Recap / Once Upon a Time S1 E2 "The Thing You Love Most"

Season 1, Episode 2:

The Thing You Love Most

Centric Characters: The Evil Queen

Previous: Pilot | Next: Snow Falls

Maleficent: Don't do this, this curse. There are lines even we shouldn't cross. All power comes with a price. Enacting it will take a terrible toll. It will leave an emptiness inside you—a void you will never be able to fill.
The Evil Queen: Then so be it.

Emma: If I stay, Henry's only going to keep getting hurt.
Mary Margaret: What'll happen if you go? I think the very fact that you want to leave is why you have to stay. You care about him. Who will protect Henry if you won't?

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Regina thumbs through Henry's storybook, and stops on an illustration depicting her alternate self, the Evil Queen. She discovers the next few pages are missing and asks Henry where they are, frustrated that he is seeing her as a villain. He shrugs off the question, and Regina becomes distracted by the clock tower chiming for the first time. Going to inspect the tower, Regina spots Emma's car nearby. She goes to Emma's room at the inn and threatens her again under the guise of gifting her some honeycrisp apples.

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FLASHBACK! Returning to the scene of Snow and Charming's wedding, the Queen makes her promise to cast the curse before vanishing. She reappears at her own castle, and tells her valet and the Magic Mirror that she has decided to enact the Dark Curse. Both respond with horror and remind her that she traded the curse away, but the Queen disregards them and departs to the Forbidden Fortress, home of the sorceress Maleficent. Maleficent refuses to give the Dark Curse back, telling Regina to honor her deal to get a sleeping curse from Maleficent. They fight, and Maleficent is defeated when she gives up her position of advantage to protect her pet unicorn. The Queen breaks Maleficent's staff and retrieves the Curse from inside. She then calls several magical beings to help cast the Curse with locks of their hair, followed by sacrificing the heart of the Queen's beloved horse. To everyone's chagrin, the Curse fails.

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Regina meets with Sidney Glass^* Magic Mirror, who runs the Storybrooke newspaper and published an article trying to defame Emma, although it's ineffectual as he couldn't find much material to go off of. At Granny's Diner, Emma receives a gift in the form of hot cocoa with cinnamon, and initially thinks it's a flirtatious gesture from Graham, although it turns out to be from Henry, who also likes his cocoa with cinnamon, and tells her to walk him to school. On the way, he tries again to explain the town's residents as victims of a curse, not having memories of a past outside Storybrooke and not having aged for twenty-eight years. He shows Emma the missing pages from the book, which feature an illustration of baby Emma, although it doesn't convince her. At the school, Mary Margaret talks to Emma about Henry, mentioning that he believes her to be Snow White. After a few moments of thoughtfulness, Emma asks Mary Margaret how to find Henry's therapist, Dr. Hopper, as Regina had mentioned him earlier. At the office, Hopper gives Emma a file on Henry and tells her not to call him crazy or destroy his beliefs. After Emma leaves, he calls Regina to let her know that Emma had indeed come and he gave her the file like she told him to. Shortly after, Graham arrives at Emma's room to arrest her, as Hopper had told him she had demanded the file and later stolen it. Regina visits Henry at school to tell him about Emma's arrest, saying that she was trying to "learn about us in order to take advantage of us." At the Sheriff Department, Emma tries to convince Graham that Regina is framing her, to no avail. Henry arrives with Mary Margaret to bail Emma out. Emma proceeds to counter-strike Regina by taking a chainsaw to her apple tree.

Regina: What the hell are you doing?!
Emma: Picking apples.
Regina: You're out of your mind!
Emma: No, you are if you think a shoddy frame job's enough to scare me off! You're gonna have to do better than that. If you come after me one more time, I'm coming back for the rest of this tree. Because, sister, you have no idea what I am capable of. Your move.

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FLASHBACK! As the Queen is confused about why the Curse didn't work, her valet tells her she needs to go to the person she got it from, but warns her that "revenge is a dark and lonely road". Regina goes to see Rumplestiltskin in his cell. He tells her about Snow and Charming's visit, and requests that, in exchange for what she wants to know, he have a comfortable life in his cursed state, and that she follow any requests he gives her when accompanied with a "Please". She accepts and he tells her that the Curse failed because she used her horse's heart, and she needs to sacrifice the heart of what she truly loves most.

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Granny ejects Emma from the Bed and Breakfast, having just been reminded by Regina that the inn has a strict "No felons" policy. Graham talks to Regina, implying that he now knows she has been setting Emma up and warns her that if she insists on waging war with her, Emma will push back just as hard and only Henry will end up getting hurt. Regina invites Emma to her office under the pretense of apologizing and trying to settle things between them, but it ends up being a trick to get Emma to call Henry's beliefs crazy in front of him.

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FLASHBACK! Returning to her palace, the Evil Queen tells her valet and the Mirror that she needs to sacrifice the heart of what she loves most, which the valet realizes is himself, being the Queen's father and only remaining family. He comforts her and tells her that she can have love and happiness in her life if she gives up her quest for revenge, but she tearfully chooses the Curse instead, tearing out his heart.

