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“Once Upon A Time” recap (4.4): Hang In There, Joan

Previously on Once Upon A Time, Anna set off on a mission to find Rumpelstiltskin, Henry and Regina kicked off Operation Mongoose, and Captain Hook started blackmailing Gold because he knows the dagger he gave Belle is a fake.

We begin a long time ago, where an old man is sweeping with a little wooden broom. The Dark One comes in looking for a sorcerer, but only finds his apprentice. They fight, and the hood falls back to reveal that this Dark One is not Rumpelstiltskin. He tries to open the starbox, but it is protected by white magic, and the apprentice said no Dark One will ever possess it.

Flash forward to the current Dark One turning the starbox into a magic hat.

Across town, Emma makes a stop at Granny’s and when she leaves, she notices a puddle of water around her buggy. When she looks around and sees no rain or water anywhere else, she identifies it as snowmelt, and knows Madame Scoops has been nearby.

In Gold’s shop, Hook blackmails Rumple into restoring his hand, despite Rumple’s warning that the hand belonged to a very different man, a rougher man, and might be a bad influence on the swashbuckling but otherwise fairly harmless Hook.

In the Charming Loft, Emma puts on a dress and does up her hair to get ready to go out to dinner, and Mary Margaret takes a polaroid, which confuses the heck out of Elsa. Elsa is also confused as to why Emma’s idea of a fancy dress only has one thin layer to it. Emma tries to get them to give her a reason to cancel last-minute, but Elsa tells her she’s put people through enough trouble, and to go on living her life. When Hook answers the door, he’s in normal clothes and has two hands, so Emma takes to calling him Killian. After they leave, David wonders if his almost-stern send-off was too harsh, and Elsa makes a joke about making Kristoff sweat when he first started dating Anna.

Speaking of Anna, we flash back to when Anna finds Rumpelstiltskin. She says her name is Joan and asks about his skin in her honest and rambly ways, but Rumple knows her name is Anna and that she wants to know why her parents came to the Enchanted Forest. Rumple tells her that he did indeed see her parents, but that he requires a deal in exchange for the information. Anna says she’ll do whatever it takes, so he gives her a vial of liquid and tells her to put it in a man’s tea. She’s worried about what it will do to the man, but she signs the contract anyway, for Elsa.

Anna knocks on a cottage door, and the old man who answers is the sorcerer’s apprentice. After a few minutes with the man, Anna can tell Rumple lied, and is so moved by his kindness, she dumps the vial into the fire instead of putting it in his tea.

Present-day, in a restaurant that isn’t Granny’s but still doesn’t have Ruby as a waitress, and has a billion people in it who we’ve never seen before but are obviously Storybrooke residents because the ice wall prevents them from being anything else, Emma and Killian happen to be there at the same time. Killian offers to get them a drink, but Emma wants to stay on her A-Game in case Madame Scoops makes an appearance. He takes both her hands and Emma looks mildly alarmed. Will Scarlet turns out to be at this same bar, presumably because it’s the only other place in Storybrooke besides Granny’s, and tries to scurry out unnoticed when he spots Emma. Unfortunately, this backfires, and he knocks a drink right onto her, causing Killian’s new hand to grab him by the collar. At Emma’s command, he lets Will Scarlet go, who immediately runs off. Emma considers running after him, but figures he can’t go far, so decides to let it go. Meanwhile, Regina and Henry are in her vault looking for something to thaw out Marian but aren’t having much luck. Henry asks if True Love’s Kiss didn’t work because Robin Hood’s torch is too close to Regina, and Regina is a little taken aback that he knows this information. Henry says it could be a good thing, that maybe Regina could finally be happy, but she says he’s too young to understand that she can’t fully love Robin Hood back because HER torch is mostly lit for his other mother.

Across town, Will Scarlet tries to break into the library but Killian stops him, slapping him around with his newly reattached hand.

Flashback Anna tells Rumple that she did as he asked, which he says is a good thing, since it was an antidote. At the fear that she did more harm than good, she confesses to dumping the vial and says she’ll go back. Rumple tells her it’s too late; the sorcerer’s apprentice has already turned into a mouse. Let’s call him…Mickey.

Anna runs back to the cottage and tries to find little Mickey, begging Rumpelstiltskin to change him back. Rumple has no desire to, however, and it is only then Anna realizes that it was he who poisoned the man in the first place. Anna finds out it was a test, because Rumple needs someone who rejected the temptation of their inner darkness to get the starbox. Anna boasts that she doesn’t even think she HAS an inner darkness to be tempted by, so Rumple tells her that if she won’t be useful to him, she’ll be locked away in his tower, which will surely send Elsa on a frozen bender that will turn her into a monster.

Anna grabs a sword and threatens Rumple, telling him to rip up the contract. He tells her that ripping it up won’t matter, the only way out of the contract is to kill him. She presses the tip of the sword to where his heart might be should he have one, love for her sister fueling her hatefire. Anna finally gives up, unable to kill him, and collapses to the floor. Rumple swipes a tear from her cheek with his Dark One Dagger and is pleased as a peacock because he has what he needs to get the starbox now. Anna tells him he’s a monster for using love as a weapon, but he says love was always a weapon, he’s just one of the few who choose to wield it.

