S01E09 - True North

This episode opens with Henry reading a comic book at a convenience store. A girl and her brother (Ava and Nicholas) approach him and say they recognize him from school. They ask if he wants to go hang out, but as they're leaving, the shop keeper stops them and opens Henry's bag. It's full of stolen candy that Nicholas had stashed there. I'm guessing this won't be good for Henry.

In fairytale land, the two same children are out in the forest with their father gathering firewood. This appears to be the story of Hansel and Gretel. They're father sends them off to gather kindling while he works on chopping down a large tree. He gives the girl his compass so she can find her way back to him. As the day wears on, the kids head back to where they left their father but when they reach the tree he chopped down, he's nowhere to be found. As they desperately search for him they wind up on the road and run into but the evil queen's carriage.

Meanwhile in Storybrooke, Regina has been called to the store where Henry and the kids were caught shoplifting.

Lost Reference: One of the things in the backpack is another Apollo bar.

Regina isn't pleased but is pretty convinced that Henry didn't steal anything. She immediately blames Ava and Nicholas. When Emma arrives to do her duty as sheriff, Regina takes Henry and makes an exit. When Emma questions the kids, she discovers that their parents don't have much money (the phone was disconnected) and they things they were stealing were mostly household items (toothpaste, etc). She immediately sympathizes with them and wants to help.

The kids lost in the forest tell the queen that they've lost their father, but rather than take pity on them, she tries to capture the two. They make a run for it, but the queen has some nifty tricks like teleporting via black clouds of smoke and making tree roots tangle them up. When she finally has them restrained, she now has a new plan for them. Given their bravery in trying to run away from her, she offers to find their father if they will do something for her in exchange.

Emma is driving the kids home and when they get to the house, the kids try to pull a fast one. They get out of the car in front of an ordinary house, but after Emma drives off, they hop a fence and run to the cellar of another, much more decrepit house. They enter through the cellar and once inside, Emma shows up out of nowhere. She apparently used her super power to tell that they were lying about the house and followed them. Ava finally confesses that they don't have any parents.

Emma takes them back to her apartment and Mary Margaret doesn't recognize them from school. Apparently their mother died a few years ago but no one knows or remembers her. They don't know who their father is. Emma hasn't reported them to social services yet and reveals some details about her own time in the foster system. She's concerned that if the kids are placed in orphanages, they'll be separated. Instead, she wants to try to figure out who their father is in the hopes that if he finds out that he has kids, he'll want them.

Emma heads to the hall of records to try to look at the kid's birth certificates, but they appear to have been removed by none other than the mayor. When Emma catches up with Regina on the matter, she has already contacted social services and tells her that they're going to be put into two separate homes in Boston. She then tells Emma that she needs to drive them there tonight.

Back in the forest, the queen leads Hansel and Gretel to the "home of the blind witch". She asks them to sneak inside and steal something she needs to defeat a "wicked and powerful enemy". The queen can't enter the house herself because the house is protected with magic, but the spell apparently doesn't work on children. She tells them to wait until night when the witch is sleeping and then sneak in. She also warns them that once inside, they must not eat anything.

As Emma searches for the missing father, Henry shows up and tells her that he figured out that the two are actually Hansel and Gretel. He's convinced that their father is still in town since no one can enter or leave Storybrooke (except Emma). Henry then asks Emma to tell him about his own father. Emma tells him that when she met his dad, he was training to be a firefighter. After a while, they drifted apart but when she found out she was pregnant, she tried to contact him. She found out that he died while saving a family from a burning apartment building. She tells Henry that his father was a real hero.

Emma heads back to the apartment to talk to Ava and Nicholas. She has a theory that they might have kept something of their fathers that she can use to track him down. She says that all kids without parents keep something from them, and as proof she shows them her baby blanket that she was found in when she was abandoned. It turns out that Ava has a compass that belonged to their father.

At the house of the blind witch, it's now night and the kids sneak in through the window. The place if filled with sweets of every kind. The witch is asleep by the fire and the satchel with the item they need to steal is hanging near by. Gretel grabs it, but while she's occupied with the theft, Hansel can't help himself and takes a bite from a cupcake. As soon as he does, the witch wakes up and all the doors and windows magically close. She apparently likes to eat children as evidenced by the pile of bones by the fire.

Emma takes the compass to Mr. Gold's pawn shop. Of course Mr. Gold recognizes the compass and claims that is was bought in his shop. He pulls out his records and gives her the name of the man who purchased the compass. As Emma leaves the shop, we see that the card Mr. Gold read the name from is actually blank. What kind of trick is he up to?

