What if they’re not actually undoing their own timeline but undoing something Zelena did before they even got back to the EF in 3×11? Zelena is pretty powerful in her own right and maybe when Regina was undoing her own curse, Z was able to set her own plan in motion, in effect giving them the WRONG timeline in the first place so she could enact her actual plan. It’s way farfetched but these are the guys who worked on Lost. In this scenario, them defeating her and righting the story would actually put them back on their RIGHT timeline and then Neal would live since he wasn’t supposed to die in the first place. I don’t know. That’s probably reaching but it could happen (dude, these guys made a BABY have magical powers in this last episode….anything is possible at this point) and it would actually explain why this season feels so manic and different compared to the other ones. We’ve all talked about how this is the season of misdirection….this is one way that this could actually be explained. Meh, this is a total crack theory for sure so why am I even writing it down, LOL 😉
So…they’re undoing what Zelena undid in order to get back t Timeline A, which is the proper and correct timeline.
Well. That’s LOST S5 in a nutshell.
BTW-I don’t think it was MRJ who wanted to leave the show. I think ABC wanted MRJ to leave the show and stuck their noses into Once and made sure they did something about it. No actor in the world asks to leave a steady show when that actor hasn’t really had a lot of longer term acting gigs over the years. By all accounts this cast was right as rain during the NL arc (pics, tweets, snarky comments back and forth, etc) and then suddenly things changed and the main cast started acting odd before most of them stopped tweeting about the show all together.
There was something off about hiatus. The pics from Ginny weren’t of the casting having fun but rather almost episode stills. Hardly anyone tweeted about their day. Almost no one was tweeting each other. #TeamGG has pretty much monopolized Ginny’s *entire* feed (and does a poor job of it, if you ask me. Honestly…the EXAMINER?!)