The hippie and the hipster, Operation Hyacinth, some timeline inconsistencies and more in our full-discussion of the episode “The Girl in the Tower”!

This episode was so much better than last week. As long as we don’t talk about the timeline, “The Girl in the Tower” was so good. There wasn’t glaring problems with the timeline, but if Robin was 25 in these flashbacks, which is what she said when we first met her back when Regina went to get help from Zelena when Drizella first threatened them of the curse that is coming, that means that she is now 33 in the present day Hyperion Heights.

Furthermore, if it’s 8 years after this and this is 10 years after Henry left, which is 2 years after the present day that we saw last year, that means we’re 15-20 years in the future, so why are they still using their iPhones and why do walkie talkies even exist anymore? All of that pop culture reference was relevant both in the present day and the flashbacks. That being said, it was cute that Robin admitted she was a mean girl in Storybrooke. Maybe the curse was a little time travelly? After all, we still don’t know why Regina said that they can’t go to Storybrooke and can’t know they’re in Hyperion Heights. Time travelling was not unprecedented in the show, but there were some similarities in the way Zelena did hers back in season 3 and this curse.

You guys were talking about the inconsistencies in the aging of Nook in the latest episode of Once Upon a Time.

Here’s the inconsistency I see. Was “New Enchanted Forest” created by the wish in the last season of Once proper? Otherwise, how could Nook even exist to have Alice in the New Enchanted Forest since he didn’t exist until a few years ago on the timeline.

Not to mention that he was already old in the wish timeline, so he never existed as the young Nook until Tremain/Rapunzel used magic to make him young again.

That is, unless the wish rearranged ALL the timelines. Of course, that would actually explain the inconsistencies in the timelines. They were all retroactively changed by the wish in the last season of Once proper.

I’m sure what I just wrote doesn’t make sense, but it does to me…

Anyway, love the show!

— Chuck

We’ve had some discussion around this before and, at the very least, we decided that it must be that when the Wish Realm was created, it was created with an actual real history as far back as any other realm; they have a shared the same history but it just split so at the moment it was changed like the Charmings defeating the Evil Queen, that’s where the timelines diverged and they have a common history up to that point.

As with Nook’s timeline, it still works so he would’ve been the same age in the Wish Realm as he was when we first met him in the series in season 2. So when that never happened, their history just continued but it’s been long enough for Henry to age, go out of his bike and meet Cinderella. But that’s also really the crucial part, the assumption that the realm was created with a history rather than coming to existence at the moment Emma arrived there. Otherwise, since Alice is technically a child, at least partially, of the Wish Realm, she couldn’t exist. However, if it has a history and Nook was able to travel to other realms, who knows what effect on other timelines it would have and should have had. It clearly had an effect on assuming another realm is different than the Wish Realm.

Hunting the Big Friendly Giant

One thing that they did stick to is Alice mentioning she had ...