Once Upon A Time Review: Love Is Hard. We Get It.

Well it was bound to happen sooner or later. I’d hoped to put it off a bit longer, but maybe its best to get the first episode I really didn’t like out of the way sooner than later. This week’s Once Upon A Time wasn’t terrible, it just felt a bit like getting beaten over the head with a rolling pin, or if you’re a Tangled fan (and who isn’t) getting smacked in the face with a frying pan.

I said last week that the David-Kathryn-Mary Margaret storyline is getting on my nerves, mostly because he’s Prince Freaking Charming and he shouldn’t be cheating on his wife. Yes, we’re in the real world, where things are complicated and happy endings don’t exist, but still. If he knows what he feels for Mary Margaret (Ginnifer Goodwin) is real (and he should, he’s felt it since he first woke up from his coma), then it’s completely stupid and yellow-bellied and awful to continue to be with Kathryn (Anastasia Griffith). Yet that’s what he’s been doing, and what Mary Margaret has been letting him get away with until now.

At the beginning of Sunday’s episode, she tells David (Josh Dallas) she’s had enough and that the only way to minimize the damage and the hurt for everyone involved is to tell Kathryn the truth. Which sounds like the right thing, but best laid plans and all that…they only work if all parties come through. David chickens out at the last minute – which I just don’t get, since he doesn’t have feelings for K – and tells her he can’t connect with her and it would be better for them both if she moved on alone.

Enter Regina (Lana Parrilla), who of course spills the beans about David’s affair, complete with pictures to back up her claims. Kathryn loses her mind, as one does when she finds out her husband not only cheated, but lied about it, and heads to the school to confront Mary Margaret in front of the largest audience possible. The conversation accomplishes two things: Mary Margaret is branded the Storybrooke homewrecking slut, and she knows David lied about telling Kathryn the truth.

In fairytale land, we’re filing in a few holes as far as James (David) and Abigail (Kathryn) are concerned. Quick refresher: she is King Midas’ daughter and betrothed to James, even though he’s in love with Snow White. In this episode James is on the run from the King when he bumps in to Abigail. She claims to want to help him be with his true love, since her own ended in tragedy. She leads him to a knight frozen in gold, her true love Frederick who accidentally touched King Midas while protecting them and paid the price. She has heard legend of a lake, guarded by a monster, in which the water can restore something once lost to anyone who collects it.

The only problem is, no one has ever returned from the lake. James offers to go and get the water for her, with the hope that at least one of them will be happy. He has given up hope of ever being happy again since Snow White left, claiming she could never love him.

At the lake James finds a beautiful siren, who quickly turns into a vision of Snow White. He gives in, enraptured, for a few minutes of kissing but then pushes the siren away. James says that he has known true love, and there is nothing else like it. He doesn’t want the illusion – he’ll have the real thing or nothing. He escapes the siren and returns to Abigail, who unfreezes her true love Frederick. After giving James a lame speech about how true love is hard but worth it in the end, he leaves to find Snow White and win her back.

Instead he finds Red Riding Hood (Meghan Ory) in a scene we’ve witnessed once before, the one where James promises to never give up looking. This time the conversation continues and Red tells James that Snow does love him, that she went to the castle to stop the wedding, and if she didn’t then something changed her mind. James knows it’s not something but someone, and that someone shows up and chases he and Red into the woods.

In the sad, real world where dreams and love are pieces of trash that get mashed into the dirty sidewalk, Mary Margaret tells David they can’t be together. What they have is not real love, because if it was then it wouldn’t be destructive. They’re obviously both shattered by her proclamation, but damn I don’t blame her. He’s being the worst kind of man right now.

I had hoped that after we learned the entire backstory of James and Kathryn that some piece would come to light, a shred of a reason why our David would be so unwilling to let that part of his life go, but there’s nothing. In their fairytale past the two were ships that passed in the night, spoke of true love, but felt it only for other people. That he would be such an incredible wimp about doing the right thing makes me angry and makes me think he’s not good enough for Mary Margaret and I don’t want to feel that way.

In other news, the stranger now has a name. It’s Augustus W(ayne) Booth (Eion Bailey). He has the book of fairytales Henry (Jared Gilmore) lost when his mother razed his playground, and he’s taken it apart, soaked the pages in some kind of restorative? and sewn the entire thing back together. Is he being nice? Did he take pages out and replace them? Change the story? We don’t know. We do know he has some kind of interest in Emma (Jennifer Morrison) and the two spend some time together at a wishing well in the woods. I wish I could tell you what any of this means, but honestly I don’t even have a guess. If anyone else does, I’d be very excited to hear it.

Kathryn decides to accept admission to a law school in Boston after taking a closer look at the pictures Regina gave her of David and Mary Margaret together. The love between them is evident, and it’s real, and Kathryn wants to find that for herself. She even tells Regina that she wrote David and Mary Margaret a letter, urging them to be together.

Which we know won’t do, and Regina sneaks into their house with her massive ring of skeleton keys, steals the letter, and burns it. As far as Kathryn is concerned, we know no one can leave Storybrooke and she’s no exception. Her car runs off the road, and is discovered by none other than our world’s Frederick, but Kathryn has disappeared.

All in all, I found the episode pretty ho-hum in parts, infuriating in others, and a little heavy handed with its message that love – even true love – doesn’t come easily and needs to be fought for every single day. I’ve been pleased and even liberal in my acceptance of the way the writers are interpreting and changing these classic tales, but what they’ve done to Prince Charming is sticking in my craw, mostly because they’re not giving him a good reason to act this way.

Next week is the Oscars, so it will be two weeks before we return to Storybrooke and find out what happened to Kathryn, and whether or not Mary Margaret can find a way to forgive David. Maybe the better question is whether or not he can give her a reason to.

Season 1, Episode 13: “What Happened To Frederick?” (originally aired February 19, 2012)

Once Upon A Time airs Sunday nights at 8/7c on ABC

Images courtesy of Jack Rowand and ABC.