Once Upon A Time‘s Season Finale Surprises
04.23.13
– Off to Neverland? The creators of the hit ABC show sit down
with D23 to discuss what fans of the fantastical series can expect in
the last three episodes of Season Two.
Once Upon A Time creators Eddy Kitsis and Adam Horowitz
are officially television’s knights in shining armor. They’ve managed
to bring all our favorite fairy tales and characters together for one
hour, each week on ABC.
Once Upon A Time creators Eddy Kitsis (left) and Adam Horowitz (right) stop by to play at the Walt Disney Archives.
The two producers just wrapped the second season of
Once Upon A Time,
which brilliantly blends the fairy-tale characters we know and
love—many based on Disney’s telling of their stories—and expands their
worlds beyond anything we could ever have imagined.
They also wrapped a pilot for the
Once spin-off
Wonderland, also for ABC, incorporating some of the characters we have already met with new ones we hopefully will.
Eddy and Adam took a few moments from their busy production schedules to give us an exclusive sneak peak at
Once Upon A Time‘s
final three episodes of the season, which will begin airing this
Sunday, as well as a few hints as to what’s down the rabbit hole in
Wonderland!
Once Upon a Time
recreates iconic moments and settings from classic fairy tales, as seen
here in this behind-the-scenes shot of a storybook cottage.
So, what can fans look forward to in the final three episodes of the season?
Eddy: Well, I think the fans can look forward to
kind of the culmination of everything we set up this year. Who are Greg
and Tamara, who do they work for,
do they work for anyone, what’s their agenda?
Adam: What’s really behind everything they’re doing,
and how is that going to impact on every single one of our characters? I
think we’re bringing all those things to a head in a way we find
exciting, and we think hopefully will be really surprising to the
audience as well.
Eddy: We are going to dive more into how Lacy
affects Rumpelstiltskin, or Mr. Gold, and how that affects his
relationship with his son.
Eddy and Adam will answer some of the mysterious questions Once fans have about Tamara, played by Sonequa Martin-Green.
Obviously, Lacy enjoying Rumplestiltskin’s darker side is a
bit of a weight off his shoulders, unless, of course, she gets her
actual memory back, in which case you’ve got to wonder, is she going to
be twice as horrified?
Eddy: Well, it depends what he does when he’s with
Lacy, I suppose, you know? Belle brings out the best in Mr.
Gold/Rumpelstiltskin, and Lacy brings out the worst, and it’s a lot
easier to have someone bring out the worst in you. You get to try a lot
less.
So the last two episodes are titled “Second Star to the Right” and “And Straight On ‘Til Morning.”
Adam: (
grinning) Just randomly titled. No significance to those titles at all.
Eddy: We are going to be finding out a bit about Baelfire, and Captain Hook. There’s no coincidence with those titles.
Adam: Obviously, we’d like to keep a surprise, but
you know, Baelfire/Neal and Hook have a connection that we’ve already
hinted at, and that’s something that’s explored in the final two hours
of the season. And that may involve a second star to the right.
More
details about Captain Hook, played by Colin O’Donoghue, will be
revealed in the series final two episodes, “Second Star to the Right”
and “And Straight On ‘Til Morning.”
Fans have been speculating a lot about Neal and his connection to Hook—perhaps in the form of a boy who never grows up?
Eddy: Yes, we could say so far, nobody’s been right.
Adam: Well, that we know of. Our fans are very
smart, and maybe they’ve got it, maybe they haven’t, but we hope it’s a
surprise. We can confirm he’s not Smee.
Eddy: By the way, I don’t know if you know this or not, but rewatching
Peter Pan,
which we’ve done on numerous times, the clock, Big Ben, is set to 8:15
in the movie. It’s at 8:14, and when the kids land on it, it goes to
8:15. [
NOTE: 8:15 is the time the town's clock in Storybrooke was stuck at before Emma appeared in the first episode of season one.]
Coincidence?
Adam: Or not.
You’ve said that a new character will be teased but not revealed until Season Three.
Eddy: In the final two hours, you will hear about someone, you will
think about someone, but you won’t
see that someone ’til next year.
Any other big moments to look for?
Eddy: Emma and Regina have a game-changer.
Adam: Their relationship is going to change. It moves to a new place.
Lana Parrilla (left) and Ginnifer Goodwin (right) play the roles of the Evil Queen and Snow White, respectively.
You’ve explored this dark spot on Mary Margaret/Snow White’s
heart. But I’m curious, don’t we all have dark spots on our heart?
Aren’t we all made up a mixture of goodness and darkness?
Eddy: I think a lot of the year was exploring that,
where you saw a lot of the villains trying to be good, and you saw a lot
of the heroes do some bad things. You saw Emma lie to her son about who
his father was, and you saw Snow White kill someone. And at the same
time, you saw Regina sacrifice her life so that those two could come
back through the portal, and you saw Rumpelstiltskin trying to do the
right thing for his son. So I think that’s the truth. Sometimes things
aren’t as black as white as you want them to be, and everybody makes
mistakes. It’s, how do you come back from the mistakes you make?
