REVIEW: Once Upon A Time in Wonderland, Episode 104
Things are starting to make more and more sense and Jafar is one step closer to getting what he wants on episode 104 “The Serpent”.
This episode starts with a flashback, and in it we see young Jafar finding a woman everyone was afraid of, to be his teacher. It is because of flashbacks like this that they are so important in the Once Upon A Time universe. There are some things that could always, of course, be explained in the present, but it would probably feel more rushed and it wouldn’t be as easy to understand, and this is one of those cases. In this episode we finally know more of Jafar’s plans, and what he needs to do it. To change the laws of magic, Jafar needs 3 genies and to perform that spell it takes 2 sorcerers. Jafar already has 2 genies, which he and Amara were able to catch, so now he only needs Cyrus. Maybe it would be to imagine that something had happened to Amara along the way, and the two sorcerers now are Jafar and the Red Queen but, as I said before, Jafar is only using the Queen to get what he wants. She thinks they are going to change the laws of magic together, but she has no idea what is to come.
We also see some symbology of the serpent. “When they need to, they change their skin, and are reborn”. And that is exactly what Jafar does. But turned out he had done that already, before we all thought he did. Jafar was playing Amara just so that he could learn everything she knew. We also learned, with a little twist in the end of the episode, that the staff Jafar carries with him all the time is actually Amara’s magical essence. She was the one who made him aware of the genie spell. And as everyone has an endgame, we will find out, in episodes to come, not only exactly what Jafar wants to do when he is able to change the laws of magic, but also why Amara also wanted to perform this spell.
In present day, we continue to see conflicts of interest inside the villain team. Now that Jafar knows Alice has help, he wants Will eliminated and wants Anastasia to do it. The Red Queen is hoping to set the matter aside by simply putting Will behind bars, but Jafar wants him completely gone and wants everyone to see it, so that they don’t follow his example of helping Alice. A public execution is prepared and Anastasia is probably hoping very badly that Alice shows up to save him. I have to say that the people of Wonderland are definitely having too much of a good time in a public execution, which can totally relate to the original story in which the Red Queen is obsessed with cutting people’s heads off.
Meanwhile, after Alice and the Knave split up to run from collectors, who are working for the Caterpillar, Alice makes a new friend who is actually an old friend of Will’s: Elisabeth, also known as Lizard. This could possibly be another connection to the original animated movie Alice in Wonderland. There we see Bill who was literally a lizard, unlike Elisabeth who is a person. This character isn’t that much important in the movie, but then again she isn’t also here in the show, although we will see her once again. They find out the Knave of Hearts is to be executed and they manage to save him.
Trying to escape from the royal maze, Alice and Will stumble upon Jafar and the Red Queen. Jafar threatens to kill Will and even starts chocking him, which forces Alice to make her first wish: “I wish that if the Knave of Hearts dies, then I die”. This was totally a smart wish. Jafar can hurt Alice, but he can’t kill her since he needs her alive to make the rest of the wishes, otherwise he can’t use the genie. So, Alice doesn’t have to wish to save her own life. But Jafar would gladly kill Will, and now he can’t. It was also smart since she didn’t wish that only Jafar couldn’t kill Will (like a guy did in a flashback), no one can, or else she dies too. Jafar tried to force Alice to make a second wish by saying he would rip her arms and legs off, but she didn’t, which makes Jafar aware that she cares more for others than herself, and so going after the people she loves is exactly what Jafar is going to do. But wishes comes with a price and Alice paid it when Jafar turned Will to stone, saying if she wants her friend back, she will have to wish it.
Confrontations between good and evil started to take place, Jafar is starting to get what he wants and Cyrus is closer to being free. This was definitely a great episode and so I am giving it an 8.2/10.
I will be back soon with my next review of episode 105, “Heart of Stone” where we will find out how Will and Anastasia were separated and how she became Queen.
