Skip to content
Answering Your Questions About Reactor: Right here.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Everything in one handy email.
When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

Okay okay, so I was wrong about there being a new episode of Grimm before last Friday, but there will be from now until May 18th! Ask Grimm writer, Akela Cooper, if you don’t believe me!

So, we have another Once Upon a Time special about “Hat Trick,” the episode in which we find out just what it was that drove the Mad Hatter mad.

Also, there are mad hats, yo.

Once Upon a Time, Ep 17: “Hat Trick”

Mary Margaret (Ginnifer Goodwin) has flown the coop, using the mysterious key in her cell to escape. It’s up to Emma (Jennifer Morrison) to bring her back to the precinct before her arraignment so that she doesn’t become a fugitive. In her search for Mary Margaret, she narrowly misses hitting a man named Jefferson (Sebastian Stan) with her car. She stops to check on him and, noticing he’s limping, offers to drive him home. Big mistake. He drugs her and holds her captive forcing her to make a magic hat work. Oh, and by the way? He’s captured Mary Margaret as insurance that Emma do her job properly. And here’s a strange thing: he’s the Mad Hatter and he knows it. While everyone else’s punishment is that they’ve forgotten who they are, his punishment is that he gets to remember. Meanwhile, we are introduced to Jefferson in the fairy tale world. He is a single father to a little girl named Grace. After making a deal with the Evil Queen (Lana Parilla), taking her into Wonderland to retrieve her trapped father via a magic hat, she double-crosses Jefferson, trapping him in Wonderland while escaping with her father. He then spends the rest of his time trying to create new magic hats so that he can get back to his daughter, and it drives him mad.

Script: Vladimir Cvetko and David H. Goodman have given us an innovative story behind the Mad Hatter in “Hat Trick.” However, the episode feels dull. While the story behind the Mad Hatter is interesting, the character of Jefferson is not. There’s also the fact that this episode revolved around a character we’ve never met before and in whom we had not yet become emotionally invested. Once Upon a Time works best when characters emerge organically and step into the spotlight, rather than when it continually has new characters pop up out of nowhere for their own episodes. Jiminy Cricket and Red Riding Hood are two great examples of character exploration done right. Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel? Not so much. Now, we can add the Mad Hatter to the “not so much” list.

While containing some interesting ideas (did the hat Emma made work at the end?), moments (of course Regina wouldn’t follow a maze’s path, but go through it instead!), and my favorite line (“The problem with this world is that everyone wants a magical solution to their problems, but everyone refuses to believe in magic.”), overall “Hat Trick” is merely passable, and not particularly entertaining. And I just couldn’t bring myself to care about Jefferson.

Performances: However, my not being able to care about Jefferson has has much to do with Stan’s performance as it does with the script. For a “mad” hatter who desperately loves his daughter, his performance was really bland. I never felt the high stakes he was dealing with, even in madness. He also had no chemistry with Ali Skovbye, who played Grace, and gave a bland performance herself.

Jennifer Morrison, on the other hand, got to shine more than usual in the scene where Emma tries to convince Jefferson that she believes just before she clocks him in the head. Not only is Morrison a good actress, but apparently so is Emma! I was totally sucked in and believed her!

Production: The production quality in the Wonderland segments was perfect. Wonderland was perfectly designed and colored, the animation on the giant caterpillar was great, and the effect of Jefferson’s head being cut off worked really well. Jefferson’s Storybrooke home was appropriately well put together while also seeming a bit creepy, especially as far as the wall of hats looking a little too perfect. And lastly, Regina was unrecognizable under her old woman make up. Great job, make up department!

Representation: The episode managed to make its female characters look strong and brave even as they’re being drugged, tied up, or trapped. First there’s the little matter of Mary Margaret breaking out of jail in the first place, and we’re starting to see the multi-faceted personality in her that we know exists in Snow White. When Mary Margaret breaks the window, you get the sense of all the Snow White badassery lurking underneath her demure exterior, and suddenly know that she must have been drugged the way Emma had been in order to be tied up, because otherwise she would’ve been able to handle herself. The same for Emma. She was never written to act like a stereotypical Woman In Danger. She took all of her realistic chances to escape and didn’t allow her fear to cloud her determination.

