Once Upon A Time Season 7 Episode 15 Sisterhood Review

Sisterhood has a lot of plots occuring simultaneously. This combined with the flashback plot that doesn’t really go anywhere, leaves the episode a jumbled mess. The writers wanted to do too many things at once, and it ended up weakening what should have been the main plot of the episode–Ivy/Drizella’s character arc and ultimate redemption.

Ivy

Since this is the supposed focus of the episode, let’s start with Ivy. She wants to find her magical sister before Gothel does in order to protect her from Gothel’s evil plot. On her search, she is attacked by the serial killer who has been targeting witches. She manages to fight off her attacker and flees to the safety of Regina’s bar.

While she hangs out there, Facilier approaches her. It takes less than five minutes to convince her that saving people is for chumps, and she should sacrifice her sister’s life to flee from the serial killer. Ivy brings Anastasia to her by releasing floating lanterns, and then drugs and kidnaps her.

Gothel appears while Facilier is preparing his dark ritual to steal Anastasia’s magic. She wakes up, almost murdering her sister for her repeated betrayals, but decides not to because her sister said something nice to her. Gothel gets bored and gives up. Regina tells Ivy to stop being a doofus and sends her on her way. The sisters flee to their homeworld via a magic bean and presumably pursue a happy ending.

Gretel

These flashback plots are usually meant to show some new side of the character to focus on or reveal some piece of information that adds dramatic irony to the present-day situation. This episode tries that, but it fails. 

Gothel invites Drizella to compete with her to join her coven. Despite explicit instructions to work alone, Drizella teams up with Gretel, a witch who can make things explode into candy. They mention Hansel in passing, and I have no doubt he’ll come up again at some point.

Gretel and Drizella become best friends after spending an hour hiking through the woods together until Gothel comes and tells them that they need to murder each other. Drizella tries to convince Gretel to run away with her, but Gretel attacks her. Drizella kills Gretel in self-defense,

I can kind of see where the writers were trying to go with this one. However, there wasn’t any emotion in the scene. There wasn’t very much chemistry between the two lead actresses. They were doing the best they could with the material they were given, but their performances felt flat. Ultimately, I feel the screentime that was devoted to this plotline could have been better served elsewhere.

Henry and Friends

A good portion of this episode is dedicated to Henry and his friends hanging out at an arcade. Remember when Ivy asked Henry for his help with finding and reconciling with her sister? Neither do the writers.

Instead, Henry spends most of this episode playing Galaga while Rogers trash talks at him. Honestly, I can get behind that. It might have been better to put this side-plot into a different episode so that it doesn’t throw off the pacing of the main plot, but the concept itself isn’t bad.

Jacinda walks into the bar, and Henry spends the rest of the night talking to her. The whole ‘will they or won’t they’ thing is remarkably played out already. Especially since we already know they will, but they can’t because the plot won’t let them. It doesn’t create tension or interesting conflict so much as it drags this season out. Honestly, it could have stood a rewrite or two.

To prove that his love is true, Henry almost throws a token into a mug from across the bar. He is thwarted by the bartender deciding to clean up a little at the last possible moment, thus ruining his chances with Jacinda for the evening.

Rogers and Nick have a chat about the Candy Killer case. They really went with Candy Killer as the name of their serial killer. Free tip for all you writers out there. Having a character say that the name you came up with is bad does not excuse the fact that the name you came up with is bad.

The conversation “foreshadows” the reveal at the end of the episode that Nick/Jack is the candy killer. If he’s a serial killer named Jack, does that make him Jack the Ripper? Is that what the writers are going for? It wouldn’t be the first time they had a character pulling double duty with their fairy tale persona.

The conversation in question Nick as the killer is familiar to anyone who’s watched an episode of Breaking Bad before. Clearly, Rogers hasn’t, because he doesn’t notice that he’s being pumped for information at all.

I’m honestly a little embarrassed for Rogers. I don’t know how he became detective. He’s outsmarted by literally everyone he meets including the eight-year-old that forgot her hat at the apartment she broke into. I can’t tell if he’s intentionally written as not so smart or if it’s an accident. Is he the victim of the intellectual equivalent of Commander Worf getting wrecked to show how tough the new bad guy is?

Conclusion

This episode used up all of that goodwill the previous episode left me with.The bones of a good episode are there, but it ended up so cluttered with irrelevant side-plots that the climax feels meaningless.

Entitled Sisterhood, the episode’s writers devotes more time to them. Anastasia has been a prop instead of a character this entire season, spending more than half of her screentime comatose. This episode could have given her character some room to grow and made us care about her in some way. Instead, Anastasia remains a MacGuffin instead of a person. Drizella’s characterization feels all over the place. One minute she wants to protect her sister, but after a five-minute chat with a stranger, she decides it would be better to kill her.

It would have been nice if the writers had spent more time developing the relationship between the sisters rather than shoehorning Gretel in and spending half the run time on Henry playing video games.

I have a feeling that they originally planned for the episode to focus entirely on the sisters, but had to shuffle things around when they realized that they needed to set up Hansel and Gretel earlier in the season than they had intended. I’m almost certain that Nick/Jack will turn out to be Hansel, and that’s why he’s killing witches.

The worst part about this episode wasn’t that it was a jumbled mess with an anticlimax for an ending. It was just boring; even the parts where Ivy/Drizella have to fight people to the death are utterly devoid of tension.

I can only hope that future episodes of the show manage to be bad in an entertaining way.