Magic Mirror

"Well, that was awfully cruel..."

- The Magic Mirror to the Evil Queen on manipulating the Mad Hatter

The backstory of the Magic Mirror is revealed in the episode The Fruit of the Poisonous Tree. Before he became the Magic Mirror, he was a powerful Genie from an ancient and mysterious city named Agrabah. However, he was soon imprisoned in mirrors after wishing to always look upon the face of the Evil Queen. His Storybrooke counterpart is Sidney Glass.

Season One
In The Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, b efore he was known as the Magic Mirror, he was known as the Genie of Agrabah, a powerful magical being who was imprisoned within the confines of a magic lamp; granting wishes to all who happened to come across it in their travels. One day, while taking a stroll through his kingdom, King Leopold came across said lamp by the side of a river. After curiously rubbing the lamp, the Genie appears to the king, granting him three wishes; with the warning that once a wish is fulfilled it cannot be undone.

After realizing that King Leopold desires no wishes because he has everything he wants and seeks only the happiness of those in his kingdom, the two sit by the river's edge and the Genie tells the king of his sorrowful life, and how he has never found happiness while granting wishes for others over the years. When asked by Leopold what the Genie would wish for, he tells the king how he would wish for nothing more than to be free. Wanting to make the genie trully happy, King Leopold uses his first wish to release the Genie from his chains, giving his second wish to let the Genie have his third wish.

The genie is both surprised and worried, as over the years he has watched a thousand and one wishes be made only to have them all turn out bad in the end, which is why he vows never to make his final wish. Seeing the Genie as a wise confidant, Leopold invites him back to his palace where he meets the king's daughter Snow White and his second wife Regina, with whom he falls in love at first sight under the queen's apple tree.

During a birthday party for the king, the Genie sees Regina alone and unhappy, while the king, his daughter, and their subjects are all enjoying the king's speech about his daughter and how she looks like his first wife, her mother, who was the "fairest of them all". When Regina is alone outside, the Genie follows, giving her a mirror to show her how beautiful she is as he sees her as the fairest in the land.

Sometime later the king finds the mirror and discovers written in her diary that she has found another love and asks the Genie to find the person who gave her the mirror. As the Genie stood under Regina's apple tree, the queen's father, Henry, delivers a box asking him to take it to his daughter as he isn't allowed inside the castle.

He takes the box to Regina and as she opens it, she tells the Genie that she is going to kill herself from the bite of poisonous Agrabah Vipers, he stops her and offers to kill the king instead, so that they can be together forever. He then takes the box with the vipers to the king's room, opens it and let them slither up to the king's face, telling the king as he lays dying that he was the one who gave Regina the mirror and that he has fallen for her.

After telling Regina that he has successfully killed the king and that they can now be together, Regina tells him that she never loved him and only used him to kill King Leopold for her. His heart broken, the genie wishes to be with her forever and to look upon her face always. With this wish and much to his dismay, he becomes trapped as the Magic Mirror, now, ironically, able to look upon Regina forever.

After his imprisonment in every mirror, Regina uses him for spying on her enemies. Some people he could spy on were Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin and the Blind Witch. It is the magic mirror who suggests that Regina use a hunstman to kill Snow White after Leopold's death, knowing that Snow was too well-liked by everyone to be killed outright by the Queen.

Sometime after Regina came to power, Magic Mirror called her "cruel" when she disguised herself as a hag merchant and didn't allow Jefferson to buy his daughter a stuffed rabbit for less than the asking price.

Trivia

 * After being released from the magic lamp, he introduces himself as the Genie of Agrabah, which is likely a refernce to the genie from the Disney film Aladdin.
 * When first meeting King Leopold, he states that he has granted "One thousand and one wishes...". This is a reference to the popular Middle Eastern folk-tales One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, which itself contains the story "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp".
 * Although he acknowledges the power of true love, he obviously does not understand how to differentiate between it and his lust for Regina.
 * He has a complex love/hate relationship with the Queen, in that he resents her for his imprisonment, but adores her all the same.
 * His lamp is currently in the possession of Mr. Gold.

Miroir magique