I’m assuming the agent saw all the papers he needed to see to convince him that everything was legit (home visits, tax returns, references, etc…) but I’m guessing a lot of those papers were generated by Mr. Gold greasing the palms of many people. For the right amount of money, lots of reports and court documents could be forged and misfiled. I also agree that it’s not really important that we didn’t see all of that. After all, the episode was about the growth in Regina’s character and the development of her relationship with Henry – not a Mission Impossible plot about the intricate machinations required to pull off an illegal adoption.
Fair point that all the necessary documents were probably forged and sighted by the agent, but I do wish they’d clarified things. Just give Mr Gold an extra line, “All the necessary documents have been falsified and forwarded to the authorities, and your application has been approved. All that remains to be done is for you to go to Boston to collect the child from the unsuspecting agency,” as he handed that envelope over to Regina in his shop.
The way they’ve actually shown it, we’ve got Mr Gold engaging in underhanded tactics, and the agent acting like it’s business as usual, and it feels all disjointed and clear as mud IMO.
After Mr Gold saying, “This morning, I, uh, spoke with an agency,” I was expecting Regina to have been dealing with the person at the agency who he’d been in contact with to set everything up, but this guy doesn’t seem like that person, (if he was, then they should have clarified it with a concerned expression or two, like it was a situation he’d been coerced into). He seems to be someone who is assuming that her application to get on the waiting list was approved two years ago, and she just so happened to be next on the waiting list when the previous family dropped out, (having been paid off by Mr Gold, I assume). I guess they wanted to portray the adoption as having been as legal as possible, so they didn’t want to show or specifically address any of the illegal parts of the process actually happening.