REVIEW: American Gods, Episode 103
American Gods‘ episode 103, “Head Full of Snow”, begins, as usual, with a little sideline scene that reflects mostly the banality and unpredictability of death. Just when one is trying to get something from a high shelf, Anubis comes knocking at your door. Literally. When the woman, Mrs. Fadil, finds out she is dead, a lot of questions go through her mind, but none of them truly matter, because ultimately the little things are important too. “They will find me like this” and “they won’t even taste my meal” are two thoughts that go through her mind. It is also nice to notice how calm both people in this scene are. No bad words, no tempers lost, the conversation just flows naturally (there may not be anything more natural than death). After climbing an almost infinite staircase, Anubis and Mrs. Fadil arrive to what we may refer as heaven, and the cinematography in this scene is beyond incredible. There he weights her heart against a feather. In this moment we see the concern on Mrs. Fadil’s face because she knows that if her heart is heavier, things will probably go wrong. She starts saying all the bad things she did over the years and, because they weren’t so bad, she passed the test and was probably able to find peace.
Before I get into the major storyline, I will talk about another scene also more to the sideline, but that will be more relevant a few episodes from now. Later in the episode, we meet Salim, a guy that waits an entire day for a reunion that didn’t happen. Even though that day sucked and that most people would start a murder spree because of the way they were treated, Salim never once loses his temper. In the end of the day he gets a taxi to go back to the hotel and, because his eyes are in flames, Salim finds out the taxi driver is a Jinn. Even though the Jinn says repeatedly that he does not grant wishes, Salim invites him over to his room, where we see an intense sex scene, and on the next day the Jinn is gone. Turns out the Jinn was wrong, because he granted Salim’s wish to be free of all the things he had to do, to be free of his life. Now has a Jinn, Salim gets the other guy’s clothes, like he was completely taking his identity, and goes to the taxi to start his new job. When he is checking the wallet the other Jinn had left, we see a taxi driver license that doesn’t even belong to the previous Jinn. This could mean that in New York no one will care that Salim isn’t the guy on the picture, just as they didn’t care the other guy wasn’t either. Apparently, New York doesn’t care about anyone.
Back to our main story now, we find out more about the Zorya sisters. Zorya Polunochnyaya tells Shadow that the 3 sisters watch the stars (the constellations Ursa Minor and Odin’s Wain to be specific), day and night to prevent “not a god, but like a god” to escape. This, like the Czernobog, comes from Slavic mythology and the creature they watch is a doomsday hound called Simargl, who is chained in the star Polaris, in the constellation Ursa Minor (Little Bear). If the chain breaks, the hound will devour the constellation and the universe will end. In the original myth, there are only two sisters, who are called the Morning Star and the Evening Star, but Neil Gaiman (author of the book that inspired this show) declared he made up a third sister. This third sister is the Zorya to whom Shadow talks to in this episode, and she is called the Midnight Star. Still in this scene, Zorya Polunochnyaya reads Shadow’s hand and says he believes in nothing but he is now on a path from nothing to everything. She gives him a coin, and Shadow wakes up.
At the same time, in a hilarious scene in which Wednesday flirts with Zorya Vechernyaya, she reads his future through his coffee. She says he will lose the battle, but Wednesday refuses to believe that.
After another game of checkers that ensures Shadow stays alive and Czernobog will join the fight against the new Gods, Wednesday and Shadow go off to rob a bank. This is another hilarious scene in this episode. Now we know how an old God makes money. This is the scene in which Wednesday asks Shadow to think of snow and later on, it does snow, against everything weathermen everywhere had said. This makes, not only Shadow but also us, think if any other person could have done that (we have been seeing what belief can do in this show, so could anyone make that happen by believing hard enough?) or if Shadow is somehow special. I don’t really know the answer to this, but my bet is on the second. I think Wednesday didn’t choose Shadow just because he was the first guy he stumbled into. There is also the fact that in the last episode, Media said Shadow was special. Looks like we will have to wait and see how special he is, and what exactly he can do.
