Once Upon A Time’s Kitsis & Horowitz Talk Romantic Challenges & More Scoop

Because of the Oscars airing this Sunday, ABC’s Once Upon A Time doesn’t return with new episodes until Sunday, March 5… but if you can’t wait that long, here are some details to tide you over!

KSiteTV’s Craig Byrne attended a journalist Q&A with Executive Producers Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis this morning, and you’ll surely be reading about it here and on several other media outlets. We’ll also have some more details here in within the next 11 days, before the show returns. But first… you all want some scoop… right? So what is coming next?

When Once left off, it appeared that David’s wife Kathryn disappeared in Storybrooke, and Horowitz promises that it’s a mystery that will be resolved this season. The disappearance will put yet another challenge to the romance between David and Mary-Margaret, who, of course, are Prince Charming and Snow White in the fairy tale world.

“David and Mary-Margaret are really fighting a curse to be together, and this is just another element in that,” Horowitz says. Kitsis adds that this challenge “will definitely test them.” But for the Charmers who want to see more of Charming and Snow, will there be any luck?

“We do have a plan for them,” Adam Horowitz says. “We are building to something this season with them, that we’re excited to share with you, just not today, but yeah, there is a plan and there is a definite build that we’re trying to do, and we hope people enjoy where we take them.”

“The whole idea of the show is that Storybrooke is cursed, and therefore, the love is so strong, it keeps pulling them together no matter how hard we try to keep them apart, but of course the curse has to keep them apart,” Edward Kitsis adds. “One of our favorite things is the fact that I love that the audience is mad that David cheated. But he’s married to Snow White! And in Storybrooke, he has all of this guilt of cheating on Kathryn, but the truth is, that’s the curse,” he says.

“Is he cheating on Snow White by being with Kathryn?” Adam asks. “There’s a complexity that we’re trying to build with with these relationships, and making nothing easy for our characters, so that when they do achieve the things they want to achieve, it’s all the more satisfying, hopefully.”

Other scoops to come out of the Q&A:

– “What we saw August doing with putting the pages in the [Once Upon A Time fairy tale] book is kind of the first step in pulling back the onion on who this guy is and what his agenda in Storybrooke is,” Adam said about the “mysterious stranger” August, adding that August’s goal will be known “very shortly.” As for the book itself, Kitsis tells us “who wrote it and those questions will be more for Season 2.”

– Episode 16 takes place after Snow has lost her memories; a sequence in 15 takes place *before* then.

– In Episode 17, Sebastian Stan will play the Mad Hatter, and we’ll see how the Mad Hatter became mad. The caterpillar will be played by Roger Daltrey of The Who. “We kind of do our Once twist on it,” Adam says.

– Episode 18, we’ll see why the Evil Queen hates Snow White so much. Barbara Hershey guest stars.

– We’ll be learning more about the backstory of Rumplestiltskin and his son in Episode 19.

– The producers would like to have Jamie Dornan back to the series, but it is all dependent on scheduling.

Stay tuned for more Once material as we get closer to March 5! To see a gallery of images from the episode, go here, and be sure to visit KSiteTV’s Once Upon A Time forum!