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“Once Upon a Time” recap (4.5): It’s Like You’re My Mirror

Previously on Once Upon A Time, Maid Marian got frozen by the Snow Queen and Regina took it upon herself to save her, Emma thinks the Snow Queen and her are connected somehow and wants to know why, and also there’s still no sign of Ruby or Mulan so I’ve officially decided that they met up and have been mourning the loss of their respective lovers to stupid boys by hitting up all the lesbian pubs in the Enchanted Forest.

We open this week on Madame Scoops being shady and carving a human out of a block of ice, because why not.

In the Sheriff’s office, Elsa is frustrated that all they’re doing is reading files and probably also a little uncomfortable in her sparkly gown. She tells Emma that she wants to go out there and fight, but Emma says they should do their research first; Emma is sure her memories have been stolen, and doesn’t want to go into this fight unprepared.

Will Scarlet is still in the cell, so Emma gives him some water and a Pop-Tart, kind of enjoying actually being able to be a little sheriff-y for once and tell him she’s not letting him out yet. Elsa finds a stack of pictures and Emma recognizes them as the ones Regina had taken when Emma first arrived in Storybrooke. They find one photo in the stack of Emma talking to Sarah Fisher in the ice cream shop, but Emma has zero recollection of this either, so she decides to go to Regina for answers. Speak of the devil, Regina is asking her magic mirror where the Snow Queen is. Glass sasses her about how she’s always looking for this woman or that, but she tells him to shut up and find her most recent target.

Sidebar: the Charmings were to this episode what Aria was to the first three seasons of Pretty Little Liars; eating pie while everyone else was getting axe-murdered. Their storyline in a nutshell: Mary Margaret was worried about leaving their baby with Belle, David convinced her, they chased the escaped Will Scarlet, Mary Margaret pardoned him because she thought David orchestrated it for her benefit, he hadn’t, the end. The only good part was when Will Scarlet thought Mary Margaret was married to Emma for a second because Emma pinged even his gaydar.

Emma and Elsa drive to Regina’s place, and Emma remembers when those pictures were taken, a time when her and Regina hated each other, and that one time Regina pinned her against a wall. She says she wants to fix things between her and Regina, they had gotten to a good place, and she wants to go back there. Elsa saw the way Emma talking about Regina steamed up the car a little, so she says that Emma should go in to talk to Regina alone; she’d wait in the buggy. Far be it from her to get in the way of true love.

Emma says she’s worried that things are ruined forever, and when Elsa asks why, we’re hurtled into a flashback.

We flash back to a teenage Emma, flannel shirt and leather jacket, trying to lift a box of PopTarts by sticking it under her coat instead of into her giant backpack. Just when she’s about to get busted for her crappy shoplifting skills, a girl around her age covers for her and offers to buy her the Pop-Tarts; she says lifting credit cards is the only way to go. Outside, Lily spots a man in a car and tells Emma to run, which they do. Emma pulls them into an alley, narrowly avoiding being caught. The new girl thanks her, and says her name is Lily. Emma says, “You’ve got my back, I’ve got yours.” Emma goes into Regina’s vault and Regina is none too pleased to see her. She says she’s a little busy trying to save her “true love’s wife” but she says it in a way you mention your current fling to the ex you really care about to try to hit them where it hurts. Emma shows Regina the pictures, who feigns ignorance about the whole thing. Emma says that she would ask Sydney Glass about it herself, but she’s just now noticed that no one has seen him in quite some time, excellent sheriff that she is. When she realizes Regina has no more information for her, she asks about the progress on the whole Marian problem. Then she literally offered her services in case Regina wanted “some extra juice.” Those were literally her words. When Regina asks why she would help her, Emma says the same thing she said to Lily, “You’ve had my back, I have yours.” Regina scoffs; of course Emma would be on her-oh, right, she HAS her back. Okay. But Regina still turns her away. Outside in the buggy, Elsa hears her sister’s voice calling out to her and heads into the graveyard after it. When Emma finds the buggy empty, she follows Elsa into the darkness.

Inside the vault, Sydney Glass returns to the mirror to tell Regina he has found the Snow Queen’s lair. He tries to blackmail her into freeing him for the information, but she literally laughs in his face and reminds him how much power she holds over him, so he agrees to lead her to the Snow Queen.

