Once Upon a Time stars on that Emma-Hook twist

Warning: This story contains major spoilers from Sunday’s episode of Once Upon a Time. Read at your own risk!

Hook put that engagement ring to good use during Sunday’s episode of Once Upon a Time — but probably not in the way he would’ve liked.

Struggling with whether or not to reveal to Emma (Jennifer Morrison) that he long ago killed her grandfather, Hook (Colin O’Donoghue) looks poised to come clean. Then he ends up proposing to her instead. “She puts him in a terrible position,” Morrison tells EW. “He’s coming in trying to figure out how to tell her. She’s found the ring and is on a whole different track, and then puts him in a position where he feels like he has to propose in that moment because of the circumstances.”

To be fair, Hook had designs to ask Emma to marry him before he knew he was the one to kill David’s (Josh Dallas) father, so O’Donoghue believes Hook had good intentions. “This version of Hook is remorseful for all of the killings that he did,” O’Donoghue says. “I think his full intention going into the house before the proposal is to tell Emma, ‘Look, this is the situation, I’ve done something wrong,’ and she finds the ring and backs him into a corner to propose.”

“Now, he makes the wrong decision,” O’Donoghue continues. “He should just say, ‘Hold on a second. Before we do this, I should let you know that this is the case,’ but I think, yet again, it’s a case of Hook making a spur of the minute wrong decision, which he regrets — he doesn’t regret the fact that they’re engaged, he regrets the circumstances and what went on behind it.”

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Though Emma is currently none the wiser to these family woes, Morrison does believe her character is ready to take the next step with Hook. “If she wasn’t ready when she found the ring, she would’ve pretended like she didn’t find the ring,” Morrison says. “But she found the ring and she’s excited to have found the ring, and she thinks she’s doing something kind by helping him have that moment, as opposed to him trying to find that moment. Both of them are coming at it with good intentions. It just ends up being a muddy situation because he was about to tell her and then it seems like a terrible moment to tell her.”

Now the question remains of if and when Emma will discover the truth. We’ll find out when Once Upon a Time airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.