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Wow, that’s a good theory! I’ve never subscribed to the “Blue is sneaky” hypothesis – I’ve tended to accept her at face value as good – but I must admit that your idea would set up some great drama. What if she wants to eliminate dark magic but sacrificing Henry is the price? She might rationalize it as the greatest good for the greatest number but our heroes would never go along with it setting up quite a conflict as the heroes and reformed villains together fight on the side of dark magic against “Good”! Blue did point out that Dreamy and Nova had to sacrifice their happiness for the greater good.

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I think the PDF sums it up better than all the text in my post – a picture really is worth a thousand words. I started to post it as an image instead of a link, but I fear it would be too troublesome for people to scroll past it if they aren’t interested – it’s a full page.

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@RumplesGirl wrote:

But I believe it was Myril who pointed out (I can’t remember which thread. Myril if you read this, chime in and let me know what you were saying) that our answer to the time question isn’t going to be solved via science. Science and magic are tricky. People generally assume they are opposites but the are not. Truth be told I tend to follow Arthur C. Clarke’s law that

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Excellent point, RG. I agree that they don’t need to actually address any of this in the show; it’s a fantasy after all and they can just say “It’s prophecy” and still be consistent with everything already established in the show. I just find it fun to consider all the various interpretations, given all the questions about the appearance of Henry’s picture at the end of the episode and the debates about “No time travel.”

And I LOVE the fact that you quoted Clarke’s Law! Any reference to Arthur C. Clarke makes my day! 😀

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Favorite moments: I liked just about everything in this episode, so it’s hard to pick just a few but if I had to, I would say my favorite character moment was Regina offering to sacrifice herself. I got chills when she said “Let me die as Regina.” My favorite plot moment would be the revelation of Henry’s picture at the end because it was so unexpected.

Least favorite moment: Probably their decision to leave Belle behind but I have faith the writers will ultimately do right by Belle next season.

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Some of us have been discussing this same topic over in the thread “Peter Pan and the Home Office” at:
https://oncepodcast.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=4061

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[attachment=0:2eckzfy0]timelines.pdf[/attachment:2eckzfy0]I’ve been thinking that it’s possible to account for everything we’ve
seen so far without invoking any time travel at all. We just have to
assume that there is no absolute time connecting the different
worlds. Even though we have seen that time does appear to be
synchronized between our world and the Enchanted Forest, that could be a special case; it doesn’t imply that time is the same for all
worlds. In fact, we know from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that
there is no such thing as absolute time; time is a local phenomenon
and different observers, moving relative to one another or experiencing different gravitational fields as myril pointed out, may measure
very different time intervals. Even if they once shared the same time and
place, two moving observers may later measure different time intervals and not even agree on whether a particular event lies in the past or in the future. Most of us tend to ignore this property of time because the effect is very small unless the relative velocities are very large, but it can be significant in many cases, such as calculating one’s location from GPS signals (If you have a GPS in your car or your cell phone, you are doing General Relativity calculations – impress your friends with that!)

Anyway, my point is not to give a physics lesson but just to point out
that we don’t have to assume there is a universal time connecting all
the worlds just because we have seen a connection between
time in our world and in the Enchanted Forest. We’ve already been told that “time is different” in Neverland, so we can avoid time travel as long as characters only move forward in time within a given world. Moving between worlds means you join the time of the world to which you have travelled; it makes no sense to say whether that time is “before” or “after” the time in the world you left because the two worlds do not share a common definition for “before” and “after”. We can only apply “before” and “after” to events within a given world and to the
history of a person who has travelled between worlds.

We can obey this rule if we simply assume that Bae arrived in Neverland after Henry’s picture arrived there. Since Henry appears to be about his current age in the picture, that picture was sent from our world (or will be sent!) sometime within a year or two of the present. For simplicity, let’s just guess an arbitrary date and assume for this example that the picture was sent from our world exactly one year ago. Since Neverland and our world do not share a common time, that doesn’t mean the picture arrived in Neverland one year ago – “one year ago” here doesn’t say anything about the time in Neverland. We don’t know how long that picture had been in Neverland before Bae arrived but we definitely know it was there before he was and before Hook arrived since Peter Pan had been searching for Henry for some time. It’s true young Bae had not yet fathered Henry when he arrived in Neverland but one can’t say the picture arrived in Neverland “before” Henry was born because Henry was not born in Neverland – his birth is an event that took place in our world so it has no direct link to time in Neverland. Henry’s birth lies in Bae’s future but it lies in Neverland’s past. What makes this confusing is Bae’s ability to move from one world’s time (the
Enchanted Forest) to another world’s time (Neverland) but we know from
Rumples statement in “The Return” that travelling between worlds means crossing “the barriers of time and space.”

