Recap / Once Upon a Time S5 E20 "Firebird"

Season 5, Episode 20:

Firebird

Hades turns to the heroes to ask for help with getting Zelena back from Rumplestiltskin and Peter Pan. In return, he offers to take all their names off their tombstones. However, when Hook is still unable to leave, he and Emma must journey into the depths of the Underworld...and the effects are not what anyone anticipates. In flashback, we finally get to learn just how Emma became a bail bondswoman, via her fruitless search for her birth parents.

Tropes

• All for Nothing: Emma wasn't able to save Hook and she has to leave him behind.
• Bait-and-Switch: Twice.
  • When Emma puts her heart on the scale, it seems as if nothing happens and their love must not be true. But when she goes to get the heart, she collapses, and when Hook goes for it, he becomes wreathed in flames. This turns out to be the Secret Test of Character, since choosing to save Killian from the fire is how Emma passes and gets her heart back.
  • Robin, wandering off to deal with Regina giving his baby back to Zelena (and Hades), gets caught by Gold and has his heart taken. Next time we see Gold with Pan, it seems he's going to keep his word and give him the heart...but it turns out to be a fake.
• Batman Gambit: Everything from the moment the gang stepped into the Underworld has been part of Hades's plan, making Zelena believe they were in love, suckering the gang in, playing their every moment off each other, making himself the villain seeking redemption, all so he could escape the Underworld.
• Bounty Hunter: Not bounties, but Cleo Fox hunts down people evading bails, a profession she'll inspire Emma to take up.
• Call-Forward:
  • Emma is sarcastic about the bounty hunter wearing her leather jacket everywhere, unaware she'll be doing the exact same thing.
  • The bounty hunter tells Emma "we're going to Arizona, not Hell."
• Cannon Fodder: Henry defies this trope by refusing to leave with all the souls in the Underworld still having Unfinished Business, because many of them don't even know what theirs is...and so he uses the time while Hook and Emma make their quest to write out everyone's stories with the quill so they will know and can continue without the heroes. And when he is kept from doing this directly by Cruella and the Blind Witch, he leaves behind all the pages (and the Underworld's storybook) so that eventually "they'll find it."
• Cannot Spit It Out: Hook sums it up when Emma stumbles on words about him.
  Hook: Why can you only say what you feel when one of us is facing certain death?
• Character Development: Not only is Emma finally able to openly admit her love for Hook, and let him go when there is no way to bring him back, but she promises to not keep people out any more with her "armor"—and then ends up redefining her jacket as the armor she'll use to protect others, rather than to protect her from them.
• Continuity Nod:
  • When Emma tries to flee the bounty hunter in her car, she finds it's been booted, the same trick she'll pull in the future.
  • Emma's escape from Cleo also plays out exactly like the scene in the first episode where Emma tracked a suspect.
  • The magical binding is once more used on Zelena.
  • Zelena reminds Pan her heart has a protection spell around it. Pan has the power to get it out but Emma stops him.
  • The gang try to bring Hook back by having Emma place her heart into him. It doesn't work and when Charming claims Snow did it for him, Hades points out that Charming was only dead a minute but Hook has been dead longer.
  • Pan offers Pandora's Box to Gold to keep Belle safe until he can awaken her.
  • We finally see how Emma bought her iconic red jacket as "armor."
  • Among the items in the Underworld version of Gold's shop are the puppets of Geppetto's parents.
  • One of those whose Unfinished Business needs addressing is Stealthy. Henry even mentions Grumpy/Leroy talking about him.
  • Gold once again tells Pan "villains don't get happy endings."
• Continuity Porn: The flashback story serves to explain how Emma became a bail bondsperson, learned some of her sneakier tricks, and received her leather jacket. None of this is especially crucial to the plot of the show going on, but it bridges some gaps in the show's continuity.
• Couch Gag: The title card features Emma's VW.
• Deal with the Devil: Once again, literally—if Emma will help him rescue Zelena, Hades will wipe everyone's names from the headstones so they can leave. When it turns out Emma can't use her heart on Hook, he even tells them of the ambrosia that can restore Hook to life. Of course as always there is a loophole and a price.
• Dragon Ascendant: How Cruella sees herself, figuring that with Hades leaving, she can take over the Underworld as its Queen.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Rumple is far from the side of good. However, even he knows that having Pan back in the realm of the living is not a good thing.
• Eviler than Thou: Hook notes how Emma is "about to go to the one place in Hell even the Devil is afraid of."
• Evil Versus Evil: Unsurprisingly, Gold ends up betraying and destroying Pan, this time for good—not out of any altruism in not wanting to hurt Robin Hood, but as payback for everything his father did to him.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Hook and Emma find the ambrosia tree cut down and realize Hades must have done it ages ago. Meanwhile, Regina realizes the Witch shouldn't have the power to keep them sealed up. Both groups then realize that Hades planned all this to ensure they don't follow him to Storybrooke.
• Falsely Reformed Villain: Hades.
