42. There's No Place Like Home ... REALLY

So last night I got home, the house was still standing (please, neither my wife nor I nor our kids are that destructive) and dinner was whatever we chose to make for ourselves! I'm ok with that … got dinner for myself – a bowl of Frosted Flakes! – and we settled in to watch the season finale of Once Upon A Time which is named today's title. Minus the “ . . . REALLY”. You probably recognize the line as what Dorothy says when she clicks her heels and leaves Oz to return to Kansas.

Toward the end of the 1938 movie. That doesn't appear in the L. Frank Baum novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from 1900 – nor do the ruby slippers she clicked; they're Silver Shoes in the book – and reading the Barnes & Noble Classics edition (ISBN 9781593082215; including introduction, in-text notes, and contemporary criticisms of the book) brought out some points I hadn't seen or didn't remember before. The Scarecrow was only two days old when Dorothy met him?

A Star Trek: The Next Generation episode brought up a good point to me nearly twenty-five years ago. When the Enterprise second officer Data – the android – asks his “grandfather” Ira Graves (the guy who taught Noonien Soong who built Data) what he's whistling when he hears “If I Only Had A Heart”, Graves relates the story of the Tin Woodman who wanted a heart and believed the Wizard would give him one. Turns out based on his actions he had a heart all along, just not the fleshly kind.

Our big smart boy Jeffrey has got it at six that when people kiss they love each other and doesn't (say) he views it quite as icky any more. (The grandfather in The Princess Bride: When you get older you might not mind so much.) By the end of the OUAT episode – see paragraph one – Hook and Emma, Rumpelstiltskin and Belle on their wedding night, Robin Hood and Regina are all finding “wuv, twu wuv” and then comes Marian. Maid Marian, whom in the original time line got executed by Regina,

but due to a few events that got changed that needed to be changed back, something potentially more significant that Clayton Ravine in Hill Valley becoming Eastwood Ravine (see Back to the Future Part III) has happened; without the three decades of separation that Regina, Belle, Snow, Charming, and the others originally endured from the Enchanted Forest, it hasn't been that long for the Robin Hood family. More hearts will likely get ripped out in Season 4 starting this fall!

And if the Lord tarries, I expect we'll see them.

David