To help illustrate all this, I’ve drawn some partial timelines in the accompanying PDF. To save space, I only drew our world, the Enchanted Forest, and Neverland but one could construct similar timelines for all the lands we’ve seen. Forward movement in time corresponds to movement upward along a particular timeline in the diagram, so events near the bottom of a timeline occur earlier than events above them on that particular timeline . Notice that there is in general no significance to the vertical position on the page of events on different timelines. I’ve color-coded some of the events to make it easier to spot events which involve more than one timeline, such as Bae travelling from Neverland (NL) to our world (US) which is labeled as “Bae: NL to US” in the diagram.

So long as Bae only moves forward in time in one world (upward along one line in the diagram) there is no time travel in the usual sense of the word. If he moves between worlds, say NL and US, it’s irrelevant that the event “Bae: NL to US” happens to be shown higher on the page along the Neverland timeline than it is along our timeline – since they are in different timelines, the “Bae:NL to US” event in Neverland can not be said to occur before or after the “Bae:NL to US” event in our world. Indeed, both labels refer to the same event which represents a single moment in Bae’s personal history. Of course, if he returns to a world he visited previously, he can’t arrive at a time that would be earlier in his personal history without invoking time travel, i.e. if adult Bae goes to Neverland in Season 3 and arrives there during the same time young Bae was there, then we clearly have time travel.

Finally, I drew some horizontal lines on the figure linking events in our world and the Enchanted Forest to remind us that we have seen that time does appear to be synchronized between those two worlds so some events (like the curse breaking) can be said to occur at the “same time” in both worlds.

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What if the shadow no longer has a body and wants to attach itself to Henry? In the process, it might “possess” him and essentially kill his own personality as it takes over his body. This could be what Felix was referring to when he told Bae “You get to live.” Of course, we expect the “good guys” will either get there in time to prevent this or find a way to reverse it and restore Henry if the shadow is attached to him. Perhaps Rumple’s “undoing” will be what is needed to save Henry.

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The “Peter Pan and the Home Office” thread at https://oncepodcast.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=4061 also addresses this.

I like the idea that Peter Pan may have lost his body and needs a replacement which can be attached to his shadow – and Henry is the only one who serve as that replacement.

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@HappyEndings wrote:

The 1st Season, Henry couldn’t stand Regina now all at once he likes her. Most kids do not interfere when two adults are talking. Snow interfered when Mulan wanted to take the compass from Emma coming up with a plan for all of them this should have happened here too

I disagree. Given Snow and Regina’s history, I think if Snow had been the one to say it, Regina would have been more likely to perceive it as Emma and Snow ganging up on her and she might have reacted by just getting more antagonistic toward them. Henry is the one person who can mediate between them because they both love him.

I also don’t think that Henry “couldn’t stand Regina”. On the contrary, I think they’ve shown us repeatedly that he loves her (like in “Queen of Hearts”) but he can’t stand the evil things she does. So he was always faced with the emotional conflict of having to fight against her even though he didn’t want anything bad to happen to her (just like we saw in “Broken” and in “Welcome to Storybrooke”). When she showed that she was finally willing to acknowledge responsibility for her actions and to sacrifice herself for everyone else, Henry was able to again show her the affection he had for her before he discovered last year that she was the Evil Queen. It was the same sort of affection Cora referred to when she reminded Regina of Henry’s feelings when he made the “For Mommy” hand print years ago.

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I agree with all that has been said- Rumple, Regina, and Hook are going to make a great set of anti-heroes as they struggle to do the right thing. I do think Regina’s redemption will “stick” this time because they put her through such a long tortuous path all year to get to this point. But I also agree with the previous comments that she will still have her temper and will still have a tendency to cut corners. This will undoubtedly lead to some conflict with the Charmings, but it will just be good, dramatic character conversation conflict, not fireball-hurling, attempted murder conflict. That will be reserved for those who kidnapped Henry. Can you imagine what she will do to Greg and Tamara if she captures them and needs to extract information from them to save Henry?

I like the observation that Peter Pan is apparently so bad that even Rumple is wary of him, but on the other hand we now have the Evil Queen, the Savior, and the Dark One all allied against him. That’s a lot of firepower!

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