Reply To: Emma + Baelfire = Swanfire

Slurpeez said –

This is the single best explanation I’ve read yet about why Emma is acting the way she is, and it totally makes sense of why Emma couldn’t see the storybook!

I think your point about the storybook is really excellent.  I had interpreted that scene as the storybook not appearing for Emma, because it only appears for Mary Margaret, but it would definitely make more sense that it was there and Emma did not see it.  The thing is fueled by hope, faith, and belief in happy endings.  It’s pretty hard to be hopeful, or have belief in a happy ending when yours died in your lap days prior.

One of the things that I think is really interesting about this season is that we’ve spent a LOT of it examining Emma’s reactions to lack of Neal.  The season opens with her thinking he’s dead; we go four or five episodes before she has the possibility he’s not.  There was reference long ago to the fact that we see her doing pullups on the Jolly Roger – she never SAYS a word about not being able to hold onto his hand over the portal, but they did SHOW it.  We see her talk to her parents about how pissed she is – not at HIM but the situation.  Then she reacts to him being alive; with her normal Emma confliction of feelings.  Thankfully Neal is pretty awesome and is totally cool with it.  😉  They never REALLY get the chance to deal with what life would look like if he’s alive, and there’s a chance – we got a hot minute of it with the “moments” scene with Charming but then the curse got repealed and he’s gone again.  We DO see him have genuine sorrow for him that he has to go “back there,” so clearly she understands that piece of his story and has sympathy for him.

We go into the year break, and Emma gets another year of “Neal is the scum who left me alone, pregnant and in prison.”  When she comes out of that via memory potion, I think the flashes that are shown are really telling – I have a list around here somewhere, maybe I’ll type it up this afternoon.  Then we launch into 312-315, where she’s all, “Where’s Neal?  Where’s Neal?”  Her line, “Not the first time I’ve dated a flying monkey” is peculiar, too… is she currently dating him?  LOL.  Anyways, she tries to play it cool, but my roomie LOVES to make fun of Emma during this time period – to her, as a GA viewer, Emma was really transparent in her worry.  (Which is funny, because she really didn’t ask for him THAT many times.)  What is Emma’s mindset during this period?  You have to think, what was she planning to say to him when she finally saw him?  How was she viewing their relationship?  I have to think that there was a shift during that week, because their scene in the woods had an ease and light to it that we hadn’t really seen in their prior scenes.  It wasn’t quite the lightness of ten-years-prior “Tallahassee,” but they fell into a VERY easy routine and she didn’t fight it.  And then – to paraphrase her own words – she had him back for the briefest of moments before she lost him once more.

We’ve had the opportunity to see Emma in every stage of possibility with Neal this season, and I have to think that’s for a reason.  More importantly, EMMA has had that opportunity.  Which is better?  We examined this in Echo Cave, where it might have been better to lose him than deal with things, but is it, really?  Is it better to life in that place of misunderstanding she was in NY where he was scum, or deal with the understanding in Storybrooke of why he left, and that she understands with her head, but in her heart, it still hurts?

Unfortunately, if this is what they are trying to tell, I think A&E give the audience a little too much credit for reading into these things.  Obviously they transmit through to a certain, subconscious degree – it’s why I’m here, why I was inexplicably drawn to ship these two – but there is a TON of their story told through subtext.  And as much as I love unpacking things, and finding the breadcrumbs strewn episode-to-episode, it’s really hard for the it to compete with the “pirate who pines” in the minds of the GA audience.  If we don’t get MO322, I think it’s this subtle style of storytelling that cost us the poetic love story that should have been Once.  And it sucks that a miscalculation cost us that.

But then, they are still trying to tell it with subtext.  They bothered trying to tell it that way in 3×19.  Why?  WHY lay out that Snow/Emma parallel with Zelena, of how terrible it would be for Snow wandering town looking for (dead) Charming and having no idea where he’d gone or what he’d given up in the process?  Why sprinkle all of those pieces of story throughout 3×19 if this story is finished?  That’s what puzzles me, so very much, even as I am “told” we are going CS.  I know you can read a lot into things, and sure, you could say that maybe NYC pizza is just NYC pizza.  But stealing the car, that’s a Known Thing.  Bothering to dredge up a long-forgotten necklace is a Known Thing.  This story is so bizarre.  I just can’t figure out what they’re doing here, and all I’m left to hope is that they are trying to tell the CS surface story to appease the masses while still trying to get back to their core and long-planned SF story.