There is also something that has been bugging me since the beginning: in every episode there seems to be a buffalo looming over. We saw or heard about it in every episode so far. In the first one, we saw a buffalo with flames in its eyes (I wonder now if that could be related to the Jinn) in Shadow’s dream when he was still in prison. In the second episode, after getting beaten up, Shadow takes a shirt from the motel he and Wednesday were staying at. The logo of that motel was a buffalo and so there was a big one in Shadow’s T-shirt. In this episode, one of the first things we hear Zorya Polunochnyaya say is: “The buffalo is waning tonight”. I don’t really understand what she meant, but she was probably refereeing to the moon. Aside from this, we can see that there is a buffalo in one of the official posters of the show. And this isn’t just a detail that only fanatic fans see by analyzing every inch of the poster, it is right there, big enough for everyone to notice, hiding in plain sight. I read there is also a buffalo in the book and it is important, so we will find out more about it when the time is right.
Overall this was a great episode, as usual, and it won’t take long now for one of my favorite episodes of the season. I am giving it an 8.5/10.
As I said, there is an amazing episode coming soon, so stay tuned for my next review of episode 104, “Git Gone”.
REVIEW: Once Upon A Time in Wonderland, Episode 103
Once Upon A Time in Wonderland’s episode 103, “Forget Me Not”, continued two important and major messages from Once Upon A Time. In the flashbacks we meet (or merely see for OUAT fans) Robin Hood and we find out that Will Scarlet was once a member of the Merry Men. In these scenes we could see that Robin was already the thief that steals from the rich to give to the poor. Will convinces him to go to the Forbidden Fortress (Maleficent’s castle) to steal a chest of gold. It is a shame we didn’t get to see Kristin Bauer (The actress who plays Maleficent on the main show), but it is nice we got to hear her voice on the scene where the Merry Man were celebrating the theft. This scene makes Robin aware that Will stole something other than gold, he stole a magic mirror. And here is where he warns Will: “All magic comes with a price”, and unfortunately, Will will have to pay it later in the season.
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Aside from this, we see, also in flashbacks, that “Evil isn’t born, it’s made” (a message that will also be looming over for the next 2 episodes). We meet Anastasia and after the scene that Will talks to her but we don’t see her face, I felt like it wasn’t hard to guess who she was. I don’t think it was exactly obvious, but it wasn’t that difficult to figure it out. Anastasia, and Will’s lost love, is the Red Queen. We see that then she was nice and sweet. In the end of the episode they use the mirror Will stole and open a portal, ready to go to Wonderland. Before I continue, I would like to address this matter. Many people say that the writers made it, at first, super hard to travel between worlds and it became more and easy throughout the seasons. That may be true sometimes, but this isn’t the case, since this mirror (like some other portals we see throughout the show) was made to take people to one specific land (Wonderland in this case). Will and Anastasia could not have used that looking glass to go anywhere else.
Back to the present now, I found in this episode a lot easter eggs to other stories/movies. When the Red Queen is looking for monsters that are fearful enough to force Alice to make a wish, she mentions two that might have been a little overlooked and/or ignored, but not by me. First she mentions the Mome Rath which is taken from the original animated film of Alice in Wonderland, but only the name. She says that it is a very dangerous creature with teeth like needles that cut through almost anything, but in the movie they are harmless flower-like creatures (as you can see in the image below). The Queen also mentions the Sarlacc. This one was taken from Star Wars and in these films, this monster is very alike what Anastasia said: a creature able to digest someone through the course of a thousand years. But the creature that Jafar and the Red Queen pick is the Bandersnatch. This one was featured in Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) and it is also alike the one we meet here, expect for the fact that in the films it looks more like a dog, while in this show it is more like a boar.
Still with other movies mythology, we meet Grendel which can be a reference to the movie Beowulf, although in this show this beast is made more human. Here, Grendel is an ogre-like man who is stuck in the past and can’t move on from his wife’s death. It is explained that he stole the “Forget Me Knot”, a knot that allows people to see into the past, from the Red Queen and she was the one who gave him that horrible appearance. Grendel helps Alice and Will when the Bandersnatch comes after them and together they manage to kill it, since Cyrus had tricked Jafar and the Queen to thinking it would force Alice to make a wish, when he knew she wouldn’t because he had taught her a lot about these creatures.
With the knot in their hands, Alice and Will finally find out that the Rabbit was the one who knew where Cyrus’ bottle was, and that he is working for the Red Queen.