Emma and Regina meet in the woods, each on the hunt for their own beautiful, blonde, snow-loving gal. Emma thinks they should stick together and sort of meekly asks if it’s okay and Regina LITERALLY says, “You’ll just come anyway.” Because the writers either have no idea what an innuendo is or appreciate them as much as I do. Flashback to teenage Emma and her new friend Lily eating a romantic stolen picnic, sharing their feelings like the good babygays they are. Emma says she realized she was too old to get adopted and ran off, and Lily said she understood what it was like to feel invisible. Emma asks if Lily was in the system too, if the man who had been chasing them was from social services, and Lily takes the lie she was handed and says yes. She says that the houses across the lake are just summer homes, so she plans to live in one since it’s fall now, and asks Emma to move in with her. In present-day Storybrooke, Elsa follows Anna’s voice to a chasm in the woods. She makes an ice bridge and starts to cross it, but Anna disappears again before Elsa can reach her sister.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in the seemingly endless Storybrooke Forest, Emma is following Regina, asking too many questions about the magic that is supposedly guiding Regina in the right direction. Regina snaps at Emma, saying if she bothered to practice, magic wouldn’t be such a mystery to her. Emma says she’s mostly winging it, but that she learns faster when Reigna is helping her. SHE LITERALLY SAID SHE WANTED TO MAKE MAGIC WITH REGIN. I can’t make this stuff up. (Okay, I can, but I didn’t this time.) Emma says she admires Regina and what she’s doing for Robin hood. Regina’s walls are up and fortified, though. She turns on Emma and shouts at her, telling her stop apologizing, because intentional or not, Emma ruined Regina’s life. She broke her damn heart.

Flash back to Emma and Lily breaking into one of the fancy, empty houses. They play video games and have a grand old time. Emma sees a mark on Lily’s arm in the shape of a star and asks her about it; Lily doesn’t remember getting it, but says she always thought of it as something that made her special. She draws a star on Emma’s arm too, so they can be special together. Emma finds a video camera in the house, and they videotape themselves smiling and laughing. Lily makes Emma promise that they’ll always stay friends, no matter what, and Emma agrees. Present day, in the woods, Elsa is still searching for Anna’s visage when she finds a patch of snow. She also thinks she has found her sister, but when she hugs her, Anna barely responds. The Snow Queen emerges, and Elsa goes on the full defensive, but Anna was never Anna in the first place; Anna was made of ice. Madame Scoops puts Elsa in chains and apologizes for being so dramatic.

She tells Elsa that she could do so much if she could control her fear, her power, but for now all Madame Scoops needs is for Elsa to stay out of the way. Conveniently, she also tells her that the strength of the ice cuffs relies solely on Elsa’s fear. Scoops says she could promise she wouldn’t hurt Elsa, but that wouldn’t do much for the strength of the spell she just explained the loopholes to. Before the Snow Queen leaves, Elsa asks what she’s going to do. Madame Scoops turns around, smiles, and says that she’s going to build a snowman.

Emma and Regina find Elsa’s ice bridge, but Emma can sense that something isn’t right. Of course, not until they’re already halfway across. Regina realizes suddenly that Sydney was in on this, and goes into a crazy rage-stare. Emma begs her to tell her what’s wrong, pleads to know what Regina has been keeping from her.

Flash back to Emma and Lily, asleep on the couch in their big stolen house. Someone comes into the house and Emma awakes with a start, rousing Lily and telling her to get behind her, ready to protect her new girlfriend at all costs. Emma tells the man he’s not putting anyone back in the system and the man asks “Lilith” what stories she’s been weaving. It turns out Lily has two parents, who do care about her, and she cries under the weight of the truth being revealed, of the devastated look on Emma’s face.

Present-day Emma looks similarly betrayed by a different brunette, and wishes Regina had just let her in on the whole Sydney Glass GPS thing. Regina says Glass is a traitor, and he yells out of the mirror that the Snow Queen has a present for the ex-Evil Queen. The bridge starts to collapse beneath them, so Emma and Regina run and jump and make it to land in the nick of time. Elsa is still trapped by her icy handcuffs, but she knows it’s time to test the limits and break through so, like a kid shouting they don’t believe in monsters to end a bad dream, Elsa says out loud that she’s not afraid and frees herself of the chains holding her down.

Emma asks Regina if she’s okay, but before they can finish assessing the damages, a giant ice warrior (and decidedly not a snowman by any stretch of the imagination) appears.

Flash back to Lily, in the back of her dad’s car, tears streaming down her face. She writes down her contact information, begging Emma to take it, saying they could run away together, they could live happily ever after. Emma is hurt that Lily tricked her, but Lily insists she wasn’t lying about feeling the same way Emma does. She says she was adopted and that her home never felt like home, that she does feel invisible, like no one understands her. In other words, she felt like a teenager. Lily pleads with Emma to keep her promise, that they would be together forever, but Emma walks away without taking the paper and smudges the marker star on her arm like Harriet the Spy washing off her foot tattoo, never once turning back. (I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen the last of Lily, but I can’t figure out who she is yet.)

