Season 5, Episode 3:
Siege Perilous
In the past, Arthur and Charming team up to find a missing artifact that can help Merlin. In the present, the reliquary of Camelot that was brought to Storybrooke is robbed, and David and Arthur set out to find the missing items, particularly a magic bean that Arthur claims will help everyone from Camelot get back home. Meanwhile, Emma tries to find a new champion to wield Excalibur and chooses Hook...at first.
Tropes
- Adaptational Villainy: Arthur is willing to do many morally dubious acts for the good of Camelot (or possibly himself).
- Ankle Drag: Horrifically so. David is dragged under water by an enchanted suit of armor that just won't die.
- Back from the Dead: Lancelot.
- Batman Gambit: As said by Meleena
, Rumple is out-rumpled... by himself. - Be All My Sins Remembered: Hook admits that when he and Rumpelstiltskin first met, he was the villain, forcing a good man who just wanted to keep his family intact to beg and humiliate himself.
- Blind Obedience: Like Felix with Pan, Arthur's squire is utterly loyal to his master, to the point he is willing to lie, steal, and go to jail for him, all in the name of Camelot and its people. And like Felix, Grif pays for it with his life.
- Brandishment Bluff: To flush out the thief in Storybrooke, Charming shows off the "Chalice of Vengeance," to the Camelot crowd which he claims will bestow punishment on the guilty party. The thief takes off as Charming relates it's just a cup from Granny's.
- Bromance: Arthur and Charming obviously have one going on in both the flashbacks and modern Storybrooke.
- Continuity Nod: The poison Arthur makes his squire take is the venom of Agrabahn vipers.
- Couch Gag: The title card features the Forest of Eternal Night.
- Cyanide Pill: Magical version for Grif, enforced by Arthur.
- Evil All Along: Arthur. Or at least a very dark Anti-Hero, but he is certainly willing to do things a hero shouldn't in the name of Camelot and his people.
- Failure Knight: Charming believes himself to be this, especially in present-day Storybrooke—relegated to the sidelines, a poor leader, unable to help or save anyone, or do anything heroic. Even comes with an example of Once Done, Never Forgotten: "I don't want to be known only as the man who kissed a sleeping princess awake thirty years ago."
- Foil: Played with. After traveling to the Forest of Eternal Night together, Charming and Arthur discover they have a great deal in common—both being originally of peasant stock, having very loving but fierce Action Girl wives, having a great deal of pressure on them to measure up to expectations and become champions of valor and goodness, having suffered losses and tragedies but gotten back up to try again. This is part of what convinces Arthur to knight Charming and give him the Siege Perilous. But it turns out that while Charming fears being useless or that he'll never be able to make something of himself (unlike his father) or do good to make up for what his brother did, he is still genuinely a valorous man...and Arthur, who claims to have learned from his mistakes and been made humble by the Round Table, is actually secretly willing to lie, manipulate, and even order someone utterly loyal to him to their death for motives that, whether or not they are worthwhile, certainly do not justify such dishonorable methods.
- Fond Memories That Could Have Been: Emma appeals to this to try and get Hook on her side. It doesn't work.
- Foreshadowing: When David asks Grif who he thinks may have broken into the reliquary and why, the squire nervously suggests the Dark One, only for Arthur to call him a fool and dismiss the idea. While this seems borne out by David finding the picked lock (and the observation that Emma would seem to have no more reason to break in than she did to take Happy's axe, since her powers are all the tools she would need), the exchange also foreshadows not only Grif being the actual thief but that he did so at Arthur's orders (note the look they share) and the latter was trying to keep him from Saying Too Much and giving the game away.
- Hope Spot:
- In the past, Charming is dragged into the water by the phantom knights, and just when it seems he will drown, Arthur appears to pull him out...but then when they've recovered, Charming finds the toadstool is gone. (Because Arthur took it.)
- In the present, Belle is despondent while at Granny's Diner because the rose Mother Superior gave her has nearly lost all its petals. Suddenly the flower perks up and all the petals start reattaching. Realizing what this means, she rushes back to the pawn shop...only for Gold to have vanished. Because Emma summoned him away and healed him for reasons of her own.
- Hypocrite: Regina gives Zelena a "The Reason You Suck" Speech telling her she doesn't deserve any more second chances. But the only reason Regina found redemption was because the main characters kept giving her second chance after second chance.
- I Did What I Had to Do: Arthur treats hiding the toadstool from Charming, and coercing his squire into killing himself to keep from being made to reveal the truth, as this.
- Idiot Ball: Regina mocks and threatens her sister, a woman who managed to survive being killed by the Dark One. There's no way that could backfire, right?
