The Final Battle Part 1

"She's the Savior. Of course the Final Battle isn't a war. It's a battle for her soul, for her belief. Her hope."

- Snow White to Prince Charming, Hook and Regina

"The Final Battle Part 1" is the twenty-first episode of Season Six of ABC's Once Upon a Time. It was written by Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz, and directed by Steve Pearlman. It is the one hundred and thirty-second episode of the series overall, and premiered on May 14, 2017.

This episode is the first part of the season six finale.

Synopsis
Henry awakens to a cursed Storybrooke and discovers Emma has been in the mental hospital, and the Black Fairy is the new mayor. Henry attempts to help Emma regain her memory while Gold tries to find out what has really happened to Belle. Meanwhile, Snow, Charming, Regina, Zelena and Hook are trapped in a crumbling Fairy Tale Land and desperately try to figure out a way to be reunited with Emma and Henry.

Extended Scene with Henry and Archie
An extended version of the scene where Henry runs up to Dr. Hopper in the street. This version features additional elements: Granny driving Ruby's car and sitting with Archie while Leroy is walking past, and members of the Sisters of Saint Meissa walking in the street.

Starring

 * Ginnifer Goodwin as Snow White/Mary Margaret Blanchard*
 * Jennifer Morrison as Emma Swan
 * Lana Parrilla as Evil Queen/Regina Mills*/Evil Queen (Serum)
 * Josh Dallas as Prince Charming/David Nolan*
 * Emilie de Ravin as Belle French (Voice)
 * Colin O'Donoghue as Hook
 * Jared S. Gilmore as Henry Mills
 * Rebecca Mader as Zelena
 * Robert Carlyle as Mr. Gold

Guest Starring

 * Deniz Akdeniz as Aladdin
 * Karen David as Jasmine
 * Alison Fernandez as Little Girl
 * Giles Matthey as Gideon
 * Jaime Murray as Black Fairy
 * Raphael Sbarge as Archie Hopper
 * Andrew J. West as Young Man

Co-Starring

 * Peter Marcin as Chief
 * Ingrid Torrance as Severe Nurse

Uncredited

 * Lee Arenberg as Leroy*
 * David Avalon as Doc*
 * Keegan Connor Tracy as Mother Superior*
 * Faustino di Bauda as Walter*
 * Gabe Khouth as Mr. Clark*
 * Mig Macario as Bashful*
 * Michael Coleman as Happy*
 * Beverley Elliott as Granny*
 * Tony Amendola as Marco*
 * Unknown baby as Prince Neal
 * Unknown baby as Robin
 * Cinder as Pongo

Note: *: Only in archive footage.

Trivia

 * -|Production Notes=

Title

 * The title card features a growing Beanstalk.
 * During the original airing, the title card for "The Final Battle Part 2" featuring the Seattle Center Monorail was used at the beginning of this episode.
 * The title of this episode was revealed by Adam Horowitz via his Twitter account on March 15, 2017.

Production Notes

 * Colin O'Donoghue suffered an injury during the filming of "The Song in Your Heart" and filmed this episode with a broken foot, while Deniz Akdeniz filmed the episode with a broken leg after a car crash.


 * -|Episode Connections=

Event Chronology

 * The Storybrooke events take place after "The Song in Your Heart and before "The Final Battle Part 2".
 * The Enchanted Forest events take place after "Mother's Little Helper" and before "The Final Battle Part 2".
 * The New Enchanted Forest events take place after Henry introduces Lucy to Tiger Lily in "The Eighth Witch", and before "The Final Battle Part 2".
 * These scenes are also include in the flashback events of "The Eighth Witch".

