Above image: a sketch I drew of a young Baelfire.

As of today, it has been twelve years since the first appearance of Baelfire on the show Once Upon a Time. 

He made his debut in the eighth episode of the first season, when viewers got their first glimpse of the life of Rumplestiltskin before the Dark One landed. While at first he seemed to be merely an elusive part of Rumplestiltskin’s past, it soon became clear to viewers that his role in the overall story of the show is much, much more than that. 

While he may have only been a recurring ‘main’ character for two half seasons, it is undoubtable that without his acquisition of the conniving Blue Fairy’s magic bean, the rest of the show wouldn’t have happened. Regardless of the strange retcon they made in season 4 that the dark curse was simply a recovered artefact and not created by Rumplestiltskin (a choice that in my opinion takes away from Rumple’s gravitas as a character, but I digress), the point remains is that the entire reason that Regina was so perfectly teed up on the chessboard to create Storybrooke in the first place was because of Rumple’s love for his son and drive to win him back.

This simple fact is a key piece to the early show’s puzzle. Quite frankly, I don’t know if Rumple would even have been targeted to become the Dark One in the first place if it wasn’t for his desire to save Bae. Like Zoso said, he knows how to recognize a desperate soul, and Rumple’s love for his son made him quite desperate indeed.

In the first season, we only get to see Baelfire twice. Both apperances establish him as brave and caring, although perhaps with a bit of an impulsive streak as well. (He didn’t think to ask many questions about that bean Blue gave him—knowing her track record, it might well have been a regular kidney bean with a fancy polish.) 

We get enough of a tease that we know he has to be relevant to the plot in later episodes, even if we’re not quite sure when. There’s a little hint that the stranger August might be him. Of course, this turns out to not be true; but by then the audience’s interest is thoroughly piqued. (Or mine was, at any rate.)

My one big regret with how the show handled Baelfire was simply that we could have gotten so much more on him. There was decades worth of trauma gone virtually untapped, first from his father’s exploits as the Dark One and later on at Pan’s cruel hands. In Desperate Souls we quite clearly see Bae witness his father murder several people in front of him, something that’s largely glossed over despite the horror it would have brought him. We unfortunately never get to see his daring escape from Neverland, only getting a brief mention of it in his dialogue. There are so many fascinating things about Baelfire the show never got the chance to tell us about. I would have also loved to know more about his time with Tamara; their relationship seems simultaneously in character (we’ve already seen how Bae doesn’t necessarily think things through all the way before he does them) and out of character (he’s also understandably filled with mistrust after years of Pan’s abuse). 

While we unfortunately don’t get a whole lot of it, the few scenes the show gives us of Bae and Henry bonding are sweet. There’s something rather sad and tragic that Bae (albeit accidentally) perpetuated the family cycle of abandoning children that caused him so much strife, but unlike Pan (who was, unsurprisingly, a piece of work about it) and Rumple (who wasn’t thinking straight due to a curse), he at least was thoroughly unaware of his actions. While many people use him abandoning Emma as a reason to slander him, I think it’s a bit of an unfair conclusion especially considering that a) August was largely responsible for  and b) at that point in time especially, Baelfire was far from the most mentally stable person to begin with. At least he didn’t let go of Emma or Henry’s hand and let them tumble into a strange world to fend for themselves knowingly. I would argue that he neither knew that Emma would be caught (if my memory is serving me correctly it was August that called the authorities, which is rather rich coming from him), and was ignorant of both the time frame of the curse and Emma’s pregnancy. He wasn’t exactly well informed of the situation.

Another curious thing is that Baelfire is one of the only characters in the show without a direct parallel to another character from an existing work. Even Emma could be argued as an homage to the Ugly Duckling and bears a striking resemblance to protagonist Sabrina Grimm from Michael Buckley’s The Sisters Grimm book series. (Henry is debatably congruent to Sabrina’s younger sister Daphne, if you really want to take the connection and run with it.) However, there isn’t really anyone you can properly compare Baelfire to; even in The Sisters Grimm—while there are two different characters that both bear a slight resemblance to Baelfire, neither are quite as clear-cut as Sabrina and Daphne’s parallels to Emma and Henry. There are a few theories floating around the bowels of the Internet that he’s meant to represent another facet of Peter Pan, but even they are stretching fairly thin. He’s unexpected, and that’s an interesting contrast for a show based around new takes on pre-existing characters.

