TV Recap - Once Upon a Time in Wonderland 1-6 - Who's Alice?

It’s funny – last night when I was watching the show, I thought it was a great episode.  But now that I’m looking back on it to recap it, I’m realizing it was pretty light.  Heck, I could do this is just a few paragraphs.

We’ll start with the flashback.  We headed back to Alice when she returned from Wonderland after losing Cyrus – so a year ago.  I’m really curious how long she was gone because while she was gone, her father had remarried and had a daughter who looks to be roughly Alice’s age the first time she went to Wonderland.  Her father is thrilled to have her back, but her step-mother no so much.  She pushes her father to deal with Alice so Alice doesn’t affect her step-sister.  So Alice is forbidden to talk about Wonderland and is expected to get over Cyrus and start dating the neighbor boy immediately.  When she refuses, she is given the choice of that or going to the asylum.  So in a matter of days, she is shipped off to the asylum where we first met her.

Meanwhile, in Wonderland, Alice heads due west to follow the trail and find Cyrus.  However, her path leads her through the Black Forest, which is so dark even a torch is barely enough to see what is in front on her.  She pops out on the other side to find a forest that uses mist to enchant people into deciding to stay.  In fact, it makes them so happy that they turn into trees and never leave.

Fortunately for Alice, Knave is hot on her trail and finds it thanks to the two thieves she had beat up earlier.  He gets to these woods, and they don’t have a hold on him.  He realizes what is happening, but gets increasingly frustrated as Alice loses more and more interest in continuing on.  She is happy.  So happy that she even starts to forget who she and Cyrus are.  As she is turning into a tree, Knave throws the necklace she usually wears at her, and it breaks the spell.  She breaks free of her roots and the two leave.

For his part, Cyrus is also trying to get to Alice, but his escape hasn’t gone unnoticed – the Red Queen is hot on his trail.  She thinks if she can capture the genie to go with the bottle she already has, she will have all the power and Jafar will have to go along with her plans for a change.  She corners Cyrus on a cliff overlooking the sea.  But instead of letting himself get captured, he jumps off the cliff.  No idea how he survived that, but I’m sure he did.

For his part, Jafar has landed in Victorian England of the present, or at least the present of the series.  He gets the first scene of the episode as he goes to the asylum and meets with Alice’s doctor.  He’s trying to get more information on Alice.  The doctor at first pretends to have never heard of Alice, but when Jafar shows him White Rabbit, that appears to loosen his tongue.  We don’t’ see Jafar again until the finale scene, when he appears at Alice’s father’s door and says he is a friend of Alice and thinks he has a way to help her if only Alice’s father will go with him.

I did it!  5 paragraphs!  For wordy recap me, that’s pretty impressive.

Alice’s father is going to be in for a rude awakening next episode since he’s going to find himself in Wonderland I’m sure.  Now he’ll have to believe Alice.  But this is also a trick from Jafar to get Alice to use another wish.  Will it work or will she think her way out of the trap.

Okay, so I cheated a bit in that I left out an important piece of information we learned – Knave has no heart.  It was stolen from him at some point, and Alice got it back.  However, he never put it back in because what happened with Anastasia hurt him so much he couldn’t bear it.  So, what happened to make him lose his heart?  Was that Cora, aka the Queen of Hearts?  And where is it now?

Next week, we’re off for Thanksgiving, and I honestly don’t know when I’ll get my recap of the episode after that up.  I’ll have family in town that weekend, so I might not even get it watched until several days later.