Aside from Wonderland, we also are shown Underland, a place “ruled” by the Caterpillar and filled with thieves and hunters, that is to say, Will’s enemies. Jafar visits this place short after he kills Grendel, to find out more about Alice’s Knave.
This episode was cool and, as I said before, this show is getting better and better. I really don’t know why so many Oncers didn’t watch it, since it is very truthful to the main show. I will give it a 7.8/10.
Stay tuned for my next review of episode 104 “The Serpent”.
REVIEW: Midnight, Texas, Episode 101
I never watched True Blood, but I did hear great things about it, and for it to last 7 years it had to be cool. Since “Midnight Texas” is based on books by the same author (Charlaine Harris) I was hoping I could “atone for” not watching “True Blood” by watching this one. Let’s see how it will turn out.
Right in the first second of the pilot we are introduced to the main character: a psychic named Manfred Bernardo, who can talk to dead people. I thought the first scene was funny in a bit of a dumb way. Apparently Harold didn’t want his wife to move on from him as much as he said he did.
Because of some people that are after him, Manfred moves away. Following his dead grandmother’s advice, he goes to a town in Texas called Midnight. Like usually happens in supernatural shows, this town isn’t like the others. We learn later that it draws supernatural creatures to it. There they can lay low because the barrier between the living and the dead is thinner. But Manfred isn’t very lucky because we learn closer to the end of this episode that whoever is after him knows where he is.
It doesn’t take long for bodies to start piling up. Short after Manfred gets to Midnight he goes on a picnic and finds the body of Bobo’s fiancé (who had been missing for 2 weeks). Like most shows, the police doesn’t take long to start suspecting the new guy. Wanting to find out more about the murder, Manfred contacts Aubrey with an Ouija board and she tells him one word: “Pecados” (which is Portuguese for “sins”). In this scene things go terribly wrong but unfortunately it gets cut by a police officer who shows up in his house.
It also appears that every Midnighter either is a supernatural creature or knows about them. Like always happens on a pilot we are introduced to many characters, and here are the ones I think are the most important (since you can’t really know based only on a pilot): Lemuel, a vampire that not only feeds on blood, but also on emotional energy; Bobo, I am not yet sure if he is human or not; Olivia, this one is said to be human and she is also very experienced with weapons (at least guns and bow and arrow); Joe, a fallen angel; Fiji, a witch that kind of looks powerful (at least in the final scene); Mr. Snuggly, Fiji’s cat, which can talk; Rev. Emilio, who I am also not sure if he is supernatural or not, but who has a pet cemetery, which, for a Stephen King fan, has a weird special tune to it; and Creek, who is human and kind of that cliché character everyone loves to hate because she is so sweet and interested in the main character.
The episode ends with Bobo being arrested for Aubrey’s death and people aren’t too happy about it, especially not Fiji. We also see that Manfred’s house has become a much hunted house, consequences of the interrupted scene.
I didn’t have a lot of expectations for this show and I am happy I didn’t. I found the supernatural part of it a little silly. My first supernatural show was “The Vampire Diaries” and I think supernatural creatures were well made there (maybe because it was my first) and I find all the creatures that are very different from it a bit weird. But this isn’t the only reason. I am going to mostly blame the fact I thought it was weird on the talking cat. Maybe some people found it nice, but not me. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against talking cats, but I think animals that speak are more fit in animated movies and not shows like this, nor live action movies. But maybe I took this show too seriously. If I had been prepared for the fact that there was going to be a talking cat, maybe I would have taken it more lightly. But I know now, and it is better late than never. Now I will be prepared for when it comes back.
I am going to be honest, I felt this was a “meh” episode. Not “meh” as in “meh, who cares”, but more like “Did you like it? Meh, it was OK”. I hope it gets better. I will give it a 6.8/10.
Hope my “meh” didn’t pull you away, because I will keep watching and reviewing it next week with episode 102 ”Bad Moon Rising”.
