I agree, MysteryKat, this year we are learning nifty shadow tricks. I am reluctantly warming to the Rumple and Pan as brothers. Perhaps though they are spiritual brothers of a curse that does not belong to the realm they are in. I would like it if this storyline is setting up the back half of the season. So we end NL finding out that Pan is to NL as Rumple is to the EF. In both cases they are strong, powerful, evenly matched in some ways but opposite. What if Pan searched for his father just as Rumple searched for his son? Like Rumple thinks, he found him too late and it marked a shift to a loss of belief that began to eat away at magic, because hope is the strongest magic, and both lose hope.
In the original movie, Peter Pan runs away and when he comes back and his parents have had another child and Peter thinks they forgot about him. Wouldn’t it be interesting if Rumple was the other child. Then maybe the reason Rumple’s father left was to try and bring his other son home, but was never successful.
Also thinking about it Peter Pan being evil makes perfect sense, since he feels like he was abandoned, its glossed over in more traditional stories but he would end up having some issues.