Season 4, Episode 2:
White Out
Elsa, believing Anna to be in Storybrooke, creates a wall of ice around the town to prevent anyone from leaving and hindering her search. Unknowingly, she also cuts out the power. David and Emma investigate the wall of ice and Hook decides to tag along, leaving Mary Margaret to deal with the complaints of her new subjects. Parallel to this, the episode's flashbacks show us Princess Anna meeting David before becoming Prince Charming, and helping him fight off a warlord, Bo Peep.
Tropes
- Adaptational Villainy: To the extreme. Bo Peep is redepicted as a tyrannical, mystical warlord who extorts wealth from a poor family living in a hovel.
- Age Lift: Bo Peep is commonly imagined as a young shepherdess - hence the name Little Bo Peep. She is a fully grown woman here.
- An Aesop: See Living Is More than Surviving.
- Couch Gag: The title card features the ice wall created by Elsa.
- Decomposite Character: Queen Elsa may not be the Snow Queen after all.
- Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: A variation. David is shown to have had long hair in his past.
- Harmless Freezing: Averted. Just being in Elsa's cave is rapidly killing Emma.
- Living Is More than Surviving: What Charming learns from Anna.
- Mythology Gag:
- When Emma is complaining about the cold, Elsa mentions how it "never bothered me." In "Let It Go," one of the important lines was "The cold never bothered me anyway."
- When David's mom gives Anna some food for her journey, Anna mentions that she loves sandwiches. In "Love Is An Open Door," she shouted out the word "sandwiches" in response to Hans's line "we finish each others-".
- Anna uses the alias "Joan" when traveling through the Enchanted Forest; in Frozen, there is a scene in "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" where Anna is seen talking to a painting of Joan of Arc, due to being lonely.
- Henry also talks to Regina (briefly) through a door.
- Never Mess with Granny: Downplayed. Bo Peep commands a few soldiers and appears to be no slouch wielding a sword herself. Though Bo Peep's age is never stated, actress Robin Weigert was forty five at the time of filming.
- New Powers as the Plot Demands: Anna knows how to sword fight, claiming she learned from her soldiers. Granted in Frozen she was never in a situation where she would need to demonstrate said skill.
- Not That Kind of Doctor: While brainstorming who could fix the power, Dr. Whale and Geppetto are dismissed by Grumpy as being a medical doctor and a woodworker, not electricians. Ironically, Frankenstein's usage of electricity to bring his brother back to life suggests this might not have been a completely ridiculous idea.
- This is also a Call-Back to when Little John turned into a flying monkey and Whale said "I'm a doctor, not a vet".
- One Degree of Separation: It turns out that Charming was originally friends with Kristoff, took swordsmanship training from Anna, and is now being forced to work with Elsa!
- Remember the New Guy?: Two cases. Bo Peep is in Storybrooke as the town butcher, while the Snow Queen runs the ice cream parlour. Bo Beep could have been brought over in the previous curse - but a later episode reveals that the Snow Queen was present since before Emma came to town. And in fact her ice cream parlor, "Any Given Sundae", replaces the animal shelter that had been near Granny's Diner before.
- Second Episode Introduction: For the Arc Villain, the Snow Queen.
- Sympathy for the Devil: Snow muses that the reason why Regina was evil was because of the whining townspeople.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: Granny, Grumpy, and Happy badger Snow to fix the power in the most whiney way possible. Snow eventually tells them to shut it, reminds them that they survived most of their lives without electricity and tells them to buy a flashlight.
- Jerkass Has a Point: They were being rather ungrateful and whiney, despite Snow really trying to help them all. Not to mention that - rather than attempting to solve the problem themselves - they dump it on a woman who gave birth only a couple of days ago.
- Wham Shot: The reveal that Elsa isn't the only one with snow and ice powers. An ice cream parlour worker serving Grumpy is revealed to have ice powers too, and for all intents and purposes she appears to be the actual Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen's original tale.
- Xenafication: Bo Peep is a villainous warlord who is able to enslave people by branding them with her crook. She appears to have some talent with a sword as well.
