Once Upon A Time - Season 5 Theories & Speculation

******SPOILER WARNING: Spoilers from Interviews, promotional material, and some BTS Set Photos Included in this article!!



With a bunch of information coming right off of SDCC , I have some thoughts or theory's in attempt to put some of these ideas together. Of course I could be completely wrong, but just for the sake of passing time as we wait for the next season of Once Upon A Time, I thought I might share this with you! A lot of it relates to time travel possibilities, so please bare with me! :)
                         

"Camelot exists in a parallel time ago, and maybe in the future. or it may have existed the time Killian was in the royal navy---but it is not in the same time as the events of Storybrook" -EP's


*********UPDATE - Twitter Post Confirms that Merida is not Z's & R's child, because they said we would not see the baby as a grown up. So part of the following Theories [in some places] are debunkend, but there are still other ideas that might be interesting to entertain! I for one stand corrected and apologize to anyone who took this personally, but I also will just say, we thought Zelena was dead too and look at how that turned out! XD

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe 

My theory for the first part of the season Five-A, or the entire season, is that the Merida is Zelena's and Robin's daughter and upon birth and learning that either something terrible is going to happen to Storybrooke, or simply as way to save Emma by reintroducing an new savior in the scheme of things, they send their baby via wardrobe 2.0 somewhere or somewhen across time, which may in turn cause some kind of catastrophic physical effects such as object displacement or multi-universe convergences.

 I just find it suspicious that season four left off with a reveal that Zelena is still alive and kicking, but it also pregnant with Robin's child, when now also Once's creators have decided to introduce a red-headed Robin Hood-esque character from Disney's Brave to be apart of story at SDCC, not to mention Rebecca Mader and Sean McGuire are now series regulars!!!

One place she could easily have be sent is Camelot or her own separate land, but Camelot seems to be special because it may not run perfectly current--in parallel in time in relation to the other time lines. One reason for this could simply be that it naturally runs at different revolutionary rate, like Narnia from The Chronicles of Narnia or for a more complicated reason, giving us an origin as to why, it may be that it was not effected by Regina's curse and thus it's current time period has at least a 28 gain in comparison, which allows it's current time to appear as"a future" (which is what I think is more likely based on what was specifically said in the quote above, --and for other reasons I will attempt to lay out)

One reason how the second idea I presented could be possible, is if Camelot was responsible for Regina's curse to begin with. We know Regina stole it from Maleficent, but where did Maleficent acquire it? We also know that Lancelot will be shown again to the audience,, perhaps suggesting a flashback,--well, at least form Camelot! We can gather from season two of OUAT that Snow knew him pre-curse presumably in the Enchanted Forest, he marries Snow and Charming for the first time, but also might explain how Cora came to kill him and then impersonate him.

So what does that exactly mean? It means we could have time traveling and/or space-time issues!! It's gets down to schematics and a series of questions. First, can anyone time travel from their current time to the current time of Camelot, or can they only travel to Camelot's past?

Time travel however seems to be in sight, as BHTS set photos reveal Droids, that know doubt wink to the television series (and novels from which they are based) Outlander! Writer Jane Epenson worked as a writer and EP with Ronald Moore on Battlestar Galactica and so this is a neat wave to old co-workers and an interesting, but also fun piece of mythos to add to OUAT!!!

But another question to ask is, if Camelot was not effected by Regina's curse, could have the people from there interact with the other timelines, either while in stasis or during the periods after, let alone what if they paved the way for what is known as Regina's curse? If so to any of these, then we might be able to see how fate was created by time travel in creating a non-exact parallel universe with massive quantum entanglements! Thinking about the droids, perhaps the people in Camelot can use them to time travel across there own time line, just like in Outlander, and then they can find a way to cross over to "our" characters' current universes in their past and visa versa...

TRIVIA, IDEAS, & OTHER THOUGHTS

The following is a bunch of trivia relating mostly to LOST and Fringe and their own references including actors & actresses the the three series share, as OUAT's creators were also Bad Robot writers and clearly make allusions & references to some of the more successful works!