- It's the Journey That Counts:
- When the quest for the Crimson Crown (seemingly) fails, Arthur appeals to this trope—at first literally by defining a quest as the seeking, not the finding, then humorously when it turned out he was only saying that to lift Charming's spirits, then genuinely again when their shared desire to get back up and keep fighting no matter how many times they lose inspires him to knight Charming (and give him the Siege Perilous).
- Subverted (or inverted?) in the present—David tracks down the reliquary's thief, only to find that the bean which was supposedly in it is either still missing or was never there (thanks to the missing six weeks); the process of doing this inspired him and Arthur to trust each other, so something good still came out of it...but this just played into Arthur's hands as the whole point of the theft was to divert suspicion from himself. And then David finds the Crimson Crown on the ground, fallen from among the things Grif took, which thanks to those same missing weeks, neither he nor Arthur remembers how it got there. So the original thing which was not found on the journey turned up after all, and the hero doesn't even know that the reason for that is he was deceived by who he thought was a fellow hero.
- Leave Behind a Pistol: After David arrests Grif for stealing items from Arthur's reliquary, Arthur convinces Grif to drink a magic poison that not only kills him but results in No Body Left Behind so that nobody knows Arthur was the one who told him to steal the relics.
- Mythology Gag: Aside from the Siege Perilous itself, it seems when Arthur is describing the quests the man who sits in it will be sent on he is about to reference the Holy Grail...but instead only refers vaguely to pursuing sacred artifacts. When Charming is shown the contents of the reliquary, the only Biblical item which appears in any guise is the Unquenchable Flame, which is said to contain fire from the Burning Bush. This, coupled with the fake "Chalice of Vengeance" David uses in Storybrooke, seems to be a subtle reference to the Holy Grail being neither an actual Biblical reference nor even an original Arthurian one.*
- Natural Spotlight: The toadstool is highlighted this way. The fact this is in the middle of the Forest of Eternal Night really should have clued Charming in to be wary.
- The Needs of the Many: Seems to be Arthur's motivation, that finding a way back to Camelot for him and his people, reforging Excalibur, and freeing Merlin are more important than the residents of Storybrooke or freeing Emma. It comes across, though, as more It's All About Me.
- Only the Pure of Heart: Played with. Arthur describes the Siege Perilous as the place where only the purest knight can sit, after which he will be sent on only the most sacred quests for Camelot. After the journey into the Forest of Eternal Night, he knights Charming and grants him the seat...but the previous occupant, Lancelot, had betrayed Arthur and Guinevere (or so he says), and Arthur himself turns out to be rather unpure and thus not really in a position to say who is worthy of it. Yet David's actions in both past and present do at least bear out his heroic, selfless nature.
- Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Back in Season 2, Cora claimed to have killed Lancelot. Here, he shows up, with his only explanation being "it's a long story".
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: Arthur and Charming's hunt for a toadstool that will let them communicate with Merlin in the Camelot storyline (because Arthur hid it).
- Shout-Out: The empty suits of armor Charming has to fight in the bog are rather reminiscent of those animated by substitutiary locomotion in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, complete with having helmets and gauntlets knocked off, then 'reattached'.
- Spell My Name With An S: King Arthur's squire is named "Giflet", and one alternative form of this name is "Griflet", which is why the squire is referred to here as "Grif."
- Town with a Dark Secret: How Lancelot describes Camelot to Snow, and given Arthur's actions he is probably right.
- Unconventional Vehicle Chase: In his truck, David chases Grif who is on horseback, forces Arthur (who's never driven a modern vehicle) to drive the truck at one point, and eventually stops Grif with an Improvised Jousting Lance.
- Utopia Justifies the Means: The other reason for Arthur's unheroic actions. Whether he's simply a Well-Intentioned Extremist or a true tyrant remains to be seen.
- Villain Has a Point: While his methods leave a lot to be desired, and his motivations are also questionable, Arthur does have a point that not only did the heroes lie to him about Emma being the Dark One (which makes it very difficult for him to trust them now), it's because of her curse that all of the people from Camelot are now stuck in Storybrooke.
- Xanatos Gambit: Emma's plan to get Excalibur out of the stone, after being told she needs a hero to do it—luring Hook to his ship, she attempts to make nice, convince him she's still the woman he fell in love with, and get him to join her...since she believes his having redeemed himself makes him a heroic candidate for the sword. Hook rebuffs her—but in the process he shows her the sword he used to torment Rumple before he was the Dark One, which is the last ingredient needed to heal him...and with him now being a blank slate after being purged of his darkness by the Apprentice, Emma believes she can fashion him into the hero she needs. So whether Hook went along with her or not, her plan proceeds. (Though there may have been a bit of Xanatos Speed Chess in her move with Gold, since nothing indicated her intentions beforehand and learning of the sword probably acted as a sudden windfall she took advantage of.)
- Somewhat subverted later, though, into more of a Batman Gambit.*
