When Ingrid first arrived in our world, she ran across a psychic who ended up being a fraud. Ingrid decided punishment would be appropriate, but quickly learned that her powers did not work here. She found a place to wait for Emma, and started a Foster home so as to be ready for her. She doesn’t seem to have aged a bit.
Eventually, Emma ends up at her house and Ingrid gives her all the special treatment and attention she could possibly want. She even takes her to a boardwalk, just the two of them, where she tells Emma she wants to adopt her, as a big sister. They were playing a claw machine game when Ingrid suggested that Emma focus on what she wants and make it happen. Emma focused on the claw, the electricity flickered, and she got the stuffed animal. It was enough to make Ingrid think Emma was ready to discover her powers, but she went about it the wrong way.
Ingrid remembered that her powers were revealed to her in the midst of a traumatic experience, and so thought Emma would also find hers in a traumatic moment. She decides to put Emma in a dangerous and frightening situation in hopes of forcing her to use her powers to save herself. She grabs Emma by the hand and runs in front of a car with her. She yells at Emma to make the car stop, but Emma gets away from Ingrid and thinks she’s crazy.
After that, Ingrid uses the scroll from the sorcerer’s apprentice to open a doorway to the place where she will find Emma. She ends up in, you guessed it, Storybrooke. It turns out that Emma ran into Ingrid when she first arrived with Henry. She was shocked that Ingrid had not aged a day, and then accused her of stalking. When she decided to call Graham, Ingrid took her memories.
Snow and Charming have it out at the Sherif’s station. She calls him a fraud and he calls her a spoiled brat, so on, and so forth. Kristoff is being a jerk, so Anna steps into the other room and tells Elsa and Emma that the Snow Queen got the idea for the shattered sight spell from a book. The only way to break the spell was to kill the one who cast it. Elsa and Emma decide to confront Ingrid, and leave Prince Neal with a protesting Anna.
When Elsa and Emma try to confront Ingrid, their powers don’t work, but the ribbons glow. They realize that the love in the ribbons is preventing them from harming her. Ingrid confirms their suspicions and tells them the love within the ribbons is equal to none. This leads Emma to the idea of counteracting Ingrid’s excess love with excess hate. There’s only one person who can hate that much, evil Regina.
Emma decides to release Regina from her vault and taunt her into a hate filled attack. It worked! When she told Regina she wanted to destroy her happiness by bringing Marian back and gloat in front of her with Hook, Regina sent a fireball that burned the ribbons right off their wrists. It was a great plan, except now evil Regina is loose.
Hook checks in with Rumple, who tells him that he must get Henry and bring him to the town line to meet up with Rumple and Belle. So, Hook goes off to find Henry. Meanwhile, Regina attempts to follow Emma by going to the Sherif’s station. Instead of Emma, she finds Snow, Charming, Kristoff, Anna, and Prince Neal. Her new plan for revenge is to take Snow’s baby, but Anna tries to reason with her. Irritated with Anna’s commentary, she sends her and Kristoff back to where they came from. You might think they went back to Arrendale, but she really just poofed them to the trunk on the beach. Kristoff is angry and decides he’s going back to Arrendale even if he has to swim there. As he begins taking of his shoes, Anna knocks him out with a bottle she found in the sand. It turns out to be her mother’s message. As she reads it, Anna realizes how important it is that Elsa receive the letter, so she hurries off to find her, leaving Kristoff laying on the beach unconscious.
In the Sherif’s station, Regina and Snow decide to fight “man to man,” without magic. Instead, Regina conjures up two swords for them to use. At one point, Regina gets distracted by the fact that Prince Neal has managed to sleep through the entire event. When she comments on what a good sleeper he is, Snow flips out, screaming at her to not wake her baby. It is a hilarious moment for anyone who has had the pleasure of calming an infant stirred from his or her sleep!
Hook finds Henry, but Henry gets away. Various townspeople are attacking or at least antagonizing each other, while Emma and Elsa go to Ingrid’s ice cave. At first she is upset to see the ribbons are gone, but then she says it doesn’t matter. It just so happens that she has their missing memories (they look like purple rocks), and they are of times when they loved her. They know they only way to stop her is to kill her, but she calls their bluff, they don’t have it in them. Anna shows up, claims Elsa as hers not Ingrid’s and tells Elsa she found the message from their mother. She insists on reading it aloud so they all can hear it. It turns out Gerda was sorry she called Ingrid a monster and imprisoned her in the urn. In fact, she really did love Ingrid and she had a purple memory stone of her own containing all of Arrendale’s memories of Ingrid and Helga.
At first Ingrid was infuriated, calling Anna a liar. She grabbed the message and read it for herself. An act that caused her to remember her sisters lovingly, and she fell to floor crying. Maybe she became so evil because she lost her part of her memories too. She looks up at Elsa, Anna, and Emma and realizing what she’s done, decides to undo it. Of course, that means destroying herself, so the noble three try to tell her they’ll find another way. Emma is concerned, because she feels like Ingrid deserves her happy ending too. Ingrid reminds Emma that the scroll said she’d lead her to a happy ending, and insists that’s what this is. Although it does not seem that way, Ingrid tells them that all she wanted was her sister’s love and now she has it. Now she can to join them. She apparently draws the spell back into herself, vanishing. We then see her as a child running with her sisters in the field like the day they found the kite.
Elsa tells Anna that they must carry out their mother’s final wish to bring the memories back to Arrendale. When Regina and the Charmings come to, Regina looks at herself in her evil Queen garb and wonders what she’s wearing. They all laugh about it. Hook returns to Rumple sans Henry. According to Rumple, everyone is a failure but himself. He’s still planning on leaving, and Hook has but one day to live.