Brave New World

For Fringe fans, this is not only an a reference to Aldous Huxley's novel of the same name, but two-part episode title with the same name and themes in Fringe itself. Season four ended with a rather dark version of William Bell (Lenard Nimoy) trying to collapse Fringe's [new] universes by converging them into one, but even more sinister, his vision was also about killing the human race and using his shapeshifting technology to de-evole and re-evolve into new dinosaurs for his brave new world (which were also refereed to "flying monkeys" by the way)! Lenard Nimoy  had also once played a character in a previous film adaptation of Huxley's post apocalyptic novel, but Rebecca Mader also guessed stared in these two episodes with a character named Jessica Holt! Her role in them was not entirely clear, but I speculated that she was like another character from season one named, John Mosely and that both characters either were time traveling terrorists or had gotten a hold of information and/or technology from someone who could. In these episodes Jessica was able to use futuristic technology to catch an Observer (someone who could travel through time and time lines), but whose episode also showed, a casualty loop as the Observer is somehow able to course correct time and save the day!

Dharma Days

Speaking of Rebecca Mader, she also had a bigger role on LOST beginning in season 4 named, Charlotte Staples Lewis--a reference to C.S. Lewis and his renowned Chronicles of Narnia series! Her character was one of the few characters who had a childhood on the Island and connected to the final efforts of the Dharma Initiative in the 1970's before "The Incident" and whose character's love interest, Daniel Faraday, is yet again a character caught in a casualty loop!!

But curiously actor Patrick Flescher also had a role being a sort-of nobody 1970's Dharma member, who eventually tries to make a stand when he discovers Sawyer had been helping his friends, who are thought to be hostiles breaking the thready, even though they are all just really time traveling from 2004 and 2007 back to 1970's at two different times! His Once Upon A Time role as "The Author" makes him presumptuous and eager to get ahead like his LOST character Phil, but also have power similar to LOST's Jacob having more power then the rest, and being able to pass that power onto someone else.

But the Dharma 1970's era is also when they used a boat called the Pala Ferry to go back and fourth between the main Island and the Zoological and Mind Control station, The Hydra. The Pala Ferry is reference to another Aldous Huxley novel titled, Island. Island also is a Utopian counterpart and sequel to A Brave New World!!!

Because You Left & Those You Left Behind (Or What Kate Did/What Kate Does)

Thinking about concepts from both LOST and Fringe, it might be easy to view Camelot also a combination of those ideas. In some sense we might speculate that we will see a future reality that might be like both what the beginning of LOST's Flash Sideways looks like and/or season five of Fringe that takes place in a future where the main characters come to meet their adult daughter, and where Walter strives to find a way of changing the past, by changing the future! --This also goes hand in hand with LOST when characters time travel back to the 1970's to try and change the future, which some believe never happened! But my interpretation of LOST's flash sideways is similar in concept. I believe it to be an ethereal plane that drives corporeal reality within and between corporeal life times, I also believe that beginnings of the flash sideways actually showed the upcoming 2004 the characters made when they time traveled back to the 1970's, but going with Alice in Wonderland-like dream logic, the flash sideways' quantum mechanics glimpse the future only to have them remember the past, in order to find the connections between them, and for a certain group of characters, was meant to move on from the flash sideways and from not having to directly deal with the Island in the next life time, where other characters may still have "work to do". Both series end with characters walking into bright lights synonymous with time travel.

Will Scarlet: There's No Place Like Home 

Taking a side trip from mentioning Alice in Wonderland, Will Scarlet was character introduced in Once Upon A Time in Wonderland, a spin off series that aired during season three, but whose current story ran in parallel to Once's second season. Last season they made actor Michael Socha a series regular, but didn't really do very much with his character except embrace a theme of "rebound" and fed into an argument over fate verses free will, as his own previous happy ending seemed to fall apart and as he also help to tear Belle from Rumple.



Before the season started I had speculated what his role might be, as Will had some allusions to both LOST and Fringe, especially time traveling concepts of both Desmond Hume and Peter Bishop. He is briefly seen breaking into Granny's dinner with a red converse shoe key chain before time traveling with the White Rabbit. For LOST fans this is significant, because those red converse shoes are a reference to the episode Flashes Before Your Eyes, which deals with Desmond being told he can not change the future, just because he can come to see it, and the episode kind of works as though he had traveled back in time with knowledge if doing so and ended up doing what he had already done again! The  red converse shoes have to deal with a man that can not be saved when he is killed walking under a construction site---The scene itself is an allusion to the house falling on the Wicked Witch of the East in the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz. Interestingly, Will Scarlet now has a connection to Zelena and ultimately Oz by having a past in it, but also new set photos may also reveal something in similar Oz- like fashion with Granny's dinner looking like it had been dropped out of or "converged" into another forest-land! It makes sense this could be a true allusion given it was where Will met the White Rabbit to start the season off. Now perhaps again her dinner might yet play a role in being a time traveling vessel! (Set photos also reveal most of the cast in Storybrooke attire walking among King Arthur either in the Enchanted Forest or Camelot.)

