Day 1: Whomst
So, I’m probably going to post a few of these a bit late for Wish Hook Week, but I’d like to talk a bit about what Wish Hook means to me.
When he was first introduced in season 6 I, like many others, thought he was humorous on he surface but a problem for the character of Killian underneath. After all, he seemed to make no sense: why would a version of Killian Jones have allowed himself to age and become a drunken farce of himself when his goal for centuries had been to rid the world of Rumple—and act he clearly had not done—and he’d always been an able-minded, adaptable, intelligent man. Love him or hate him, he was arguably always portrayed as someone who understood countless subjects and could pick up on things quickly.
Then, for me, 7x07 happened. Sure, there was that hopeful glimmer of “I’m trying to find my daughter” in 7x02, though to me the writing in that episode for the sake of a reveal was a debacle. Then there was 7x03-7x06, where he was shown to be a more bashful version of his Storybrooke counterpart whose cursed persona was an upstanding, compassionate man. More on Rogers another day...
7x07 was the start of my absolute adoration of this version of him, and it only snowballed from there. From giving up his life as he knew it for an infant he hadn’t expected in a thousand years, to the clear influence he had on Alice as he was her only source of human contact for seventeen years, to his friendships with others and his selfless loyalty he showed to them throughout their time together in the Enchanted Forest.
So, after 7x07, who is Wish Hook to me?
He’s a version of the character that I’d hoped he always could be, and a perfectly created transformation of the Captain Hook persona to a George Darling-like person. He takes what we could have gotten with Baelfire and shows that, indeed, given the right circumstances, he’s absolutely the type of person that always will sacrifice his life and his possessions for those he loves.
To be honest, he’s a reminder that there are people out there that will love unconditionally, that will always strive to be a better version of themselves even if they may sometimes falter, and that even when life gets hard and sometimes you fail, you can pick yourself back up again.
You can be that good person.
You can succeed even if you may have failed before.
You are worthy of friends and family.
This version, like basically all versions, of Killian Jones are made to suffer time and time again through familial loss, romantic loss, poor luck, his own demons, etc. Still, through it all, he always comes through in the end and ensures others do, as well.
