Did Cruella Really Meet Her 'OUAT' End?

Things are getting truly dark and deadly in Storybrooke on OUAT Season 4. On Sunday night's "Sympathy for the De Vil," the series threatened four important characters' lives and seemingly ended one of them. But, really, after the return of the Wicked Witch, does anyone really believe that Emma killed Cruella on Once Upon a Time ? The new episode dove deep into Cruella's back story and why she wanted The Author to be killed and ended with a huge reveal and Emma — everyone's Savior and beacon of good — pushing the villain off a cliff and, if Rumple's plan is falling into place, becoming evil for the rest of Season 4.

This is all well and good and it'll surely make things interesting if Emma's gone to the dark side, but we really need to pay close attention to the final moments of "Sympathy for the Dev Vil" and the important information Cruella might still be holding. It seems extremely suspicious to me that we saw Cruella's body after the fall — if she really died here, OUAT probably would've made the bottom of that drop so deep and misty that we wouldn't have seen Cruella's body. Honestly, it doesn't seem like she fell that far, which leaves open the possibility that Cruella was just knocked out on that cliff face and she'll be awake by next week's episode or, at the very least, at some point in the future.

Does that seem optimistic? Well, it shouldn't. Sure, we got some closure on Cruella's story through The Author's memories of her past, but bringing people back from the dead is something that OUAT has really run. So far, the series has brought back Cora, Rumple, and Zelena and that's just naming a handful. Earlier this season the series killed off The Snow Queen by having her explode into millions of pieces — Sunday night's death just doesn't seem like enough. OUAT deaths are dramatic and that last look at Cruella would be more brutal than anything the series has done thus far, it's just not the Storybrooke style to go there. We shouldn't count Cruella's return out of the cards for the drama that's about to come to Storybrooke. No one stays dead for long on this series anymore, after all.

Image: Jack Rowand/ABC