Rumple strolls down into the CGI vault and waves his dagger over the starbox and out comes the magic hat again.

Present-day Rumple and a bouquet of flowers get into his car, but Killian jumps in, growling about wanting his new angry hand gone. Rumple says he switched the daggers back, so Killian has no leverage; if he wants the hook back, he has to make a deal. Killian doesn’t want one of Rumple’s classic “you’ll owe me one” deals, he wants to know the terms outright. Somehow, sometimes, he can be the smartest one on this show. Rumple says he doesn’t really have a choice, since he’s the only one who can remove the hand, so Killian’s hand rams the hook into Rumple’s chest. Fearing his loss of control, Killian agrees to the open-ended deal, echoing Anna in saying he’ll do whatever it takes. Rumple tells Killian to meet him at the docks in the morning.

The next day, Emma is listening to Storybrooke Radio, which is all kinds of hilarious, when her buggy spins out on a random sheet of ice. Emma knows this means Madame Scoops is nearby and gets out to find her, and sure enough, an ice trail leads her right to her. Emma follows the ice to a parking lot but the trail goes…warm? It stops, abruptly, and Emma is confused and aggravated. But she’ll have to deal with that later, because Belle calls to tell her they have a situation. The situation is Will Scarlet passed out drunk and bloody on the library floor.

Also passed out drunk is Killian, who slept on the docks so as not to be late for his meeting with Rumple. Or maybe that’s where he lives? Anyway, Rumple brought a broom with him and when he lets it go, it sprouts little arms and marches away, leading Rumple and Killian to who Rumple is calling “an old friend” but surely is not a friend at all.

Flash back to Rumpelstiltskin and the starbox coming out of the vault to see Anna hadn’t run away; she still wants what she came for: answers. Rumple tells her that her parents came to him to try to find a way to rid Elsa of her powers, but the only thing capable of that is the hat in the starbox, which collects magic. Anna asks why he wants the hat if the Dark One is already unstoppable and he says there are still limits.

Anna says she can’t, in good conscious, just let him take the starbox, and just then little Mickey leaps down from the rafters and bites Rumple, making him drop the dagger, which Anna quickly picks up. She almost immediately realizes that she now has full control over him, and understands the limits he mentioned before. Adorably, she still says please when she commands him to give her the starbox. He threatens her, telling her he will get the dagger back, but Anna has a few more demands: She wants to go back to Arendelle, with the box, she wants Rumple to never be able to hurt her or her sister, AND he has to turn Mickey back into a man.

Rumple twitches, but does as he’s told, and is furious at the dagger for letting him be bested by a non-magical princess.

Present-day Rumple is with Killian, still following the marching broom, which leads them to the door of the apprentice, in man-form now. Killian forces him into a char and Rumple kneels before him, turning the starbox into the hat once more. The apprentice is surprised, but not for long, since Rumple tips the hat and it sucks him right in.

Flash back to Kristoff trying unsuccessfully to get Sven to eat a carrot. He wonders out loud what’s wrong when a cute little voice asks if the reindeer missed her. Anna tells Kristoff that her mission was a bust, that everything she set out to prove wrong was true. Kristoff asks her if she’s going to tell Elsa that her parents left because they were afraid of her, because they wanted to take away her powers, but Anna doesn’t know if that’s the right decision.

In Gold’s shop, Killian says he upheld his end of the deal, so Rumple takes his hand back and returns his hook. Captain Hook says they’re quite through now, but Rumple has security footage that says otherwise. Hook says Emma will understand that he had to do whatever he could to be a better man, but Rumple says it was all power of persuasion, the hand wasn’t cursed at all. The two have a bit of a pissing match, solidifying the fact that they will be lifelong enemies.

In the sheriff’s station, Emma greets a rather hungover Will Scarlet, asking why he had a copy of Alice in Wonderland with the page about the Red Queen torn out. He tells her he doesn’t know why he had those things on him, and that he doesn’t know who gave him his shiner, and even though that was two very blatant lies in a row, Emma “The Human Lie Detector” Swan has no idea and moves on to the next problem. Which is Madame Scoops, who had been living in Storybrooke as Sarah Fisher, isn’t in the record books, which means she didn’t come here via curse. Henry goes to Regina, who has been in the vault the whole episode, which is entirely unacceptable, and tells her he has a plan for Operation Mongoose: He believes Gold knows who wrote the storybook, so he’s going undercover to find out more by getting a job at Gold’s Shop. He goes to ask Rumple for the gig, saying he would work “after school,” but I haven’t seen any other children in the town in years, so I’m not sure he’s even really going to school.

Gold agrees, with a few rules, and tells Henry he can be his apprentice, then hands him a little wooden broom.

What did you think of “The Apprentice”?

Here are some of our favorite #queerytales tweets from this week (your tweets were definitely the best part of this episode):

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