Episode Connections

 * The "darkness" that the young man escapes from is revealed in "The Eighth Witch".
 * The scene early in the episode where the Black Fairy's curse envelops Storybrooke during Emma and Hook's wedding is the final scene from "The Song in Your Heart".
 * The time on the clock tower is stuck at 6 PM, the same as when the curse struck in the previous episode. The clock was also frozen during the first curse, which was seen in "Pilot", "The Thing You Love Most", "Welcome to Storybrooke" and "Awake".
 * Archie makes a reference to his psychiatry sessions with Henry, which took place throughout Season One.
 * Cursed Emma believes that she was admitted to the Storybrooke Sanitarium after Henry tried to prove that fairytales were real by eating a poisoned apple turnover, referring to events from "An Apple Red as Blood".
 * Henry reminds his mother that she woke him with true love's kiss and fought a dragon, which took place in "A Land Without Magic".
 * The mysterious page that Henry shows Emma is the page that he wrote in "Mother's Little Helper".
 * Snow White and Regina both mention that they are standing where Snow White and Prince Charming were married. Their wedding was shown in "Pilot", "The Thing You Love Most" and "The New Neverland".
 * Fiona mentions how Emma had a lovely apartment in Boston, the place where Emma was living in "Pilot".
 * The photograph of Emma and Henry that is pinned to Emma's wall, which Fiona notices, was one of the photographs that Henry showed the Hostess while searching for his missing family in "Operation Mongoose Part 1".
 * The crumbling worlds are restored in "The Final Battle Part 2".
 * Regina is surprised to see the Mad Hatter's hat and asks, "Wasn't it destroyed?", referring to how Albert Spencer burned the first hat in "Child of the Moon".
 * When the heroes meet Aladdin and Jasmine, the couple have just fled Agrabah. How they ended up there was shown in "A Wondrous Place".
 * Zelena correctly states that the Mad Hatter's hat can't make a passage to a land without magic. This was also explained by Rumplestiltskin in "The Doctor".
 * Emma can be seen doing pull-ups to pass the time, just like she did in "The Heart of the Truest Believer".
 * Hook recalls his first adventure and how they climbed the Beanstalk together, referring to events from "Tallahassee".
 * David points out that Hook tried to kill Emma and Mary Margaret, referring to how Hook and Cora left them in the Dark Dungeon in "Queen of Hearts".
 * Emma states that her parents gave her away when she was a baby, referring to events from "Pilot".
 * When Emma starts to remember her wedding, clips from "The Song in Your Heart" are shown.
 * When Mr. Gold opens Her Handsome Hero, he sees the message that Belle wrote for Gideon, which was first seen when Fiona opened the book in "Mother's Little Helper".
 * The Regina and her serum version discuss how the serum queen and Robin of Locksley were sent to the Wish Realm, an event that took place in "Page 23".
 * Regina's serum counterpart points out that Regina neglected to mention that the latter killed King David and Queen Snow and Sir Henry was seeking revenge for the murder of his grandparents. These event took place in "Wish You Were Here".
 * The last time Hook visited the Giants' Lair was when he and Emma broke in to steal an Enchanted Compass in "Tallahassee".
 * Henry tries to make Emma remember by asking her to touch the storybook. Touching the book is what made Emma and Henry remember in "A Land Without Magic" and "A Curious Thing", respectively. Unfortunately, it doesn't work this time, because it also requires the person believing in magic, something that was alluded to in "A Land Without Magic" and confirmed in "A Curious Thing".
 * Emma says, "Just because you believe something does not make it true", the same words that she spoke to Henry in "Pilot", and Hook in "New York City Serenade".
 * The storybook, which Emma burns in this episode, is restored in "The Final Battle Part 2".


 * -|Cultural References=

Disney

 * Aladdin wears similar prince attire to his counterpart from the Disney film.

Fairytales and Folklore

 * This episode features Snow White, Prince Charming, the Evil Queen from the Snow White fairytale, Captain Hook from the Peter Pan story, the Wicked Witch of the West and Munchkins from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz story, and Aladdin and the Princess from the One Thousand and One Nights story.

Popular Culture

 * Henry names his latest operation Operation Cuckoo's Nest, a reference to the famous 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the book of the same name. Emma is less enthusiastic and points out that although she hasn't seen that movie in a long time, it ended with a lobotomy; a reference to the main protagonist's fate. Henry's name is fitting, as Emma is now a patient at a mental institution where Nurse Ratched works and the Chief is one of the fellow patients; both are central characters from the story.
 * When Mr. Gold is searching his pawnshop for Belle's book, two old volumes of Encyclopedia Americana and the novel The New Tenant by E. Phillips Oppenheim are sitting on the shelf.
 * When Fiona shows Mr. Gold the fake photographs of Belle traveling the world, Belle can be seen in front of the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben.


