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Starring Ginnifer Goodwin, Jennifer Morrison, Lana Parrilla, Josh Dallas, Jared S. Gilmore, and Robert Carlyle.

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The Enchanted Forest

A clumsy fairy, Nova, dreams of becoming a fairy godmother, though her current job is a fairy dust carrier. As she begins her trip, she accidentally drops some fairy dust onto a dwarf egg, causing this egg to hatch early and seem different to the rest of his…litter? Brothers? Who knows. Anyway, he is Dreamy – though, we know him as Leroy/Grumpy, so I suppose there’s going to be some tragic backstory here. Buckle up. Anyway, it turns out that dwarves are not born, but rather are hatched in batches of eight. Their job is to mine, and they each are given magical axes which give them their name. Apparently, the pickaxes never lie. He is named Dreamy, while his brothers are Stealthy, Doc, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, and Bashful.

A year later, Nova is collecting some of the fairy dust that the dwarves mine, where Dreamy recognises her. He says that he dreamed of her before he hatched. Nova makes the mistake of placing the bag of fairy dust on a conveyor that leads to an incinerator, but Dreamy manages to retrieve it, for which she is incredibly grateful. Nova says that she is going to watch the fireflies, hoping that Dreamy will come with her, but he doesn’t take the hint.

Dreamy is told that dwarves do not love (which is why no female dwarves exist. I mean, that’s heteronormative, but fine. Apparently no gay dwarves exist either. Or any dwarves who have met any other creatures? Ridiculous) but he is convinced by Belle that he should meet with Nova. Together, they plan to run away and see the world together, but they are stopped by the Blue Fairy. She persuades Dreamy that the best thing for Nova is if Dreamy isn’t in her life anymore, and that their relationship is doomed, and Nova will lose her wings. Wanting to protect Nova and her chances of achieving her dreams, Dreamy leaves her. He returns to the mines and, in his anger, manages to break his axe. He is given a new one, which now names him “Grumpy”.

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Storybrooke

Mary Margaret, desperate for people to start liking her again, is trying to sell candles made by the nuns in honour of the Miner’s Festival. She is further hurt when Leroy tells her that the only person the community hates more than him is her. He decides to help her, however, when Sister Astrid accidentally spends all of her money on helium and he promises to sell all of the candles to make up for it. Mary Margaret notices that Leroy is interested in Astrid though, as she is a nun, it will not happen. He responds that is no different to her pursuing a married man, and the two commit themselves to selling, but they are not able to sell very much due to their lack of likability in the community. Leroy offers to sell his boat to Mr. Gold in exchange for Mr. Gold giving the nuns some leeway on their rent, but Gold fiercely dislikes the nuns and refuses. Almost at their wit’s end, Leroy has an idea. He breaks the power transformer for the entire town, ensuring that everybody needs to buy candles. The candles sell out, and Leroy becomes Astrid’s hero. Even though the graffiti on Mary Margaret’s truck, branding her a “Tramp” is still visible, the town starts to accept her once more.

Elsewhere, Emma Swan begins to investigate Kathryn’s disappearance and starts by questioning David. He claims that he has not seen her and he assumed that she had headed to Boston as she planned to. Sidney, who hopes to get a story and his position at the newspaper back, offers to assist Emma. Regina sends Sidney across some phone records from David, which he shows to Emma. This shows that David did speak to Kathryn on the day that she went missing, in direct contradiction to what David told her. Emma takes David in to the sheriff’s station, so that he can tell her everything.

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Thoughts

• This week on: Where is Raphael Sbarge? He has been using his extended sabbatical to solve world hunger. Everything is peaceful. Well done Raphael.
• Interesting to note: Eion Bailey (August) is now credited as a series regular from this episode onward, even though he doesn’t actually appear in this episode.
• I’m going to level with you guys, I think this might be the worst episode so far. It’s literally so unnecessary. Very little of consequence happens here, and I could have done without a week of learning all about Leroy’s backstory. Literally who needs that? Does it add anything more to the story whatsoever? What’s even worse is the fact that Nova literally just appears in this episode. She never appears again. So what was the point in dedicating an entire episode to her and Grumpy’s doomed love story? None whatsoever. It sort of took the narrative back a couple of weeks to just showing a live-action Disney remake, with fun twists for the audience. And we’ve been doing so much better than that, guys. Even the episodes before where we learned about random guest characters, like Hansel and Gretel or Cinderella, it still furthered the stories of our characters in the present storyline. Here, very little changes. So it’s annoying.
• Kathryn’s disappearance storyline is rumbling on nicely. I’m suspicious by Regina’s procuring of the call logs, though. It seems like maybe she is fudging those or lying in some way. I don’t know. I don’t trust that woman. Sue me.
• Yeah, I have very little to say about this episode. It’s not a good one. That’s all, carry on.