Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.
CHAPTER THREE
OPERATION ANNIHILATE!
Anton was sitting in a cell in Storybrooke's Asylum. The diminutive giant had been there for the past month since a rather slapdash trial found him insane.
"You knew the Middle Mists were affecting people's behavior," David prompted after being let into Anton's cell.
"I did," Anton confirmed. "That's why I had to institute Operation Annihilate."
"Why didn't you say anything?" asked Snow.
"Would you have believed me while under their effects?" Anton countered, relieved that someone had finally come to their senses. "It was the only way. I had to ensure every last bit of their pollen was destroyed and then I knew it would take time for what was in the air to dissipate and what was in everyone's systems to work its way out."
"Start from the beginning," Snow told him, taking a seat on the other bed, and Anton sighed and nodded.
"Well, it started when I was watching an old Star Trek marathon with the Dwarfs," said Anton, getting a confused look from the couple.
"Star Trek?" David repeated.
"Yeah, you know, the USS Enterprise? Kirk? Spock? Bones?" Anton pressed, then continued, "It was the episode where they go to Omicron Ceti III which is going to be destroyed by deadly berthold rays and discover that somehow the colonists haven't been irradiated to death and their subspace radio had malfunctioned so that's why they didn't communicate with anyone, which turns out to be a lie."
"Okaaay," Snow interjected. "I don't really follow."
"It's all about flowers," Anton expanded, "flowers with spores that mess with people's emotions and make them susceptible to the whims of other people, the ones responsible for exposing them. And that's totally what happened in Camelot with the Middle Mists!
"Arthur is like the botanist lady who used them to seduce Spock, see," Anton continued, gesticulating with his hands. "He brainwashed Gueneviere into forgetting she loved Lancelot, but more importantly her concerns for the well-being of Camelot and what was happening to her husband. She just became a spacey little hippie fool while his selfish intentions, his desire to covet her and everything, gave him a sort of... autonomy to work in a symbiotic relationship with the spores. He got control of Camelot and a hot wife who didn't actually want him and the flowers got help being cultivated, multiplying in their numbers faster than they could have without human agricultural ingenuity.
"Arthur surrounded the kingdom with them just like Layla surrounded the colony on Omicron Ceti III," said Anton, "which ensured the spores were always infecting people no matter which way the wind blew and would easily infect newcomers besides. Which is what happened to the Enterprise crew just like it did to you guys, including even Emma, the Dark One, who banged Hook in that flower field the way Layla banged Spock, but gender-reversed, since it was Hook who was obsessed with her and projecting his desires into her through the spores. Not that Spock wasn't kind of into Layla in a basic shallow way on his half-Human side, but the rest of his combined Human-Vulcan self wasn't that into her and after he got cured of the spores with Kirk's help he chose his true self over embracing that fake happiness based on physical attraction."
Shaking his head, Anton continued, "Anyway, that episode is when I had the epiphany that the Middle Mists were similar to the Omicron Ceti III flowers. That's why you guys came back a bit off and everyone else started to act differently after the Camelot refugees brought the flowers here.
"I figure that because of how Nimue created them with the Holy Grail, they had to have acquired some sort of sentience that allowed them to infect Humans as hosts, altering their behavior," explained the quasi-giant. "Which was good for the flowers, but not good for Humans since it totally messed up their feelings, their choices, their relationships. Sure, people here seemed happy in their pollen-induced paradise like the people of Camelot did, and like on Omicron Ceti III, but like Kirk said, maybe Humans weren't meant for paradise, maybe they were meant to fight their way through, struggle and scratch for every inch of the way.
"It wasn't right," concluded Anton. "And I'm sorry if waking up to the truth will be hard for some of you, but I couldn't watch you all destroy yourselves for fake happy endings."
AN: The referenced Star Trek episode, if you haven't guessed, is "This Side of Paradise" and instantly came to mind when I endued the Camelot episode with Hook seducing Emma off to that field with a creepy flower. "Operation Annihilate" (which alludes more to Emma's struggle with Zelena's curse) is another TOS episode involving neural parasites that kill off a research colony, including Kirk's older brother Sam. Resisting the parasites' control was excruciatingly painful, but Sam's wife Aurelan managed to get a brief distress call out to the Enterprise. Only their son, Peter, lived after being ultimately freed of the parasites.
(RIP to another Anton, Anton Viktorovich Yelchin, who played Pavel Chekov in the Star Trek reboot series.)