 * -|Set Notes=

Props Notes

 * When Henry visits Emma at the Storybrooke Sanitarium, she is painting a swan.
 * The Black Fairy, who is the mayor of Storybrooke during the new curse, is driving the car that belongs to the real mayor, Regina.
 * Colin O'Donoghue who plays Hook, fractured his foot during the filming of the "The Song in Your Heart". As a result, he had to wear a foot brace during the filming of this episode. It is mostly noticeable during the scene where Hook and Prince Charming are about to climb the beanstalk.
 * When Mr. Gold opens Her Handsome Hero, one page contains a variant of Lorem ipsum, a filler text commonly used as mock-content when testing a given page layout or font. Lorem ipsum consists of badly garbled Latin, based on sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of De finibus bonorum et malorum ("On the ends of good and evil"), a philosophical work by the Roman philosopher Cicero. Lorem isum is often used when previewing the layout of a document, as the use of more understandable text could easily distract the user from the layout being examined.
 * When Emma burns the storybook, illustrations by the famous British illustrator Arthur Rackham can be seen:
 * An illustration from Grimm's Fairy Tales - Illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1909), later re-published as Snowdrop & Other Tales By the Brothers Grimm (1920). It depicts a scene from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of "The Seven Ravens".
 * The same picture can be seen among the numerous fairytale illustrations pinned to the wall in Henry's room in the Season One episode "Pilot". It could also be seen among the pages that August took out of the book (before putting it back together again) in the Season One episode "What Happened to Frederick".
 * If you watch in slow motion, you can see part of an illustration from a 1922 edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's children's book A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. It depicts a scene from the story "The Paradise of Children".It can also be seen, in its entirety, in the Season One episode "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" and the Season Three episode "The New Neverland".
 * A 1909 illustration from the fairy tale of "Little Red Riding Hood".
 * "The waiting maid sprang down first and Maid Maleen followed" from the fairy tale collection Little Brother & Little Sister and Other Tales By The Brothers Grimm (1917). It depicts a scene from the Grimm fairy tale "Maid Maleen".
 * Excerpts from the fairy tale of "The Golden Bird" can be seen when Emma burns the storybook.

Set Dressing

 * Among the hand-painted pictures pinned to the wall in Emma's room at the Storybrooke Sanitarium is a landscape painting with two ships, a reference to her husband's pirate ship, the Jolly Roger.
 * One of the doors inside Jefferson's hat features the same motif as the floor in Hades' Lair in Season Five: A pentacle with pitchforks at the edges.
 * The Triangle Pattern Door greatly resembles the triangle patterns on the domes and walls of Jasmine's Palace in Agrabah.
 * The painting Bend in the River at Morrow by the American artist Mary Jean Weber can be seen in Archie's office.

Costume Notes

 * Prince Neal is wearing the same cap worn by his big sister Emma in Prince Charming's vision in the Season Four episode "Best Laid Plans". He wears the same cap in "The Final Battle Part 2".
 * When Henry comes to break Emma out of the Sanitarium, she is wearing a Vince High Neck Tank Top.
 * The Evil Queen is wearing the same dress, albeit with a different necklace, hairstyle and an added cape, that she wore in "Page 23" when she fought with Regina and when she was sent to the Wish Realm for a fresh start.
 * The cape is the black cape with red feathers worn by the real queen when the latter interrupted Snow White and Prince Charming's wedding in "Pilot", "The Thing You Love Most" and "The New Neverland"; indicating that the serum queen found it when she moved into Regina's palace.


 * -|Goofs=

Goofs

 * Prince Neal was born in "Kansas", which takes place in 2013, when Henry was twelve. However, according to the Black Fairy, Henry is fourteen years old in this episode ("Now, thanks to you, I have a 14-year-old boy, who still believes in fairy tales"). By this time, Neal should be already a two-year old toddler, while he is still just a baby at this point of "The Final Battle Part 1", just like he has been for the entire season.
 * In addition, according to Archie Hopper's cursed memories, Emma has been at the mental institution for two years, while according to Emma's cursed memories, she's been there ever since Henry ate the poisoned apple turnover. However, this incident took place 28 years after the first curse began in 1983 (this is proven in an episode that takes place after "An Apple Red as Blood", "Queen of Hearts", where a title card states that the episode takes place 28 years after the casting of the curse), while Henry was still ten years old.


 * -|Other Notes=

Filming Locations

 * Hook and Charming's climb up the Beanstalk was filmed in a studio, against a blue-screen.
 * The scene where the Black Fairy pushed Henry down the stairs were filmed on a set at The Bridge Studios. The stairs were covered in green-screen material, which were digitally transformed into a real staircase during post-production.