You're listening to Once, episode 219, Birth and the Bear King, Initial Reactions.

Music Welcome back to another episode of Once, the unofficial podcast for ABC's TV show Once Upon a Time.

I'm Daniel J. Lewis. I'm Jeremy Loughlin.

And we just finished watching these two episodes for the price of one, birth and the Bear King.

Keep in mind that one of the reasons they put these two episodes together is because there's

no episode on Sunday, November 22nd. That is when they have the American Music Awards. So that will take the

place of Once Upon a Time. But once upon a time, we'll be back on Sunday, November 29th. So we got to

see next week's episode and this week's episode on the same night. But these two episodes

were clearly separate episodes. It wasn't like a part one,

part two thing. If it were up to me, they would have shown two episodes last week and ended with that

rather epic first episode and then just shown the second episode this week. Or played it in the other

order, played the episode birth after the episode The Bear King, because I think birth was a much

better episode. Yeah, there are some things that are really weird and some things are a little

crazy. But I think that that was the

better episode of the two episodes tonight and certainly has more that we'll actually be talking

about in our initial reactions here in our upcoming full discussion. Yeah, I thought of showing

them in the opposite order, except then you wouldn't have had Arthur and Zelina running around three weeks ago.

That would have been the only thing, though, that was out of order.

Yeah, so we now know Arthur is the one who killed Fergus.

Which, thankfully, makes a much stronger tie to the Merida side of the Ark.

Right.

And explains a lot about how she ended up in Storybrook.

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