Stay Curious, Stay Weird, Stay Kind - A Brief Retrospective

the relationship that an audience member has with a particular piece of media is in a worst case scenario something that ceases as soon as they stop engaging with that work when you see a movie and you stop thinking about the movie as soon as you walk out of the theater then it was a bad movie but a good piece of media be it a show movie comic or even a painting is something that sticks with the audience long after they stop being exposed directly to it if there's a game you haven't played in years that you still think back to after all this time or a particular line from a song that gets stuck in your head then you understand the influence that media can have this relationship however is usually something spurred on by a deep connection to the works themes or characters the lessons we learn and emotions we experience vicariously through fictional characters can stick with us nearly as much as our own lift experiences it's much less common for that peretectual relationship to persist as a matter of design Gravity Falls began in mid-2013 and aired its final Mainline episode in 2016 but since then it's managed to maintain a level of loyalty from its viewers bordering on fanatical which of course is typical of any fandom and yet the way that this fanaticism came about is something utterly unique and how intentional it all was the relationship between the audience the work and the creators is so wildly different from the norm due to the level of meta Elements Incorporated into the show itself everything from ciphers in the credits to languages that hint towards future plots two ARG elements that encourage viewership not to end just because the credits have finished rolling as such simply watching Gravity Falls from start to finish does not give you the full Fan Experience in the way that it would with many other TV shows though it's not as though the actual experience is something that you can even get these days if you want to figure out the key to one of the ciphers there are multiple web resources that will hold your hand through the entire experience if you want to guess wildly and what might happen next there's no need to as not only is the question long since answered but a guy on Reddit probably accurately predicted the twist months in advance it's not to say as if Gravity Falls as a show that can no longer be enjoyed though even if some of the magic from the show is gone much of the appeal still existed within the 22-minute segments in their own right and so that's what this video is going to focus on it's a middle ground between not talking about it at all and spoiling everything to the point that there's very little reason to engage with it in the first place while still feeling like I get to tell a complete story as usual this video will be split into individual episode retrospectives which themselves are split into three sections recap review and wrap up recap for a general detailing of the plot review to summarize my thoughts on the episode as they pertain to the show as a whole and wrap up for things I can't find another place for tourist trapped the story starts with an inmedius res Glimpse at Dipper and Mabel Pines two siblings on the run from an unseen monster before flashing back to when it all started the two had moved to Gravity Falls with their tourist trap running great uncle who they call Grunkle Stan as their parents wanted them to get some time Outdoors over the summer and while Dipper is suspicious of the new town Mabel is excited to start a new chapter of her life and meet a boy eventually Mabel succeeds in getting a date with one Norman but a mysterious book Dipper finds in the forest leads him to believe that Mabel's new boyfriend is actually a zombie he gathers evidence of her boyfriend's condition before ultimately rushing to rescue her from the threat only to learn that rather than a zombie Norman is a bunch of gnomes in Disguise intent on making Mabel their Queen she refuses and so they decide to kidnap her instead which leads to the chase scene at the start of the episode in the end Mabel is able to defuse the situation by defeating their leader with a leaf blower after tricking him into believing she accepted the offer the two twins in the episode declaring that despite Dipper's book stating not to trust anybody they can rely on each other the role of a first episode in any TV show is to introduce the setting tone and characters to the audience while also being entertaining enough to sell those Concepts as well but in Gravity Falls a large amount of the show's appeal comes from the underlying mystery element and as such that this episode instead has the limitation where it also needs to ensure that there's a balance struck between telling too much and ruining the mystery or telling too little and failing to engage the audience ultimately this line is written by connecting the characters to the setting the plot itself is engaged by Mabel trying to meet a guy and Dipper trying to find something to justify his uneasiness and by these things kicking off the mystery element we see how the show won't simply incorporate these elements independently each one is dependent on the others to work and nothing exists in a vacuum and so it's Dipper's mistrusting personality and Maples more outgoing tendencies that end up bringing the two together for the finale as well as their respective abilities to allow them to neutralize the threat and the book is also established not as a device where eliminating mystery or taking attention out of plot lines but as a tool to enhance them while Dipper is at first wrong about the nature of the threat to Mabel's livelihood the book isn't able to help him out and winds up playing into his fears in mistrust because that's what he wants to find it's a tool that can be misused as well as used properly and this is an idea that's put into the audience's head from a very early point the legend of the gobble Walker eager to spend some quality time with his grandkids stand ropes Dipper and Mabel into a day fishing at the lake but the Pines