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Emma visits Mary Margaret to pay her back the bail money, and Mary Margaret tells her that she feels they've met before, and that she believes Emma is innocent. Emma goes to Dr. Hopper's office during Henry's session and reassures him that she is staying in Storybrooke for him, and that she thinks the Curse is crazy rather than him, and burns the missing pages from the book to make sure Regina never sees them.

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FLASHBACK! Regina tosses her father's heart into the fire, and it erupts into purple and green smoke which fills the land. She then goes to her father's grave to pay her respects. The camera shows the name on the stone is "Henry".

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Mr. Gold visits Regina, informing her that Emma has still not left for Boston and offers to make a deal with her to get his help in removing Emma, which she declines, reminding him of the last deal they made, to find Regina a child to adopt. He asks how she chose the name "Henry", but she doesn't answer and instead accuses him of intentionally giving her Henry in order to bring Emma to Storybrooke, but he claims to not understand what she means by that. She tries to stop him from leaving, but he tells her to move out of his way with a "Please", stunning Regina as she allows him to go.

Tropes

• Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults: Variation. After tricking Emma into obtaining Archie's file on Henry, then getting Archie to claim Emma stole it so Graham can arrest her (again), Regina pretends to make a peace offering to Emma...all to get her to admit (after having read the file) that she thinks Henry is crazy, when Regina knows Henry will be right outside the door to hear her.
• Couch Gag: The title card features Maleficent's pet unicorn.
• Don't Explain the Joke: When Graham says Emma staying is "bad for local signage."
  Graham: "It's a joke ... because you ran over our sign."
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The hearts which Regina removes from her horse Rocinante and her father Henry look like real hearts (albeit bloodless), rather than having the magical red glow pulsing within or the crystal/ice covering which the hearts in the vault have in "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter." This may be because the creators decided a heart removed magically rather than physically should make it look different, or because they needed the plot point of Graham still having a regular heartbeat even as his heart and will were magically controlled by Regina. Also, both hearts are just thrown in the fire to cast the curse, rather than crushed to dust as we see in later seasons.
• Escalating War: Everything Emma and Regina do this episode. Graham as the voice of reason tries to point out to Regina how this will just end up hurting Henry in the end. Eventually Regina does back off a bit, only to get much worse later in the season.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Maleficent refuses to give the Dark Curse to Regina as she says "There are lines even we shouldn't cross". Season Four reveals Maleficent is pregnant, so the thing she would have to sacrifice is her unborn child, which she won't do. Also, Regina is able to defeat her and take back the curse because she refuses to let Regina harm her unicorn (which she calls weakness, of course).
  • Regina, despite taking the curse from Maleficent, does not harm her and Season 4 reveals Maleficent easily escaped the chandelier.
• Evil Is Petty: A number of things Regina does this episode is this, but particularly how she drags Henry out of his class just to tell him Emma got arrested again, how she has Emma's car booted, her leading Emma into saying the wrong thing in front of Henry (after she set her up with Archie's file), and especially how she reacts to Emma taking the chainsaw to her apple tree: calling Granny to remind her of a city ordinance regarding felons not being allowed to stay at her B&B, forcing her to kick Emma out.
• Foregone Conclusion: We know Regina won't spare her father no matter what happens because the Curse was unleashed in the first episode.
• Hidden Depths: Aside from the Wham Line below, "You're my only friend." As time goes on, we only find out more and more how sadly true this was.
• Ironic Echo: "You have no idea what I'm capable of" and "Your move".
• Match Cut: Not an exact match, but the scene where the Evil Queen turns the gnome who taunts her into stone does dissolve into the scene where the same statue, now a literal garden gnome, is revealed to be in Regina's yard in Storybrooke.
• My God, What Have I Done??: Regina is in tears after killing her father, implying that she is definitely wondering what she has just done...
• Self-Made Orphan: Regina kills her father because she loves him, as the only way to make her heart dark enough for the curse to work.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: Regina and Maleficent basically spend their entire conversation snarking and bitching at one another. Just because they can. And because it's fun. And while Maleficent loses the battle, she wins the snarking contest by implying that Snow, on her wedding night (at that moment having sex with Charming on her honeymoon) is not suffering at that moment.
  • There's a fair amount of this between Regina and Gold in the final scene as well.
• Taken for Granite: Taunting Regina for failing to cast an effective Dark Curse was a bad idea for that gnome. Also acts as a bit of Black Comedy through the pun involved (see Match Cut above).
  • Averted with Maleficent who, despite being a massive troll to Regina, is left unharmed. While she is wrapped in a chandelier, Season 4 reveals that she was easily able to break out and that there was no harm done at all - showing that while Regina did defeat her, the line about Maleficent being her "only friend" is true because, ultimately, Regina can't harm her.
• Wham Line:
  • Or rather, Wham Word. Gold says "Please" to Regina, hinting that he still retains his memories.
  • "Daddy, I don't know what to do". Regina's Hidden Depths are first revealed.