Present-day Emma uses her magic to shove the ice magic away, and it comes to her easily and quickly in the name of saving Regina. Regina had tried too, but the ice monster quickly regenerates, weapon and all. Emma tells Regina that they have to try again, together, and they both send beams of light at the monster, Emma’s white and Regina’s red. Together, they melt him into a giant puddle. Just then, the Snow Queen shows up and steals Regina’s pocket mirror in a flash. She starts to choke them both when Elsa shows up and knocks the Snow Queen down. I’d say she was flaming mad, but that seems unlikely…frostily mad? Yeti mad? Anyway, she’s not pleased, and says that this fight is hers, not Emma and Regina’s. She has a ship to protect.

Madame Scoops is proud of Elsa’s display of magic, as well as her ability to control her fears and escape the ice cuffs. But she has no intention of fighting Elsa; she has what she wants, so she disappears.

Emma tests the waters again, hoping making magic with Regina would have fixed everything, but as Callie and Arizona learned, sometimes it’s not as easy as all that. Regina says (again, literally) that they’re not partners. What was she going to do? Tell Emma that she had trapped Glass in the mirror to kill Marian but then changed her mind and was using him to try to stop the Snow Queen? After everything she’s been through in this town, why on earth would she think Emma would ever believe her? Emma looks hurt, but can’t argue; she doesn’t have a good track record for taking Regina at her word. Elsa tells them that they can mend their differences, that this ship isn’t un-sailable, but Regina has no interest in ship repair at the moment and disappears into a poof of purple smoke.

In her ice cave, Madame Scoops sets Sydney Glass free. He asks her what bidding of hers he can do, but she waves him off; it wasn’t his service she wanted, it was the mirror itself. A mirror is a powerful thing, and this one in particular is imbued with much dark magic. She tells him it will help her get what she wants, but when he asks what it is, she says it’s between her and her reflection. She opens an ice door and tells him to enjoy his freedom, and tells him to buy a warm coat because winter is coming.

Madame Scoops shatters the little mirror and summons a larger mirror that is also cracked. She pulls a piece of glass from the small one and magics it into place on the big mirror, which instantly heals itself. She looks into the Mirror of Erised and says she sees a family that loves her. Elsa apologizes to Emma for running off, saying that she only left because she thought she saw Anna. Emma understands, she’s done stupider things. Elsa then makes another valiant effort to mend the Good Ship SwanQueen. She says that you shouldn’t just give on people, even when they’re trying to push you away. If Anna had done that, Elsa would still be in her ice tower singing songs and letting Arendelle freeze to death in an eternal winter.

Emma takes Elsa’s advice and goes to Regina again. This time, when Regina pushes back, Emma doesn’t stand down. Emma says that she had a friend once, a friend she loved in a similar albeit slightly more innocent way that she loves Regina, and she had walked away from her instead of forgiving her. She regrets not forgiving Lily, and she doesn’t want to feel that same regret. Sure, Emma found her blood family here in Storybrooke, but sharing blood doesn’t automatically mean you understand each other. Emma and Regina are similar, more similar than either of them had been willing to admit up until this point. Emma screwed up, and she feels bad about it, that sure right now Regina might want to kill her, but Emma wants to be friends with Regina again. Regina raises an eyebrow at the thought that Emma considered them friends, and Emma says (with her eyes, not literally this time) that it was more than that, but she’d settle for friends too. Emma starts to leave, having made her point that she wasn’t about to give up on this, but Regina stops her to tell her that she doesn’t want to kill her. Emma smiles and says that’s a start. Emma heads back to the sheriff’s office and is looking through some of her things in her drawer when Killian shows up bearing rum. She tells him what’s left of her childhood is in this one file box, and he asks if they can go through it together. He starts picking through things; her old glasses, a ring, a photo of her and Neal, the blanket Snow White and Charming sent her through the magical tree stump with, and the video camera from her tryst with Lily. Emma puts it in the VCR and plays it, smiling sadly at the memory of her first girlfriend, when suddenly it cuts out and starts up again in a room full of kids. The boy who has it says the camera belongs to the “new girl” and teenage Emma is there all right, but present-day Emma has no recollection of this moment, or any of these kids. A grown-up voice interrupts the ruckus and tells the boys to leave Emma’s camera alone. When her face appears, it is none other than Madame Scoops; Sarah Fisher has once been Emma’s foster mother. What did you think of Breaking Glass? Gayest episode ever, or gayest episode ever?

Here are some of our favorite #queerytales tweets from this week (you should really check out the tag, there were tons of great ones this week):

 

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