@AngieBelle wrote:
Also, K&H did not have the rights to Peter Pan last year, and I imagine that they had already decided what happened to Bae at that point.
They’d have had Hook’s story decided from early on, I’d imagine. The guy who stole Rumple’s wife being Hook is kind of a big deal, so it wouldn’t have been a last minute decision they only came up with when they were planning season 2. It was pretty safe for them to assume that if the show was a big enough hit to get a second season, their bosses would be willing to fork over the cash to get the rights to the Peter Pan characters. So as long as they didn’t need to address Hook or Peter in season one, they could still safely have planned for the roles they’d play if the show had a future.
So they were able to set up the fact that Rumple’s wife left him, had him very unconvincingly say she was dead, and even threw in the suggestion that Rumple wasn’t Bae’s bio-dad. That all set up that Rumple had been in an unhappy marriage and his wife left him for another man. If the show hadn’t have gone beyond season one, that storyline still would have been sufficient as is, but they got season two and had the chance to expand the story and tell Hook’s role in it.
In a similar way, if they hadn’t have got a season two, they’d still already showed Bae apparently going to our world, which is where Rumple’s curse took everyone, so it was safe for fans to assume that one day they’d have been reunited, so that storyline had a resolution of sorts. But then they got a second season, so have the opportunity to expand that storyline and show that actually, Bae’s first stop wasn’t our world after all, it was Neverland.