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As others have pointed out, there is no relation between Emma and Rumple, even if Neal is Baelfire. If Emma and Neal were to marry, Rumple and Milah (posthumously) would become Emma’s in-laws. As for great-grandparents, Rumple and Milah would be the great-grandparents of Henry’s children (but I doubt the show will run long enough for us to see them – August did say that Henry is precocious, but I don’t think he’s THAT precocious!) 😆
Even if Neal is not Bae, the relationships can get complex. I’ve drawn up a crude family tree which I’ve attached to this post as a PDF. Notice that Henry is not only the grandson of Snow, he is also her step-brother. Which means Henry is Emma’s uncle and therefore he is his own great-uncle! It reminds me of the old song, I’m My Own Grandpa which may be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0s5Kn9QXtU (which I posted long ago, but we have a lot of new people now so I’ll repost it – with apologies to any who may not have even liked it the first time,)
[adrotate group="5"]Over in the “Mr. Gold’s Threat” thread, I suggested that this reunion might be the thing that prevents Emma from killing Gold. Without it, I think the threat Gold made against her family at the end of “In the Name of the Brother” might convince Emma that she has to act to protect Henry and her parents and take advantage of his temporary vulnerability while he is outside Storybrooke and without his powers. Phee suggested in that thread that seeing him so weak and vulnerable in the outside world might change her view of him and give the two of them a chance to grow closer. That could make her more sympathetic to him than Bae/Neal will be.
If Neal is Bae, I’m hoping we get some backstory on how he grew up in our world. Given what he went through, and the fact that he was alone in this world, it would not be surprising that he turned out to have the troubled past we saw in “Tallahassee”.
I think it’s appropriate that we’re discussing Star Wars here because both Star Wars and Once Upon A Time are perfect examples of modern retellings of timeless mythological themes. As Dooley Wilson so clearly reminded us with the lyrics of As Time Goes By ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vThuwa5RZU) in Casablanca:
“It’s still the same old story.
A fight for love and glory.”And of course, Casablanca itself remains another example of retelling those classic themes (and one of my favorites, as you can tell!).
I’m ambivalent about the idea of more Star Wars movies. Part of me likes the idea of a story well told which reaches a good conclusion and just leaves us with a beautiful memory (like Casablanca.) On the other hand, if the story was really good, part of me always wants to see more.
So I’d like to see more movies IF they do them well and evoke that same magic the first ones did. But that’s very hard to do. It’s the same way with Once Upon A Time; I hope the show runs a long time because I enjoy it so much and will really miss not seeing it anymore, but then I wonder how many years they can keep up the creative levels we have seen. Seeing the show “jump the shark” and descend into bad writing would be more painful than losing it all together. But let’s hope they keep up the good writing long enough to show us the adventures of Henry’s grandchildren!
@Phee wrote:
That’s how I look at it too. It’s like K&H have come to be in possession of newly discovered historical documents that actually have the facts of what happened, instead of the distorted versions of the truth we’ve previously heard in stories that have been told and retold over the centuries.
That’s what I thought initially but I reconsidered that interpretation when I thought about the fact that they have introduced more modern (19th Century) stories like Pinocchio and Frankenstein which have well known origins (unlike the folk tales which have evolved over centuries; the story of Cinderella for example evolved from the tale of Rhodopis which goes back to around 500 BC). So, I decided to believe that there is some sort of mental connection between the worlds in which some of the thoughts of people in Frankenstein’s world, Pinoccio’s world, or any of the others wind up bleeding over into the subconscious of authors like Mary Shelly and Carlo Collodi, who gave us Frankenstein and The Adventures of Pinocchio. This idea is not original – I stole it from Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem, but I like it and I’ll stick with it unless K&H give us an alternative explanation.
@NONNIE wrote:
After college I got caught in the trap of narrowing the focus of my studies. It has just been recently I am getting into the habit of reading and listening ( audio books and podcast) about subjects that I have not investigated.
.I sympathise. I had the same problem. Even when I was in college, I had so little free time that most of my reading was very narrowly focused and it seemed to get worse afterward. It’s only recently that I’ve been lucky enough to find a job that actually affords me a little free time now and then. I hope you get a chance to enjoy the book!
