Once Upon A Time - 5.06 "The Bear and the Bow"

Once Upon A Time followed up their Swan Queen (Regina & Emma) centric episode from last week with one on another pairing, Rumbelle (Rumple & Belle). This week Merida continued her quest (given by Dark Swan Emma) to make Rumple brave so he would pull the sword from the stone. Did she succeed?

***** SPOILERS BELOW ****

Boring would be a harsh word for this episode, but I will say I found the episode a little less interesting than other episodes so far this season. Overall I’m really liking the Dark Swan vibe Emma has going this season and I’m really intrigued to see where all that’s going. With that being said, this episode didn’t progress that storyline much, other than Rumple finally doing what Emma wants – Excalibur is now free from the stone! Emma got her hero. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to say Rumple was the “hero” in Storybrooke.

Most of the episode switched between Merida and Belle’s travels in Camelot, where Merida basically kidnapped Belle and had her assist in saving her brothers from the angry clansmen. Merida had Belle help brew up a potion to turn her into a bear, but Belle ends up convincing her not to use it. Instead, Merida uses her natural bad-ass bow skills to convince the other clans to follow her rule. Unfortunately for Belle, this means Dark Swan gets ahold of the unused bear potion in Storybrooke in present time and forces Merida to go bear beast mode on Belle to try to get Rumple to man up.

Rumple certainly lived up to his old reputation of being a coward this episode, until the bitter end when he battled the bear for Belle. Thank god; Rumple being a whiney coward was getting old – FAST.

One of the highlights of the episode was Emma breaking Zelena out of prison for an onion ring snack to try to get her to help her out with one of her evil plans. In the end Zelena declines, but it was a great scene between the two characters. Have I mentioned how hilarious Bex Mader is? Zelena is one of the bright spots of the show; her snarky lines are always pretty hilarious. Not much new on any other fronts in this episode except that Arthur was being shady as hell as usual and the rest of the Storybrooke crew finally figured it out.