S02.E04: The Crocodile

[Camera One]

So from Belle's father's POV, it must have been really difficult to deal with the situation when he "woke".  In the Enchanted Forest, he hadn't seen his daughter for a long time and he was sick with worry.  He probably knew that Gaston went to confront the Beast and never came back.  Then, he finds out that Belle was in love with Rumple, a man who had beaten him up recently.  That makes it more understandable why he would have gone to such extremes in this episode.  

Oops, what am I saying.  I forgot to put my Rumple goggles on!

Edited August 26, 2018 by Camera One

[KingOfHearts]

2 hours ago, Camera One said:

I forgot to put my Rumple goggles on!

Jane Espenson will let you borrow hers.

[andromeda331]

10 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

Its such a classic Once move. Show someone else, even someone previously not shown to be evil, in an even more, almost comically, evil light than the villains (usually Rumple or Regina), and that makes them think that the audience will instantly forgive the evil actions of their favorite villains, even if they never show a second of remorse. 'Yeah, she killed 100 innocent people because she got a pebble in her show, but that guy killed 200 people because he tripped over a stick! That makes her the good guy!" 

Yeah that's ONCE for you. Where every new big bad has committed less crimes then Rumple and Regina. Where every character actually has a more tragic and horrible backstory then Rumple and Regina. Where your suppose to think Percival is the worse for avenging his entire village's murder. What a horrible person he is! Where your suppose to think Rumple still has a good heart despite his never ending backstabbing and betrayal. Where your suppose to think Regina still deserves a happy ending. Where your suppose to be happy and moved that CORA got into Heaven. Where every character besides the two aren't suppose to think of how fucked up everything is and how much their lives have been destroyed by Rumple or Regina or both and decided they need to pay for their crimes. Where Snow is Regina's biggest cheerleader and fan instead of happily making up for lost time with her family, friends, Regina in jail or dead or has been carted off to asylum because she must clearly have Stockholm Syndrome along with Belle, Henry and Emma.  

Edited August 27, 2018 by andromeda331

[Shanna Marie]

I think one of the problems with this episode is that they're doing their usual thing of having story lines existing in silos or bubbles, not intersecting with other story lines, but in this case, they actually do overlap.

One of the stories they're telling is about Rumple being a coward. He loses Milah because he's too afraid to even move to a different town, and he's in danger of losing Belle because he's getting his courage from magic. But while in the past he won't stand up to Hook and fight for Milah, in the present he stands up to Belle's father and saves her from being sent over the town line to have her memory wiped, and then he finds the courage to be honest with her about why he's using magic. So, yay, Rumple's changed and become better, and by giving Belle the library, he's learned to become a better partner. He's rewarded when Belle suggests going on a date.

And that would kind of have worked if we'd only seen the first parts of the Rumple and Milah story, just up to the part where he goes to Hook's ship and then leaves. Except the other story they're telling is Hook's backstory of how he got the hook and what started the revenge quest. That shows what Rumple did to him and to Milah. It's really hard to reconcile Rumple murdering his wife in a fit of pique with Belle suggesting she and Rumple get hamburgers together. Even the grand gesture of giving the library looks a bit empty coming from a man who murdered his wife for leaving him. It looks less like giving her freedom and something that will make her happy and more like a way to keep her utterly dependent on him, even if she's not still living in his house.

[companionenvy]

1 hour ago, Shanna Marie said:

But while in the past he won't stand up to Hook and fight for Milah, in the present he stands up to Belle's father and saves her from being sent over the town line to have her memory wiped, and then he finds the courage to be honest with her about why he's using magic. So, yay, Rumple's changed and become better, and by giving Belle the library, he's learned to become a better partner. He's rewarded when Belle suggests going on a date.

Even here, though, it doesn't take much courage to stand up to Moe given that Rumple is the DO, in the same way that he hasn't made a meaningful and authentic change between the two encounters with Hook. He isn't braver; he's just objectively far more powerful. Hook deserves some credit for at least proving that he is able to take it, as well as dish it out, in his willingness to face his death when he realizes who and what he is dealing with (and refusing to take the possible out of revealing that he didn't kill Milah). We get no evidence in this episode that a Rumple who isn't holding all the cards would be capable of any real bravery or sacrifice.

Even in his honesty, what is Rumple really risking? Belle has left him because of his magic use; the revelation that he is looking for his son is a pretty obviously sympathetic one likely to at least in part justify his behavior to Belle. I'm not saying it took nothing out of him, since Rumple is at this point a reflexive schemer and liar for whom access to knowledge that other people don't have is one manifestation of his power, but in this case, there's actually no logical or tactical reason not to tell Belle that he is using magic to find his son. To the contrary, it is a smart move if he wants her back. Similarly, the fact that he saves her from being sent over the town line doesn't actually work in demonstrating his superiority to Moe, because Rumple and Moe have different priorities in this situation. Moe is wrong to do what he does here, but there's at least a reason why he might think this is a good idea (in the context of a world in which, apparently, half the town wanted to hop across the town line last week), whereas there is no reason for Rumple to think Belle losing her memory is a good outcome.

