Actually, in my opinion, Ariel saving both Snow and Eric wouldn’t be redundant as much as it would be an interesting parallel. Maybe Ariel is a self-appointed lifeguard of downing people.
If they were in separate eps then I’d consider it more of a character building parallel thing. They already have to cut stuff out of every ep to get it down to time, and showing two separate scenes of Ariel rescuing people at around the same point in the t-word would be eating up valuable airtime that could be used for something else. But I’m guessing if she does save Eric, it’ll be in this ep, because they’d probably show the rescue before showing them dancing together.
Guess we dunno for sure what part of the t-word Eric is in yet though, because we dunno how mermaids age yet. Might be differently to humans, Anderson’s lived for 300 years, so if Once mermaids are similar, (or even if it’s just the NL factor that lets you live indefinitely) she coulda been around for a long time, and her scenes with both Eric and Rumple may be from a couple centuries before the time of Snow & Co.
I’m super excited for the show to come back in less than a week, but a little bit miserable that we’ve gotta wait another whole month to find out the mysteries of how Ariel fits in. Here’s hoping my sanity holds out that long. 😛