twins are more interested in the stories of Old Man McGucket who claims there is a lake monster named the gobblewanker destroying things everybody else including Stan dismisses this story but Dipper and Mabel enlist the help of soos to get to the bottom of the story they blow off their family to pursue the monster hoping for a nice photo of it to win a contest but the search comes up fruitless that is until the actual lake monster appears and chases them off the island they're eventually chased into a cave where the gobblewalker is trapped before a Falling Rock shuts it down as it was all along a mechanical being piloted by Old Man McGucket so his son would pay attention to him in the end the Pines twins feel guilty over their exclusion of their great uncle and they spend the rest of the day with him [Music] one aspect of Gravity Falls that has given it the amount of praise and Longevity that it still has today is the level of detail put into its World building and consistency from plot to plot it's apparent in this episode though only on a second watch through how much forethought went into the series as a few examples Stan's car has a license plate that reads Stanley mobile for shadowinka's real name Gideon makes an appearance on the back of the magazine Dippers reading at the start of the episode blend and Landon can also be seen in the background of this episode as well as the previous one though he's not introduced properly until eight episodes later and of course old man mcgucket's proficiency for invention is introduced here as a gag only to become a major plot point leader in the series as such Gravity Falls is a type of show to heavily reward a careful viewer the type of show that becomes more engaging the more effort is put into watching it and part of its success can be attributed to the fact that it calls attention to this aspect rather than keeping it hidden seeing all of this continuity encourages re-watching as well as engaging with communities online to see things you may have missed this episode itself even had a fake screenshot put online which Slenderman edited into the background one that caused many viewers to re-watch it so they could determine if it was real or not and this sort of fine combing of background element is an early glimpse into the later Obsession it would Foster in many of its fans Headhunters Zeus tumbles Upon A Room of Forgotten life-sized wax figures beneath the Mystery Shack and shows it to the Pines family Mabel creates a wax figure of Grunkle Stan in order to commemorate the grand reopening of the wax museum of mystery the reopening is a success though only due to a lie about free pizza being provided to the attendees and Stan retires to his couch for the evening alongside the statue of himself but a mystery arises when it's discovered that the wax statue has been decapitated and Dipper sets out to investigate operating on the assumption that the attacker was motivated by anger at the wax Museum's botched reopening the investigation never finds success until it's learned that the real culprits were the statues themselves angry about being mistreated for years and they were attempting to decapitate the real Stan Pines so Mabel and Dipper team up to fight the cursed statues and eventually succeed when Dipper lures their leader wax Sherlock Holmes up to the roof as the sun rises an interesting aspect of Gravity Falls that makes it so distinct relative to other mystery shows of its ilk is the inversion of the expected outcomes that many plot lines have typically a supernatural element is introduced at the start of an episode and it's slowly played out more and more until the ending where it's revealed that there was a mundane logical explanation for everything the ghost haunting the Mansion is really just a guy in astute scaring teenagers but in Gravity Falls it's just as likely that a mundane plot about tracking tanoax figure Vandal can turn out to be a supernatural phenomenon of cursed figures as it can be a lake monster who turns out to be an animatronic Ploy for an old man to spend more time with his son it's not just an inversion of the typical animation cliches but a step further by inverting the predictability of those plots in so far as the show isn't afraid to take a story in a riskier less predictable Direction in lieu of something that might be considered safe this episode is one of the most proper introductions to the town of gravity falls in the show as seen in Dipper and Mabel's investigations into the beheading suspect as they go around the town the general Vibe is explored more and more this is a town small and intimate enough that a wax statue being vandalized is enough to have the police mobilized as well as to have a majority of the people show up to a single event and a list of suspects to be formed purely from people that you recognize at that event the small town Vibe of Gravity Falls gives a realistic reason for much of the recurring cast rather than a constant revolving door of new people or suspicious lack of Outsiders and strangers to the plot the same few people can serve the same few roles because of an understandable lack of anybody else to film that existing role The Hand That Rocks the Mabel the Pines twin seek to investigate little Gideon whose tint of telepathy serves as a direct competition to the Mystery Shack although they can't help but find him harmless and no more of a con artist than their great uncle but Gideon becomes enamored with the sight of Mabel and seeks out her affections taking her on dates and using the pressure of the town's folk to convince her to agree to more and more but Mabel doesn't see the relationship that way and tries to let him down easily though she finds no success until Dipper agrees to have the conversation for her but rather than getting the message that Mabel isn't interested he instead doubles down and decides that Dipper has deceived doubts into the mind of his bow Now intent to destroy the Payne's family he lures Dipper into a trap and fights him with telekinetic powers only for Mabel to catch him off guard and smash the amulet that granted those Powers as well as the hopes for their relationship meanwhile Stan tries to tell off Gideon's father bud about their family dating but instead of an argument the two begin writing up plans to merge their businesses for an even greater profit only for the agreement to be called off when Gideon returns home from the a plot Gideon is introduced in this episode as a sort of anti-pines family existing as a foil and a recurring season 1 antagonist while the town of Gravity Falls as a town inundated with Fantastical and Supernatural elements these elements are shown more as tools than inherent evil characters like Gideon who Miss news things like the journals for personal Glory rather than a sense of wonder or curiosity serve as an ideological opposite to Dipper likewise while Mabel seeks out social interactions and affection from others she does so by forming genuine bonds with them while Gideon wants the same thing but only so he can create a sort of dominance one of the best ways to introduce a character is to introduce a polar opposite to them or at least a negative influence over the same aspects of the world so that the characters you learn about in this case the Pines family can develop a set of traits and characteristics opposite those of the antagonist and so a character like Gideon serves as more of a parallel to the Pines twins rather than an exact opposite it isn't that he's completely different it's that he's the kind of person who never quite had the same close familial relationships as Dipper or Mabel both characters are part of a familial con artist business both are adjacent to the supernatural elements of the setting with the only thing separating them as how they interact with these elements and what they want out of them if things had been slightly different it's not unreasonable that Gideon could have turned out like the Pines Twins or even vice versa the inconveniencing Dipper begins to develop a crush on Wendy one of the other Mystery Shack employees although he feels as though the relationship is doomed to be one-sided due to the age difference and the fact that he's not a teenager and so when Wendy's older friends come around to hang out Dipper invites himself and Mabel along so he can spend more time with Wendy and prove to her that he's not a child the group goes to a condemned Corner Store where the couple who ran it the dusker tins were allegedly murdered before the place shut down they mess around in the store for a while before eventually Dipper starts to fear that something is haunting the store although he's too afraid of being ridiculed by his new friends to say anything until the duskerton ghosts begin capturing and punishing the group one by one although Mabel is incapacitated due to overeating expired candy mix it's not until Dipper pieces together that the ghosts hate teenagers that he steps up to defuse the situation by announcing that he's really 12 years old and doing a childish dance to prove it the couple let their captives go and everything is returned to normal with Dipper and Wendy finding a new respect for one another thematically the town of Gravity Falls is meant to represent the childhoods of Dipper and Mabel their Canon birthdays are on the last day of summer break and being both 12 years old their time in Gravity Falls overlaps with the last few weeks of their childhood and so one thing that pops up throughout the show is the duo trying to contend with the idea of their impending teenager dumb and whether holding on to or rejecting the gift of that last period of childhood innocence is worth doing both twins have differing ideas on how to approach this subject Mabel is actively embracing the part of her that's childish with the looming threat of adulthood being something that he chooses to ignore in order to live in the moment Dipper on the other hand cannot wait to be a full-fledged adult and actively resents being viewed as a child but through the series he starts to learn that the sense of adventure and wonder is something that can fade with time and as such he must learn to appreciate it while it's still there but for now this subject is something that exists more so in the realm of subtext meant to accentuate plots rather than to be the basis of them the difference between the two twins in this way doesn't create any lasting conflicts between the two until much later in the show but it's still something that forms as early as this episode giving the finale of the show a much stronger impact as it's the culmination of ideas that have existed since the very start Dipper versus Manliness after embarrassing himself at a video game strength testing machine Dipper declares his intentions to become more manly although he isn't quite sure what this entails so he goes into the woods where a mano tour detects his strife and decides to teach the boy about being a man Dipper baits the manotor tribe into teaching him what they know and soon he's put through a series of toughness trials the final trial for him to undergo involves fighting and beheading a multi-bearer which is exactly what it sounds like but when Dipper defeats it and prepares to detach one of its heads he learns that the bear likes the same songs as him and the two form a bond Dipper returns to the manotors after refusing to slay the bear and they deem him unmanly for refusing their challenge although in the end Grunkle Stan declares that doing the right thing even if it's unpopular is more manly than anything this is after Mabel has spent the entire episode trying to get her great uncle more in touch with his sensitive side so he can ask out his Crush Lazy Susan working at the local Diner but when she fails to soften him up she instead sells Susan the idea of the guy as he fix her upper the two plots of this episode are opposites one of Tipper trying to find happiness by being more manly and one from Stan trying to find happiness by being less so manliness in this context being something so nebulously defined that it may as well not exist for only potential interpretations Dipper wants more of it and stands once less and so it's viewed as something you only desire when it's something you don't have as such the message at the end of the episode plays into this Dipper wants to become more manly until he passes the final trial at which point he realizes that that manliness is worthless if it isn't bringing you happiness or any sort of satisfaction with your life if your only desire is to fit in with other people then you'll likely end up fitting into whatever group thinks it can get the most out of you Dipper only wants to fit in with the manotors as they seem to have something that he doesn't and yet all they want out of him is to slay the multibare out of some personal grudge against the Beast and so Dipper rejects an ideology that exists purely to perpetuate itself manliness for the sake of being manly is worthless it's better to be tough for the sake of standing up for yourself and others rather than to fit in Double Dipper [Music] Stan throws a party in order to attract kids and their money to the Mystery Shack and while they're setting up for that party Dipper and Mabel discover that Stan's copier machine can also clone people when Mabel is asked to man the ticket booth with windy Sheila means that she's not able to go out and make new friends so Dipper volunteers to take her place in order to get closer to his Crush but when he ends up ditching her post to go to the party anyway and so Dipper uses the cloning machine to make a second hymn so that he can enact an elaborate plan to win Wendy's heart but as this plan gets more and more complicated Tipper continuously makes more clones of himself until in typical sci-fi fashion the Clones overthrow him for not sticking to the earlier plans in the end Dipper spends too much time fighting the other Dippers to spend any time with Wendy and they all lose out on the night with her he concludes from this that perhaps he shouldn't get so hung up on plans in the future meanwhile Mabel takes the dance floor in an attempt to impress her new friends grinda and Candy by beating the most popular girl in town in a dance-off she fails to win over the crowd largely because she's unable to threaten them into support but does manage to win over her new friends despite this Dipper learns to let loose and relax in this episode largely through spending time with others instead of getting in his home ahead about things we see this play out by seeing the comparison between him and dwell hymns some of the dippers stay reclusive and plan amongst themselves while the real Dipper Dipper classic goes out and tries to plants out firsthand only to see their weakness by going out into the world and gaining first-hand experience Dipper is able to grow and mature beyond the more analytical recluse he would have become had he kept to himself a type of recluse who would grow to resent the more outgoing and adaptive person he could have been Dipper gets along well with the Clones of himself right up until the point where he realizes that he needs to change since that desire to change is a direct challenge to the older versions of him they take offense and attack this episode is also our first look at Pacifica Northwest a secondary antagonist for the Pines twins to deal with while Gideon is somebody who has more knowledge of the mystical side of Gravity Falls Pacifica is the representation of the mundane her animosity towards the twins comes as a part of their dealings with social situations and human interaction it takes much longer before she gets any proper development though so I'll leave the section on her character for then for now she exists as more of a plot devised than a proper character something we'll see built upon in The Following episode irrational treasure the town is celebrating Pioneer Day where everybody reenacts Gravity Falls as it was during the year it was founded during the festivities Pacifica Northwest who is the great granddaughter of the town's founder denigrates Mabel for her silliness saying that she's incapable of taking the festivities seriously enough and so to make his sister feel better by taking Pacifica down a peg Dipper decides to investigate a fact he read in Journal 3 that the Northwest Family did not really found Gravity Falls thanks to Mabel's Shenanigans their investigation leads them to another ground Vault where they learn the truth the town was founded by the eighth and a half president Quentin trimbley who was such a national embarrassment that his existence was covered up and the honor of founding Gravity Falls was given to a local buffoon instead but some shadowy Force doesn't want them to learn of this cover-up and the police take them into custody let out only when Quentin's body is thawed from a peanut brittle block and as he's technically the acting president orders the mystery twins pardoned and freed Gravity Falls is at its core a silly show it's targeted towards children having aired on Disney's networks and more or less tries to appeal to that demographic and everything and while there are a lot of themes and jokes that only get picked up on by adults as well as many ciphers and tertiary puzzles to keep fans engaged outside the show that may go over the heads of some of the younger fans at the end of it all gravity fault is not a show that takes itself extremely seriously and it doesn't necessarily demand that the audience does either approaching it it's though it's a Masterwork of deeper meaning as esoteric as it is profound is fundamentally missing the point the plots are silly the characters are silly and if you aren't indulging in the lighthearted fun of the episode to episode plots then you're actually missing out on just as much of the experience as a person who engages with the work exclusively to find the hidden messages Gravity Falls is not the kind of show that demands and its audience create a two-hour video essay picking it apart nor is it the kind of show that's so shallow that such a thing cannot be done either the end goal of the episode is to show that the silliness of a character like Mabel combined with the enthusiasm for the Fantastic of a character like Dipper is ultimately what makes up the rod appeal that the show has to offer there's no one correct interpretation of the show you have to take the individual Parts together to appreciate it fully The Time Traveler's Pig the Mystery Shack is holding a fair and Dipper spends the time with Wendy enjoying each other's company until he accidentally hits her in the eye with the baseball while trying to get ice for her injury Robbie comes by and treats it with a snow cone before asking her out Dipper mopes for the rest of the afternoon but Mabel has a great time winning a pig which she names Waddles but when Dipper meets a time traveler blendin Blandon who says he's there to investigate a series of time anomalies he gets the idea to travel back in time and redo the throw that injured windy so she doesn't end up with Robbie after a series of failures he eventually enlists the help of Mabel to get his happy ending but this comes at the cost of Pacifica Northwest winning the Pig instead they fight over which timeline they should stay in before eventually Dipper caves in and allows Winnie to date Robbie so Mabel can get back waddles in the end Waddles is able to embarrass Robbie to give Dipper a satisfying conclusion after all and blend and Blandon is made to fix all the time anomalies set during the previous episodes this is probably the moment that made the most people want to go back and re-watch earlier Gravity Falls episodes while a few of the more canine observers certainly recognized blinden from his subtle Cameo appearances as well as popping up into theme song this is the point where all of that pays off and because this is a payoff episode it also distracts from potential looks into the future that may fly under people's noses Ford makes an early appearance in this episode it was originally planned that he would have six fingers shown on his hand but that was considered to be too obvious by the showrunners and so his hands are off screen instead for Mysteries it's best to ride the line of subtleties or that viewers are never completely able to recognize when something is given away or what details are meant to be important but in addition to dropping subtle plot hints such as blendon's camo outfit teasing later episodes at pieces this episode also plays into many of the Thematic moments of later episodes Dipper ultimately chooses to sacrifice something he wants for the better end of his sister's life the damage caused by Supernatural elements of the town could always be mitigated as long as we maintain a close relationship with those nearest to us one other thing that comes up in this episode as well as to be the previous is showing off massive forces beyond the explanation of the show up to that point that don't get built upon in the moment leading to a general feeling that there's a much greater set of conspiracies than what we're ever exposed to moments like this lead to a feeling that each episode is building up to something as there are always more unanswered questions than answers and the audience will want more fight fighters after an argument over windy Robbie challenges Dipper to a fight and he fears for his life as Dipper knows he can't find somebody older than him or anybody at all for that matter while panicking on what to do he finds an old cheat code carved into an arcade machine that brings the royalty-free fighting game character Romo makes Skirmish to life and so rather than fighting Robbie himself Dipper plans to have Rumble fight for him and lies that Robbie slew his father to rile up the fighter but when the fight actually happened Rumble begins actually beating up Robbie with the intent to finish him and so Dipper has to stop the rampaging video game character in the end the only way to satiate the Fighter's lust for violence is by admitting that he lied and then accepting his impending doom at the hands of Rumble but after Dipper is beat up Rumble Fades into nothing as the game is now over ultimately when Wendy sees the Carnage and announces her hatred of violence the two boys lie about their intentions and declare a cold war truce where they simply hate each other in silence meanwhile Mabel tries to cure Stan of a newfound fear of heights by luring him to the water tower only for that Tower to be damaged during the fighting which cures his fear through exposure a very self-aware episode of Gravity Falls this story comes with a moral about how lying to avoid or circumvent conflict can lead to much more harm than simply accepting the consequences up front Dipper is to remind it for not doing the manly Thing by finding Robbie outright preferring to cower like a wimp the show's own language and ends up lying to rumble about his backstory to get the fighter to battle for him but had he told the truth from the start there could have been a lot of collateral damage avoided including Tipper having to fight a professional instead of some random teenager but immediately after this lesson is learned Dipper and Robbie put aside their differences to mutually lie to Wendy about where all the Carnage came from claiming that they both hate fighting instead of telling the truth upright where most shows would have gone for a moral of some kind where Dipper is honest and proclaims to improve himself we immediately get a comedic beat of him instantly forgetting his lesson this episode is ultimately a filler episode not really one to push the plot forward in a directly meaningful way but largely existing to establish the relationship between Robbie and Dipper following The Time Traveler's Pig it's fitting that a major part of the episode comes from the world of an arcade-style fighting game with such lines as you killed my father again it plays into the repetitive and ultimately pointless nature of it all not that this is necessarily a bad thing it's fine for an episode to explore the characters or to Simply tell a story without being directly plot relevant and so in episode every so often that lets the audience cool off of a constant elevation of stakes is a much needed Refuge Little Dipper Mabel is revealed to be a millimeter taller than Dipper and she spends the afternoon making fun of him for it upset at this Dipper sets out to find something paranormal that can make him taller and comes across crystals that when light is refracted through can grow or Shrink objects he creates a flashlight out of the crystals and uses this to try to get an edge over Mabel but when the two weekend fighting over the flashlight it's discovered by Gideon who uses it to shrink Mabel and Dipper in order to hold them hostage but when Stan doesn't respond to his threads he decides to Simply shrink Stan and take the shack for himself Mabel and Dipper are able to beat him to the shack but when they're about to grow to their usual size Dipper begins arguing with Mabel over whether she'll regrow him to his original height or let him keep the extra height he gained from the flashlight this argument prevents them from her screwing stand in time and when confronted about it later Dipper admits that he felt he was being made fun of too much for the height difference to which Mabel responded it's the only thing she really had over her brother in the end they team up one more time to disable Gideon before he can shrink Stan and the two grow back to their original size with the issue beneath them atically this episode plays into many of the morals that Gravity Falls routinely uses through its run a paranoidal device is misused for personal gain and can't be set right until the family puts some kind of argument behind them as such this episode is a standalone interpretation of the show at large even in smaller ways it shows off character motives and personalities Dipper Begins the episodes plot by being insecure but rather than this being viewed as a fault exclusive to him it's instead presented as something Mutual between the Pines twins Mabel it was just as insecure over Dipper rubbing it in that he's smarter than she is so it's less so that one character is in the wrong and more so that both characters need to grow this is a much more satisfying way to do character development as it makes it feel like less of a personal responsibility to grow and more of a thing that people can work on together isolation only makes you more distant from others which also revealed in this episode is a much less interpersonal conflict namely that Gideon's desire to take over the Mystery Shack is less a grudge and more a desire for power he knows there's something greater at play behind the scenes and wants not only to crush the Pines family for opposing him but for being in his way and so an episode that sets itself up as being about the interpersonal relationships of the show can also surprise the Audience by having something much more tangible revealed summerween it's summerween Halloween and summer because Gravity Falls loves celebrating it so much and because it'd be strange to air a Halloween special in a show that takes place over the course of a single summer the mystery twins are preparing to celebrate but when Dipper finds out that Wendy is going to a party and that she thinks trick-or-treating is childish he decides to skip going out with Mabel and her friends to go to the party with a Winnie instead but they're stopped by these summerween trickster a Monster who attacks children who don't have the seasonal Spirit who demands 500 pieces of candy from the group or he'll eat them they set out to collect the Bounty and have fun doing it but ultimately fail when Dipper accidentally destroys the candy trying not to look childish in front of Wendy the summer wean trickster then comes to collect and chases the group into a costume store where he eats Zeus before cornering the others but just as he's about to finish them off he collapses as Seuss eats him from the inside in the end it's revealed that the trickster formed out of all of the collected rejected candy and being eaten and appreciated by somebody was all he ever wanted so he dies happy in the B plot Stan tries and fails to scare two kids and fears he's losing his touch but when the kids break into his house to collect candy and see him preparing to shower they run off in fear and he celebrates the victory in this episode we see Mabel lamenting that she wasn't able to spend one final Halloween trick-or-treating with her brother that they'd be too old the following year and the tradition would be lost to the inevitable flow of time as well as the desire to grow up as the town of Gravity Falls exists as a metaphor for the childhood of the two main characters we can see the fear that the two are going to lose at special something they had showing itself and how each character views their childhood Mabel isn't just clinging onto her childhood innocence and a desire to avoid growing up but she's holding on to her connections to the town of Gravity Falls as she fears that growing up also means abandoning things she Associates with the happy childhood such as her relationship to her brother likewise we often see Dipper rejecting the more mundane aspects of the town of Gravity Falls only to inevitably go back to the way things were when these get in the way of spending time with his sister and so summerween as an episode and a holiday exists as a sort of last hurray a moment for the twins to celebrate their childlike Tendencies while it's still acceptable to do so Mabel might have trouble Moving on but it's an issue that she doesn't have to worry about for now and Dipper might be too eager to move on but likewise it's an issue that he shouldn't have to worry about for now boss Mabel foreign tired of Stan's Iron Fist when running the Mystery Shack Mabel makes a bet with her great-grandfather as to whether she could run the business with kindness rather than he could run it his way so they agree that if Stan makes more money on his vacation then the Pines family can make without him Mabel will become the new boss for good things are off to a good start for Mabel when she lets others have input but it turns out Seuss's ideas are too far-fetched to actually work Wendy is too lazy to do anything without being forced to and Dipper's idea of using Real Paranormal creatures as attractions only succeeds in scarring guests ultimately Mabel is forced to take more after Stan in order to get things accomplished and soon the Mystery Shack is profitable again although after all the damage dealt they only succeed in being profitable by a single dollar meanwhile Stan was on a game show where his con man way succeeded in giving him a large prize only for him to bet it all on the final puzzle and lose because he couldn't say the word please but when he returns and announces his victory Mabel decides to give up the prize and let her uncle stay his boss as she didn't like the person she had to become to run the Mystery Shack Grunkle Stan is not a good person he lies cheats and enjoys watching others suffer despite this his Antics are always portrayed positively despite the clear negative effect that they can have on those around him for the most part this is due to the light-hearted nature of the show this Antics never cause any permanent harm and so they can be excused but also he gets away with a lot because there are far worse and more interesting things going on around him ultimately his only real goal so far is to make as much money as possible at least this is what we're told this is proper motivation until much later it's interesting to go back and see how the narrative is able to take a much more light-hearted approach to his Antics while denouncing the similar behavior of somebody like Gideon it's practically a giveaway that he's later going to receive some sort of tragic justification for his actions but for now he comes across as an ill intention but ultimately harmless individual standing in contrast to the children under his care such as Maple while her approach to listening to her employees and treating them as friends is optimistic one it's also an approach that only works when things are running smoothly the second something goes wrong it takes a Sterner more experienced hand to correct those issues and nobody has more experience with things going terribly wrong than Stanley Pines bottomless pit the Pines family and Seuss are disposing of unwanted things by throwing them into a bottomless pit but a gust of wind blows them into that pit and they begin falling to their labian falling in order to pass the time before presumably starving to death they take turns telling stories the first story is voice over told by Dipper in it he feels self-conscious when his voice is made filed by his friends and so he goes to Old Man McGucket who promises him a potion that will change his voice the potion works but despite having a voice worthy of TV commercial voiceovers doesn't bring him any happiness as it causes his family not to recognize him and crowds to chase him in the end the potion wears off and he rejects the offer to get a new permanent voice giving the rejected potion to Grunkle Stan instead the second story is Seuss's really great pinball story is not a good title do they have to be puns or whatever told by Zeus Zeus is trying to set a pinball high score and is convinced to cheat by Mabel and Dipper he succeeds but the machine grows angry that he tilted the machine and sucks the trio into the game where the giant skull at the front plans to torment them for their dishonesty but soos knowing how the Machine Works plans to disable it from the inside so they can be free yet when he's near the power button he hesitates as shutting down the machine would also erase his high score which is one of his only accomplishments in the end he decides to erase the score in order to save the trio so his new greatest accomplishment can be saving his friends then Grunkle Stan tells his story but it's self-indulgent enough not to get an intro card finally Mabel tells a story called Truth ache Maple is upset it stands constant lying and deceiving others so she searches through Dipper's journals in order to find something that will make him more honest she comes across a pair of dentures that Force the wearer to only say the truth and she slips it into his mouth while he's asleep but the new truthful Grunkle tells the truth all the time even when it's inconvenient or unwanted and soon the kids are traumatized at the horrible things he keeps saying without his usual filter eventually his truth-telling gets him in trouble with the law and Mabel is forced to lie on his behalf in order to set things right in the end she decides it's too much of a hassle to have a truth-telling Grunkle and she destroys the teeth by throwing them into a bottomless pit which is where the episode begins it ends when the group finally reaches the Pit's bottom which also happens to be its top and they're placed back at the entrance to the pit with no time having passed they make a mutual agreement to never speak of the incident again the deep end the Pines family heads to the local pool on the hottest day of the summer to cool off there Dipper learns that Wendy is a lifeguard and that there's a position open for assistant lifeguard so he goes to the neurotic head lifeguard to get the position only for his rule breaking to draw his Iger and eventually winds up with the task of finding out who's been stealing pool supplies to retain his job this turns out to be Mabel who met a merman named murmondo trapped in the pool and they fell in love ultimately deciding to commandeer this applies to help him Escape where he can go free to reunite with his family Dipper tries to stop her from stealing the supplies but when he learns that she's doing it to free someone she loves he relents and accepts that he'll lose his job to make his sister happy while all of this is going on Gideon and Stan Feud over a seat by the pool that results in Stan getting glued to the seat after camping out overnight an overlooked thing this episode does is switching the typical formula mini Gravity Falls episodes have thus far used typically Dipper is the one to go off on some sort of paranormal or investigation while Mabel obsesses over a social relationship only for the two plots to converge later but here Dipper obsesses over windy and tries to spend more time with her while mabels is the plot that focuses on some paranormal