"Oh my gosh," Toby whisper-screamed, "they totally kissed!"

"What in the world are you talking about?"

"Draal and Nomura – when they were fighting! Their faces kind of smacked together and there was lip-to-lip contact! True Love's Kiss broke the mind-control spell!"

"That's a very drastic interpretation," Nomura protested. "For one thing, I think at least one party has to be kissing on purpose for it to count as a kiss, and for another, Draal and I–"

"Used to have a thing," said Jim. She'd told him about it, a little, when they were imprisoned together, and he'd been embarrassed to realize Draal had dropped repeated hints about it before that Jim had simply not picked up until Nomura spelled it out for him.

"Decades ago, and it started under false pretext, and it ended badly, and we've barely seen each other since." Nomura counted off her points with fingers on the tip of her sword.

"Um," said Draal. "This isn't exactly how I'd hoped to tell you, but, I do still have – feelings for you – Not that I think – I mean – I don't understand what kissing has to do with that. I mean, Jim told me what it means for humans and I've seen him do it with Claire and I know some Changelings do it – but I don't see how that could've reversed the Decimaar Blade's effects."

"I was taping the fight." Toby waved his phone around. "Lemme get this video onto my computer and we can go through it frame-by-frame. If Draal's eyes went back to normal when their mouths touched, it was True Love's Kiss. If not, I guess, maybe we'll see what really happened."

"It would've been Draal's first kiss, anyway," said Jim.


In the Grit-Shaka episode opener, Draal asks Jim to explain what kissing is, after Jim explains he's distracted in training because he's worried about kissing Claire in rehearsal for the school play. "When two people like each other, they put their mouths together, and depending on how much you like them, the longer the kiss. Sometimes for hours." Draal thinks Jim's description of kissing is "disgusting - killing sounds easier." In fairness to Draal, Blinky mentioned a few episodes earlier that trolls consider oral hygiene a foreign concept. Draal later sees Barbara and Strickler kissing, so he knows that some Changelings do it, but when Jim and Nomura were rescued from the Darklands and Jim and Claire have a reunion kiss, Draal shudders and describes it as "a savage custom" and Nomura agrees; "Absolutely."

I do not actually expect kissing to be the key to break Gunmar's brainwashing, but who knows? Kisses have been plot-significant to the show in the past, and whether someone's been kissed before or not has even been canonically relevant to the effectiveness of magic.

I do expect Season 3 to have a scene where Draal and Nomura fight in Jim's backyard, in a parallel to the episode where Draal moved into Jim's basement. We'll see on Friday, when the season is released on Netflix.

Post-S3 Edit: Well, I was wrong about how a lot of things were going to get resolved, but I like my version better.