I had an idea do you guys know the Oz story of the Tin Man Originally an ordinary man by the name of Nick Chopper (the name first appearing in The Marvelous Land of Oz), the Tin Woodman used to make his living chopping down trees in the forests of Oz, as his father had before him. The Wicked Witch of the East enchanted his axe to prevent him from marrying the girl that he loved, after being bribed by the lazy old woman who kept the girl as a servant, and did not wish to lose her. Some parallels?
Maybe but I don’t know about parallels with that story because that might require something like Neal having to have visited Oz before for the history and I really don’t think he’s been there.
New head canon: We discover in the next episode that the WW not only has the pendant for her random weird collection of token Oz items but she also took Neal’s heart because he was trying to help Rumple and got in her way. Neal remembers that he doesn’t have his heart so he’s been avoiding everyone in SB because he doesn’t know if the WW is controlling him or not. They finally meet up with Neal in the forest and he tells them what all he remembers (not sure how the curse affects him without his heart but maybe his memories stay because of that?). He says that he doesn’t have his heart and should be locked up away from everyone in case the WW tries to make him do something bad (maybe she all ready did in the EF stuff that we see in later episodes). Regina suggests using the sleeping curse instead and making the WW think that Neal died so his heart wouldn’t be of any use to her and then he also wouldn’t be able to do her bidding or hurt anyone while he’s missing his heart. They put him to sleep at the end of 3×15 (and please give us emo Emma moments at least if Neal can’t feel anything!) and Emma promises that she’ll get his heart back and reunite him with everyone including Henry and Rumple. Ep 3×16 then has the fake funeral for Neal while he stays asleep hidden in the back room of Gold’s shop where Belle can watch over him. Everyone goes through whatever random things in the next few episodes and then we get to 3×20, Kansas, which turns out to be a parallel story of Neal in the past trying to find Emma (and the ‘bad things’ that he was warned about start happening to him….maybe he ends up in jail at some point while looking for her?) and the present of Emma and the group racing to get to Neal’s heart before the witch figures out that they tricked her. The end of that episode is Neal in the past giving up on finding Emma because of the bad things while Emma in the present returns Neal’s heart to him and wakes him up with TLK (and then we all melt into a thousand years of feels). Then they head into the two finale episodes united as one group to fight the WW. I have quite a few other details in this whole scenario but my manager has been lurking around all day and it took a ton of sneaking on my part just to get this much posted for you guys, LOL 😆
#HopeforSwanFire #SwanFireAlways #BelieveinSecondChances
#MoreBOOMLessGloom