Welcome back to the dark side.

Acting on Snow’s request to go undercover and join the bad girl’s club, Regina pops into Granny’s to find her old gal pals Cruella, Maleficent and Ursula drinking up a storm. While the ladies are skeptical of the former evil queen’s motives, Regina assures them that she only cozied up to the heroes in order to survive. Maleficent  has a bit more faith in her friend, asking her, “Are you still a bad girl, Regina?” To that, Regina downed a shot in a single gulp, crushed the glass in her hand and replied, “The worst.” Oooh, she’s so good at being bad.

Before they’d completely let her back in the club however, the Queens of Darkness set out to test her to see if she really belonged. Test number one, which is the only one we really get to see, involved Cruella parking her car in front of an oncoming train. She told the other ladies in the vehicle that whoever saved them all first, would lose. Regina of course, poofed them all out of the way in the nick of time. Though she ended up playing the hero by saving them all, they admitted she was just a little rusty, and that none of them wanted to die.

Meanwhile, Snow and David finally decide its a good time to tell Emma what Regina’s been up to, of course without revealing why they put her up to it. As expected, Emma flies off the handle and freaks out. Later on, the Charmings meet up with Regina and question her about her night out with the girls. Though she isn’t sure what exactly they are planning as of yet, she knows it’s big and terribly bad. The deadly trio, on the other hand, do some reporting of their own. They inform Rumple that Regina is indeed looking for info but Rumple says that doesn’t matter because she is going to have to choose a side once the war they are cooking up begins.

Later, Maleficent shows up and lets Regina in on a little secret: they’re looking for the author, too. Instead of just having their happy endings rewritten, what they want is to shift the balance, and steal all the happy endings of the heroes instead. They desire a world where the heroes lose and the villains finally win. When Regina tells Emma about this, the blonde savior vows to stick by her side no matter what.

As Emma hides in the shadows, Maleficent and Regina hop into Cruella’s self driven car to go on a secret mission. They end up in front of Marco (Gepetto) the handyman’s home in search of something powerful. To really prove she hadn’t lost her darkness, Maleficent wants Regina to kidnap Pinocchio, which is a real test for the dedicated mother in her.

This is an interesting role reversal for the duo, as it is revealed in a series of flashbacks throughout the episode that it was a young Regina who helped Maleficent fall back into her fire breathing ways after she was beat by Briar Rose (Aurora’s mom). As soon as she gets her groove back, she heads straight for Aurora’s castle and forcefully pricks her finger on a needle, putting her under a sleeping curse. So basically, like many other events in Storybrooke, Regina was also responsible for everything that happened in Sleeping Beauty.

Meanwhile, Hook shows a lot of interest in Belle and Will Scarlet’s romance, and you can tell he and Belle’s new beau have a bone to pick. That however, is a story for another day. Hook pulls Belle aside to talk to her about the dagger. After telling her that he’s afraid the witches will find the Dark One’s dagger and use it for evil, she agrees that it would be a good idea to hide it better.

Belle leads Hook to where she hid the dagger, so he could use his pirate skills to hide it somewhere safe. Belle has second thoughts thinking that she should hold on to it for protection just in case. She has a strange feeling that Rumple is already back in town. To test her fears, Hook tells her if that if the dark one was in town, all she had to do is call him forth with the dagger and he would show up if he was near. When she saw that he didn’t show up, she breathed a sigh of relief and went back to her car, leaving Hook with the dagger. As she is pulling away, Hook transforms into Rumple. That explains his curiosity about Belle’s relationship with Will.

Later Hook shows up back in the shop to tell Belle that he hid the dagger and makes her swear she would never talk about the dagger plan again. He then questions her about whether her love for Will Scarlet is real. She replies it is new but admits that she could never move on from Rumple for good. When he leaves the shop, he turns back into Rumple.

In other news, after being brought back to Rumple’s cabin, Regina discovers that the dark one is the one behind everything and that he is back in town. Now with the dagger in hand, he reveals that he knew Pinocchio would never be able to answer questions about the author. So, the episode takes a surprise turn and Rumple brings back August! YES.

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Are you excited about August’s return? What do you think is going to happen now that Rumple has his dagger back? Let us know in the comments below.