10th Anniversary Cinderella

Spoilers for Grimm Fairy Tales’ 10th Anniversary Cinderella special. This version of Cinderella has a lot going on, and the anniversary special gets into some of the messier parts of her life. She's already dealing with Malec's death when someone starts going after the people connected to her. The Dark Horde needs somebody to take over. Cindy doesn't want the job. She's grieving, she's angry, and being responsible for everybody else is pretty much the last thing she wants to deal with. Then we see what her home life looks like, which is about what you'd expect from this Cinderella. Her stepmother and stepsisters are doing the chores while her mice keep them in line. She's basically put them in the position they used to keep her in, and as far as she's concerned, they're getting a chance to make up for how they treated her. But somebody comes after all of them. Her godmother is taken into a magical book. Her mice are attacked. Her stepfamily is kidnapped. Cindy gets back in time to hold Max as he dies, and that scene shows how much those relationships still matter to her, underneath all the threats and jokes. She checks the security footage, recognizes the book, and goes straight to Sela and Belinda for answers. That's where this connects to the Binders. Each realm has one, and their job is to collect its important stories. When one dies, another takes their place. The man coming after Cindy is a new Binder. The earlier one had already become corrupted by what the book could do, and this replacement is going after people connected to Cindy so he can get to her too. Cindy gets the explanation and immediately decides she's going to handle it herself. She even uses a fake grenade to keep Sela and Belinda from stopping her. They're trying to tell her how dangerous this is, and she's already on her way out. The Binder then tries to use Malec against her. He puts somebody in front of her who looks like the man she's grieving and offers her the possibility of having him back. For a moment, she gets close to him. Then she attacks, and the body on the floor turns out to be somebody else. That could have been an easy way to control her. She misses Malec, but she still sees through what this man is doing. She tells him she's never going to belong to anybody again. The part with her stepmother is another thing worth talking about. When Cindy is overwhelmed by the Binder's birds, her stepmother actually intervenes to protect her. The Binder kills her for it. Cindy attacks him, but he eventually escapes on his dragon. So there's no big, happy family reunion where everybody apologizes and suddenly gets along. Cindy looks down at her stepmother and says she guesses that makes them even. After everything between them, that's the goodbye she can give her. She takes her surviving stepsisters back to the Horde and puts them to work with buckets and mops. She's still Cindy. But she also makes it very clear that nobody is allowed to hurt them. By the end, the Horde is calling her the boss. She started the issue refusing to take responsibility for them, and now she's giving orders and deciding who is under her protection. There's something interesting about that combination. She can care about people and still be cruel to them. She can want her family back and still want them cleaning up after her. The issue lets all of that sit together instead of making her suddenly become a completely different person because she lost somebody.