Welcome, Ser_Dragon! Like you, I really like the “bad guys” on this show but I think it is a testament to how well written OUAT is, because I usually don’t like the villains in most other stories. On OUAT however, I find Rumple and Regina the two most interesting characters.
I see a mixture of motives. Yes, part of it is Rumple’s cowardice, and part of it is a realization that he can’t really do much to help Belle right now anyway. But let’s not forget the important point that Cora gave him the orb to find Bae and he wants to leave immediately while the location information he got from it is still valid. Rumple is broken by his loss of Belle and Regina is broken after being framed. Now Cora has gotten Rumple to leave town and Regina is ready to listen to Cora’s advice. It looks like her plan is coming together…
Thanks for posting this, Nonnie. it was very interesting. There’s a good deal more discussion of Shelley’s inspiration for Frankenstein in Richard Holmes’ excellent book, The Age of Wonder. He devotes several chapters to the life of Humphrey Davy, whose electrical experiments were mentioned in the podcast and even has a chapter devoted to the origin of the Frankenstein story entitled, “Dr. Frankenstein and the Soul.”
In addition to the influences mentioned in the podcast, Holmes tells the story of Dr. William Lawrence, a physician who was the leading opponent to the ideas of Vitalism, or “animal electricity” in the early 19th Century. Lawrence expanded on the late 18th Century work of Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavosier which had debunked the “animal magnetism” Vitalism claims of Franz Anton Mesmer. Lawrence denounced the more mystical claims of a “vital principle” or “Life Force” made by Galvani and Aldini. He argued that the results of their experiments were due entirely to normal electrical activity on nerve and muscle tissue. He wrote in 1819,
“To make the matter more intelligible, this vital principle is compared to magnetism, to electricity, and to galvanism; or it is roundly stated to be oxygen. ‘Tis like a camel, or like a WHALE , or like what you please…”
(I couldn’t resist adding the emphasis on whale.)
Why is Lawrence so important? Because in 1815 he became the personal physician of Percy Bysshe Shelley and spent a significant amount of time with both Percy and Mary Shelley. He may have told her a great deal about the work of Aldini and others, although there were other influences as well. Percy Shelley had been writing about current scientific advances for several years and Mary Shelley had been taken to one of Humphrey Davy’s public lectures by her father in 1812, when she was only fourteen.
Six years after that lecture, Mary Shelley would write the novel that not only gave us the other identity of Dr. Whale but, in this passage expressing the Feelings of the Creature, could almost sound like the voice of Rumplestiltskin or Regina:
“When I call over the frightful catalogue of my deeds, I cannot believe that I am he whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty of the world. “I agree. When Dr. Whale said “We’re not from this world.” in “Broken”, Emma’s reply, “You’re in it now” and her statement that “I’m still Sheriff” emphasised that our rules will still apply to the fairy tale characters.
Given that we’ve already seen some disagreements brewing about whether to stay here or try to return to the Enchanted Forest, I wonder if some of the townspeople may say to Snow and Charming, “We’re grateful for all you’ve done, but you really shouldn’t be running the town since nobody ever voted for you.” I’d love to see another election in Storybrooke.
@Phee wrote:
I think that seeing him in this light and in this environment that’s so strange to him, will give her a whole new understanding of him.
I think Phee and Josephine have it exactly right and I love Slurpeez108’s analogy to Emma’s wall. The writers gave us the threat scene not only to show how far Rumple fell in this episode but to set up a contrast with making him more vulnerable in the next. It also parallels Cora’s speed bump in Regina’s Rushed Road to Redemption. Now both villains have encountered obstacles to reform. Short of him actually trying to harm any of our sympathetic “good guys”, nothing could have made us recoil more from Gold than the way he made that threat, especially while looking straight at Henry. He will have to endure a lot to make up for that and I think, in the end, Emma will be convinced by what he endures (although she may still give him that “punch in the face” that she threatened to in “Broken”, just for frightening Henry.)
I generally avoid spoilers, except for the promos at the end of the episode, so here are my thoughts on that preview:
I agree. It looked like he was trying to walk through a metal detector without his cane. That does make him look much more vulnerable. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Emma go from planning to kill Gold at the beginning of the episode to trying to help him by the end of the episode. But if they do that they are going to have to show us some good reasons for it, not just an expression of “Oh, don’t worry about what I said.”
