We love Once Upon A Time's hunky hunk Prince Charming. He's got those big, purple Kool-Aid stained lips, golden retriever locks and beautiful baby blues. But this week's episode painted him as kind of a dick, stringing along our favorite dowdy schoolmarm Ginnifer Goodwin. Not good sir. But then again, he did fight a giant CG dragon.
Spoilers ahead...
Is anyone else getting the strong sense that Once Upon A Time is killing time, puttering around like a lonely winter lakeside retiree? This entire episode was dedicated to Prince Charming's backstory — which, on paper, sounds incredibly interesting. He's the secret twin whose brother was whisked away by Rumpelstiltskin, sold to the King of the Land and raised to fight a dragon. But after a hilarious run-in with a knife (above) the King came calling for the other brother.
Here is an image of the "other brother" (the real Prince Charming) who is so very poor, he can't afford a haircut.
Yadda yadda, the new Prince Charming leaves to fight the dragon, kills it, and is then forced to marry Midas' daughter and give up his life of a 30-year-old shepherd who still lives with his mother. The whole thing plays out like an Alanis Morissette song, because the poor Prince was dead set on marrying for love, not for money. Wah wah. But the real problem isn't the plodding backstory, it's that none of it matters. Because we all know that Prince Charming doesn't HAVE to marry the blonde bitchy daughter of Midas. In the pilot he marries Snow White and in the third episode we saw Snow and Charming meet almost an hour after Charming agrees to marry the other girl. So what is the point? It's just filler. It could be revealed that I was raised by apes as a child, but if I live a normal life and never lose my mind and start flinging my own feces at someone who cut me off on the train platform, it doesn't matter! These backstories need to have dramatic implications on their characters, please. We KNOW he ends up with Snow White, because we saw them get married!
Sidenote: Prince Charming's fake Dad is Charles Widmore! Clearly this whole TV show is just another Lost alternate reality timeline. I suspect somewhere Jack is running around screaming at a gnome, "We have to go back!"
Meanwhile, back in the real world Prince Charming is still fighting off his amnesia and his ex-wife's sexual advances. Channeling his best Ryan Gosling, he shows up at his true love's place of work surrounded by children to hit on her and let her know that he left his wife for her. Whaaaaat! Snow is shocked, because she'd spent the better part of this series trying to be a good person and not jump the shellshocked body of Charming because he's married and that would mean she'd been fantasizing about a comatose man for years (which is creepy). Anyway, Charming shows up and is all "meet me at this very difficult to find and remote location if you really love me, because this won't blow up in our faces at all, so yeah, let's meet in the dark woods under a bridge instead of at a bar with normal people."
The Evil Queen, whose evil doings have been all but completely absent for some time now, is told that she has a friend by Charming's past wife, and then she smiles like Dr. Seuss' Grinch, so yeah — no bad will come of that. This moment really made me miss the Queen. Too long have we've been without her conniving schemes. And while I don't mind Robert Carlyle skipping around, squeaking out Pillsbury Doughboy noises, we're resting a little too hard on his character. Surely he isn't pulling ALL of the strings in fairy land? At least we hope not. Bring back the Queen!
On his way to meeting Snow in real life Charming gets lost, of course, and runs into the real life Rumpelstiltskin who jogs his brain and zoom, zip, bang — Charming has some of his memories back. He then goes to the bridge and in a totally dickish move dumps Snow. Thank goodness, our girl tells it to him like it is. What. A. Dick. This whole series is turning into a never ending loop of missed connections. I need some smut or something. The Sheriff (who is clearly the huntsman) isn't even boffing the Mayor on camera, I want some heat, passion something please! No more of these "oops we missed it" moments, GIVE ME FIRE.
Until next week, when Snow White gets a magical STD from Doctor McFeelBad who she met at the bar.