Season 1, Episode 4
Date of airing: December 4, 2016 (DR1)
Written by: Klaus Rasmussen
Directed by: Lars Kaalund
”Snow White, I welcome you! We have been looking for quite some time for someone to clean up this place and do the dishes.”
This episode managed to do with a low budget what Disney couldn't do with more than $200 million: cast little people to play the seven dwarves. And judging by the names of the actors who play the dwarves, three of them are women (Ann Smith, who plays Karl; Tina Quist Nernegård, who plays Ekhard; Sigrid Houseland, who plays Heinz), making it extra spicy to watch, and possibly even pushing this show more towards a theatrical experience. On stage, it's quite normal for actors to play characters of the opposite gender. DEN ANDEN VERDEN deals with a theater play, so it would only be logical that it would employ the same casting process when dealing with a narrative that could be construed as a theater play. And in a way, Sara's trip into the fairytale world could be set up as a version of her real-life, dreamy stage play in which she has the starring role – but unlike THE WIZARD OF OZ, where Dorothy dreamt up a fairytale world, the roles in it are not played by people she knows in real life.
That is why I was surprised to see that the Prince was not played by Janus in Sara's fairytale world, something I was expecting, since it would add to the story of Sarah's unrequited love for Janus, using her fairytale world as a way to cope with the real-life rejection. No, the characters over there are played by different actors, all of them strangers to Sara, continuing to suggest (together with the tree needle she found in her hair at the end) that her fairytale world might not be a dream after all, and may in fact be a real occurrence of something fantastical, supernatural going on.
I was also not expecting Sara to wake up from her post-accident slumber before the episode ended. She didn't even spend an entire episode's worth of time in that world. Not enough to fully establish it, but seemingly enough to immediately impress her and make her wish that she didn't have to go. Which is weird, considering the Evil Queen's Huntsman was hunting her down in the woods and almost stabbed her to death – I would think that's a situation terrifying enough for Sara to convince her to get out of this world and wake up again. But no, she was digging all of it. Including half a day's worth of “slavery” for the dwarves by cleaning up all their crap. Sara is not a normal girl...
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| Sara is either sleeping or living in a fairytale adventure. |
