Rumple: Getting away with it?

Rumple’s been on what he must believe is a winning streak. He thinks he CAN have everything–Belle, his grandson, his power–and get it easily by destroying the people he hates most. Win-win all around for him, and if it costs the rest of his grandson’s family and the town too…oh well. (And he doesn’t even have to destroy Emma. Not a whole lot on his conscious then–he clearly had mixed feelings about using her, but the fairies? that’s like telling him he has to kill Hook–it’s Christmas for Rumple!)

But we know he’s not going to get away with it. It’s all too easy, for one thing. We don’t yet know why that hat was just sitting there for him to discover, and he, apparently, isn’t worried about it. He should be. Someone has been setting him up for SOMETHING.

When this falls apart, a lot of people have been focusing on what Belle’s going to do–leave him, forgive him, both, slap him silly, etc…but there’s going to be a LOT more fallout now. When it was just the apprentice, Rumple was pretty safe. He had Hook nicely blackmailed into a tight corner, and plenty of alibis to go around.

Now, however, Hook has no reason to not turn against him if he lives, AND he knows every diabolical thing that Rumple’s been doing. Hook’s life is a major liability; Rumple hasn’t been worried about that because he plans to end it anyway, and has the means to do so. So the question is, should the hat be destroyed/taken from him and Hook survive (which I fully expect to happen For Reasons), how in the heck is Rumple going to get away with any of it?

First off, I now expect that the fairies will be back, and the apprentice too. That will mitigate the harm Rumple did somewhat, but they’re not going to be happy with him.

So some options Rumple might have:

–Remove memories–Hook’s most importantly. Right now, the blame for the fairies’ disappearance is on Ingrid; if Rumple can persuade everyone that Ingrid was controlling Hook, he might escape his judgement this time. There’s reason to believe he can remove memories–he commented on Ingrid’s ability, there’s a spell in the book that Regina used, and in the cut scene he told Henry he could do that but wouldn’t. Other cut scenes they’ve shown us turned out to be relevant down the line; this may be too.

–Persuade Hook not to tell everyone the truth. This is going to be a hard one. However, now that we know where the Jolly Roger is in present time, it’s back in play. It’s possible that Rumple could make a deal with Hook for his ship. I’m not sure that would be sufficient, but depending on how things go down, Hook -might- sympathize with the crocodile. I know, that sounds ridiculous, but the way that he warned Rumple in 409 about having to choose between Belle’s love and his power, I almost got the feeling that he’s seeing parallels between his own past and where Rumple is right now. (It’s close to where Hook was in the latter half of S2 in a lot of ways, and also bears a resemblance to where he was in the flashback of 317 when he tried to kill Black Beard–who was in the ep to remind us of that parallel.) Right now, Hook has zero reason to sympathize with Rumple, and yet he wasn’t just pleading for his own life there. The conversation on the dock, too, makes me think that Hook was not just aghast at Rumple’s disregard for everyone save his immediate family, but recognizing that he’d have done the same thing in certain points of his own past. What kind of grand gesture it’s going to take Rumple to get Hook’s very loose sympathies to work in his favor, though, I’m not sure–even the JR doesn’t seem like it would be enough to stop present Hook from warning Emma & Belle that Rumple’s not a Good Guy.