‘Once Upon a Time’ season 6, episode 9 review: Who is Rumpelstiltskin’s mother?

The further and further along we get into the current sixth season of “Once Upon a Time,” and the more we’ve started to feel like Rumpelstiltskin is really a guy who wants to be redeemed — or even can if he wanted to. He’s genuinely terrible; he wants to hurt people, and while he may care about Belle somewhere underneath that skin and piercing evil eyes, he certainly cares more about himself first.

In the early going on Sunday night’s new episode “Changelings,” he made it clear to his love-interest-but-not-really-since-he’s-partially-using-her the Evil Queen that they could rule together, but one of the things that he would need from her would be the destruction of one of the people standing most in his way: Zelena. He wants her gone. The Queen did follow along with this little mission, and was ready to take her sort-of-sister down once and for all. Were it not for Regina showing up, saving Zelena, and then daring the Queen to go have a chat with Rumple, we have a feeling that she was going to be dead.

The thing to remember here when it comes to Regina is that even though she’s not the Evil Queen anymore, that doesn’t mean that she has just the widest array of forgiveness in her heart. She made that clear to Zelena that despite everything, she still didn’t forgive her for what happened with Robin Hood.

One other thing of course Rumple wants is to ensure that Belle’s child cannot escape from him, which is why he is doing everything that he could in order to take the child and trap them, including speeding along the pregnancy. After getting a vision from her son Belle wanted to be proactive in the hunt to stop him, but they encouraged her to stay away to not put her child into any further danger. Probably the right move. Emma and Hook took it upon themselves instead to pay a visit to Mr. Gold’s shop to find the shears, and instead Emma found herself being taken over by another premonition from the future.

Eventually once it was clear that Emma’s plan completely bombed, we had one of the most angsty conversations ever between Belle and Rumple, one stuffed full of admissions of how he was not capable of loving or being loved while she pleaded with him to, more or less, not be terrible. Alas, that’s not really in his DNA.

The thing about Rumple as a character is that while he is evil, he’s also relatively easy to manipulate. We saw this courtesy of the Evil Queen, newly empowered from the information she received from Regina. She knew that Rumple was not using her, and this once-romantic relationship quickly turned contentious when she realized that her second self was right about his intentions … which didn’t exactly include trying to help her.

The birth – Belle welcomed her son early thanks to another bit of “magic” (though this time courtesy of the Evil Queen via Rumple rather than the guy himself), and realizing through another vision what she would have to do, she made the most heartbreaking decision that any mother could: Allowing the Blue Fairy in Storybrooke to take the child far away to a place where he could never hurt him. She hoped that someday she could have a life with him, but it would take some time for this to happen.

Consider Belle being forced to abandon her child one of the most shattering moments of the series, and at this point, it feels all the more impossible for Belle and Rumple to have a happy ending at the end of all this. The Queen relished in her victory, but that didn’t stop Rumple from sending a rather ominous warning her way about playing the “long game.”

The search for Agrabah – While having a friendly meal over at Granny’s, Jasmine revealed to Snow that Aladdin was starting to get closer to answers in regards to Agrabah. The more we started to get here of Aladdin putting himself in a magic lamp and the hope for him and his love to get back home, and the more we started to wonder why this was even in this episode given that it didn’t have much of a connection to much of anything.

This week’s flashbacks – Apparently, at some point during the old “Beauty and the Beast” days Rumple had taken a child from someone to be used for his own nefarious purpose. He wouldn’t tell Belle much of anything about the child, but apparently, he realized all along that Belle was going to try to protect the child just because that’s in her nature to do so.

What we learned through this story is that Rumple was looking to summon someone known as the Black Fairy, a being responsible for stealing children for an unknown purpose. Also unknown? Why said fairy would turn evil in the first place. We eventually got a chance to see the Black Fairy … who turned out to be VERY important. There’s a specific reason why Rumple summoned her, and that was in order to get answers as to why she left. The Black Fairy is his mother!

Basically, Rumple was willing to sacrifice an innocent child in order to get answers on his past. It’s understandable that he would want further information, but way do it this way?

The end – Hook and Emma decided to search for answers in order to get her to the other side of her visions, and they found the sword at the center of them. A crazy ending to what a crazy, at-times heartbreaking hour. Episode Grade: B+.

Next week – The winter finale is upon us! If you want to get some other news about it right now, head over to the link here. (Photo: ABC.)