It doesn't take long for Emma to track down the father once she has the name. He's a mechanic and he's not convinced that the kids are his, but when she shows him the compass he has a hard time not believing it. Emma lays the guilt trip on him pretty thick, but even so he doesn't go for it and won't take the kids.

Emma calls Mary Margaret and has her come outside the apartment to talk to her privately. She tells her what happened with the father and also confesses that she lied to Henry about his own father. The real story isn't something that she wants him to know about. Just then Regina shows up to make sure that Emma has the kids on the way to Boston.

The witch has Hansel and Gretel locked up in a cage and is preparing her oven to cook them. When she opens the cage and pulls out Gretel, she grabs the key from the witch's pocket and tosses it to Hansel who gets out of the cage. After a struggle, they manage to shove the witch into her own oven and lock the door. They run out of the house and we see that the evil queen has been watching the whole scene through her mirror. When she sees the witch locked in the oven, she sends a fireball through her mirror into the house to light the oven, cooking the witch inside.

The kids make their way back to the queen's castle. They hand over the satchel which the queen opens, revealing a very magical looking apple inside. The queen is quite pleased with the kids, but instead of reuniting them with their father, she offers to allow them to stay with her and live a life of luxury. Hansel seems to be considering it, but Gretel throws the offer back in the queen's face. The queen is pretty ticked after this and using some smoke magic teleports them to an unknown destination.

Emma is loading the kids up in the squad car to drive them to Boston. Henry is distraught that something bad will happen if Emma tries to take the kids out of Storybrooke. Once again, as they approach the town limits, something odd happens and the engine dies. Emma starts calling someone to help - anyone not think it's Dad the mechanic?

The queen is busy spying on Snow White in her mirror who is walking along with the dwarfs. I guess we know who the magic apple is for. The queen's guards bring in Hansel and Gretel's father. We find out that she captured him in the forest in the first place and has been keeping him locked up. She asks him why when she offered his children everything they could ever want, they refused her. He tells her that it's because they're a family, which is something she genuinely doesn't seem to understand. In a moment of humanity, she releases him, but the catch is that in order to be a family, she tells him that they must all find each other. We then that see Hansel and Gretel are in the woods with their compass and start to follow it toward their father. The shot zooms out to show that they are very, very far away with the castle nowhere in sight.

On the outskirts of Storybrooke, Emma is waiting with the kids by the car. Ava notices that the compass has started spinning around and then pointing back toward town when the tow truck shows up driven by their dad. Emma gives him another chance and once he sees the kids, he has a change of heart. He finally agrees to take the kids home.

Emma heads back to the apartment and fills Mary Margaret in on what happened. Emma starts pondering whether she'll ever find her own parents. During the conversation, she finally tells Mary Henry's theory on who Emma is and who her parents are. She's strangely not weirded out by this. Emma heads back outside to get some air and as she leaves, Mary notices Emma's baby blanket. She's admiring it and pulls it out to smell it. She seems like she's almost on the verge of remembering something.

As Emma is looking through a file outside, Henry shows up. Emma still can't quite tell him the truth about his father, but seems like she wants to. Just then a stranger rides into town on a motorcycle. He stops and asks them if he's in Storybrooke and if there is anywhere to stay in town. They send him off to the bed and breakfast, and when they try to get his name, he dodges the question and rides off. The two of them are baffled by the appearance of a stranger in town. No one is supposed to enter or leave Storybrooke.

My Questions:

• Who the heck is the stranger? This is interesting... hopefully we're starting to get into some episodes with more plot progression.
• Is Mary Margaret starting to remember? I suspect we won't get total recall from her anytime soon since she's such a major character, but hey, we can hope right?
• Why is Mr. Gold consistently helping "the good side". He recently led Graham down the path to remembering who he is and now seems to be helping Emma with no obvious benefit to himself. What exactly is his endgame?

New Theories:

• Seems like a lot of the magical items from fairytale land that transferred to  Storybrooke still work. The compass that showed the way to Hansel and Gretel's father seems to work the same way in Storybrooke - at least once he was close enough to them. Clearly the queen still has some magic items, including her wall of captured hearts that she used to kill Graham.
• So far, it's been impossible to leave Storybrooke. At first I thought Regina sent the kids off with Emma thinking that she could cross the boundary and get them out of town, but now I wonder if she knew that they wouldn't be able to get out without something bad happening and she was really trying to get Emma out of the picture finally. Once again, Storybrooke seems to emulate the Lost island in this "no way out" respect.

Other Thoughts:

• Pretty solid episode. I really think that the season is going to start picking up steam in terms of plot progression from here on out.