Another reference is that Will had a sister named Penelope who allegedly died because she fell through the ice of a frozen lake! Penelope is the name of Desmond's love interest on LOST and Fringe featured the story of Walter Bishop breaking the fabric of two entangled universes when he used a portal devise to cross universes over a frozen Reiden Lake, where blue universe Walter Bishop tries to save an alternate version of his son Peter from dying like his just had, only to end up stealing him, which ensued a prophecy of war and his alter-son being kinetic with a doomsday devise that kept happening for several iterations according to both episodes The Day We Died and the comic, Peter and the Machine. 

Like I had mentioned in above in Fringe's episodes titled, A Brave New World, is also where we see one of few episodes that features time line convergences. Other episodes include Jacksonville and Welcome to Westfield, where items and people are meshed together across universes. The only reason I mention it, is that this could also be what is going on with Granny's dinner, as perhaps Storybrooke (or parts of it) are converged or teleported into the Enchanted Forest or Camelot, but I am leaning towards The Enchanted Forest due to some other set photos. Other possible explanations could be that Storybrooke had another curse and went into a different kind of stasis where the land just took over around them, but IMO Granny's dinner looks like it's on top of fresh dirt and not like it had been sitting there for ages.

Sword in the Stone

One other thought that crossed my mind looking at Granny's dinner was also if she might double over as Mad Madam Mim from Disney's King Arthur story, Sword in the Stone? I have no real reason at all to support this, except to say that sometimes time travel stories play with the concept that you could go nuts or die being 'dislodged' from one's own space time and the actress just seems like she could easily jump into that role. Additionally there is a lot of speculation that Ruby may also be rejoining the gang this season, In Sword in the Stone, there are instances of Wart being turned into animals to learn various evolutionary lessons,where he has to try and survive from predators, including a wolf! But Mim also can change into other creatures, including a dragon! So perhaps there might be something that can be used with Mim in relation to either Maleficent or better yet, Lily Page, who said to have a story involving learning who her father is sometime later in the season.

Ladies in the Water

Getting back to Will for second, it's hard to say if he will still play some kind of role in helping Merlin, Merida, Emma, or anyone else, as Michael Socha has been demoted back down to reoccurring, but I do think the writers were once thinking he might have had a bigger role with all of these LOST and Fringe references.

I keep thinking that maybe his sister didn't die and we would come to meet her eventually, but more over Once Upon A Time in Wonderland was kind of a precious gem, because it's mythology often contradicted the rules and/or laws of magic by both having a spell book that could break certain rules, but also revealed a mass mythology about a lady-entity named Nyxe who guards and lives within what is called The Well of Wonders! It was revealed that there are magical waters that run through and connect all the of the magical lands!! This is very similar concept to the exotic mater and/or light infused water featured in the heart of the Island on LOST, which IMO represented the concept of life extension on all conceivable levels, including the flash sideways with the ability for people to reincarnate back into the corporeal world. The Well of Wonders also was shaped in an octagon, a familiar symbol or logo for LOST fans representing the Dharma Initiative.

Another reason why this is interesting is life extension and challenging fate has occurred before in the episode, Lady in the Lake. This is the only episode where we meet one known Arthurian character Lancelot, as the other was a fake! Charming sends Snow on a task to pull a sword called Excalibur from a stone in order to make her believe that she could defeat Regina and bring sovereignty. The whole thing was staged and also fake, but was meant to invoke free will and reference the real thing that most fans probably believe exists or once existed in Camelot, being a common known weapon in Arthurian literature. This is also the episode where Charming looses his mother Ruth to a "poison arrow" and where he attempts to save her life from magic water of Lake Nostos, but when he arrives the lake is dry and his mother only wishes him to see him marry the woman he loves and Lancelot marries Snow and Charming. Nostos is also a Greek word that translates to "homecoming" a huge Bad Robot theme shared through allusions to the Wizard of Oz (There's no place like home or home is where the heart is) and even Homecoming itself was a LOST episode title.