What we have here is an example of a storytelling problem that is going to come up to a greater extent   next week in "Tallahassee" - the show seems to want us to see a character in a certain way (see? Rumple is changing! And look how much better he is than that meanie Moe!), but the logic simply does not work at all.

And that's before considering the fact that he actually murdered Milah. Any version of this episode that didn't end with Rumple a )unequivocally letting Belle go without an immediate promise of reconciliation or b) confessing, not the self-serving truth that he was searching for Bae, but the self-condemning one that he had killed his first wife, just doesn't work. 

[Shanna Marie]

57 minutes ago, companionenvy said:

What we have here is an example of a storytelling problem that is going to come up to a greater extent   next week in "Tallahassee" - the show seems to want us to see a character in a certain way (see? Rumple is changing! And look how much better he is than that meanie Moe!), but the logic simply does not work at all.

I should point out that I wasn't seriously arguing that this was at all successful, just trying to figure out what they were going for. It's definitely skewed to make Rumple look good, with him being the victim in the past and the hero in the present. Standing up to Moe when he's basically invincible and has magical powers and Moe is an ordinary human is by no means a sign of progress compared to facing a ship full of pirates. Giving Belle the key to the library he owns isn't nearly the same degree of emotional labor that would have been required for him to try to make Milah happy. And then you throw the murder into it, and what we get is a mess. You just can't have a romantic storyline for a character in the same episode in which we see him murder his wife.

I find that when I rewatch this one, I only watch the flashbacks and fast forward through the present, and making myself watch the whole thing this time reminded me why. The backstory is really quite well done. The image of a withering marriage is poignant. I know on the first page from a few years ago we were discussing whether or not Milah had the option of divorce, but I'm not sure that having a way to make the separation legal would have really changed much. She was still trapped in a town she hated, and she still wanted to see the rest of the world. Even with a divorce, she would have left. A divorce just might have given her more of an option to pop in and have some kind of visitation with her son, but that would depend on how divorce worked in her world. It was the 20th century before women started being able to keep their kids in a divorce in our world. Before that, the children were considered property of the husband, and if the woman left, she lost access to her children. But then, while Rumple enrages me in his dealing with Milah, I do have some sympathy for him in his dealings with Hook, because that was a potentially no-win situation. He didn't stand a chance of winning, but by not doing anything at all, he looks like a failure (I have a hard time imagining that Hook would have actually fought a serious duel with him, but Rumple had no way of knowing that at the time). But then by the end, I'm sympathizing with Hook because Dark One Rumple was a monster, and there are way too many cases in the real world of men murdering their wives for trying to leave. That's not just "fantasy violence." It happens all the time, and it makes me sick that any relationship with him could be portrayed as romantic without him having gone through some serious angst and true redemption over it. If we were supposed to see that he'd changed, we needed to see something suggesting regret and remorse, and he needed to confess what he'd done to Belle.

Very little, if anything, about the Storybrooke side of things works at all. I guess the scenes between Ruby and Belle are good. I like their rapport, and I like seeing Belle discover our world.

[companionenvy]

22 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

(I have a hard time imagining that Hook would have actually fought a serious duel with him, but Rumple had no way of knowing that at the time)

Yeah, I really am curious about what Hook would have done if Rumple had called his bluff. I'd like to think Hook wouldn't have killed him, but the truth is I wouldn't be willing to bet against it, either. He was in front of his whole crew, and had obviously taken to inhabiting the role of the ruthless pirate. Killing Rumple, under those circumstances, could have been as much part of his MO as the other bullying behavior we saw from him.

I think it is also possible, however, that if Rumple had shown real courage and tried to fight, Hook would simply have disarmed him in two seconds and then sent him back to Bae - and possibly even told him the truth about Milah running away with him. 

[Shanna Marie]

15 hours ago, companionenvy said:

I think it is also possible, however, that if Rumple had shown real courage and tried to fight, Hook would simply have disarmed him in two seconds and then sent him back to Bae - and possibly even told him the truth about Milah running away with him. 

I think this is the most likely scenario -- possibly even sending Milah back with her husband to her family after seeing that Rumple was willing to try to fight for her. This was his original crew from the Navy days, so I doubt he was too worried about his reputation with them, and it's not as though killing a cripple would have done much to enhance his reputation. It would have actually made him look like a bit of a coward, himself, to seriously fight someone like that.

Given what we learn later ...
 

Spoiler

 

That Hook backed off after first meeting Milah when he learned she was married, and the fact that he has issues with abandoning kids, I think that if Rumple had even tried, Hook would have been less keen on letting her come with him. He told Belle she begged to come, which suggests that he took some persuading.

And then there's the way the scenario played out when it happened again when Hook was Dark Hook and Rumple was back to being helpless and crippled. Hook healed Rumple's bad leg before the fight, then poofed away after drawing blood instead of really seriously fighting, even though Rumple was seriously fighting. True, Hook had changed a lot by then, but he was still a Dark One and therefore probably darker than he was in his pre-Hook pirate days.