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What Happened To the Snow Queen's Other Sister?

by Christine DiStasio

The Frozen family just keep growing — even though there's no Olaf in sight. On Sunday night, Once Upon A Time doled out a huge dose of Snow Queen realness and basically proved all of our theories about Season 4's new evil wrong. During "Family Business," Once Upon A Time revealed the Snow Queen's history and exactly what her plan is — oh, and by the way, the Snow Queen is actually Elsa's aunt and her real name is Ingrid. While I have plenty of questions as to how and why this woman ended up on this creepy quest to create the "perfect family," OUAT introduced an even bigger question on Sunday night: Who is The Snow Queen's sister Helga and what happened to her?

Here's the deal — sometime in the distant Arendelle past, Helga and Ingrid (this will be how we discuss the Snow Queen from now on) "disappeared" and the rock trolls erased the entire kingdom's memory of the two sisters that didn't become queens. That's some heavy, dark family drama, which is really saying something, considering how dark and twisted Rumplestiltskin's relationship with his father, Peter Pan, turned out to be in Season 3. Sunday night's episode of OUAT was enlightening, even if it didn't detail the reason why and where Ingrid and Helga went when they "disappeared." In a flashback with Anna, it became clear that Ingrid and Helga's "disappearance" is the reason why Ingrid is so paranoid about people not accepting her for who she is.

Which is all well and good, as it's nice to learn about the roots of every OUAT character's issues. But now the series has introduced yet another former Arendelle resident that's on the missing persons list. What exactly happened to Helga? Why did these two disappear? And where could she possibly be now? Judging by Ingrid's reaction when Anna asked her about what happened to Helga (she made a comment about some secrets being better off buried), it seems reasonable to believe that Helga died. But how exactly it happened is another question entirely.

Ingrid's answer didn't give much away, but if Helga died, there are two possible ways it could've happened. First, going off of what we know from Frozen, Ingrid might've killed her by accident — which would've explained why she was locked in the urn and was aware of the Sorcerer's hat. Much like Elsa in Frozen, Ingrid's powers grew stronger as she aged and one day, totally by accident, she might've struck Helga and killed her. It's a gruesome and dark assumption, but it's entirely possible and would be an excellent explanation as to why Ingrid was locked in the urn — to protect the Queen of Arendelle's safety as a "normal" heir to the throne.

The other possible situation is that Helga died while trying to escape being captured. What if Helga also had the same icy powers as Elsa and Ingrid? It's possible that, like Elsa in Frozen, she tried to escape from Arendelle where people feared her, but she wasn't so lucky when it came time to fight for her life. Maybe something went wrong with her powers or maybe she died at the hand of some soldier or townsperson. But that would be another likely reason why Ingrid would feel the way she does about the world, especially if Helga and Ingrid were trying to escape together and Helga tried to protect her sister and ended up dying in the process.

Once Upon A Time has officially reached that dark place with its Frozen storyline. I mean, it's also possible that Helga is just missing and imprisoned somewhere else and I'm just really jumping on the idea of OUAT death. It just really seems like Helga's gone for good — especially since Ingrid wants to replace her with Emma in her "perfect family."

Image: Jack Rowand/ABC