[RumplesGirl]

Ratings are in for episode 6×11 “Tougher Than The Rest”

Demo: .9

Eyeballs: 3.02 million

This is the same demo we ended S6A with. It is, however, a slight decrease in eyeballs from episode 6×10.

[RumplesGirl]

2) Wish Robin and Evil Queen leave together somewhere, so Outlaw Queen still lives on in some odd way, while also wrapping up the Evil Queen storyline of the Season.

That’s my thought.

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

I was looking through the YouTube comments, and some suggested that David might be hallucinating that Hook is King George in that one scene at the end of the promo. It seems to match the earlier scene in the promo with David confronting George, and he has a knife up against both of their throats. Could David be sleep deprived?

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Good theory.

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

Liked: I think OUAT is at its best when it is unapologetically structuralist, with big, mythic themes that are then explored through the characters and their relationships to each other both as specific characters, and as avatars of certain archetypes. There was something of this in this episode. By making Gideon and Emma total, almost mythical antagonists, the kinship tree clicks into place, such that Snowing and Rumbelle also become mirror images of each other — as I think the show hints at from the beginning, whereby if Snowing is the couple that, by its very nature, always finds each other, Rumbelle is the couple that always loses each other (which also explains somewhat why they’re such a stable pair despite the clear dysfunctions). It also highlights the potential parallels between Emma and Gideon, which also makes them sort of mirror images of one another.

I love this.

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

Kitsis: We’re going to have two flashbacks. One is Gideon and the Black Fairy, and how he went from a baby to a 28-year-old in one episode, and we’re also going to tell you the origin story of the Black Fairy: What’s her deal, and why she gave up Rumple. So we’re looking to explore all aspects of that realm — and all the questions that we hope the audience is asking, we’re going to answer.

So Mother’s Little Helper and The Black Fairy. She’ll die at the end of the latter

 

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

How does something this big not come up sooner?

Or why is Emma just now getting her mythological villain? Aladdin actually met Jafar very early on in learning he was a Savior.

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

I don’t think it was killing The Black Fairy that he thought would give him Savior powers, I think he said he wanted to kill Emma to get Savior powers so that he could kill TBF.

Arg! That was my typo. Fixed!

And what exactly was TBFs motivation in all of this? I hope we get some answers at some point.

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someone else asked this over hiatus–but why Gideon? Did she ever go after Baelfire all those years ago??

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

This version of Robin was, for me, a bit better than the utterly lackluster Robin we had by the time he died. This one had snark and spunk and felt like he was a good match for Regina.

I don’t think he’ll stick around for long but I don’t know what will be his motivating factor to go back home. (Can they go back to the Wish Realm??)

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

And why does Gideon think killing the Black Fairy will give him Savior powers?

I’m a tiny bit frustrated by this.

In what part of the OUAT universe does Saviorhood work like the Dark One’s Curse? It never has; Emma is a Savior because she’s the product of the truest love and because of Rumple’s machinations with the Dark Curse. Aladdin is a Savior for some vague handwave-y reason involving being a thief with a heart of gold and a “diamond in the rough” (whatever that means).

Emma’s Saviorhood and Aladdin’s Saviorhood has little in common but it does have that neither of them had to kill another Savior in order to gain their status as Savior. Gideon is motivated by his own horror of a childhood and some sort of innate goodness that fuels his desire to save others from the Black Fairy–which in and of itself is interesting and a good narrative jumping off point–but confusing the Savior mythology (even more than it already is after the introduction of Aladdin) calls Gideon’s character into question. You could theorize that Gideon’s belief that killing the Savior would make him a Savior came from the Black Fairy but if Gideon has shrugged off all of the fairy’s other lessons (like hatred and evil) then why would he follow this one?

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

They’re making it seem like Hook killed Charming’s father and I doubt the writers are going to go that route.

Man, were these promos always so dramatic??

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

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