REVIEW: American Gods, Episode 102
Like the pilot, “The Secret of Spoon” starts with a little sideline scene, but that still fits completely to the story. A few centuries ago, in a boat full of slaves, a black man prays to his God for help, and in fact a God appears, but probably not the one he was praying for. This way we meet Mr. Nancy, short for Anansi, African trickster God. Like any other God (as we saw in the first moments of the last episode), what Nancy wants is death, sacrifices in his name to keep his belly full. What I like about tricksters in shows and movies (at least in the good ones) is that they usually trick people by telling them the truth, and that is exactly what he does. He tells those soon-to-be slaves all about their not-so-bright future once they get to America. And that makes them burn the ship, killing all those aboard. Pleased, Nancy manages to get back to shore, in a spider form, ready to continue with his tricks.
But Nancy isn’t the only God we meet in this episode. When Shadow goes shopping for Wednesday, he crosses paths with Media who is Mass Media and Entertainment personified. This time she appears as Lucy Ricardo from I Love Lucy. Even after unplugging all the TV’s in the store, Media is still there and she is focused on hiring Shadow, welcoming him to the “winners team” saying that Wednesday is “old news”. I love when she says that the screen is the altar and what people sacrifice to her is time and attention. There are definitely a lot of differences between old and new Gods, but it is really interesting to think about it and realize that maybe sacrificing attention may be better than sacrificing lives. When you sacrifice a life, it may be a powerful sacrifice, but that’s it. But when you sacrifice attention, you do it today, tomorrow and you also did it yesterday. This may prove that the New Gods may have an upper hand. Or not.
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It was also nice seeing how old-fashioned Wednesday is, which could not be in any other way. It was hilarious when he threw the phone off the car window and when he said they would not be using highways, ever. In this episode we also have one of the first clues to Wednesday’s real identity. When Czernobog gets home, he calls him “Wotan”. I am not going to talk about it here (at least not now) because I don’t want to spoil those people that want to find out who he is in the context of the show, but if you do want to find out about it, just google “Wotan”, and you will find it easily.
We are also introduced in this episode to the mysterious Zorya sisters (who come from Slavic mythology). If you, like me, had never heard of them don’t worry because who they are and what they do is explain in the next episode (pretty close to the beginning if I am not mistaken). Apart from these, we also meet Czernobog, who, as a cow killer, also doesn’t like modern tools very much (the details in the explanation he gives are beyond weird and scary, even for someone whose name can be translated as “Black God”).
Czernobog challenges Shadow to a game of checkers and they eventually make a wager that is only worthy of the “Black God” himself: if Shadow wins, Czernobog will go with Wednesday and help him on his quest, but if Shadow loses, he gets to smash his head and brain with a hammer. I think this is the moment Shadow kind of starts to believe the things around him. After seeing Media he was a bit reluctant about the whole thing, but then he sees Czernobog’s hammer bleeding and he just gives up on trying to find a reasonable explanation for everything, because “The world is either crazy or you are”, like Wednesday said.
I think it is also nice to reflect about the title of this episode, because unlike the premiere’s title, this one is not as much straightforward. While Czernobog and Shadow are playing checkers, the “Black God” starts singing a song and after a little digging I found the lyrics:
My love made the sweetest coffee with no sugar at all
She only stirred with her spoon and it was done
Now my drink is bitter, the secret of spoon forgotten
When my voice breaks on this song, remember all love gone
And drink the bitter coffee
And drink the bitter coffee.
We see earlier that the Zorya sisters can read the future through what stays in the cup after one drinks his coffee, and that is what she does with Shadow. But after saying she will do it, Wednesday gets a spoon and mixes his coffee, maybe making it impossible for Zorya Vechernyaya to read his future, and therefore, that secret is forever lost to the spoon.
Overall, this episode was great. It was nice being introduced to new characters, especially knowing that each one has a meaning of its own. This way, I will give it a 8.3/10 (I don’t want to overrate it, because it is only going to get better and better).
Stay tuned for my next review of episode 103 entitled “Head Full of Snow”.
