Thoughts on Rumplestiltskin in the pilot
I actually liked him from the very beginning. The very first time I watched the pilot, I didn’t see the first few minutes. I think I came in at the point where Rumple was talking about the curse, and he was mesmerising. What really struck me about him then, though, was the way he connected with Snow about the name of her child. Sure, now we know that he needed it because it was his way to wake up once Emma arrived in town, but at the time, I thought it was interesting that he asked for the name, because if he were a villain, he wouldn’t do that, I thought. There was something about him and children, I felt, that was different from the original Grimm story.
Because he wasn’t trying to take the princess’ child: he was trying to help her save it. Granted, we later learned he wanted the curse cast and he wanted it broken for his own specific reasons, but he didn’t want to take the baby, which makes him different from the Grimms’ version. He’s very close to the Grimms’ version of the story too, though, because that Rumplestiltskin always struck me as a neutral figure: not hero, for sure, but not really villain either. He spun the straw into gold for an agreed payment and then the young queen refused to pay up, and broke their deal (which wasn’t very fair, now, was it?).
So I didn’t read Rumple as the villain of the piece. Seeing Snow trust him to protect her child sort of reaffirms that for me. She even tells David that Rumple could guarantee their baby’s safety, which showed a lot of trust. Rumple’s own agenda was hazy here, and we didn’t know what he wanted in all of this, but he wasn’t set up as the villain in the way that Regina was initially. Rumple was the powerful sorcerer everyone went to for advice, and we see Regina do that in episode two as well. He was on no one’s side, wasn’t actively trying to hurt anyone here. He wasn’t a hero by any means, but he was more nuanced than to simply call him a villain. He was kind of a neutral party with his own agenda, working diagonally, as Emma so astutely guesses later.
What’s interesting about Rumple is that he’s been on different sides at different times, and out for himself much of the time as well, but watching his first scene here, where he drops from the ceiling and knows exactly who’s under the cloaks, and then watching his second last scene, where he talks about facing the unknown…it’s such an epic journey. He begins as a neutral, mysterious, shadowy figure, who knows all, goes back and forth several times through the show’s run, becoming hero and villain by turns, and finally ends very definitely a hero, and very definitely in the light.
I don’t think I could have foreseen the love I would have for this character at the start, but I definitely knew I liked him, and I definitely knew I didn’t see him as a villain. And, of course, Mr Carlyle’s performance was mesmerising from the start.