• Genre Savvy: Hades, regarding making a deal with the Stiltskins. And as it turns out, Robin Hood was correct to be similarly wary of Hades himself.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Cleo Fox wears a leather jacket and once Emma finds Fox's daughter years later, she's inspired to take up the jacket herself.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Hook makes this once more, staying in the Underworld to ensure Emma leaves.
• Hostage for MacGuffin: Pan and Gold make one to Hades: Zelena for the contract for Gold's secondborn. By Loophole Abuse, of course, they neglect to mention they don't intend to give her back with her heart, since Pan needs it to live again.
• I Can't Believe I'm Saying This: Hades having to ask the heroes for help. In fact at first he can't even say it.
• I Kiss Your Hand: Hook kisses Emma's hand a few times before the elevator takes her completely out of reach.
• Killed Off for Real: Cleo Fox is killed by a piece of glass from the windows she broke trying to help Emma find records on her birth parents.
• Meaningful Name: The episode title refers to the operation to help everyone in the Underworld resolve their Unfinished Business (which Henry takes care of via the Author's quill), but it could also metaphorically describe Cleo and Emma's relationship, since it's the former's death that inspires the latter to take up her mentor's profession.
• The Mentor: Cleo Fox teaches Emma everything she knows about being a bail bondsperson.
• Missing Mom: Cleo Fox dies, leaving Emma with yet another lost maternal figure.
• Mythology Gag:
  • According to Hades, the only two people who escaped the Underworld were Orpheus and Eurydice.
  • On the other hand, having a set of scales to weigh Emma's heart and prove her love true is quite reminiscent of the Egyptian belief of having one's heart weighed against the feather of ma'at to determine one's fate in the afterlife.
  • Once again when offering someone a time-sensitive deal, Pan says, "Tick tock." Ironically, this time he's saying it to OUAT's Crocodile.
• No-Sell: Again on Emma using her heart to save Hook, this time because he's been dead too long.
• Origins Episode: Of a sort. While past episodes have explained such things as Emma's time in foster care, how and why Pinocchio abandoned her, and how she met Neal and had Henry, this one finally establishes how she got out of prison in Phoenix (jumping bail), why she gave up on looking for her parents until Henry came to find her in Boston (the government file on her having no useful or new information, and Cleo's insistence that she let go and move forward), and how she became a bail bondsperson (following Cleo's example, and making up for having inadvertently and accidentally led her to her death). It's even explained how and why she got the red leather jacket.
• Oh, Crap!: Pan has this when he discovers that Gold has put a wineskin he had filled with water from the River of Lost Souls and glamoured as a heart into his chest.
• The Power of Trust: Regina invokes this when asking Robin to give the baby back to Zelena, saying she trusts her—and when he (understandably) says he doesn't, she asks him to trust her. Whether this will have dividends with Zelena remains to be seen.
• The Promise: Hook makes Emma promise not to put her "armor" back on and keep people out any more; she makes him promise to move on, not to make her his Unfinished Business and wait for her. Then she promises herself that she won't lose anyone else she loves.
• Race Against the Clock: Once Hades's heart starts beating again so his banishment is ended, the Underworld he created begins breaking down, eventually reverting to the afterlife it was meant to be (where every soul can solve their Unfinished Business and move on one way or another, because there is no longer anyone preventing them from doing so)...unless, of course, a new ruler establishes themselves. Meanwhile, a portal to the mortal world re-opens, but it will only appear a short time, at sunset, before closing. Said portal is also actually through the clock face of the fallen library tower, the hands of which spin to symbolize the countdown.
• Revenge:
  • The Blind Witch finally cites this against Regina to explain why she teams up with Cruella. Cruella herself, of course, not only wants revenge for Emma killing her and Henry refusing to restore her to life, but for David knocking James into the River of Lost Souls.
  • Aside from Pan's final fate, when he first makes it back to the pawn shop and chastises Gold for seemingly abandoning him, Gold rather smugly informs him "now you know how it feels to be abandoned."
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After Emma asks why Rumple is still around when Hades ripped up the contract, Rumple nods, smiles "good point" and vanishes to Pan's shock.
• Secret Test of Character: Unsurprisingly, the scales to weigh your heart to determine True Love use this, by putting the person's love in danger so as to see if they will try to save them or selfishly go for their own heart.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Rumple does this twice in the episode: once to his father — with dire consequences later — and to Robin — also with dire consequences later.
• True Love's Kiss:
  • Gold tries it on Belle but it fails to wake her.
  • Hades uses it on Zelena successfully, however—to Emma's shock.
  • Apparently one of those involved being dead is another thing (like being intangible/in another dimension) that prevents it from working, since nothing happens when Emma kisses Hook despite the test having proven their love was true. Though there wasn't any spell that would need true love to break at that moment so this is circumstantial.
• Villain Team-Up: Cruella and the Blind Witch unite to lock the gang up so they can take over the Underworld.
• What the Hell, Hero?: The gang give it to Regina over letting Zelena go to Hades.