First off I want to say I started following you after your wonderfully convincing post about why Hook was not going to die. It got me through that day when that dreaded spoiler first came. I don't want anyone to die on the show really but never Hook. Secondly I'm so excited to see Henry matchmaking CS. I always believed Henry to be one who could spot true love when he saw it. Also he wants Emma happy no matter what. Lastly could you explain the Walsh/Ww theory? I read still a little confused
Aw you’re welcome. Honestly, after 0.5 seconds of the OH SHIT the entire fandom experienced on reading the death spoiler, I never once seriously thought it was going to be Hook (possibly because I spend way too much of my life analyzing this show and could see at once why that wouldn’t happen and yeah). And I don’t WANT Neal to die, but of all the series regulars, he’s the only one whose death wouldn’t affect me or my overall enjoyment of the show too terribly much.
Also, of course Henry’s matchmaking CS. Did anyone really think he was going to try to set up Emma with the WW’s minion/possible monkey man? He’s her true love and for him to do that would mean she can’t trust his judgment/he’s undercutting her/etc. Because there was that whole lengthy meta I wrote about Hook and Henry being Emma’s TLs and following very similar narrative patterns, naturally Henry’s the one giving Emma the nudge to listen to the crazy guy in black. As for the theories on Walsh being sketchy, first of all (there was a post about this going around earlier today IIRC) he’s clearly Humperdinck to Emma’s Buttercup: aka the guy who wants to marry the princess for his own nefarious reasons. Which if Walsh was working for the WW and she was trying to neutralize Emma, makes a lot of sense for her to send out one of her minions to do the job. We think he might be a transformed flying monkey because the guy who played the lead monkey in the Wizard of Oz film was named Pat Walshe (it’s worth noting that Katrina Tan, who works on the OUAT set, has spoiler pictures/info, and so on, also mentioned this as a reason to think Walsh was a flying monkey, and there are unconfirmed rumors of Chris Gorham doing voiceover work, which means it would be a CGI/animated monkey that he was recording for).
Also, OUAT loves itself some bit-part evil love interests (example A: Tamara) and because we do for a fact know that Walsh isn’t just some random nice guy Emma started dating in NYC. It was spoiled awhile ago that he has connections to Rapunzel as well, and Adam and Eddy spotlighted her storyline as being darker and more in a horror-movie vein. What with a hooded figure being spotted outside Rapunzel’s tower (almost definitely the WW) that connects Walsh with the Witch in another way. Because Chris Gorham is a lead/regular on his own show and therefore isn’t going to make more than a few appearances on OUAT, and because we know that the Witch is the big bad only for the second half of season 3, it makes sense to tie his storyline to hers so they’re both not needed for future work after the finale.