Archimedes Point & The Arrow of Time

The arrow featured in that episode is also interesting considering not only the possibility that Merida is a new savior, but that being a great arrowess might mean she could be related to Robin Hood. Another LOST reference, which often sited in pop cultural, is book or concept The Arrow of Time from British Astronomer Arthur Eddington that sites a belief that time can only move in one direction. This also leads to some Fringe-like ideas about cycle cosmology and time lines or universes in relation to wave sync collapses!  But the reference might also tie back to Disney's Sword in the Stone's Archimedes, a pet owl character and friend to sorcerer and astronomer Merlin.

Archimedes is also a reference to another famous antiquity scientist of multiple fields from Ancient Greece. One of his greatest ideas features what is called Archimedes Principal which is about being able to figure out the volume of an object with an irregular shape. There is also Archimedes Point which is a hypothetical vantage point where an observer can see 'all of time or objects in time', but with being independent of it. Fringe's Observers played to this concept. One instance where one might see something like this was in the episode, The End of All Things where Peter is in the Observer September's conciseness and they witness the death and birth of universes from an ethereal room reserved in September's mind and where it is revealed that Observers are a group of scientists from some future who have go back in time(s) to witness their own creation!! LOST too played with this idea a bit with Jack seeing his childhood home in the mirrors of Jacob's lighthouse in the episode, Lighthouse.

Disney's animated film had Merlin often argue with the grouchy and sarcastic Archimedes, being a bit forgetful or clumsy, but Archimedes is the one who teaches Wart about "flaying" including trajectory and force! Once Upon A Time could easily weave these concepts together giving way to time travel theories in relation to either telling a story about how King Arthur becomes King Arthur and/or help Merida on quest to be savior by balancing time and bringing sovereignty! It might also be worth noting that Disney's animated film does feature a disgruntle Merlin being able to time travel, including getting mad at some point and traveling on a rocket to 20th century Bermuda!

Merida Is My Constant

It's hard to tell how much of Disney's Brave will be true to form, but unlike Frozen and/or Snow Queen characters, Brave was set in Scotland's past where Frozen had a fictional land of Arendale. It's seems likely that OUAT's creators will be more liberal here and I think it's more likely that although originally a Scottish character, she will be more of a Scottish-esque character being sent to or growing up in another realm. As for things like having 3 little brothers and her father becoming a bear, it will be interesting to see, depending on if any of my theories here are right, if she will have these things, or come to have them---whether it will just be learning she has a little half brother named Roland, and also a pseudo step brother named Henry should Regina and Robin tie the knot, and/or perhaps even another sibling if Regina and Robin themselves won't also come to have a child vs if Merida will be growing up with three little curly-haired red headed boys --and if her non biological father will be transformed into a bear (I'm thinking Merlin might be behind this), or if it will happen to Robin Hood? --or if it will be just another name for Rumpelstiltskin's beasts allusions????

But after thinking so much about a forgetful, but super smart Merlin and a time traveling capable Merida, there could be obvious allusions to Desmond and Daniel Faraday (or Eloise Hawking)--where various kinds of time traveling can have all kinds of temporal effects making one seem a little crazy and sometimes in need of being grounded back in time--I could easily see this be Merida's and Merlin's dynamic or a bit of a mash-up! There might also be another all seeing magic mirri]or, cyrstal ball, or maybe even magical cauldron for Merlin and/or others to see into time. Or perhaps the Knights of the round table will be/or had been tasked to observe the other time lines and now must restore Camelot like Fringe's Observers?

Could Camelot be like an Island that Moves/Skips in and out of Other Times?

On last thing I thought about in terms of Camelot, was if Camelot will be a place that in itself travels through other time lines? I have funny feeling that Camelot may not be a place that stays in one place or time, --and that for most of the scenes, I suspect that it will more along the lines of Camelot's characters will be in the Enchanted Forest and other places, rather than most of the main characters converging onto it, until later in the season or series.

