining lives and killing lake ladies and being totally stupid, urghhhhh. This is a thing that I find to be generally true in pop culture: I can't stand "nice guys" because they are always the ones who do the worst things, and they always hide behind "but I didn't want to hurt anyone!" Ugh.




So, Kathryn is trying to leave. Can she? Is that even possible? Nope. Crashed her car. Slash disappeared. Yup. Disappeared. Um. Okay. And we wait for this to get explained!

God, this really sucks. The premise of this show essentially means that none of the characters get to live fulfilling lives with running water and no cholera and rights for women. Sigh. Except Emma and, I guess, Henry, and maybe DA. Are they implying that that's ideal? I don't know if I like this.



In the world of LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE THAT ONLY TOOK UP LIKE FIVE MINUTES OF SCREEN TIME BECAUSE SOMEBODY WRITING FOR THIS SHOW SERIOUSLY HATES ME:



Oh hey! Remember that drifter guy? He's back. Oh, no. His name is August. I'm sorry, dudes named August (or ladies named August), but that is not really a sexy drifter name.

Aaaaaand he's sewing a book. I don't know what's happening here. Is he like making up additional stories? Is he CHANGING THE FUTURE OF THE HISTORY THEY LEFT?!?!?! Let's just pretend that follows.


So... Emma and Drifter August are going to a well... It's a wishing well... He's a writer... Anyway, I think I kind of like DA. He seems weird enough.


Oh my god, amazing. EQ has a ring of skeleton keys with skulls on them. That's fantastic.

EQ is about to lose some pawns. Who was she really in love with? I need to know! I don't think it was genie-in-the-looking-glass, and I feel pretty confident that it wasn't the king/Snow's dad. There has to have been a really good motivation buried in all that.

Also, EQ, in her role as Henry's mom, just gave him a Gameboy or something to replace his BOOK. What kind of parenting is this? Who seriously says, oh no, your favorite book got destroyed when I destroyed your playground, so here's a Gameboy. No. You get the kid new books. Because you're an adult. And you want your child to read. Because it builds character. Or something.

So, all in all, an episode that just reminds us how awful it would be for most of the women in the town to have to go back to being fairy-tale characters. And zero Rumplestiltskin! What is that? Seriously, writers, are you trying to kill me? Nobody cares an entire episode-worth about the MM/David/Charming/Snow White thing. Nobody cares. I like Ginnifer Goodwin, we have been over this, she's great and all - BUT THIS STORYLINE IS BORING AND AWFUL AND ABOUT SOME TERRIBLE PEOPLE. Not even like interesting-terrible, a la Rumplestiltskin trying to steal that girl's baby or EQ doing literally anything, looking super fine and stealing children's happiness or whatever. Boring-terrible, like "I'm going to cheat on my wife, and string both her and my outside-girlfriend along for a while, leaning pretty heavily on my whole amnesia thing, and then I'm going to unceremoniously dump my wife for my girlfriend, and let the girlfriend get attacked by the ENTIRE DAMN TOWN while I'm too chickenshit to tell my wife I was cheating on her."

CAN YOU TELL THAT I HATE DAVID/CHARMING. CAN YOU TELL. I WANT THIS TO BE AS CLEAR AS POSSIBLE.

Ughhhhhh. I wish MM could move on and find love in the arms of literally anyone else, BUT SHE CAN'T, because of some stupid fairy tale crap.

UGH. And now Kathryn can't even go to law school. She can't leave her terrible loveless marriage to go to law school. In BOSTON. She can't even go to BOSTON. This show is making me sad.

Next week, writers, please bring me more Rumplestiltskin, and have some karmic loophole happen where David/Charming gets eaten by a dragon or some other mythical creature so that he can't ever come back, ever. He's just such a tool. He's the biggest tool of all the tools in all of fairy-tale land. Ugh.