Recap of 2×15 The Queen is Dead (aired 3/3/13)

Young Snow is a pretty in pink, but a snobby little brat, sticking her nose in the air when she catches the servant Johanna trying on Snow’s birthday-present tiara. Snow’s mother, Queen Eva, sets her daughter straight, telling her that everyone is equal and the tiara is a symbol that Snow will always hold goodness in her heart. Unfortunately, the kind Queen does not have long to live and soon succumbs to what we will later learn is Cora’s poison. (Continued after the jump).

Young Snow chooses goodness

Snow appeals to the Blue Fairy for help, but the Fairy is really Cora in disguise, who offers Snow dark magic — a remedy that requires that Snow take someone else’s life in order to save her mother’s. Snow chooses the path of goodness, deciding not to use the remedy. Her mother is proud. Her last words: “As long as you hold the spirit of goodness in your heart, I shall never leave you.”

The servant Johanna comforts Snow in her grief and takes her under her wing.

Johanna in Storybrooke

Mary Margaret learns that Johanna is in Storybrooke, and they have an emotional reunion.

Hook almost kills Gold

Hook attacks Gold in the entryway of Bae’s apartment building, slashing Gold with his poison-infused hook. The only way to save Gold is to get him back to Storybrooke, where there is magic. He has to get there quickly. Luckily, Neal can give him a lift in the pirate ship.

What we learn about Neal

1. He has a fiancee.
2. He knows Hook.
3. He knows how to sail a pirate ship.
4. Before he came to Storybrooke, he went to another world…
5. … which explains why he is not several hundred years old.

What do you make of this? Is it possible that the Internet theories that said Bae was Peter Pan could be right after all? I hope not. Neal AND Bae AND Peter Pan would be one identity too many.

Cora does something very evil

Mary Margaret finds out that Regina and Cora are looking for the Dark One’s dagger. She tries to persuade Regina to turn her back on Cora and join the side of good. Regina refuses, still bitter that she had not been accepted by the townsfolk when she had briefly flirted with goodness before.

Meanwhile, Emma persuades Gold to reveal the dagger’s location, in the library clock tower. David and Mary Margaret find the dagger, but Regina and Cora outwit them, threatening to kill Johanna if they don’t get the dagger. Mary Margaret gives them the dagger, but Cora tosses Johanna out of the tower anyway, gratuitously killing her.

How can Regina still stick by her mother now? But she does. “There you go,” she says to Mary Margaret and David, before disappearing in a cloud of purple smoke. “You see where good gets you?”

Regina learns more about her mother

Although Regina made a show of unity with Cora in the clocktower, she is troubled by what she has heard. She hadn’t known that her mother killed Snow’s mother in order to make Regina queen. Regina puts two and two together and realizes that Cora had caused young Snow’s riding accident. (But hadn’t Regina already realized that last season in “The Stable Boy”?)

Why did Cora kill Snow’s mother?

In the library clocktower, Cora tells Snow that she killed Snow’s mother to make her own daughter the queen, but there seems to be more to it than that. Back in FairyTaleLand, Cora had gloated over Queen Eva’s dead body, saying that she would corrupt Snow, darkening her soul. That way, Cora said, she would destroy not only Eva, but Eva’s legacy as well. There’s some extremely bad blood between Cora and Eva. We don’t yet know why but are likely to find out in “The Miller’s Daughter” episode.

Snow vows revenge

After Cora kills Johanna, Snow starts to doubt her commitment to doing the right thing, blaming her own goodness for the loss of innocent lives. She vows to kill Cora.