Adam: And I think that there’s darkness in everyone,
there’s dark impulses and urges that we resist, and I think for Mary
Margaret, she finally succumbed and didn’t resist, and that darkness
that we actually physically see in our heart is the after effect of
succumbing to something she knew was wrong, and yet she did anyway.
Eddy: Well, I think what you’re going to see is how
she deals with it, and what is in her mind the way to lighten it, and
that’s kind of her quest now.
Once Upon A Time star Jennifer Morrison, who lends her talents to the character of Emma Swan, doesn’t play by the rules.
Now, you actually touched on something I’ve been dying to
ask. So Regina did save the lives of Mary Margaret and Emma when she
stopped the portal.
Eddy: Yeah, absolutely.
And yet they couldn’t ask her out to dinner that night?
Eddy: [Laughs] The greatest thing was the fact that
this is a woman who created a curse that ripped away the happy endings
of everyone in town, and in that moment, the audience was like,
They can’t invite her to dinner? And the fact that you can have people feeling sorry for the Evil Queen was a victory for us.
You’ve taken great care to expand upon Regina and
Rumplestiltskin’s backstories. Is that to show that there’s hope for
some kind of redemption?
Eddy: I think so, I think that everyone has the
chance for redemption. It’s just a matter of whether or not that’s a
path you choose. So for us, villains who are just evil for evil’s sake
are boring. We like tortured characters. We said in Season One, evil is
not born, it’s made. So for us, if it’s made, then there has to be a way
to undo it, and that’s the journey for all of these characters. In the
beginning, there was a curse that took away everyone’s happy ending. But
what I think people don’t realize is, the queen’s still looking for her
happy ending, and Rumpelstiltskin’s still looking for his, and so the
show is a journey on whether or not they can achieve it, and what that
really is.
Lacy (Belle), played by Emilie De Ravin, and Mr. Gold (Rumpelstiltskin), played by Robert Carlyle, have a heart to heart.
Can you talk a little bit about Wonderland?
Adam: Yeah, I mean, it’s premature at this point,
but other than to say that, it’s an idea we’ve had, and if it goes
forward, it will exist in the universe of
Once Upon A Time but be its own thing.
Eddy: Yeah, it’s kind of a romance. And in
Once Upon A Time
fashion, it’s also a mash-up, so it has Alice and, you know, we’ve
shown you the queen, we’ve shown you the Mad Hatter, and we’ve shown you
the hookah-smoking caterpillar.
Sebastian Stan [the Mad Hatter]… discuss.
Adam: We love Sebastian Stan, and we have no
intention to recast that part. He’s just a very busy man right now. Our
door is always open for him.
About Wonderland, Adam says, “We love Sebastian Stan [seen here as the Mad Hatter in Once Upon a Time], and we have no intention to recast that part. He’s just a very busy man right now. Our door is always open for him.”
Back to Once Upon A Time,
some of the characters want to stay in Storybrooke, some want to go
back to fairy tale land, do we think that there’s a chance for a happy
medium?
Eddy: Well, I think there will be a
chance for a happy medium. Anton grew those beans for a reason, and that very thing will come into play in the last two hours.
Last year you mentioned you wanted to put in Mulan, and she’s
awesome. You’d also mentioned Pocahontas and potentially Ariel. Any
chance they may pop up?
Eddy: Ariel could potentially be a Season Three. We’re definitely going to meet new characters.
Adam: We don’t want to give away who we’re planning to meet yet, but…
Eddy: If you watch the finale, you can probably guess who would be there.
Last year you teased we never saw Maleficent’s body after she was killed.
Eddy: Well, we saw, and we will see Maleficent in
some form in the final three episodes. In fact, I would watch this
week’s episode “The Evil Queen.”
Once Upon a Time stars Ginnifer Goodwin as Mary Margaret (Snow White).
The start of the season was “magic is coming.” How do you feel the season has evolved?
Eddy: I would say this, the theme at the beginning was: magic is coming. And the theme for the finale is: it always has a price.
And what do you hope fans leave the finale thinking?
Eddy: I can’t wait for Season Three!
How did we know that that was what was coming?
With titles like Second Star to the Right and And Straight On 'Til Morning, 
"The Evil Queen" - With the aid of Hook, Regina attempts to put a plan
in motion that will help transport herself and Henry back to Fairytale
land. But her plan revolves around a fail-safe that was planted within
the curse, which if triggered could wipe Storybrooke off the map - and
kill all of its inhabitants; and Emma's suspicions about Tamara grow.
Meanwhile, in the fairytale land that was, the Evil Queen asks
Rumplestiltskin to transform her into an unrecognizable peasant in order
to kill an unsuspecting Snow White, with the twisted aim of earning the
love and respect of her subjects, on "Once Upon a Time," SUNDAY, APRIL
28 (8:00-9:00 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network.
Once Upon a Time Season 2 returns from its mini hiatus this Sunday, April 21 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC, with Season 2, Episode 19: “Lacey." And for those of us who have been missing Belle, Rumbelle, and the wonderful Emilie de Ravin, this Belle-centric episode should be just the thing to help us get over the seven stages of hiatus grief.
