Once Upon a Time – When will Emma’s baby daddy arrive in Storybrooke?

As a child, Emma was bounced around from foster home to foster home, never feeling loved or embraced. She was rootless and refused to forge emotional ties with anyone although, in the back of her mind, she always wanted to find and know her parents and why they’d ditched her on the side of the road when she was a newborn.

In this episode of Once Upon a Time, the writers finally provided a satisfactory answer to one of the questions that has been bugging me: What was Emma’s specific motivation for staying in Storybrooke, especially given its oddness and the fact that its mayor aggressively did not want her to remain withint town limits? Emma’s heart ached for the son she’d given up for adoption, the one she hoped would have been placed with a loving family like the one she never had. Yet like Emma, Henry never got that and is currently being raised by a cruel, cold woman who, for reasons that haven’t  yet been divulged, wanted to be a mother, even though she named her son after her father, whom she murdered.

It was Emma’s identification with being that unloved child that has kept her in Storybrooke and which prompted her to go to bat for Hansel and Gretel whose mother was dead and whose father didn’t know about their existence. Emma didn’t want them to go into the foster system so she pulled at the father’s heartstrings like a puppeteer until the father agreed to take custody of them.

This episode offered one of the more grizzly Fairy Tale Land stories, the Hansel and Gretel one, as they were manipulated by The Evil Queen into robbing the blind, cannibal witch of a magical apple but, in the process, faced being cooked and eaten in one of the oddest scenes where the blind witch kept screeching, “Gravy or butter?” as in what substance the kid wanted to be basted.

There was something almost heartbreaking in the way The Evil Queen attempted to persuade Hansel and Gretel — once they escaped the gravy and butter crazed witch by sticking her in her own fiery oven — to become her children. She offered the poor children the chance to live in a castle, to wear the finest of clothes, eat delectable cuisine, be waited on by servants … everything a child of that era could’ve desired. Yet when they refused, saying they wanted to be returned to their father because he was family, The Evil Queen seemed unable to process it, unable to comprehend human compassion and connection. There’s clearly some DNA missing within her. Has she always been this way or is her coldness a result of circumstance, of losing that loved one supposedly because of something Snow White did?

Speaking of questions, there are still a bunch of them surrounding Henry’s father, about whom Emma lied in describing him to her son. Emma wouldn’t say much but alluded, when speaking with Mary Margaret, to bad things about her former paramour. When that mysteriously, motorcycle-riding stranger arrived in Storybrooke, I wondered when exactly Henry’s dad is going to make an appearance, because you know he’s going to.

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Jan 16, 2012 @ 11:58 EST5EDT