Archive

“Once Upon A Time” recap (5.18): Over the Rainbow

Holy queerytales, batman. Okay, I’m going to go back into regular recap mode for this episode and put all my Big Thoughts at the end.

Previously on Once Upon a Time, Ruby topped Mulan and invited her on a processing journey for the ages until one day Ruby got dropped in the Underworld by a tornado.

Actually, wait: I’m going to do the unimportant storylines quickly then get into Ruby’s storyline because I don’t want anything to detract from it.

David and Hook learned that Hades tore out the haunted phonebook so they finally found a way to be useful and used the pirate’s magical hook to cross out Snow White’s name and put David’s on the tombstone instead so that Snow could go back to Storybrooke and be with baby Neal. Belle took advice from Zelena and put herself under a sleeping curse to pause her pregnancy and give Gold a chance to find a way out of their contract with Hades. Okay, I think that’s everything. Time to go over the rainbow.

At some indeterminate time in the future (and not like I’m unable to determine it, more like time does not move in a straight line on this show), Mulan and Ruby are running through a forest in Oz, trying to find Ruby’s pack but not having any luck. Ruby is feeling discouraged, but Mulan tries to keep her head up.

Mulan asks what Ruby knows about Oz, but all she knows is what she saw in the movie, and there’s no yellow brick road in sight. They hear a growl and spring into a circling back-to-back move that they have clearly done before.

But Li’l Red recognizes the tiny creatures that approaches them and is about to pet Toto when Dorothy appears, crossbow in hand, asking which of them is a witch.

After some encouragement from Mulan, Ruby comes out as a wolf to Dorothy and explains that she’s harmless. She leans down to pet Toto and prove her point, but Toto runs off. Dorothy says she doesn’t want their help finding him, but when Ruby proves her tracking skills are above average, Dorothy relents and joins the two women on their adventure.

Back in Storybrooke, Ruby wakes up in the Loft and is surprised she’s in the underworld, because she had just been trying to track down Zelena, but her friends explain that this is where the wicked witch has landed.

Ruby starts desperately explaining that her friend Dorothy went after Zelena but never returned. Ruby blames herself, saying the monster inside her ruins everything, but Snow talks her down. Regina says they’ll just go talk to Zelena and sort this out.

When they get to Zelena’s place, she’s mid-click with the silver slippers, but Regina stops her with magic, telling her that she’s not going anywhere. Regina was planning on leaving her be, but then her latest bad deed fell into their laps so now she has more explaining to do.

Flash back to Oz, where the trio is still looking for Toto, but run into Zelena instead.

Zelena tells the girls that she has to get back to her daughter, but then sees that Dorothy isn’t wearing the silver slippers. Zelena has Toto though, and will only give him back in exchange for the slippers, tomorrow at sundown.

Present-day Regina tells Zelena to fight her evil instincts and just help them.

But Zelena couldn’t fix this even if she wanted to, because she’s under a sleeping curse. Only true love’s kiss will save her, and Dorothy has no family or spouse. Regina convinces Zelena to hand over the slippers, much to Ruby’s relief.

But Ruby’s still stressed; even though they have the slippers, they don’t have anyone who can give Dorothy true love’s kiss. The only family she had that cared about her is Auntie Em, and she’s dead. But they are conveniently in a place where dead people tend to hang out, so they head off to find Dorothy’s aunt.

In Oz, Mulan, Ruby and Dorothy work on a potion, a sleeping powder like the one that brought Mulan and Ruby together in the first place. Mulan just needs poppies to finish it off.

Dorothy knows where the poppy fields are, having napped in them before, and Ruby decides to come with. Dorothy is sassy about it, but Ruby isn’t going to let her go alone. Ruby tries to get to know her and ask about Toto, and though Dorothy resists at first, she looks into Red’s eyes and can’t help but feel safe enough to share.

Dorothy explains that the first time she came back from Oz, her family tried to have her committed, all except Aunt Em. And Aunt Em gave her Toto just before she died, so he’s all he has left of her, and her only friend. (And at this point I got so worried that the “true love’s kiss” Dorothy needed was going to be given by Toto. That’s how little faith I have in this show.)

Ruby says she knows the feeling, because her whole town chased her out of town with torches and pitchforks when she was just a closeted wolf and accidentally killed her boyfriend.

