Pangea

It just occurred to me that Mulan's return might give us some additional information. We still don't know how she and Aurora saved Phillip. Maybe they retrieved him from the Underworld.

I've been thinking along these lines too. I think Emma is intending to destroy the Dark One. She knows there is no way Hook would kill the Dark One if it meant killing her. So she is trying to create an alternative Orphan King (to Killian, who is probably the intended one) by setting up Rumple to be able to pull the sword from the stone. Rumple would not hesitate to kill her. She's driving away anyone close to her who can interfere with her plan.

Yes, but when Regina reversed the original curse it was supposed to send everyone back to where they came from. So Whale would have been sent back to The Land Without Color. The only way he could have ended up back in Storybrooke is if the second curse pulled all of the original cursed, as well as anyone that got in the way of the curse cloud. Hook wasn't part of the original curse, so him outrunning the cloud makes sense, but Eric was part of it.No matter which way you look at it, who did or didn't end up in Storybrooke is not covered by any consistent rule. I suspect that the writer's original idea was what YaddaYadda and I speculated (curse cloud + any stray original cursed), but by the time The Jolly Roger rolled around it was either forgotten while writing the episode or they just hoped no one would notice the inconsistencies.

This was my thought too until they showed us Eric living on an island with Ariel, shouldn't he be in Storybrooke too?

Anyone else think that Kitsis & Horowitz are poking fun at a certain portion of their fanbase with this storyline? Regina being the people who yell at K&H on twitter when the story doesn't go according to their desires, and K&H being the book author?