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PHOTO RECAP: ONCE UPON A TIME’s Storybrooke Scenes for 2×04 The Crocodile

The Crocodile opens with Emilie de Ravin’s Belle having a nightmare about Robert Carlyle’s Rumplestiltskin. She wakes up relieved that it’s not real but then spies him practicing magic. Later she cronfronts Rumple in his house (filmed in New Westminster), telling him he needs courage to let her in.

Is this the end of RumBelle? Belle leaves Rumple’s house and he goes looking for her at her father’s garden shop, the wonderfully-named Game of Thorns (filmed in the Prickly Pear Garden Centre in Steveston) but she isn’t there.

Belle is down on Main Street drinking iced tea after iced tea in Granny’s Diner, where Meghan Ory’s Red/Ruby befriends her, offers her a room at Granny’s and suggests there might be work for her at the shuttered Storybrooke public library. As Belle’s peering through one of the boarded-up library windows, Chris Gauthier’s Smee approaches and abducts her (filmed on Second Street in Steveston).

Rumple seeks help from Josh Dallas’s acting Sheriff David/Charming to find the missing Belle. No one trusts Rumple but Red/Ruby is persuaded to join the search party, using her special wolf sense of smell on Belle’s wrap to track her to her father’s garden business. It turns out Belle’s father has made a deal with Smee to abduct Belle and take her across the town line to make her forget about Rumple, even if it means she will forget about her father too.

Charming figures out that Belle’s father had Smee take Belle to the tunnels leading out of town (filmed mainly at the Britannia Mine Museum near Squamish). Rumple uses magic to pull back Belle from crossing the town line on an underground train. While she is grateful for the rescue she tells Rumple and her father that she doesn’t want to see either of them again.

But Rumple has learned something. How important honesty of the heart is. So he arranges for Belle to return to the library, leaving a key for her at Granny’s. There he tells her that she was right about him. That he is a coward and has been his whole life. How magic has been a crutch. And then he confesses about his missing son Bae and the quest to get him back. A quest that now seems at an impasse because Rumple will forget about Bae the moment he crosses the town line.

Does Rumple’s honesty of the heart earn him another chance with Belle? It seems so. She suggests going out for a hamburger sometime at Granny’s Diner — “I hear they make a great one.” RumBelle isn’t over.

P.S. Once Upon a Time filmed those magnificent scenes on Captain Hook’s pirate ship in Howe Sound near Britannia Beach where the mining museum is.