REVIEW: Once Upon A Time in Wonderland, Episode 102
After an episode of questions (a pilot episode tends to do that) it is nice having an episode of answers. In “Trust Me” we find out what Jafar and the Red Queen are up to: they want to gather 3 genies in order to change the laws of magic. It also doesn’t take long to know what these laws are because Cyrus explains them to Alice in a flashback. Cyrus says he can’t kill people (this is only a genie rule and not a law of magic), can’t bring back the dead, can’t change the past (this one is not so strict anymore as you might remember from season 3B of “Once Upon A Time”) and can’t make people fall in love. These are the 3 rules these villains want to be free of, each for their own personal reasons, I’m sure, and those reasons won’t probably take long to be revealed to us.
What is interesting in a villain team up is that they are all constantly trying to be the leader and that is why they usually fail. In the beginning of the episode it is clear that Jafar is the most powerful one and that the Red Queen is just a pawn in his game. He is simply using her to find Cyrus’ genie bottle, making her promises along the way he doesn’t intend to keep. After all, as the Red Queen says, “promises were made to be broken”. But Jafar underestimated the Queen of Wonderland and it doesn’t take long for her to make a stand. She sends Jafar on a wild goose chase, while she and the Rabbit (who she has an upper hand on) go to where the bottle is actually buried, making herself now much more than a pawn in the chess game that is starting to take place.
But Jafar is not the only one making planes, because Alice also makes some of her own. She wants to make 3 harmless wishes (since magic, wishes included, always comes with a price) and then Cyrus will be back to his bottle, which she intends to have by then. But most planes are made to be tossed to the trash and this one is no different. First Alice and Will find a very big lake and, needing help to get through it (since Will can’t swim), they call a fairy, Silvermist. But she isn’t very willing to help (given her past with Will, which she is not as “move on” from as she said) and eventually throws them both into the lake. As luck would have it, they landed close to a little island (convenient, right?) where they rested while trying to come up with something that would allow them to continue their journey. But turned out that they hadn’t used all the luck they had for that day, and the island they were in wasn’t really an island and more of a gigantic turtle. Alice not being one of subtlety, demands the turtle to take them to their destination.
But turned out Alice simply wanted to see who they were up against, because the place they go to wasn’t where the bottle was buried. After finding Jafar digging, Alice and Will go to the place the bottle was actually buried but only find a hole in the ground. The bottle had been taken already. And that is when a message from Cyrus arrives. Cyrus asks Alice to leave Wonderland while she still can’t, but he didn’t have to bother because everyone knew (maybe even Cyrus) that she would never do that. Instead Alice sends him another message: “I’m coming for you”.
This episode also introduced two mysterious character: Anastasia (who is “a tale of heartbreak” for Will) and another prisoner that is trapped in the same dungeon as Cyrus. Keep them in mind because they will be important as the story develops.
I feel like in this episode, in contrary to the previous one, the flashbacks were a little pointless and didn’t add much to the story (not only this episode’s story, but the entire season’s). The only thing that could be called “relevant” we learned in the flashbacks were what the laws of magic are, but that could be easily explained in the present. This being said, I’m glad there weren’t a lot of flashback scenes. They are important and very explanatory in some episodes, but not in this one.
But it was still a good episode and I will give a 7.5/10.
Also keep in mind that Alice isn’t the only one “coming for you”. I will too, so don’t forget to check my upcoming review of episode 103, “Forget Me Not”.
REVIEW: American Gods, Episode 101
As a book lover and a fan of “American Gods”, I know that this show is based on a book with the same name. But as a book lover, my “to-read list” is close to infinite, so I didn’t read this one yet. But I will. Hopefully before S2 starts.
The pilot, entitled “The Bone Orchard”, begins with the main character, Shadow Moon, an ex-con, in prison. He makes a phone call to his wife, Laura Moon, and we find out he is going to be released 5 days after, but Shadow is not all too happy about it because he has a strange feeling that something bad is about to happen. After that, Laura replies with a really interesting quote: “Waiting for the sky to fall is going to cause more bother than the sky actually falling”. Sometimes we worry too much about something that turns out didn’t deserve that much concern and that is what this quote is all about.
