6 Things to Know for the Return of Once Upon a Time 

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6 Things to Know for the Return of Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time returns this Sunday and from the previews we’ve seen, it’s going to be one villainous season. With Gold teaming up with the Queens of Darkness, Maleficent, Ursula and Cruella De Vil, we have a feeling the town of Storybrooke won’t be without evil for long.

Recently, we had the chance to attend a Q&A with Once Upon a Time creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz where they revealed some interesting insight into what fans can look forward to on this half of the season (please note: there are spoilers ahead if you are not caught up on the show).

A long running joke on the series is that Storybrooke is far behind when it comes to technological developments. In the previews we saw, dial up internet and “You’ve Got Mail” notices are just a few of the nods to the past that Kitsis and Horowitz put it and it’s all very intentional.  “Storybrooke to us is timeless and so we always wanted it in that weird sort of Wes Anderson space,” said Kitsis. “When we created the show, we never wanted to look back… and go ‘Oh my god that’s so 2010.’ There are bits and pieces here and there, but for us we always wanted Storybrooke to be timeless.”

We will find out about who the author is this season.

In the first half of this season, fans have watched Regina and Henry devise “Operation Mongoose,” in the hopes of rewriting Regina’s story into a happier one. The search had been fruitless until Henry found empty storybooks inside the sorcerer’s mansion in the last episode. We’ve been left wondering what the connection is between the sorcerer and the author and Kitsis and Horowitz promised all will be revealed soon. “What’s going on with the sorcerer and the author is something that should hopefully be clear pretty quickly,” said Horowitz.

“I will say in this second half that question will be answered. And as well as we will meet the author,” added Kitsis.

While Disney fans are quite used to having characters be reimagined in the Once Upon a Time world, Cruella de Vil’s new backstory is a clever update to the villain we know and love. “We just thought when we reimagined Cruella, we kind of wanted her to be Zelda Fitzgerald,” explained Kitsis. “We wanted her to be more jazz age than ‘50s England, and we thought she should have a power so that she feels a part of the show. And we loved the idea that she can speak to animals, not like Dr. Doolittle, but in a more cruel way. And her backstory is coming up towards the middle of the second half and that’s probably our favorite one.”

“The origin of that power, and why she is the way that she is in our version is coming up soon,” added Horowitz.

Belle and Will Scarlett have more in common than we realized.

When Belle banished Gold from Storybrooke, fans were left wondering what would happen to their complicated relationship. It seems though that Belle may have already found someone new by the time this season starts. Will Scarlett, (aka the Knave of Hearts) might have broken into the library one time much to Belle’s dismay, it seems that these two will be getting closer in the new season.

“They both fell in love with villains. They both hoped that these villains would be redeemed,” said Kitsis. “(Will Scarlett) fell in love with the Red Queen and she changed and he saw the woman beneath the monster, and that’s the same with Belle.”

Snow White and Charming have always been the definition of good in

Once Upon a Time. It turns out though that these two have been holding on to a secret from season one that is in jeopardy of being revealed. “It’s a tricky needle to thread sometimes (going back to the first season)…that’s kind of the tip of the iceberg of the secret. Our hope is that by the time everything is kind of revealed, it really informs who they were in season one when you met them,” said Horowitz.

One of the main themes of this half of the season will be exploring the notions of good and evil.

The theme of the first half of season four was never giving up on the ones you love. For this half of the season though, Horowitz and Kitsis wanted to explore the label of what it means to be a hero or a villain.  “For the last number of seasons, we’ve seen a lot of our villains like Regina and Gold go on a redemption arc. We’ve seen them start really bad and try to fight those urges and be their better selves to varying degrees of success. What we wanted to do is explore that idea with our heroes as well. We think we’ve seeded things in throughout the show that it’s not been just clearly black and white with them,” noted Horowitz.

“For us, what we really wanted to explore is if you’ve done a bad thing, can you come back from that? Can you become the person you want to be, even if you didn’t start out that way and vice versa? And what makes a hero and what makes a villain is a point of view and that to us was really interesting as opposed to just black and white,” said Kitsis.

All will begin to be revealed as Once Upon a Time returns Sunday, March 1 (8:00-9:00 p.m., ET) on ABC.

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