What I’m Watching: Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time: Season 1, Episode 12 “Skin Deep” (C+)

This show is really doing its best to combine as many fairy tale stories as possible together, conveniently inserting the Evil Queen and Rumplestiltskin into nearly every familiar fable. It’s great to have a constantly evolving web of fantasy characters that appear in only one episode apiece to make their mark in the arcs of the primary characters, but this is a web that might spin out of control, eventually losing track of where it’s headed. That said, it’s still somewhat fun to realize what the impending tale is going to be when a certain keyword or name is uttered, like when “the beast” and Gaston are called out by the king and his daughter. Emilie de Ravin from “Lost” makes for a great Belle, charming everyone around her including Rumplestiltskin, and so easily manipulated, like any good princess, by Regina’s alter ego. I’m consistently impressed by Robert Carlyle’s maniacal interpretation of Rumplestiltskin, effective in its dramatic, more somber moments but even more impressive when he just appears insane. In this installment, we get a few solid confirmations of the fact that there are definitive links between the real world and the fairy tale one, most specifically in Mr. Gold’s utterance of his real name, Rumplestiltskin. In typical evil fashion, Regina’s visit to her underground ward reveals that she’s holding Belle captive, presumably as something to hold over poor Rumplestiltskin’s head, who has given up all hope of finding true love because he fears that his powers will be taken away and Regina will have limitless powers. In the most ridiculous moment of the episode, did David really have to give Mary Margaret the wrong Valentine’s Day card? That was something that could easily have been avoided.