The story of Alice’s struggle for love in this new world continues with episode 106 of Once Upon A Time in Wonderland, “Who’s Alice”.

Flashbacks in this episode showed us where Alice went after she lost Cyrus and before she joined Bethlem Royal Hospital (fun fact: this is based on a real asylum in London, the oldest in the world). Alice went home where she found her father’s new family: his new wife, Sarah, and his new daughter, Millie. Of course that her father continues not believing Alice but, let’s be fair, who would? He could obviously try a lot harder to understand what his daughter went through, but his new wife definitely doesn’t help by forcing Alice to meet someone else. It was never to expect that Sarah would try to understand Alice’s situation, that is more Edwin’s job, but it would have definitely been nice to see him stand up to her. I think he wasn’t really a fan of the idea of forcing Alice to marry, and that he was hoping he didn’t have to pick a side between his daughter and his wife, but when it comes to family you can’t not take sides. Realizing that ultimately her father took Sarah’s side, Alice preferred to go to the asylum than marry some dude. I wonder if these parents (specially Sarah) would make the same choices and demands if this whole thing was about Millie instead of Alice. Maybe. But maybe not.

Present day begins after Alice found the location of Jafar’s tower, and now she is headed that way. Right in the first few scenes we see her kick the ass of 2 men, and it was really funny when they found Will and said that Alice attacked them while they were sleeping. We are all like “yeah, right”, including Will. Jafar definitely made an amazing prison: very hard to escape, since we learn that the tower is in a floating island, and also hard to get rescued, since you have to cross the Black Forest to do so. This forest definitely stood up to its name, because everything was literally black. Most people in Wonderland didn’t know this, but the reason why no one returned wasn’t because of this first part, but because of the second: Borogrove. Here we meet the creepiest man ever who apparently goes by the name Carpenter. The reason why very few people leave is because this place makes you want to stay there forever. But not all is lost because Will comes to Alice’s rescue. But even after that, things decline because Alice doesn’t remember anything, so Will makes her remember by using Cyrus’ neckless, proving once again that love is the most powerful magic of all.

Sometimes things are left unexplained, and that sucks real badly, but it is great that they explained why Borogrove didn’t affect Will: because he doesn’t have his heart. I think this makes sense because it makes you want to stay by giving you happiness (not real happiness, but happiness nevertheless), and since he doesn’t have his heart he can’t feel anything, neither real nor fake. It was also nice seeing Alice happy, even if it wasn’t real happiness and it was only for a short while. She is on a quest for love and that will probably only lead to one of the two: heartbreak, or a happy ending (or happy beginning if you prefer). Since happy endings are hard to come by, at least we managed to see her smile, just in case she doesn’t succeed.

At the same time, we see Cyrus also meaning to find Alice, while on the run from Jafar’s guards and the Red Queen. It was nice seeing the Queen here. She has the bottle and if she finds Cyrus, then Jafar can’t continue underestimating her. The writers are definitely well developing her character, and I like her more and more every episode. But her efforts are worthless, because when Cyrus is caught between Anastasia and a cliff, he literally takes a leap of faith.

This episode was nice, but I feel like it was more of a filler episode, because nothing much happened that affected the major storyline. This was a little bit of a step back in the season, so I will give it a 7.6.

I will be back soon with my next review of episode 107, “Bad Blood”, in which blood ties will become a burden.