Recap / Once Upon a Time S5 E14 "Devil's Due"

Season 5, Episode 14:

Devil's Due

Hades threatens to condemn Hook to the River of Lost Souls after Hook refuses to choose which three of his friends will have to remain in the Underworld. Meanwhile, Gold is willing to help Emma, Snow, David, Regina, Robin, and Henry find Hook if it will let him return home to Belle, but in order to do so he must find his ex-wife Milah in the Underworld, and receive her help...which leads him to make his own deal to get back to Storybrooke.

Tropes

• And I Must Scream: The denizens of the River of Lost Souls, which by the end of the episode includes Milah.
• The Bait: It's clear that the whole situation with Hook being suspended over the River of Lost Souls for Emma to save, and her need to depend on Gold to get her past the barriers against the living, was all a set-up by Hades to get Gold right where he wanted him—and that while he would surely have accepted if Hook had chosen to carve names on the headstones, it was never really anything Hades counted on, since as soon as Hook was freed he simply chose the names himself. (As he said in both this and the previous episode, he's perfectly able and willing to do the things he asks others to do, but he wants them to do it to further damn themselves/put them under his control.)
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • It seems as if, when the healer says he will make a deal for the antidote to cure Bae but it will have "a terrible price", and Rumple says he would give "anything" for it, that this price will be Milah—such as, perhaps, that it will be a spell by the healer that causes Milah to run off with Hook. But instead the deal is for Rumple's second-born child...and it is the repugnance of this deal that indirectly drives Milah to Hook.
  • Gold's crystal ball spell seemed to be meant to let him look in on Belle, yet his horrified reaction as he drops it suggests otherwise. It's not till episode's end that it's revealed he'd actually been trying to look in on his child (Bae), and seeing her both let him know he had another child on the way...and meant that child was in danger should a certain old contract come to light.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Lampshaded by Gold when he rather nastily informs Milah of Emma's connection to both Hook and Bae/Neal (and specifically how she had the latter's child while in prison). Milah has the expected, if somewhat subdued, reaction.
  Gold: I'm sure we'll all have a good laugh about this someday.
• Black Comedy: Gold tries to talk Milah out of her Underworld duty and into joining him and Emma in rescuing Killian:
  Milah: I'm supposed to watch the kids.
  Gold, shrugging: Well, they're dead anyway.
• Buffy Speak: Combined with a ShoutOut: Regina is talking with the new mayor, Cruella, and calls the town "Underbrooke."
• The Bus Came Back: Milah.
  • Bus Crash: ...and she ends up thrown in the River of Lost Souls.
• Couch Gag: The title card features Hook hanging on a chain.
• Crystal Ball: Gold uses one of these, seemingly to check in on Belle, only to drop and smash it when he sees her. The reason for this (and his horrified reaction) isn't explained until episode's end, as seen under Bait-and-Switch.
• Dramatic Irony
  • In the Underworld, Milah is forced to be a crossing guard, watching out for the souls of children, when in life she had abandoned her own son to run off with Hook. Lampshaded by Gold, and eventually acknowledged by her when she breaks down and apologizes for what she did to Bae.
  • Milah wanted Rumple to be strong enough to take what he wanted, including the life of the healer so that he could get the cure to save their son. He was too moral a man to commit murder...but not too moral to trade away his next child (albeit Rumple had planned on never having a secondborn to avoid paying said deal). Flash-forward to the present, and Rumple is able to both destroy the boat and cast Milah into the River of Lost Souls in order to get back to the mortal world and Belle. "I've finally become what you always wanted me to be: a man who takes what he wants."
  • Following from the above, the heart-to-heart talk between Rumple and Milah in the boat makes it look like that if they can't reconcile, they can at least bury the hatchet for the sake of their lost son. But instead of her getting to move on and see him, and pass on Rumple's message, she ends up lost forever. And to further twist the knife, it's clear both from his expression and what he later tells Hades that Rumple really did mean the things he said to her, and would have reconciled if his hand hadn't been forced.
  • Milah's first meeting with Killian, wherein she tells him her situation with Rumple and Bae could never change, and he states that "a better man" had gotten to her first.
  • Hades claims Rumple as a servant of sorts by saying he has been his best supplier of dead souls. By the end of the episode, he's forced to serve Hades for real.
  • Regina gets to find out (thanks to help from Cruella of all people) that Daniel has moved on and is happy...only to find herself stuck in the Underworld instead by episode's end.
  • See Gold's comment to Milah above under Big, Screwed-Up Family, and then consider Milah's fate in this episode...
• Evil Is Petty: Gold basically spends the entire episode rubbing Milah's failures in her face as often as he can. Since (as usual) he also blames Emma for him being in the Underworld in the first place, this also plays into how he deliberately reveals her connections with Bae and Hook to Milah, in the most unflattering way possible.
• Find the Cure!: The flashbacks to the Enchanted Forest concern Rumple and Milah's attempt to save Bae from a poisonous snake bite. Unlike most such stories, the cost ends up being rather high, and dark.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat: Robert Carlyle and Greg Germann are clearly having a ball competing for scenery-chewing. We're not sure who wins...
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Gold. Not only does he end up forced to serve Hades, but it's revealed that he had killed the healer to get out of the deal for his secondborn in order to safely have a child with Cora. That deal never got to be honoured because Cora chose to marry Henry (making her child not Rumple's)...but now Belle is pregnant, making her child Gold's second born. And the healer is in the Underworld, able to sign over the contract to Hades. So Gold killed the healer for nothing, and has now suffered the same fate he had tried to visit on Cinderella (and which the literary Rumpelstiltskin gave to all his victims).
  • Milah too - she wanted Rumple to be "a man who takes what he wants"... and he is, which leads to him throwing her into the River of Lost Souls.
• Ironic Echo: Hades echoes Milah's words on how to get out of a difficult moral situation: "That's a puzzle I'm sure you can figure out." Bonus points for implying Gold should kill Milah.
• Loophole Abuse: Subverted: After Rumple became the Dark One, he tried this to get out of the deal for his second-born child by killing the healer he made the deal with. It would have worked if he had never returned to the Underworld, where Hades got the contract from the dead healer and uses it as leverage to make Rumple his puppet.
• Magnificent Bastard: If there was any doubt on Hades being this, it is laid to rest by this episode in how well he plays Gold. (The bastard part comes in with his threat to Belle and her unborn child.)
• Meaningful Name: While the episode title obviously refers to Hades receiving what he wants (whether from Gold or Hook), it also applies to Gold himself thanks to Laser-Guided Karma and Hoist by His Own Petard.
• Mythology Gag: Cruella hints her coat may be "Bambi's iconic dead mother."
• No-Sell: Once again on Emma's heart being taken—but this time not because it was someone evil trying to take it (and she in fact wanted it taken), but because thanks to Hades she's trapped in the Underworld.
• Prematurely Marked Grave: This is what Hades wants Hook to do to Emma and the others to trap them in the Underworld—and after he refuses, Hades goes ahead and chooses three anyway.
• Rule of Three: The Underworld graveyard follows this, since every marker in it either indicates someone who has Unfinished Business (upright), someone who has moved on to a better place (tipped flat), or someone who has gone to a worse one (cracked).
• Wham Shot:
  • The image of the three headstones with the names, "Regina Mills" "Snow White", and "Emma Swan".
  • Also the look on Gold's face after he throws Milah in the river.