Lastly, I’ve always been intrigued by the Evil Queen’s relationship with her father. It’s interesting to see a powerful female character who isn’t motivated by romantic love at all, who is ambitious enough to pursue power at all costs, but who does things for the love of her family. I love how Regina is written.

Alas, this was an episode without dwarves or Sidney Glass, but they can’t be in everything! Still wondering where the gay/lesbian character is.

Audience Engagement: Ultimately, I think this episode might have bored a more casual fan of the show, “Hat Trick” was uneven and plodded along with too much conversation about things and not enough action in several spots. The tiny moments of forward movement in the show’s larger plot didn’t feel like enough of a payoff for what we had to watch.

Well, that’s it for this particular installment of Once Upon a Time! We haven’t yet heard official word about a Season 2, and ratings have been slipping. However, that “official word” is widely considered merely a formality, and the show’s creators have already talked about plans for Season 2 in interviews. I just hope we get the news about a renewal for Once Upon a Time sooner rather than later!


Teresa Jusino loves fashionable hats, but hates wearing cold-weather hats in the winter. She can be heard on the popular Doctor Who podcast, 2 Minute Time Lord, participating in a roundtable on Series 6.1, and at the end of last year she was selected as one of the Top 11 Geek Girls of 2011 at the Geek To Me blog at Chicago Redeye. Her “feminist brown person” take on pop culture has been featured on websites like ChinaShopMag.com, PinkRaygun.com, Newsarama, and PopMatters.com. Her fiction has appeared in the sci-fi literary magazine, Crossed Genres; she is the editor of Beginning of Line, the Caprica fan fiction site; and her essay “Why Joss is More Important Than His ‘Verse” is included in Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon By the Women Who Love Them, which is on sale now wherever books are sold! 2012 will see Teresa’s work in an upcoming non-fiction sci-fi anthology. Get Twitterpated with Teresa, “like” her on Facebook, or visit her at The Teresa Jusino Experience.

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Teresa Jusino

Author

Teresa Jusino was born the day Skylab fell. Coincidence? She doesn't think so. A native New Yorker, Jusino has been telling stories since she was three years old, and she wrote a picture book in crayon in nursery school. However, nursery school also found her playing the angel Gabriel in a Christmas pageant, and so her competing love of performing existed from an early age. Her two great loves competed all the way through early adulthood. She attended NYU's Tisch School of the Arts where she majored in Drama and English Literature, after which she focused on acting, performing in countless plays and musicals in and around New York City, as well as short films, feature length independent films, and the one time she got to play an FBI agent in a PBS thing, which she thought was really cool, because she got to wear sunglasses and a dark suit and look badass. Eventually, producing was thrown into the mix. For four years, she was a company member and associate producer for a theater company called Stone Soup Theater Arts. She also produced a musical in which she also performed at Theater For the New City called Emergency Contraception: The Musical! by Sara Cooper, during which she ended every performance covered in fake blood. Don't ask. After eight years of acting, Jusino decided that she missed her first love – writing – and in 2008 decided to devote herself wholly to that pursuit. She has since brought her "feminist brown person" perspective to pop culture criticism at such diverse sites as Tor.com, ChinaShop Magazine, PopMatters, Newsarama, Pink Raygun, as well as her own blog, The Teresa Jusino Experience (teresajusino.wordpress.com), and her Tumblr for feminist criticism, The Gender Blender (tumblwithteresa.tumblr.com). She is also the editor of a Caprica fan fiction site called Beginning of Line (beginningofline.weebly.com), because dammit, that was a good show, and if SyFy won't tell any more of those characters' stories, she'll do it herself. Her travel-writer alter ego is Geek Girl Traveler, and her travel articles can be followed at ChinaShop while she herself can be followed on Twitter (@teresajusino). Her essay, "Why Joss is More Important Than His 'Verse" can be found in the book Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon By the Women Who Love Them (Mad Norwegian Press). In addition to her non-fiction, Jusino is also a writer of fiction. Her short story, December, was published in Issue #24 of the sci-fi literary journal, Crossed Genres. A writer of both prose and film/television scripts, she relocated to Los Angeles in September 2011 to give the whole television thing a whirl. She'll let you know how that goes just as soon as she stops writing bios about herself in the third person.
Learn More About Teresa
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
14 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments