“I don’t want this infernal hand anymore, it’s taken possesion of me.”
About Killian Jones, mind games and wanting to be a better man
I want to talk about this…
Specifically, about the effects of Killian’s reattached hand and the lengths he went to be rid of it once again.
And just a disclaimer! Let’s set aside all those metaphors about inner darkness that OUAT loves so much. This show got way too deep into the metaphors and euphemisms about darkness as some kind of sentient entity, almost like a parasite taking possesion of the person that it lives inside. I would be very careful with using this narrative. (There are instances in the story where it is appropriate because sometimes that is how magical shenanigans work, but unless you are actually seeing and hearing demons that are bound to you and are directly influencing you, the only darkness you can blame your actions on is your bad decisions.)
So, what’s up with this “cursed” hand?
Killian comes to Gold’s shop to demand his hand, that the other man had amputed almost two centuries ago. There’s a whole another discussion to be had about insecurity and disability but I won’t dive into that here. The point is, you can clearly see he really wants that hand back, as he risks blackmailing the Dark One, his nemesis. He’s being cocky, and maybe he’s too in love to think about concequences. I find it interesting that he’s managed to live without the hand for so long, he’s used to the hook and though it certainly does hinder him at times, he manages quite well with one hand. But now he wants it enough to think about asking for it. And you can see the joy on his face when he moves his fingers and they actually obey his mind, it’s surreal to him.
But here comes Rumplestiltskin’s ominous warning, and that’s what I actually want to talk about. Gold tells him, that the hand will have unpredictable effects on him because it belonged to the cunning, selfish pirate he used to be. Of course, Killian laughs it off and thinks he’s just messing with him. But not long after, the second he gets nervous, he acts out.
“Apologize to the lady, mate.”
Certainly an overreaction, grabbing the poor guy was aggressive and overthetop. But no actual harm was done (yet) and Emma lets it slide. But from this moment on Killian becomes wary and he can’t get Gold’s warning out of his head, he keeps looking at the hand and even interrupts the goodnight kiss to stare at it broodily.
The whole situation comes to a climax when he meets Will again, drunk and attempting to break into the library. At first he’s just annoyed but when Will tries to push him away, he gets violent to the point he’s terrified and startled when the other guy calls him out on it.
And now we get to the point when he goes back to Gold, horrified and desperate, so much so that he begs his nemesis to take the hand away. I want to stress how significant that is. He comes to the very guy that cut his freaking hand clean off, after wishing to have it back, he goes as far as to strike a blind deal with him to lose his hand again, after only having it for a day. Why? Because now he believes Gold’s warning. He believes that the hand is acting out on its own, or causing him to act out. And that scares him so much. Because he doesn’t want to be the guy he used to be, he wants to be a better man and he was starting to believe that was who he was. This instance shows just how much he actually despises his past self and his past actions. He regrets them and feels ashamed of them, as is shown on numerous occasions throughout the show. He has turned his life around, mainly because of Emma, but he doesn’t just want to be a better man for her, he is choosing to be a good person for the sake of being good. You know, the whole “what kind of man you want to be” thing. And the thought that he could regress, slide back into past bad habits, bad behaviors and bad, selfish decisions… that terrifies him. He’s not willing to let that happen. He’s not willing to risk it, to allow for the slightest chance some external influence might ruin the progress he’s making. And he shows how much he’s willing to give up to make sure it doesn’t happen. Mind you, this is a man that suffered the loss of a part of a limb in a very traumatic way and wanted to have it reattached even after living for almost two hundred years without it. After all that time, he still wished to have two hands again (and who would blame him), but if losing a limb is what it takes for him to ensure he doesn’t get possesed by his past “darkness” (as he’s seeing it at the moment) then that is a sacrifice he is willing to make.
Except I would argue, that he wasn’t possesed at all and as Rumple said at the end of the episode, the hand was nothing more than a lump of flesh. I choose to believe this explanation over the first one, even though he could have lied at both occasions. I know it was kind of the point of the episode, but I feel like sometimes OUAT gets so tangled up in metaphorical narratives, that it’s a little unclear what is actually happening and how much of it the character is actually responsible for. I believe that the hand was not cursed at all and it didn’t “give him permission to be ruthless” or whatever. The only thing that was actually controlling him was his subconscious fear.
Even though he laughed it off, when Gold warned him about the hand being dangerous, from the moment he heared that, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He didn’t believe it at first, but the shadow of that fear of backsliding stayed with him and festered in his subconsciousness. Add to that, that he must have been somewhat nervous about his first date with Emma bloody Swan who finally officially asked him out eeeeeeeee! (That’s the sound his brain made when the dart hit the wall) Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, in response to the stress that the subconsious apprehension caused him, he started overreacting to the slightest disturbances. And you can see the dread on his face when he stares at the hand each time. He’s shaken. He doesn’t want to act like this. And it is the very fear of being selfish and unnecessarily violent, that causes him to lash out, the way immense stress sometimes does. It doesn’t speak so much to his personality or behavior as it does to the fear itself and the desire to be better. It’s so deliciously ironic.
The thing Gold said about the hand belonging to a selfish pirate didn’t even make sense in the first place. Sure, young pirate Killian was a douchebag and a bit of an asshole but it was only after witnessing Milah’s murder that he was at his worst, consumed by one thought: revenge, and willing to compromise his principles for it. He didn’t have his hand anymore at that point. The hand didn’t affect his behavior any more than the hook did. They were just a body part and a prosthetic, simple as that. The hand may have belonged to a selfish, cunning pirate, but that wasn’t all that pirate was, was it? He was also a gentleman and a man revolting against a corrupt monarchy. And before that, it was the hand of a naval officer and a hand of a troubled young slave. You could just as easily say “Watch out, that hand belonged to a young starry-eyed lieutenant, it will make you abstain from alcohol and you’ll wish to be a hero.”
Equating the hand only to his worst qualities, which he still succumbed to one-handed, and which he managed to overcome, with effort and active, conscious decision simply doesn’t make a lot of sense if you really think about it. But Killian didn’t think about it this way, because he had a very different point of view. He was reminded of the past sins that still haunted him in the back of his mind and his brain freaked out.
It is trully ironic how in his desperate effort to ensure he would not revert to his old self but instead stay on his path of redemption and improvement, he actually results to blackmail and blindly helping the Dark One with whatever dark schemes he’s doing and sacrificing some old man (although he had no idea that was going to happen and was surprised and appalled, when it did… but he knew it wasn’t going to be anything harmeless, so he wasn’t totally innocent).
On one hand, he is desperate enough to not be, and I quote: “selfish” and “ruthless”, that he’s willing to do literally whatever it takes and he almost begs his enemy to rid him of his hand. On the other hand, he ends up using kinda shady means to achieve that, which is just ironic. I personally don’t think blackmailing Rumple made him much of a bad guy, since a lot of the characters on the show would do that, given the chance (e. g. Emma using the exact same leverage and blackmailing him in the exact same way in season 5), but he did get careless and foolish with it, abusing the same argument too many times. Not telling anyone about the magic hat sucking people in and Rumple obviously having some secret evil plan was the actual issue. But again, he tries to come clean the moment he realizes it might have actually put Emma in danger and the voicemail he leaves her is so touching and just so telling about what kind of man he really is.
“I hope you never forgive me, because that means you get this in time to save yourself.”
But alas, by then it’s too late. He was playing with fire and he got burned. He knows that, he knows that the instant he sees the mess he’s gotten himself into. First for his hand, then for his redemption.
Rumple was clearly toying with him and playing mind games, which somehow seems to contradict his own point of view (I’ll get to that in a moment). Rumple tells Killian that he did him a favor, that he made him remember “the darkness that lies beneath”. And I would like to also just as a sidenote mention Killian’s reaction where he threatens Belle in response. I don’t think he actually meant that. He doesn’t even have a way to crush someone’s heart (it’s probably more of a reference to Milah’s death). I think that in that moment he was emotional, desperate and backed into a corner, grasping for straws, anything to use against the man that was taunting him. And as it goes on this show, poor Belle is the only leverage they have against Rumple. I have serious reservations about the way everyone (not just Killian!) often uses Gold’s dishonesty to Belle to manipulate him, instead of being a good friend first and telling her about it out of solidarity and seeing her more as a person, than Rumple’s oblivious wife. Although I think Killian stops doing that after this. So yeah, I don’t think he was serious about the “that darkness crushing Belle’s heart” line. You could compare it with him saying they should have “driven that dagger through [Gold’s] heart when [they] had the chance” when he learns Rumple’s back at the beginning of season 4B, especially when he retorts that he wouldn’t mind if that would mean his name would be written across it. We all know very well that he would mind that a lot, so he was clearly just upset and saying things he didn’t mean and I think the same goes for the threat to Belle in the “inner darkness” discussion with Rumple. But I digress.
It seems to me that Rumple wanted not so much to teach Killian a lesson as to make him pay for being bold and arrogant enough to start messing with the Dark One. He saw an opportunity to psychogically torture him a little bit and get blackmail material on him instead (because really, Killian’s participation in that deal was just seating the apprentice down, that was it, he did almost nothing, Rumple just needed to get him involved to gain leverage on him).
He made up a lie about Killian’s “past darkness” possesing him and anxiety did the rest. But this doesn’t show that Killian is “still the same ruthless pirate”, it shows something else and that is that he is a good person at his core, more importantly, that he wants to fight for that goodness now. And yes, he slips up, he doesn’t always go about things the most heroic and honorable way, but he tries so hard and it really matters to him. So yeah, I’m still astounded by the beautiful, flawed complexity of this character and his redemption arc. Mind you, I am not trying to make excuses for any shady or straight up bad thing he did, but rather, I am looking at his motivation and the inner desires that drive him at the point of his life when he is trying to make amends, grow and stick to good form.
Just let me end this with saying this guy would lose his freaking hand a second time, to the same dude for fear of losing his progress on his path to be a better person.
And that’s how you do redemption.
2087
vaporwave
ellievsbear
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns
kianamaiart
blakekathryn
