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I just found this thread but I love these sort of activities so I’ll jump in. Be warned, however, that while I tend to be reasonably good at making connections through old classic movies (thanks to a misspent youth spent sneaking out of bed to watch the Late, Late movies on TV after my parents were asleep), I’m terrible with more modern works. The result is I tend to concoct long chains of connections and then other people point out “You could have done that in two steps”! So, here’s a challenge for everyone: try to improve my lists by shortening them to a more direct connection.

Since Emma’s original job in her bailbonds business was essentially a bounty hunter, I thought of trying to connect her to famous bounty hunters on the screen. The first one I thought of was Steve McQueen’s character of Josh Randall in Wanted: Dead or Alive . Here’s my attempt at it:

Jennifer Morrison – Once Upon a Time (2012), Star Trek (2009)
Leonard Nimoy – Star Trek (2009), Fringe (2010)
Blair Brown – Fringe (2010), The Rockford Files -“The Girl in the Bay City Boys Club” (1975)
James Garner – The Rockford Files (1974-1980), The Great Escape (1963)
Steve McQueen – The Great Escape (1963), Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958-1961)

The other famous bounty hunter I thought of was Boba Fett in Star Wars. It turns out the first part of the above chain works for that one too. If we add the required new connections we get:

Jennifer Morrison – Once Upon a Time (2012), Star Trek (2009)
Leonard Nimoy – Star Trek (2009), Fringe (2010)
Blair Brown – Fringe (2010), The Rockford Files -“The Girl in the Bay City Boys Club” (1975)
James Garner – The Rockford Files (1974-1980), Toward the Unknown (1956)
William Holden – Toward the Unknown (1956), Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Alec Guinness – Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Jeremey Bulloch (Boba Fett) – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

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I’m guessing Rumple wrote the book as part of his plan. He needed Regina to enact the curse to bring him to this “land without magic” but once here he needed Emma to break the curse so he would be free to find Bae. Getting the book to Henry at a time when he was old enough to be confused by the frozen time in Storybrooke and frustrated with Regina because she couldn’t explain it to him, yet young enough to accept the fairy tale explanation would convince Henry that Regina really was the Evil Queen and that would in turn drive Henry to search out the only other person who could protect him from Regina: his biological mother.

In fact, I suspect Rumple’s plan goes back even further. He needed to find a person bitter enough to enact the curse since he himself obviously wasn’t willing to sacrifice “the thing he loved most”. Was it just convenient for him that Regina came along or did he set up all the events we saw in “The Stable Boy” to create an emotionally damaged Regina who would be evil enough to enact the curse for him? I’m guessing he may have been taking children for generations looking for one who could grow up to implement his Dark Curse until he encountered Regina’s mother, who I think most of us assume is the miller’s daughter from the original tale of Rumplestiltskin. If this hypothesis is right, now that Rumple knows what Regina did to Belle, imagine how the conflict between them will escalate if Regina finds out he was responsible for getting Cora to kill Daniel.

Oh, and if Bae does turn out to be Henry’s father, then Rumple and Regina will also both be fighting over him, in a three-way battle with Emma!

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How about combining Gaultheria’s dry ice fog suggestion with a little purple food coloring (or just start with some drink that is purple, like Kool-Aid) and you have a perfect replica of the purple smoke rolling out of the well and flowing along the ground. You could even make a little wishing well-like frame to put over the punch bowl (balsa would be cheap and easy to work with). Just be sure you start with a drink that is not carbonated. I know from experience that even a little CO2 will make punch very fizzy.

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This is a fascinating idea! I hadn’t thought of Gnostic themes in the show, but now that you mention it, there do seem to be several parallels.

First, (and somebody please correct me if my understanding from my limited reading on these topics is flawed) the Gnostics believed that the physical world was created by an evil demiurge, and was inferior to the ideal forms created by God. Couldn’t that apply to Strorybrooke? It is a flawed place created by an evil being in which the people have lost the knowledge of their true selves which could make them happy. We could say then that Regina is the demiurge, or perhaps since Rumplestiltskin created the curse, he is the demiurge and I guess that would make Regina the archon in charge of hiding the truth from people.

Second, salvation is achieved through “gnosis” because, for most of the season, Emma can’t break the curse until she has had enough experiences to finally achieve the self-knowledge that allows her to believe. Until then, Emma is a “Doubting Thomas” which could remind one of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas discovered in the Nag Hammadi library in the 1940s. Of course, the final experience that allows her to achieve the self-knowledge is her desperation to find an explanation for Henry’s illness in the finale. While this certainly fits in with a Gnostic theme, it could also just be an example of the old adage “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

There is one other connection. Although I hadn’t thought about the theme of Gnosticism, I did recently post an idea on my webpage http://www.onceuponatimespace.com/pilotComment.html that the writers’ choice of the name ‘Henry’ might be based upon the 15th century theologian Heinrich (Henry) Cornelius Agrippa, who wrote some famous books about magic. Although Agrippa was not a Gnostic, it seems to me that both he and the Gnostics drank deeply from the well of Neo-Platonism. In fact, to my limited understanding, a lot of the ideas in Agrippa and in Gnosticism just look like warmed-over Plato (Not to be confused with warmed-over Play-Dough, although both can be messy and easily worked into many forms, but difficult to use for building a solid structure!).

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