I think in general this season has our heroes and villains are all in a place of having to check the idealism at the door and realize sometimes there are no perfect solutions just as when Snow and Charming put baby Emma in the closet in the pilot. Eva died. Ruth died. Leo died. Evil gets its small victories, and good gets its unavoidable losses. Well, they are unavoidable if you want to stay good. The more you compromise your principles though to achieve a perfectly acceptable goal through unjustified means, the more you slide down that line between good and evil. Then you start in on unacceptable goals through unjustified means, of hurting innocent people, until you’re doing it to make yourself happy or worse, because you can and there’s no real reason. Pan seems to me to be in this last category but we shall see if he really is trying to save magic and help everyone, or is he just an immortal child looking for thrills to stave off the boredom of his continued existence.
I am hoping Neal will check Rumple rather than Rumple dragging Neal down, just as I hope for all our Goodies not to descend while our Baddies reform. I don’t want them to all meet in the middle in morality, as I am hoping for more of an upward shift overall. The writers probably will not do that, so perhaps they are planning to have a spiral of moral collapse. We did see sweet Henry shooting an arrow at Pan. Emma and Charming holding knives at people’s throats (but they backed off).
NL is bringing out the darkness in everyone I think, but I had some small hope from seeing that scene, that they will beat that darkness.
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?” -- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass