Hypable sat down with the creators of Once Upon a Time today to talk about the second half of the season, and they gave us a lot of insight into what we can expect.

With Once Upon a Time returning this Sunday after a nine-week hiatus, everyone is eager to find out what our heroes and villains will be dealing with. It’s been months, and finally our magic drought ends this weekend!

With the end of the drought comes a ton of information about what you’re going to be seeing unfold these next several weeks. We were lucky enough to see the next two episodes of season 4 and can tell you that this back half will have you falling in love with Once Upon a Time all over again.

We sat down with co-creators Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis to discuss this season’s new arc, and what it will mean for the characters involved. Slight spoilers ahead.

Why these three villains? Out of all the villains you have, why pair these three, specifically?

Kitsis: For us, Maleficent was previously in the show, and we always wanted to bring her back. Ursula we set up a little bit previous to this and think she’s a lot of fun, and Cruella — we just liked her. There’s a sass to her, and what we wanted was for Gold to take the lesson of the heroes that worked together, and realize that he needs to work together with the villains.

Horowitz: And if you keep watching you’ll see there’s a connection between all of them, and all of our characters, that make it clear why those three in particular.

Are we to assume the sorcerer has the author hostage or something (since no one has seen the author)?

Horowitz: What’s going on with the sorcerer and the author is something that should hopefully be clear pretty quickly.

Kitsis: Yeah, I will say in the second half that question will be answered, as well as we will meet the author.

Can you speak to the challenges that are coming up for Emma?

Kitsis: Yeah, I think for Emma right now the two people she trusts most in life are lying to her and she’s suppressing that. So finding that out will be kind of a bummer. She’s going to have to confront her past in a lot of different ways and she’s done a lot of growing in the past three and a half seasons, [but] what happens when the person that was helping you grow might actually be just as bad as the people you were trying to get away from?

Horowitz: One of the big themes of the second half of the season is what makes someone a hero, and what makes someone a villain. Emma has spent a long time in the series being told she’s a savior and she’s a hero, and now she’s going to have to face that it’s not as black and white as that. All of our characters are going to be wrestling with good and evil, not just in terms of what they’re facing as an external threat but also internally and within themselves.

Will we find out exactly why Cruella and Ursula didn’t end up in Storybrooke in the first place?

Horowitz: Yes. There’s an upcoming episode where all the pieces of the chess board are laid out and who ended up where and why, and that will also speak to why these three, and how they sort of connected.

Any thoughts about adding any Marvel characters to the show?

Kitsis: No, we like watching the show but… We often have Henry reading Marvel, but it kind of feels like Marvel is…you know there’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., we love Marvel, we love Star Wars, but… this is episode 79, and if there’s a few things we’ve learned it’s what works on the show and what doesn’t.

A lot of the times our audience would really respond to something like the Wicked Witch, which you know is not really technically a fairy tale per se but there are other things, like I don’t know if people want to see David Copperfield. Really it’s about the core characters from our show, and all these other characters are there to help them grow as people.

With so many couples struggling with their true loves, have you thought about introducing Henry to his first love?

Kitsis:Yeah, yeah! I think there’s a junior high dance for him in the future at some point. I don’t know if it’ll happen this half of the season, but absolutely. We never know if he’s going to run into Grettle at the punch bowl!

Any chance of Jamie Dornan coming back?

Kitsis:: Uh, no. I would love to have Christian Grey back, but I don’t know if you know this, he’s a huge movie star. His schedule is such that flying him back to Vancouver… we’d love to have him, and if the schedules ever worked out everyone would be thrilled to have the huntsman back. It’s just right now his schedule this year is non-stop.

Horowitz:The character lives on on DVD. It’s funny, the plan with the huntsman character was always to kill him in episode 7 of that first season. A lot of that was really establishing the stakes of the show, and you know, setting the tone for what could happen to characters. We brought him back in flashbacks and we’d love to do it again if he wanted to and scheduled permitted, but no.

Can you talk about what capacity we’ll be seeing Eion Bailey back as August?

Kitsis: I would say this: If you’re searching for the author, they’re going to check with the guy who rode into town with a typewriter.

‘Once Upon a Time’ returns this Sunday, March 1 at 8:00 p.m. eastern

Be sure to come right back to Hypable after the episode airs. We’ll release the rest of this interview discussing key moments in the season’s premiere.

Related: Five teases and four quotes from Once Upon a Time’s mid-season premiere