The next day Shadow wakes up to find out that his wife had died in a car crash and so they will release him a few days early. And that is when the action begins. He goes to the airport but finds out he has to wait a day to get a flight to the town he lives in. When the time comes, Shadow enters the plane and, because of a mistake with the sits (his was taken) he finds himself in first class, next to a very strange man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. There, they have an interesting conversation about belief and faith. Wednesday asks Shadow how he thinks the plane flies: for technical reasons or because people want so hard to believe the plane will continue to fly instead of crashing that that is exactly what the plane does. In a show about Gods (old Gods and new ones) it is to expect that faith and belief will get to be an important subject, and the show doesn’t disappoint in that area, since there are some deep conversations about it, and also some scenes that relate to it, like for example the scene we meet the Goddess of Love. This scene was, in my point of view, very weird. I won’t describe it because I wouldn’t even know where I’d begin. But it became obvious that Bilquis was feeding on that man’s belief and worship.
Shadow wakes up on the plane to find out that, because of the storm, the plane had to perform an emergency landing and so he decides to continue his journey by car. He stops in a bar (maybe to stretch his legs) and, call it fate, he finds Mr. Wednesday once again, but this time he isn’t alone. Shadow meets a man who calls himself Leprechaun but, apparently, others call Mad Sweeney. Wednesday offers Shadow a job and, to prove that he will never take it, Shadow shows him a coin and says that if it is heads he will work for Wednesday, but if it is tails Wednesday must stop bugging him with that. After rigging the coin to make sure it is tails, Shadow tosses the coin, but apparently his con tricks have seen better days, because this time it wasn’t tails, meaning that Shadow found himself a job.
After finally getting to Eagle Point and after finding out that his best friend also died in the same crash his wife did, Shadow attends Laura’s funeral. There he finds Audrey (his friend’s wife) and she tells him that they had been having an affair for a while then and that is why they were together in the car. When the funeral was over, Shadow was walking to the motel he and Wednesday were staying in, and he found a very strange object that attacked him. Afterwards, Shadow founds himself in the strangest limousine where he meets a boy (the first New God we find in our screen: Technical Boy, God of technology). After not answering his questions, the God of technology orders his faceless minions to kill Shadow. And that is where I stop understanding what is going on. Technical Boy’s henchmen start beating Shadow, tie a rope around his neck and hung him in a tree. Then there is blood everywhere, the faceless guys start being ripped in half by an invisible force and the rope that was linking Shadow and the tree gets cutted allowing him to survive and fight another day.
Since the devil’s in the details, here are some I liked:
- Maybe it is unfair to describe the very scene of the episode as a detail, but I don’t know what else to call it. In it we see that Gods have been around for a long time and that they love sacrifices in their name;
- Before finding out his wife was dead, Shadow has a dream where he is in sort of a forest full of bones and skulls (maybe this explains the title of the episode). In the dream, Shadow is slapped by a tree. Since trees are supposed to represent life, I feel like the dream means Shadow is about to gets screwed over, since it is never a good sign when life slaps you in the face. It was from this point on that the actions started and that Shadow’s life began to turn in unimaginable ways;
- It was also nice (especially for the ones that are rewatching the season, like me) to see that during Laura’s funeral there was a malfunction in the machine that was lowering her casket, almost like she didn’t want to stay dead.
It was a good start to the show, but I feel like the synopsis they gave to it and to the book has a few spoilers since there is nothing in this episode (or even in other episodes to come) that suggests that this is a show about old and new Gods in the eve of a battle. But it is in fact a great idea to a story, because if what makes a God is people’s belief in him, then Gods we worship today are completely different from the Gods that used to be worshipped. Nowadays we tend to believe more in what we see, so things like information, technology, media… We don’t exactly worship that in a God like way, but we don’t have to.
The special effects in this show are also really good. In this episode this is more present in that last scene, since it doesn’t have many more, but the rest of the season is full of amazing scenarios. We also get to see some great things in the opening of the show (no wonder the show is nominated for Emmy of Outstanding Special Visual and Outstanding Main Title Design).
This was a nice episode, but it wasn’t the best of the season, so I will give it an 8.0/10.
Stay tuned for my review of episode 102 “The Secret of Spoons”.
