Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26261153-20150716195032/@comment-91424-20150908011301

AustinSegal wrote: Are you saying that Rumple can't recreate the portal because it was Malcolm who opened it? That doesn't make sense because Emma was able to open the time portal when Zelena was the one who opened it originally.

Emma may not have opened the portal, but she created/opened the journey through the portal... We have this piece of dialogue in "Snow Drifts":

Emma: "Cause when we were falling through, I was thinking about Henry and the story we were all reading at Granny's." Hook: "You think that time portals work like any other sort? They take you back to where you're thinking of?" Emma: "Not where. When."

So Emma may not have opened the portal, but she was the who activated it. Clearly, Zelena could not activate it herself in her current state (we see in "Heart of Gold" that her life force traveled to the portal, but instead of going back to kill Princess Eva, she simply followed Emma and Hook through the portal). Emma was the one who decided where the portal would take them, so she was the one who created the journey. This suggests that only the person who actually activated the portal and created the journey by thinking of a place (Malcolm was the one who decided where he and Rumple would go, by the way), is the only one who can recreate the portal.