Major spoilers can be found in this news article if you haven’t seen the Sunday, April 19 episode of Once Upon A Time, cleverly titled “Sympathy for the De Vil.” If you haven’t caught the episode, yet, we suggest heading away from this page and reading one of our other lovely articles.
ABC’s Once Upon A Time has always been chock full of action, and the pace has picked up this spring since the Frozen storyline wrapped up and made room for way more villains and mischief. One of these storylines has revolved around the shenanigans of the history rewriter The Author, and this week his relationship with Cruella De Vil led to her ultimate death.
There was a lot of betrayal going on in “Sympathy for the De Vil.” Cruella admitted she had lied to Maleficent, while Regina tricked Rumple into thinking he had a chance to get back with Belle. Speaking of Cruella, she’s never been the kindest of personalities, but this week we learned way more about the streaky-haired villainess. The crazy and twisted (but swanky) story led to Cruella De Vil kidnapping Henry. Emma eventually found Henry in Cruella’s clutches and used her powers to shove Cruella over a cliff edge, sending her to her death, and making our heroine look not so wholesome.
What Emma didn’t know is that Cruella wasn’t actually capable of killing Henry. Much of the episode was spent looking at Cruella’s backstory. Cruella had been locked up by her mother when The Author found her and helped her to escape, falling in love with her in the process. Unfortunately, Mommy Dearest had locked Cruella up for a reason, as she had killed her own father and her mother’s two subsequent husbands. Once The Author learned the truth about Cruella, he amended her story so she would be unable to kill anyone in the future.
Of course, Emma wasn’t privy to that information. On top of this, Cruella put Emma in a tough position when she kidnapped Henry and tried to order Emma to take the life of The Author. Emma's been changing as a character recently, but if you saw the look on her face prior to the meeting with Cruella, you probably saw it was going to end with no good.
The episode ended on a prophetic note, with The Author stating that “the savior” would “turn dark.” Next week’s episode is called “Lily,” so hopefully we’ll get some more answers about Emma’s goodie or baddie status, then. However, if there’s anything Once Upon A Time does well, it is leave the audience with plenty of questions. There are four more episodes until the end of the season, and there’s plenty of time for ABC’s drama to flesh out the story before wrapping things up. You can catch new episodes of Once Upon A Time on Sunday night at 8 p.m. ET.