I always felt that if Camelot would ever be introduced, it would be a special place. because Arthurian stories tend to have a lot of allegories, including that Camelot is also sometimes thought to be "Paradise" something we may identity with a kind of Heaven. Like many of the original fables, Once Upon A Time, has used a bit of Judaeo-Christian allegories themselves. Snow White or "Mary" Margret is the mother of "The Savior". She is married to "David" who is the twin brother of "James". There is also some subtext in that fairies are also "nuns" and may play to an angelic role. which is then furthered by a juxtaposition between the dwarves mining fairy dust way under the ground, with giants who live on land way up high on top of beanstalks, who once grew magical beans, which are portals to other realms! The Tiny episode in particular gives way to an allusion to Biblical Book of Giants and Judaeo-Christian pro-agricultural themes. This was also something we saw a bit of in LOST as well including a smaller instance of Room 23's brainwashing video that projected messages such as, "God loves you, as he loved Jacob" or "Plant a Good Seed"!

It's for this connection and again thinking about what was said in the quote about Camelot, that I thought of some of those great LOST fan theories, including the one that the Island might have been connected to a continent at some point in it's history, as there seems to be a connection between it's Ancient Egyptian Taweret Statue and the fact that 'the frozen-donkey-wheel-of-time' happens to send people who turn it to it's "exit" in Tunisia! I personally prescribed to the idea that the Island was made in some future and started time traveling back and/or across time, because I felt "cold fusion" was a futuristic idea for how a tropical Island with a frozen chamber might stay afloat, but in either case, whose to say that it still couldn't of started out as apart of a land mass and/or that it couldn't of ever attached itself to one??



Note Rebecca Mader's Charlotte Staple Lewis randomly mentions Ancient Carthage upon dying from a temporal effect from time traveling too much. Ancient Carthage is modern day Tunisia. In Once Upon A Time one could argue that the land the Giants live on is like a floating Island that is connected to the Enchanted Forest by the beanstalk and in Once Upon A Time in Wonderland there was at least one floating Island that Jafar used as his base of operations

Dark Swan or Light Swan?

My last musing comes at looking at contrary set photos that show Dark Swan imprisoned in seemingly the Enchanted Forest, A promotional Photo depicting Dark Swan creating havoc in Granny's Dinner, contrasted with a lot of pleasant looking lighter (and maybe even older) Emma Swan walking around in the forest with King Arthur and a lot of the other main characters. So What's going on?

One idea is that Emma didn't leave Storybrook to begin with and her Dark Swan-esque personality causes a curse or "fringe-event" that lands Granny's Dinner either in the Enchanted Forest or Camelot, but then why is this other Emma there? Perhaps they teleport to the future where Emma has already been saved, but then why is dark Swan imprisoned in the Enchanted Forest or Camelot?  Maybe future Emma time traveled back?!

The other idea then is that becoming Dark Swan to begin with causes quantum entanglement to the point where Emma is split into two beings and that they all come to the Enchanted Forest via Granny's Dinner...

Of course wouldn't it also be weird if Dark Emma has to fill in as a substitute for Dark Rumple, meaning she has to go back in time and fill his shoes and where Rumple has "free will" to change everything???

And with Rumpelstiltskin/Mr. Gold, we have another matter too! Apparently he is put into a comma, but yet we have set pics with him as Rumple with Merida. So are these flashbacks, possibly proving my theory wrong, unless she is sent back in time, or are these flash forwards sometime after he wakes up, or does Rumple appear in the Enchanted Forest as a separate entity from himself, which could also be what is happening with Light Emma too? Who knows, but there's lots of things to consider! I kind of hope he conscientiously time travels like Desmond though in the Lost episode, The Constant!

Anyways that's pretty much all of I have at this time! What do you guys think? Any theories or hopes you would like share about Merida, Dark Swan, or Camelot? Find a contradiction with some of my theories from interviews I might have missed? Do you think Ruby is really back? Are you still hoping for Will Scarlet (and Anastasia and Jafar) to play a role or appear? Do you want to see other Arthurian characters other than the four that we know of? --Who do you want to see and why? Please feel free to share and discuss in the comments below!! Thanks for reading! :)

About the Author - Darthlocke4

Laura Becker (Darthlocke 4) is a long time commentator, TV addict, and aspiring writer participating with other fans on SpoilerTV. She writes reviews and analytic type articles. Some of her other interests include philosophy, cultural anthropology, reading, drawing, and working with animals, as she grew up and continues to work on her family's horse farm.

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