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"Season two of ABC&amp;#039;s fantastical drama has been very enjoyable up until this point, so it&amp;#039;s a shame that &amp;#039;The Doctor&amp;#039; is the first to disappoint. It&amp;#039;s comfortably the weakest episode for a long while, with too many plot threads to do any of them real justice and a letdown of an origin story. Regina is back on our screens, as she struggles with giving up magic. Things get a bit interesting when her dead fianc\u00E9 Daniel is back.   I liked Daniel, and I like Noah Bean. I also thought &amp;#039;The Stable Boy&amp;#039; was one of Regina&amp;#039;s strongest episodes to date. But Bean&amp;#039;s return lacked the emotional punch I imagine the writers were going for. Daniel, resurrected by Dr Whale, has turned into a mindless monster. Regina tries to talk him down, but although Daniel regains his sanity for a brief moment, the Evil Queen is forced to destroy him with magic. There are a few problems with all of this, the first and foremost being it&amp;#039;s too rushed. As a result of several storylines being crammed into one hour (Daniel, Regina&amp;#039;s magic, flashback Regina, Whale&amp;#039;s origin story and present day Enchanted Forest), the A-plot isn&amp;#039;t given an opportunity to develop at its own pace. This storyline would have benefited from a few more scenes to show the stakes and what the resurrection means to Regina - and maybe even touch on the morality of Whale&amp;#039;s actions and what Daniel has become (there was a bare-bones attempt at that when Regina reached out to Daniel). But it ends up being very simple: Daniel must be taken care of. The end.   And so when Regina said goodbye to Daniel for good, it felt like that moment wasn&amp;#039;t really earned. Daniel should have stayed gone. On the plus side, it&amp;#039;s nice that Regina appears to be finding closure (what&amp;#039;s dead is dead, leave the past behind and so forth). The Daniel plot lends itself the chance to explore Whale&amp;#039;s origins - as Dr Frankenstein. It&amp;#039;s a bit of a weird one, because his scenes are tonally different from the rest of the episode. Frankenstein himself is an interesting but odd addition; he doesn&amp;#039;t fit the mould at all for a Once character, with his focus on science (which is addressed, at least) and darker background. In Enchanted Forest flashbacks, Regina goes to Frankenstein for help to bring Daniel back. The doctor fails to reanimate the corpse, but deliberately so. It turns out that he struck a deal with Rumpelstiltskin to push Regina towards being the Evil Queen. She even rips out a poor apprentice&amp;#039;s heart in front of Rumpelstiltskin to show she means business - Rumpelstiltskin&amp;#039;s very own monster. There&amp;#039;s a bit of a science vs magic argument between Frankenstein and Rumpelstiltskin but it too suffers from being underdeveloped.   There had to be good justification to bring an out-there character like Frankenstein into this world, and the writers were going somewhere with the potentially interesting debate. But this is sidelined (it was given two scenes - Frankenstein insisting science is better, and then admitting he needs magic), and I&amp;#039;m not sure if it was all worth it. I did enjoy Jefferson, though. The Mad Hatter is a great, underused character, so the more of him the better. Present day Enchanted Forest sees Emma, Mary Margaret, Mulan and Aurora return to camp only to find that Cora&amp;#039;s killed everyone except one survivor. I&amp;#039;m glad that Hook&amp;#039;s deception was addressed immediately - he was surprisingly (and suspiciously) upfront about a lot of things, including wanting revenge on Rumpelstiltskin - and the beanstalk tease has me looking forward to what looks like a &amp;#039;Jack and the Beanstalk&amp;#039; episode next week. Hook remains a fun character to watch, and it&amp;#039;s nice that the group&amp;#039;s quest to find a way back to Storybrooke is picking up steam again with a clear objective in mind. Previous episodes such as &amp;#039;We Are Both&amp;#039; and last week&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;The Crocodile&amp;#039; have been sensibly restrained, but &amp;#039;The Doctor&amp;#039; comes across as a bit of a mess, guilty of trying a little too hard. It&amp;#039;s admittedly not Once&amp;#039;s finest hour, and hopefully the writers can learn from this. Perhaps it&amp;#039;s worthwhile shunning entire ongoing storylines for an episode to devote more time to others.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/once-upon-a-time/review/a434071/once-upon-a-time-the-doctor-recap-not-magic-science/>