Li’l Red says she found friends in a town called Storybrooke, but was still missing something. She thought it was a pack she was missing, but she’s not sure even that’s the answer. Dorothy inches closer to Red, and asks her what it is she’s looking for, but Red still doesn’t know what it is.

They make it to the poppy field, and Dorothy apologizes for calling her Wolfy before she knew the story about the pitchforks and all that. Ruby laughs it off, saying she kind of liked the nickname, and calls her Kansas in return. Dorothy likes it, and after saving her from getting a noseful of it, hands Ruby a flower all romantic-like.

They look at each other longingly under the light of the full moon, but are twatswatted by flying monkeys. Ruby says there’s a way to outrun them, but Dorothy has to trust her. She steals a scene right from Aladdin, and when Dorothy says she does trust Ruby, Little Red sheds her riding hood and wolfs out. Dorothy picks up the discarded cape and hops on, riding Ruby out of the poppy field.

Once they get back to camp and Red un-wolfs, she asks Dorothy if she’s okay with what just happened, like a nervous girl the morning after. Dorothy feigns exhaustion and excuses herself to bed, leaving Mulan to try to interpret Ruby’s sad expression.

In the Underworld, Ruby leads the charge to Granny’s, where they get the tools and directions needed to bottle up Aunt Em’s kiss for Dorothy.

They go to Auntie’s Diner, and tell Aunt Em they’re here to help Dorothy, and she’s more than happy to help. But before she can blow a kiss, she melts like Alex Mack. Hades appears and announces to everyone in the diner that this is the fate of anyone who helps Regina, Emma and their friends.

In Oz, Mulan asks Ruby what’s wrong, and Ruby says that when Dorothy asked her what she was looking for, she realized something. She was looking for someone like her. She knows it sounds crazy because they just met, but she’s never felt like this about anyone before. She didn’t know that making eye contact with a person could feel like getting struck by lightning.

Ruby thinks that Dorothy sensed her sudden attraction and was freaked out by it, but Mulan says maybe it’s just gay panic, a thing she knows well. Mulan tells her not to make her mistake and wait until it’s too late. I do wish here that she specifically mentioned Aurora, because I’ve still seen some straight people who have managed to convince themselves that it was Phillip Mulan was running to confess her love for back on that bridge. Granted, they’re swimming deep in the river of denial, but it would have been nice to put any doubt to bed once and for all.

But anyway, Ruby is inspired, and runs to get the girl, but Dorothy is gone, only a scrap of blue gingham left behind. Which, obviously, Ruby pockets like the good budding queer she is.

In the Underworld, Ruby is straight up distraught.

Snow comes to talk to her and says that she might know who can break the curse. Ruby is desperate, who is it, she’ll travel the world to find them?! But Snow says she doesn’t have to go anywhere at all, because it’s Ruby. Ruby’s eyes get real big, but Snow says she knows gay when she sees it, just look at her stepmother and her daughter. So Ruby confesses that she has fallen for Dorothy, hard.

Snow asks what the holdup is, but Ruby says she doesn’t think Dorothy feels the same way because she ran away. But Snow points out that love is scary, and that she’ll never know unless she tries. So it’s settled, Ruby will try to wake Dorothy up with True Love’s Kiss.

When Ruby and Snow get to Oz, Mulan and Toto are by Dorothy’s side, and she’s surrounded by adoring munchkins. Snow probably has PTSD flashbacks, but Mulan is so happy to see Ruby. She thanks Mulan for watching over Dorothy, and after a word of encouragement and a deep breath, she plants a kiss on her sleeping beauty.

And woosh! The sleeping curse is broken and a big gay rainbow washes over them.

They exchange their nicknames and gosh are they glad to see each other. Ruby asks why she bailed back in the forest, and Dorothy says she didn’t want her to get hurt by Zelena, so she went to take her on alone. She’s surprised that Ruby came back, pleasantly so, and Ruby promises to always come back for her.

Snow and Mulan watch on, happy for their friends.

Then, probably the biggest surprise of the episode for me, they kiss again. Full-on make out.

Henry even recorded it in his Storybook, a lady loving story for the ages.

And they all lived happily ever after, the end.

