Dumb question: What’s HEAL stand for? Happily Ever After Land? (From context I get you all mean the story world.) Did they ever call it that in the show? I thought it was “The Enchanted Forrest” or something?
Come on - they jerked us around all last season about Charming and Snow. This season it’ll be Belle and Rumple. Although I think they may wait until the end of the series to but those two together. It’ll humanize Rumple too much if they do it now.
I will say, what this show doesn’t lack for is villains.
StG
Yes Happily Ever After Land and that’s an SDMB creation not the shows. I think it came up in threads because the show wasn’t naming the alt to Storybrooke location and it was a handy shorthand.
Btw, love that Belle’s father was running a gardening shop called “Game of Thorns”. LOL!
Thanks
I caught that, too. Made me chuckle.
I think we were supposed to be feel a little bit sorry for her being stuck with Rumple as a husband and then having a hideous death, separating her from her real love Hook.
OK, in regards to Rump’s change of heart in library, the end of the episode showed him with Smee tied up in his basement/conjuring room wanting to know where Hook was. So the answer to that is a big fat NO.
Having a lot of trouble remembering everyone’s backstory. What happened to Baelfire? How did they get separated?
Cora is one evil bitch. Makes her daughter look tame in comparison.
Back in the enchanted forest, before the curse, Baelfire obtained a magic bean that would allow him and Rumple to travel to “a land without magic.” This would make Rumple human again, ridding him of The Dark One. Baelfire threw the bean on the ground in the forest, creating a vortex, and he jumps or fall in and is transported away. Rumple, however, backs out and doesn’t go through with it.
OK. Speculation here. Suppose Bael actually ended up in Neverland. We don’t know that there is magic there after all. Don’t know much about it at all. What if Bael is actually Peter Pan, still a young boy? Would explain why no one has seen him in Storybrook.
presumably the bean that the blue fairy gave him did what the blue fairy said it would - took him to a land without magic - that would mean he’s not in Neverland, but is instead in boringland.
Interesting.. I assumed Bael was the mysterious guy in the first episode of this season. Kind of like Pinnochio. He’s been in the real world for a while before hand.
I like this theory, but there is magic in Never-never Land; or at least the presence of Tinkerbell and the other fairies seems to imply it.
Bael could have ended up behind any of the doors Jefferson/Mad Hatter showed us in the portal room. But I’d be willing to bet a “land without magic” means that he ended up somewhere in modern day America/Storeybrook.
I’m sure it’ll help them a lot when the characters figure that out. 
Regina seems to be getting a bit more human this season, and I can actually understand how she wound up as screwed up as she is, with that specimen for a mother.
Who’s going to be the evil witch character in Season 3, Cora’s mother? 
Maybe Henry, if Regina is successful in getting him addicted to magic.
Rumple’s clearly still a monster, but maybe he’s at least changed in his understanding of Belle’s needs.
A friend of mine thinks this will happen; I like the idea of Henry going evil. Maybe he’ll feel betrayed when he finds out his father wasn’t who his mom said he is and Cora will try to corrupt him.
One other thing. Over at the Once Upon a Time wiki, someone provided a compelling answer to my earlier question about how Hook went to Neverland but the Blue Fairy implied the bean would take Bae to our world in the comments:
I think the anonymous fellow who wrote that is correct, but it puts a dent in the otherwise-awesome idea that Bae would be Peter Pan. Ah well.
Whatever happened to that motorcycle guy who saved Henry’s book? I know I watched all the shows but simply can’t remember him leaving or dying.
For me, the Rumple/Belle relationship has the biggest upside storywise. It brings a genuine ambiguity to Rumplestiltskin’s motives; I can believe, for example, that he was being genuine rather than manipulative in the scene at the library because she clearly knows who/what he is (the dream made that clear), and she’s seen through the lies he’s told her in the past.
Also, recall that Belle is the one who first called Rumple a coward, in her first appearance last year when he released her from his dungeon. So really the library scene’s power was in having Rumple admit it, which then led to a reasonable motive for why he brought magic back (finding his son), a motive that can probably drive his actions for the rest of the season. Without Belle, the Rumple character would be just an unpredictable trickster–fun for a while, but soon that kind of character turns into a plot convenience. And althoguh she’s only appeared in two full episodes, there are plenty of hints that Belle can function as more than just a moralizing scold or a damsel in distress (giving her the library–though obvious given the Disney movie–was a stroke of genius); I guess we’ll see over the rest of the season.
I think it’s instructive to compare the Rumple/Belle relationship to Regina/Henry; in both cases we have an ostensible villain with a somewhat-unrequited love that, on the surface, is supposed to move them away from evil. But the Regina/Henry dynamic seems far less sophisticated, IMO because it’s so one-sided. That makes it less helpful in understanding or changing Regina’s character without resorting to an extensive flashback. That will work for a while, but unless something can be done to move the Regina/Henry relationship forward, I’m afraid the upcoming Cora vs. Regina battle will be disappointing.
He turned out to be Pinochio- we saw him at the begninning of this season in a hotel room in a pretty wooden state. He started returning to this state in the last episodes of last season due to his “failure” to prepare and protect Emma.