This week on Once, a sex-deprived Evil Queen hits on everyone from a newborn baby to herself.  Also, the writers kill another sexy male guest star because, apparently, they hate me; Emma wears her feelings; and we are again reminded that all the characters on this show have SECRETS!

Let’s review, shall we?

Blood Magic

Ever wonder how an Evil Queen and her Wicked Witch sister spend their Saturday nights? Apparently, they toss back a few appletinis (Fun!); and then spend the rest of the night skulking around a cemetery. (Slightly less fun.) Since No-Longer-Evil Regina sealed her Crypt of Hearts and Episodic Deus Ex Machinae using blood magic (Amateur!), the Evil Queen (who obviously has the exact same blood as Regina) is able to easily remove the spell and open the crypt. Evil Queen steals something from the crypt, but we won’t know what it is for another two commercial breaks.

Zelena, understandably, is hesitant about trusting the Evil Queen. Therefore, the Evil Queen tries to earn her sister’s trust by invading her personal space, speaking to her seductively, and staring for way too long at her cleavage. One of the downsides of spending an entire lifetime as the black half of somebody else’s soul is that you never ever get laid.

In light of that, who can blame the Evil Queen for trying to make up for lost time? So what if some (read: all) of her targets are patently inappropriate? Since basically everyone in this town is already related to one another, the definition of what constitutes incest has to be a bit more loosely interpreted..

Vengeance: A Dish Best Served Cold (Preferably, with a Side Salad and Baked Potato.)

This week’s flashback involves a new character, who apparently hails from the Land of Untold Stories. It’s the Count of Monte Cristo. He’s very nice to look at. So I instantly like him and am rooting for him, because I am an extremely shallow person.

The Count is apparently a very rich guy, and he throws an entire ball just to murder this guy, the Baron, who apparently killed his fiancée, got him thrown in jail, and stole all his family’s money.  He does this about two minutes into the ball, which causes everybody to leave. Now, I know these people are all obnoxiously wealthy and stuff, but to me, this just seems like a really bad waste of good booze and food. I mean, why let something silly like a maiming ruin a good party?

The Evil Queen conveniently shows up after everybody’s left (possibly to pick up the leftover booze and food, because that’s my girl!). She’s holding a piece of paper with the names of all the other people who screwed over the Count. And she offers to give it to him, if he kills Snow White and Prince Charming for her. That seems pretty risky of Evil Queen, waving her only leverage against the Count right in front of his face, where he can easily grab it and run away. If it were me, I’d at least hide it in my underwear or something. Come to think of it, hiding something a guy wants in her underwear seems right up Evil Queen’s alley.

The Count, masquerading as a poor townsperson whose town the Evil Queen burned to the ground, manages to sweet talk his way into a job as Snow White’s and Charming’s wine steward. This means he gets to hang around the castle all day doing nothing, except for the one or two times a day he has to pour five ounces of liquid into his bosses’ glasses.  Nice work, if you can get it!

A Case of the Sads

Back in Storybrooke, No-Longer-Evil Regina is giving the town’s new excessively large homeless population a pep talk about not being afraid of what the future has in store for them. Easy for her to say. She’s not the one who’s going to have to sleep in a garbage can next to a pet rat named Stinky.

Shortly thereafter, Emma politely excuses herself to attend her head shrinking session with Jiminy Cricket. Emma is obviously super depressed about her recent carpal tunnel affliction, and the fact that SHE’S GOING TO ALMOST, BUT NOT ACTUALLY, DIE IN THE SEASON FINALE. We know Emma is having a serious case of the sads, because she dressed herself in an old ripped pillow case with two holes cut out for her to put her arms through . . .

I think I wore the same costume when I dressed up as a pilgrim for Thanksgiving in elementary school. If that shirt isn’t a serious cry for help, I don’t know what is.

You Can’t Go Home Again

In other sad and homeless news, Belle has dumped Rumpel, because she had a dream that her unborn son told her to do so, before said unborn son made out with her. This means that she, like half the current population of Storybrooke (a place that consists of basically two houses, a library, a jail, and a diner) is also without a place to hang her hat.

Fortunately for Belle, Captain Hook feels kind of guilty about that time he tried to murder Disney’s most introverted princess. So he decides to make up for it by letting Belle live on his boat. Belle is bowled over by Hook’s kindness and generosity, and thrilled she won’t have to get a pet rat (though that worked out okay for Cinderella!). As an added bonus, the fact that Belle is now pretty much guaranteed to constantly reek of fish guts will positively ensure that Rumpel never wants to bone her again.

In other home-related news, the Count of Monte Cristo has landed in Storybrooke and has left polite word with Charming and Snow White that he wants to murder them, by way of their grandson Henry. (Because that’s what all the best hit men do: warn their targets that they’re coming by writing them a love note on pretty stationery.)

