Once Upon A Time‘s Season Finale Interview

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?