Gold, Emma and Henry arrive at Bae’s Manhattan building, but when they ring his bell, he escapes down the fire escape. (continued after the jump)
Emma chases him, only to learn what many of us had long suspected — that Rumplestiltskin’s son Baelfire is Emma’s former lover and Henry’s father, Neal Cassidy.
Emma tells Neal she doesn’t want anything more to do with him. She doesn’t tell him they had a child together. But when Gold breaks into Neal’s apartment and starts threatening Emma, BaeNeal comes back to protect her.
The truth comes out that Henry is BaeNeal’s son, and they have a touching first meeting. BaeNeal, though, wants nothing to do with RumpleGold. In the end, RumpleGold remembers an old prophecy from his FairyTaleLand days that said a child would lead him to Baelfire, but with a price — that the child would be his undoing. So I’ll kill him, Ruplestiltskin, the Dark One, said in his FTL days.
Things don’t look too good for Henry.
In the FTL backstory, we learned that Rumple joined the army intending to fight, but got spooked by a blind seer with eyes in her palms who told him that his wife was pregnant but he could not survive the next day’s battle, and his son would be fatherless. Rumple smashes his own foot — this is the origin of his limp — to get out of the fatal battle, but it all backfires on him when his wife turns against him for his cowardice and his son — as we have seen — grows up in Our World, fatherless, just as the seer had said, although it didn’t happen in the way that Rumple thought it would.
So many amazing things happened in this episode. We saw Emma learn who Neal really was. We saw Henry learn that Emma had lied to him, and we saw him meet his father at last. We saw the reunion of Rumple and Bae — Rumple’s long planned-for reunion that was the cause of the curse and everything else we have seen — and we saw that it didn’t give him the satisfaction he wanted.
We learned that what was in August’s box was a typewriter holding a piece of paper saying “I know you are Baelfire.” We learned that Rumpel has the power to see the future. We learned that NealBae still cares about Emma. We learned that Henry is quick to forgive.
So many threads got tied up — and an intriguing new danger introduced — that this felt more like a season finale than a regular mid-season episode.
And we learned that Rumple is Henry’s grandfather, and we actually saw them sharing some grandpa/grandkid time in Fake!NYC. And there’s the run: Rumple thought he could kill “the boy” but…I don’t think he’ll be able to kill his own grandson quite so easily.