From a recent podcast,
Estelle: And at the beginning of the episode we see Pinocchio blink, but when Gepetto looks for him at the end of the episode, he’s gone. Why didn’t Pinocchio look for Gepetto?
Eddie: That is a great question. The question is: why didn’t he want to see his father? And is it because he has an agenda? Is it because he’s ashamed? So I think that’s kind of one of the mysteries we have starting the new season.
Adam: Yeah, I mean, we see that after the curse broke he was still wood, and the unfortunate thing for him, apparently, is that he turned completely to wood before the curse broke. So that’s what he was, and now, when he blinks we realize, you know, he’s alive and something’s going on with him.
Eddie: We saw in his episode last year, the Blue Fairy said ‘as long as you’re brave, unselfish, and true, you can be a real boy’ and he is no longer a real man, so perhaps his task that he was meant to do, he came to it too late and now he’s paying the price for it.
Estelle: I feel like he was brave last year, though.
Eddie: Well, he was brave, sure, but you know, he also abandoned Emma. And he abandoned the mission and he went off to Pukhet to have fun, so.
Adam: Why that happened and what happened to him is something that we intend to get to.
Eddie: Yes.
Adam: To show you, this is not the last you will be seeing of our Pinocchio character.
So maybe he did go to NYC to bring Bae to Storybrooke because he thinks that they can work together on some kind of plan to fix everything. And/or he thinks that if helps reunited Bae and Rumple, Rumple would then help bring Emma back since August probably doesn’t know about the whole memory wipe thing if he took for NYC right after he found he could move.
I can just imagine Bae coming home and finding a giant wooden puppet outside of his apartment. (Shudder.) He’ll probably be like, “this is why I hate effing magic.”
I don’t know someone on Tumblr speculated that Eion Bailey’s new hairstyle is for flashbacks, so maybe episode 8 is about Captain Hook or Cora, and episode 9 could be about Pinocchio, and we get to see when he and Bae met up. I’d rather episode 9 be Bae-centric, but they might hold off doing that until the second part of the season.
I doubt that Disney would allow them to go there with Pinocchio, but the Phuket mention made me think that instead of there, they should have picked Fire Island just for more Firewood, jokes that we could do on here, lol. Seriously, I want Bae and August to have a bromance at least like Rumple and Charming have.