Once Upon a Time Review: Her Handsome Hero (Season 5 Episode 17)

We get our first Rumbelle-centric episode of the Underworld arc with Once Upon a Time‘s “Her Handsome Hero.” I’m still not loving the Charming family’s weak, meandering, must-defeat-Hades arc, so anything focusing on Rumple and Belle is better-than-average in my book. I can’t even believe I’m saying this after how much I hated the Rumple-is-the-Dark-One-again reveal in the midseason finale.

Once‘s reimagining of Gaston is something of a letdown. Gone is the buffoonish, vain main in the cartoon. In his place is a blander, more covertly sinister “Nice Guy” trope. I kind of hate it. I feel like they could have done something far more interesting with him, even if he was only going to be around for a one-off (spoiler alert: he’s sleeping with the spirit-fishes by the end of “Her Handsome Hero”).

The gist of this episode is that, now that Belle’s trapped in the Underworld thanks to that portal Hades had Rumple open up last week to snag Zelena’s daughter, she and her Dark One hubby must conspire to keep their unborn child away from Hades. The delightfully hammy Hades (played with aplomb, as always, by the hamtastic Greg Germann) has got everybody’s number in the Underworld and apparently knows everything about everyone–right down to who knew who, back when they were alive. I’m imagining Hades down there on his throne watching the years and years of Enchanted Forest flashbacks as if they were a long-running soap opera.

Hades is extra pissy this week, it seems, because (1) Zelena didn’t fall into his arms after his admittedly pretty awesome speech at the end of “Our Decay” and (2) he is finding tiny flowers blooming all over his wretched Underbrooke, in weird places like construction site asphalt cracks.

Emma Swan & Crew are the cause of these little flowers of hope, and Hades is more determined than ever to snuff that hope out.

Towards this end, he tracks down Gaston, Belle’s dead ex-fiance. Gaston works at a pet shelter, which immediately makes me disinclined to hate him. Oops. Hades wants to pit Gaston against Rumple, Gaston’s murderer. He even offers Belle a deal, agreeing to free the baby from Rumple’s deal if either Rumple or Gaston pushes the other into the River of Souls during their face-off.

Of course, this is Belle we’re talking about. She’s not willing to let Gaston be doomed to an eternity of torment in order to save her child and herself, obviously. Her chief characteristic is “do-gooder,” even when said do-gooding comes off as a little naive (and sometimes grating). This aspect of her personality is in full force during the course of this episode, both in the present-day Underworld storyline and in the concurrent flashbacks to Belle’s first meeting with Gaston way back when.

I continue to be impressed by the way they’re handling Rumple’s betrayal of Belle’s trust this time around. Instead of getting angry and leaving him (yet again), Belle’s opted to take the high road, insisting that Rumple can turn his dark power into light, citing something Merlin said earlier in the season. I appreciate the fact that Belle is now fully admitting that she knows the man Rumple is and loves him despite it. I really do hope that she knows Rumple better than he knows himself, for both their sakes.

At some point during their argument, Rumple says that whether an action is good or evil is all about context, which pits the two against one another in a really interesting way and basically underlines the theme at the crux of the show–everyone is the hero of their own story. Even the villains.

(Except for Cruella. She’s just cray-cray.)

As Belle fights to save a little ogre youngling in the flashbacks, she quickly realizes that Gaston is a secret jerk, willing to kill (and not just kill, but torture) a virtually innocent lil’ ogre for some sort of vengeance against the ogre army that’s massacring their people. He’s not the pompous cartoon of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, but he is definitely still nefarious.

Belle’s earnestness borders on naïveté during the flashback sequence, as she insists on taking an out-of-the-way detour to pick up a magic mirror to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the baby ogre doesn’t have nefarious intentions towards her people. That whole plot is a little more convoluted than it needs to be to make the same point, which is simply: Belle is pure good and selfless. She has no tolerance for crappy people like Gaston (except when she needs to marry him to save her people).

Belle has historically been dedicated to doing the right thing, without fail, every time. This predisposition makes her episode arc with Rumple in the present-day Underworld storyline even more interesting.

Rumple, being Rumple, is more than ready to face-off with Gaston and toss him into the River of Souls like so much garbage, after he hears about Hades’ deal from Belle (seriously, Belle, what on earth were you thinking telling Rumple about that deal?!). She decides that she can help Gaston move on rather than defeat him using Rumple’s dark magic. She’s on a roll, too, realizing that by helping Gaston move on, they can also somehow wound Hades and eventually defeat him (in the same way that Liam Jones moving on wounded Hades).

Unfortunately, Belle decides that she’s Gaston’s unfinished business (which is confusing–in what way could Gaston “finish” with Belle and move on?) and apparently she’s wrong about that. Either she’s wrong or the discovery that Belle has married Rumple, the man that killed Gaston, totally alters Gaston’s unfinished business and switches it over to killing Rumple.

The twist, with Belle elbowing Gaston into the River of Souls to save Rumple, is excellent. It opens up so many interesting opportunities for this character. Are they about to set her off on a path where she’ll be willing to allow Rumple to wield his dark magic to save their baby? Because, naturally, Hades is a total jerk and words his deal so that Belle dooming Gaston to eternal torment is for nothing whatsoever–it needed to be Rumple doing the deed in order for the contract promising Hades the Rumbelle baby to be made null and void. Bummer.

The hopelessness that Belle and Rumple feel after being played by Hades causes a nearby asphalt flower to wither and die. Hades poofs that flower over to a sad Zelena, who’s sitting in a diner feeling sorry for herself for literally the entire episode. Between that flower gesture and her anger over Regina only feigning interest in her pain in order to get information about Hades out of her, it appears that Zelena is due for a switch back over to the dark side–a reunion with her flamey love interest.

Meanwhile, the Charming family (plus Hook) endures an extremely boring subplot (again). Apparently, Emma is able to have dream visions of the future now. She spends the entire episode trying to keep Snow from being killed (as per the vision), only for the gang to eventually rally together and decide they need to work together to defeat the unseen creature that killed Snow in Emma’s dream.

Except it turns out that the beast is actually Ruby in wolf-form.

Say what? Why is Ruby in the Underworld? Did she die? What happened to her quest with Mulan? Why did we need this entire boring subplot in order to reintroduce her?

Other thoughts:

• Is it just me or is Hook being a whiny little jerk a lot of the time lately? He’s so snippy with Emma and basically everyone! I love me some good ol’ Hook snark, but this is too much.
• Hades is following Zelena around Underbrooke, watching her from around corners, like an absolute sketchy creeper. And I love it.
• The blue flame hair moments keep happening for no reason at all and at this point, I feel like the showrunners are doing it to torture me. Yes, me, specifically.
• Belle handles the news that Rumple killed Gaston way back when pretty well. She brushes it off like nothing, after a brief moment of annoyance.
• Emma admitting that she feels guilty for having “dragged” everyone to the Underworld and put them in danger of being killed is supposed to be the heart of the Charmings’ subplot in this episode, but it didn’t play very well. Mostly because I feel like we’ve heard the “family sticks together and helps each other out” speech a bajillion times from Snow and/or Charming by now.
• Regina does not have nearly enough to do in this episode.

What did you think of this episode of Once Upon a Time? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Once Upon a Time airs Sunday at 8/7c on ABC.

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