@Phee wrote:
I think that seeing him in this light and in this environment that’s so strange to him, will give her a whole new understanding of him.
I think Phee and Josephine have it exactly right and I love Slurpeez108’s analogy to Emma’s wall. The writers gave us the threat scene not only to show how far Rumple fell in this episode but to set up a contrast with making him more vulnerable in the next. It also parallels Cora’s speed bump in Regina’s Rushed Road to Redemption. Now both villains have encountered obstacles to reform. Short of him actually trying to harm any of our sympathetic “good guys”, nothing could have made us recoil more from Gold than the way he made that threat, especially while looking straight at Henry. He will have to endure a lot to make up for that and I think, in the end, Emma will be convinced by what he endures (although she may still give him that “punch in the face” that she threatened to in “Broken”, just for frightening Henry.)
I generally avoid spoilers, except for the promos at the end of the episode, so here are my thoughts on that preview:
I agree. It looked like he was trying to walk through a metal detector without his cane. That does make him look much more vulnerable. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Emma go from planning to kill Gold at the beginning of the episode to trying to help him by the end of the episode. But if they do that they are going to have to show us some good reasons for it, not just an expression of “Oh, don’t worry about what I said.”