‘Once Upon a Time’ review: Is Red Riding Hood a killer?

“Once Upon a Time” season 2 aired its first real showcase of Meghan Ory’s character of Red Riding Hood all season long Sunday night, and it gave us plenty of reasons to start howling at the moon. While at first this felt somewhat like the sort of episode that would not end up being that important in the context of the overall story, some surprises at the very end here changed this.

So what happened? Let’s start with the bad news. Jared Joseph told us earlier this year that we would be seeing Billy again this season, but we did not expect that the mechanic (who actually had a really cool fairytale counterpart as one of Cinderella’s mice) would end up dead in the first quarter of the show. Ruby, who was worried about her turning into a wolf thanks to a full moon happening for the first time in Storybrooke, was quickly blamed for it.

Unfortunately, the Ruby mystery was obvious; we knew that Spencer (a.k.a. King George) was desperate to get revenge on David, so it was obvious that he set Red Riding Hood up to get back at him. The only thing particularly interesting about this story was that we ended up seeing Spencer burning what was the only real hope that David had to getting his wife and daughter back to town. But was it really? This is where Henry came into play this week, as we quickly learned that through a necklace that Mr. Gold presented to him at the end of the episode, he is now able to control these dreams, and strangely pass on some messages to people from the outside world (in this case, Aurora). It was a cool twist, mostly in that it finally gives the character a chance to be in the spotlight as more than just a sidekick for someone else?

What did you think about this episode as a whole, and do you think Henry could somehow use his dreams to get Emma and Mary Margaret back home?