Re: David’s lapses

[Slurpeez]

@ mia: Interesting observation you had.

David’s state reminded me of how Snow looked like when Grumpy found her after she drank the potion.

Snow White is going to suffer the price of drinking the potion, because all magic comes with a price. What if David’s experiencing the harmful effects of some unknown magic spell?

@ Rumplesgirl:

If David is having some sort of flashback to his life in FTL when he was in the woods, then why was he so distant from MM? It’s like he doesn’t even know her…

I agree that David appears to be looking for something other than Mary Margaret. I posted this theory elsewhere, but I think that what David is searching for is his own heart (the one Ruby found). https://oncepodcast.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=302 Maybe David can no longer feel anything since Mary Margaret’s rejection of him, and for some reason, he’s back to his “dream-walking” (as Emma called it). Mary Margaret’s kiss of life woke up David when he was found unconscious by the toll bridge in ep. 3. Perhaps her rejection of him in ep. 13 had the reverse effect. In a sense, she is reversing “true love’s kiss” when she tells him they don’t have real love. So, he doesn’t know Mary Margaret when in his catatonic, though functional, state. David is left even more confused, which causes a kind of split-personality disorder.

He comes across as someone who is being manipulated or controlled from afar.

One possibility is that Dr. Whale, who seems to be in cahoots with Regina, is adept at mind-control. Maybe Dr. Whale kept David in a drug-induced comma all those years. Maybe he’s drugging David again. He tells Emma what appears to be a reasonable explanation (that the blackouts are the same phenomena that David experienced when waking from a comma). Yet, remember how Dr. Whale lied to Mary Margaret when David showed initial signs of brain activity when David grabbed her hand? Dr. Whale clearly is sinister, and his motives appear dark to me.

Even if he had crossed some sort of magical boundary into FTL wouldn’t he still have known Snow/MM?

I think this is a good point. Why would crossing the line cause the citizens to have amnesia? That would just be counterproductive to what Regina wants. Regina really wants the citizens to have fake SB memories, and it seems like crossing the boundary would free them from that grip she’s so carefully constructed. The only way I could see that theory working is if Rumple set up the system such that by crossing the border, citizens of SB get “reset” to a basic amnesia mode and then have their FTL identities reloaded on to their hard-drives by viewing objects linked to FTL (e.g. Emma’s unicorn mobile would cause David to believe he’s really Prince Charming).