I reserve judgement on whether it’s something I would actually want to see, because really it depends on what this Hook2 ends up being like, and the visual of seeing Regina and Hook being a thing just feels wrong at the moment because I’m so conditioned to seeing him being with Henry’s other mother. But if trying to reason out potential logic for it happening…I could totally see them going there.
Wasn’t there some interview or convention or something during hiatus where Lana and/or Colin were talking about how Hook and Regina totally had a thing going on back around the time she hired him to kill Cora? I don’t remember specifics of what was said or when, I just remember thinking, “Oh damn, the shippers aren’t gonna like them talking about that.” LOL But maybe they were bringing it up back then because they’d been informed that it was gonna come up again this season?
If Hook1 and Hook2’s stories were the same up until the Curse did/didn’t happen, then if they make it canon that they hooked up that one time in the past, both our Regina and Hook2 have a memory of that. So there’s a canon basis for them to build something more onto.
And now they’re gonna be traipsing around EF2 together, and Regina’s gonna get to know the story about Hook2’s long lost daughter, and as a single parent herself, who is there looking after her child, that’s the perfect situation for Regina to start empathising with Hook2. The woman already has a history of “this Wish Realm version of a person isn’t the same as the version from my world”, so the concept of Hook2 NOT being Hook1 is probably easier for Regina to wrap her brain around than it is for most viewers, so she likely wouldn’t be resistant to it if she did develop an attraction towards him.
Like I said, I dunno if I like it or not. But I do think they’ve set it up pretty well for it to happen.