‘Once Upon a Time’ season 6, episode 5 review: A whole new world for Jasmine, Aladdin

Who doesn’t love Aladdin? Going into Sunday night’s new episode of “Once Upon a Time,” we have no problem stating that we were more excited to see this particular story than almost any other the show has brought to the table. After all, Aladdin is one of our favorite Disney movies, and this character felt on the surface to be relatively similar to the one that had been presented in the source material.

The big difference is that in this world, Aladdin never had the exact closure in which he did in the source material. As a result of that, we ended up seeing in the present Emma and some of our other heroes within this story figure out precisely where he was, and to give a little bit of hope to Jasmine.

Surprisingly, Aladdin has been in Storybrooke this whole time, but has just decided to hide in plain sight. He wasn’t ready to face Jasmine in this world, feeling as though he had not actually advanced beyond being a “street rat,” the same thing that he was professed to be during the earlier days of the show.

The one argument you could make for “Street Rats” being a little bit of a letdown is that so much of this story was identical to what it was in the Disney movie insofar as Agrabah goes. Therefore, there was not a lot that the show was doing in order to surprise us. Yet, the rest of the story was fantastic enough to overcome some predictability. Take, for example, Emma Swan finally facing the potential end of her story more after spending the past few episodes trying to hide the truth regarding what happened to her.

Oh, and we forgot to mention that as the latest part of the Evil Queen’s past, she decided to rescue and torment Archie for a little while before eventually turning him back into a Cricket. Hopefully, that doesn’t mean that he is gone from the world for good, given that he is a valuable part of this world and is one of the few people who is actually getting through to Emma on an emotional level.

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