REVIEW: Once Upon A Time in Wonderland, Episode 101
I don’t really like to compare shows, since one of them always gets downgraded, but I think it is inevitable to compare a spin-off and its main show. When Once Upon A Time in Wonderland started, Once Upon A Time was in its 3rd season (which is, in my opinion, one of its finest) and so I feel like OUATiW was a bit ignored by the fans. Maybe it would have been smarter to make it into a summer show, but what is done is done. In the end I was a bit sad it was cancelled but ultimately not too surprised.
Like the pilot of the main show, “Down The Rabbit Hole” begins with the words “Once Upon A Time”, which in itself often represents the beginning of a great story. There is also something in the beginning of the episode that reminded me of an amazing quote from OUAT. When Alice gets home, she tells her father what happened to her and how she visited a wonderful land (see what I did there?) and, even though he is at first a bit reluctant whether to believe her or not, he doesn’t in the end, which brought me back to 117 of OUAT when Jefferson said to Emma, who was also a non-believer: “Everyone wants a magical solution for their problem, and everyone refuses to believe in magic”. I think this quote kind of sums up the world we live in today, because even though some of us want to believe in something else other than what we have, there are always the ones that will constantly make sure we go back to believing only in what our eyes can see and that is exactly what cuts off imagination and creativity.
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It was also incredible to see that Alice is not a damsel in distress and that she can take care of herself very well when we see that, on her own, she took care of all the employees of the asylum when Will came to her rescue (which turned out to be the other way around).
After the asylum we finally leave our world (not completely, but at least until the end of this episode) and enter Wonderland. I think they built this new world very well, because we are told in Lewis Carroll’s tale that nothing makes sense there. It is true that the special effects and the scenarios behind the characters are awful and evidently fake in some scenes, but it is still nice to see the Wonderland nonsense: dragonflies that are actually mini-dragons, a marshmallow lake, food that makes you smaller and drinks that make you bigger… and that is only some of the few things we see in this premiere, because more nonsense things will continue to arrive to the screen throughout the season.
While we see Alice talking to Dr. Lydgate (who also makes an appearance in S6 of the main show), we see some flashbacks of this young girl going through some adventures trying to prove to her father she is not crazy. While in this, she accidentally meets a guy who is destined to become her true love: Cyrus, the genie. Even though their love seems impossible (since genies are always changing masters and lands) they start having a lot of adventures and have an almost immediate Happy Beginning.
But of course there cannot be heroes without villains and this spin-off introduces two: The Red Queen (who had to be a regular villain, of course, since she is the trouble bringer on the original story) and Jafar (who shouldn’t belong here, since he is in the wrong story, but somehow fits completely). It is always nice seeing a villain team-up. Heroes join forces all the time, so why shouldn’t villains do the same? In the last scene we see Alice and Cyrus together, these villains go to distance to make Alice think her genie is dead. The Red Queen throes him into the Boiling Sea (right after he proposed), while Jafar catches him with a flying carpet (Alice doesn’t see this last part, of course).
The end of the episode is also something I thought was nice. Alice goes to the Mad Hatter’s looking for Cyrus (who was allegedly seen there) but finds nothing but lots and lots of hats (at least inside the house). About to lose hope and control over her tears, she goes outside and finds a necklace that belongs to Cyrus, making the assumption that if it survived, maybe Cyrus did too, right? And that brings us to the best quote of this episode: “When you really love someone, you don’t need proof. You can feel it”. This quote Alice makes is actually a repetition of what Cyrus says in flashbacks when they first meet, but I thought it had more impact in this last scene then on the previous one, maybe because this times Alice is referring to someone who will always believe in her, no matter how absurd she may sound.
Making now the last comparison between shows, it was cool to see that this pilot didn’t end in a major cliffhanger or plot twist, like most pilot episodes do. Instead (like Once Upon A Time’s pilot) it ends with a bit of hope and belief in something that cannot be seen, only felt. In the end of this episode, Alice knows for sure that Cyrus is alive, not only based on a rumor she heard, but also in the love they share (call her mad, but she is right).
Overall, it was a good episode, but better ones are coming our way. That being said, I will give this episode a 7 out of 10.
Hope you guys stick around for my upcoming review of episode 102 of this show entitled “Trust Me”.