Baelfire’s actions throughout the show seem, to me at any rate, to be marked by a subconscious desire to prove himself, to be a hero. Perhaps it was in contrast to, as a child, being told constantly that his father was a coward and fear of making the same impression, being the same. It might also come from a deep-rooted insecurity about his mother leaving—of course he doesn’t initially know what actually happened to her, but when that jerk Hordor mentions it, I find it difficult to believe that he would completely blow the comment off, particularly considering the events that followed soon after .

We can infer this heroic desire is behind his strange resignment to the notion of being conscripted, his desperation to save the Darlings from the Shadow, for listening to August and letting Emma break the curse, for his final act of sacrificing himself for his father. Once you start looking, the examples present themselves quite readily. Perhaps it came out of a deep-seated notion that he doesn’t deserve happiness, so he must self-sacrifice, something reinforced by both Milah’s and Rumple’s abandonment in childhood. Or maybe it’s from a burning desire to prove himself as different from the reputation his father carried for all his childhood. Despite his seemingly unwavering belief in his uncursed father, the reputation of coward hung over their household like a black cloud, and I find it unlikely that Baelfire would be able to simply ignore it, even if he did not believe it to be true. Every time, his seemingly rash decisions end up with him sacrificing his own happiness and comfort for some notion of heroism. It becomes ironic, then, when we realize that he continued the cycle of abandoning his child that both his father and grandfather were guilty of, even if he wasn’t aware of it. This seems to be what really haunts his footsteps: the desperation to be better, to do something right, and the crushing reality that he can’t, not with the hand he was dealt.

Baelfire also tends to act without thinking things through. Whether it’s a small instance like revealing his birthday to a prying Hordor, or something larger like jumping in front of Michael Darling to bear the Shadow’s wrath or even proposing to Tamara when he had only recently met her, it’s an impulse he seems unable to shake. Perhaps his final episode, Quiet Minds, features the peak of this behaviour; he quite literally pushes a button that all but has a ‘Warning: Dark Magic Ahead’ label on it without a second thought. 

There’s likely also a deep-seated issue regarding attachment that’s colouring many of his actions. Between the mess that was his family situation and Killian selling him out to Pan, there’s an absolute bundle of trauma there waiting to be unwrapped, and motivations to be explored.

And all those horrors clearly did affect him; he went from being a relatively innocent and sweet kid in the early flashbacks we see of him to a well-intentioned thief with a darkened outlook after his long and arduous stint in Neverland. It’s not talked about nearly enough that he braved returning to that place of nightmares to save his family. Is this another manifestation of his desire to be a hero? I certainly think so. It can also be easily linked to his refusal to follow in Rumple’s footsteps as well, to not leave Henry to the wolves like Rumple had left him. That has to be a direct result of what both Rumple and Killian did to him, leaving him alone with abandonment issues. He can’t bear to do that to his own kid, or he’d never forgive himself. The cycle needs to break, and it breaks with him. Or it would have, if he’d had a say in it. Unfortunately, he was gone too soon to truly break the cycle.

There are plenty of insecurities and trauma to explore throughout Baelfire’s life, which is why it’s a shame that so often, in both the show and the fandom at large, he’s viewed mostly as an obstacle between Killian and Emma’s relationship. I like Killian and Emma together, but I feel as if just keeping Baelfire within the spheres of romance and a single love triangle is wasted potential. His time spent bonding with Henry, although short, is sweet nonetheless. I’d love to have seen more of him getting to know Belle as well; their turbulent relationships with Rumple would have given them a great deal to talk about. His presence was also a driving force behind Rumple’s character arc, a fact that becomes all too clear in season 4 once he’s out of the equation and Rumple’s consistent development crumbles. In that season he flops back and forth between good and bad faster than a metronome in the absence of his constant, his love for his son.

As a matter of fact, Baelfire is more or less the keystone that makes the entire series work. Everyone’s stories depend on him, from Regina’s being mentored by Rumple to the strange circumstances surrounding Charming’s ascent to the throne.

This is why it really is such a shame he was written out so early.

In conclusion, I have to say this: while I may find myself frustrated with how Once Upon a Time handled him, there is no doubt that Baelfire is an interesting character with a pivotal role to play in the series’ plot. And the good news is, because canon left us so many holes in his life, there’s plenty of space for us to come up with our own notions of what might fill them.