Before I get into what I did like about the storyline, I want to make it clear that I also have a lot of issues with it.

This isn’t what we were promised. The showrunners said that the LGBT storyline would not be covered in one Very Special Episode, but that’s exactly what it was. It wasn’t an after school special, and maybe that’s what they meant. It wasn’t about Coming Out or Being Gay. It had the same structure as, say, Hercules’s episode, a one-and-done, a short and fast development of secondary characters. But it wasn’t a “storyline.” I guess you could argue that the episode Ruby told Snow she had to find her people and then the Ruby/Mulan/Merida episodes were extensions of this storyline, but that’s a total of like 2.3 episodes of development. We’ve been dealing with this Emma/Hook nonsense for what feels like centuries. And as cute as it was, it seems like this is the last we’ll see of Ruby and Dorothy. And that’s not representation. Representation implies presence. So during this episode, we had representation. But now it’s gone. It doesn’t continue to count once the characters are gone.

And of course, a lot of fans felt like this was the showrunners’ attempt to placate them so they would stop shouting about SwanQueen. I can’t speak to how they’re feeling or what their intentions were, but I’ve seen snippets here and there and it still seems like they really don’t get it, don’t understand why people love SwanQueen so much, and don’t understand the LGBT community in a way a showrunner in 2016 should. But I will be the first to admit that I don’t know everything that went on behind the scenes, I don’t read everything they tweet, so it’s possible I’m missing key information.

To me, it feels almost like they were playing in the mud, and someone pointed out to them that they made clay. Then they flattened it out and drew pictures on it. And it took a lot of people pointing out that they made it two-dimensional when they had the tools to build something great and three-dimensional before they realized their mistake. But the clay was already starting to dry, and they were too stubborn to admit their mistake, and even though they would have just had to add water, instead they put it directly in the sun to make it bake and harden into place. Eventually they realized they had a little clay left over, and used it to make a tiny fire pit, and while it’s just the right size to toast a sweet and yummy marshmallow, it’s not enough to keep anyone warm enough to survive.

That imperfect metaphor basically boils down to; they had the potential to make SwanQueen a great queer romance, but they didn’t. But they did give us one episode of lady loving ladies getting their happy ever after, and even though it’s not enough-and it’s not, it’s not enough-it’s more than some shows give us, and it’s more than I ever EVER ever expected from this show.

Because of their past failings, I had set my expectations pretty low for this episode, and it far exceeded it. The story itself was very cute, and if I was watching it in a vacuum, I would love it unconditionally. I’ve been wanting Ruby to be queer since the first time I saw her and Belle in the same scene, and have always felt like her wolfiness was a great metaphor for queerness.

And I’m thinking of the young women who aren’t yet part of the online LGBT community, the ones who have never seen SwanQueen gifs or fan videos, the ones who have been feeling like Ruby, lost without a pack, unable to find their missing piece because they don’t even know where to begin their search. Then seeing this, a love story told in typical fairytale fashion, and even though they’ve overdone the sleeping curse/true love’s kiss thing on this show, it almost made it better that it was the same old story. Because Dorothy wasn’t afraid to love Ruby because she was a woman, she was afraid because she’s lost everyone she’s ever loved. And Ruby wasn’t afraid to love Dorothy because she was a woman, she was afraid that she was an unlovable monster. They were afraid of love, but who isn’t?

My biggest complaint is that poor Mulan still didn’t get a girl. I imagine this was because of some kind of tie-up with Mulan being Disney-owned, whereas Ruby and this version of Dorothy are OUAT originals. But Mulan was already established queer, and while it was nice for Ruby to have a fellow lady-lover to go to for advice, I don’t understand why Mulan wasn’t involved in the LGBT romance. I mean they could even play with the Disney movie and have Li Shang be a woman, I don’t know. It just seems weird. But three queer women in one episode is not nothing.

So it’s not the best. It’s not what we hoped for, it’s not what we wanted, it’s not even what we were promised. But it also wasn’t BAD. It was an adorably beautiful mini fairytale love story with a happily ever after. So while there may never be a time in my life where I’m NOT mad at the showrunners of this show, I’m not mad at the story itself. And I’m certainly not mad about Ruby being queer.

What did you think of “Ruby Slippers”?

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button