Upon hearing that the Count wants to kill her parents, Emma snaps out of her doldrums long enough to give mom and dad a ride out of town. Unfortunately, the town now has a spell on it, preventing them from leaving. This is the same spell which, undoubtedly, the Evil Queen stole from Regina’s crypt earlier in the episode. Emma and Co. are now beginning to suspect the Evil Queen’s reappearance in their lives, if only because the season’s other Big Bad Hyde is holed up in their only jail cell, nursing a bad case of pink eye.

Best Laid Plans

Back in the past, the Evil Queen gives Professional Wine Pourer the Count of Monte Cristo poison to put in Snow’s and Charming’s drinks. The Count is about to go through with murdering the couple.Though, of course, we know he won’t succeed. Because if he did, they wouldn’t be alive to be on this show for six seasons. (Way to spoil the ending for all of us, OUAT!)

The reason that the Count ends up not going through with murdering the Charmings is not something honorable, like a crisis of conscience or something. As it turns out, the Count spares the Charmings’ lives because if he poisoned them, he’d also have to poison their handmaiden, and she’s really hot. (Apparently, like me, the Count of Monte Cristo is a very shallow person.)

Unfortunately for the Count, Rumpel is not so shallow, and he poisons the handmaiden, despite her hotness. You see, Rumpel wants the Charmings to live, so the Evil Queen will cast the spell that takes them to Storybrooke and starts the OUAT television series. And in order for the Charmings to live, shallow hot guys like the Count of Monte Cristo can’t kill them.

So Rumpel, who’s no dummy, uses the Count’s soft spot for hot chicks to get what he wants. He tells the Count that the only way the latter can save the handmaiden from dying from the poison is by bringing her through the portal to the Land of Untold Stories, so her “Poisoning Story” stops and she gets to live. Granted, the Count could probably just toss the handmaiden through the portal and get the same result. But that wouldn’t help our plot.

Long story sort-of short, the Count carries this fellow hot person through the portal to the Land of Untold Stories, where the pair undoubtedly have lots of extremely attractive sex with one another. And Charming and Snow are left mourning the fact that they’ll now have to pour their own wine and dress themselves (which actually explains a lot about why Storybrooke Snow’s hair and wardrobe choices are so hideous).

Unfortunately, once removed from the Land of Untold Stories, the handmaiden suffers insta-death. The loss of his fellow hot person makes the Count super mad and murderous once again. Then again, maybe he’s murderous because the Evil Queen has his heart and is commanding him to finish the job he started. (Not the wine pouring job, the Snow and Charming murder job.)

OUAT Giveth, and OUAT Taketh Away

Oh, Count of Monte Cristo!  You of the fluffy hair, perfectly arched eyebrows, soulful eyes, and questionable moral code. We barely knew ye. (I especially barely knew ye, because I never had to read The Count of Monte Cristo in high school. I did watch the first two seasons of Revenge, though. Does that count?)

The Count arrives on the dock to murder the Charmings. But in his defense, he feels really crappy about it. The Charmings, for their part, try to ward off the Count by… recreating a sequence from the hit Broadway musical Stomp.

And so Regina, who knows the power of musical garbage can lids won’t be enough to save her new pals the Charmings from an untimely impalement, does the “honorable” thing and impales the Count instead.

Wait. WHAT????? NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU, OUAT? WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST HOT GUEST STARS, AND THE SHALLOW PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN THEIR PERSONAL APPEARANCE????

R.I.P., Count of Monte Cristo.  I’ll never forget you… or at least, I won’t forget you until they hire Ryan Gosling to guest star as Count Dracula.

Seeds of Doubt, Sprinkled Everywhere

Evil Queen conveniently appears just in time to see No-Longer-Evil Regina murder someone hot in cold blood. Apparently, this was her plan all along: Not for the Count of Monte Cristo to kill the Charmings, but for Regina to kill the Count in their defense, and realize she’s still kind of a crappy person. Murdering the Count makes Regina feel like total junk. But Evil Queen, who lacks social skills, having lived beneath Regina’s breastplate all these years with minimal opportunity for social interaction, misinterprets this as Regina being horny, and hits on her shamelessly.

The Evil Queen then warns that all of our lead Storybrooke characters still have deep dark secrets that the show hasn’t managed to mine in six seasons, but they’ll all come out now, gosh darn it. Like Rumpel, for example. He has a bondage fetish.

And Prince Charming. He may have killed his own father!!!! But worse, he collects coins! How nerdy!

And Zelena’s two-month old baby!  Well, she surely has the darkest secrets of all!

With threats of deep dark revelations popping up everywhere as a result of Regina’s sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really self-defense killing of the sexy Count of Monte Cristo, it’s no wonder that Emma is starting to question whether she can really trust Henry’s other mother, especially when Regina was one of the few main characters from the show strangely absent from Emma’s death vision.  Could Regina be Emma’s future Almost-But-Not-Actual Killer?

Tune in next week to receive a few more red herrings, but not actually find out.