aspect of the town but despite this flip in The Sibling Dynamic their relationship remains unchanged no matter what Dipper and Mabel into each episode putting their differences aside and doing what's best for them both instead of helping out one twin at the expense of the other a plot like this merely shows that or the situation reversed the same thing would happen the only consistent thing between them is their love for one another so the end result will always turn out positive as long as that lesson is never forgotten but another thing that gets flipped in this episode or rather that shows a different side is the Paranormal aspects of Gravity Falls itself rather than the abnormal being a thing that can cause damage and can't be trusted the only paranormal thing in this episode is mormondo and he's a nice person stuck in a bad situation the mundane parts of Gravity Falls are the more absurd and frankly dangerous Parts like pool checks insane Behavior or that the feud between Gideon and Stan is entirely through Petty squabbling instead of Supernatural Terror in the end despite being a seemingly unremarkable episode The Deep End has a surprising deep end pun intended carpet DM Dipper grows annoyed at Mabel for inviting her friends over to their room every night and wishes he could move out when Seuss discovers a new room in the house the two twins both announced their desire to move into it which stand attacks as an opportunity to make the two Feud he decides that whoever sucks up to him the most will get the key to the room and the two begin making themselves miserable for it but when Dipper and Mabel are arguing in the room later they wind up discovering that the carpet can switch the minds of whoever builds up enough static on it when they switch bodies but rather than immediately switching back Dipper and Mabel decides to use the opportunity to sabotage the others chances at winning by harassing Stan but when dipper Mabel gets taken by Mabel's friends for another sleepover and Stan Paul's Mabel Dipper aside for a man-to-man talk Mabel Dippers attempts at insulting her great uncle backfire as he views it as Dipper finally standing up to him and gives him her the key but Mabel Dipper realizes that dipper Mabel can't get the room if they never switch back and barricades him herself inside only for dipper Mabel to use her friends to barge in and take it back but all this accomplishes is getting more people into the mind switching carpet before ultimately they all scuffled into their original bodies this includes Zeus and Waddles who swap early on and get into an incident where Old Man McGucket tries to eat Zeus and Waddles ends up finding true love at the end of the episode Dipper reveals that he only wanted the room because he felt like he didn't belong as Mabel kept inviting her friends to their space and he ends up giving the room to Suits instead as close as the twins are they still have enough distinct differences as to loathe the time that they spend as one another and so despite this episode having a happy ending where the two reaffirm their bond to prove that they really do love each other after all this episode is still one that highlights their differences through the moral taunt in this episode is one that's only really taught to the audience Dipper and Mabel are two characters who don't really need their relationship to develop as far as sibling relationships go there's still two very close characters who know to downplay each other's faults and work together if something is going to come between them it's going to be something new so instead of learning a lesson it's all about adaptation to a new situation and this ends up giving a nice form of pacing to the series overall Gravity Falls is an abnormal place and so plots get to be about the characters learning to adapt and fit into the strangeness that's going on around them and because the mystery twins are also learning to adapt to changes in their relationship this makes the show thematically consistent whether it's World building or focusing on character drama boys crazy Mabel and her friends are excited to see the boy band several times even though Dipper and Winnie denounced the genre as artificial but when the concert is sold out they decide to sneak backstage to see the boys anyway and they learn that the band is actually a group of clones designed to sell concert tickets and music so Mabel freeze the boy band and lets them live in the Attic until the producer stops hunting them down and it's safe to leave but even after that point she's grown too attached to her new pet boy band to let them go into the woods and lies to them about the safety of the world outside her bedroom but after driving away her friends and becoming more controlling than their own boss she begins to feel guilty about the whole ordeal in the end she freeze several times and they wander into the woods presumably to get eaten elsewhere Dipper hears an argument between Wendy and Robbie that gets diffused when Wendy's boyfriend plays a song he claims to have written but closer analysis of this song by The Duo of Dipper and Stan reveals that it contains a hidden message that hypnotizes windy into falling for Robbie he Reveals His exception to windy and she breaks up with Robbie in a fit but Dipper tries to ask her out immediately after and is shot down for being equally insensitive throughout the show Mabel has constantly wanted to find a Summer Romance although every time we see her find one it's cut short by some outside influence in this episode she finally has a captive romance and refuses to let it go even if it's really healthy to do so the fact that her point of obsession is a group of guys who she just recently learned were clones and thus barely real people only reinforces the idea that Mabel was never really interested in a Summer Romance but the idea of one and so his Dipper his efforts to expose Robbie's manipulation come across as less of a thing done in the interest of keeping a friend safe and more so an action performed to be the grand gesture that will make her fall for him Dipper is obsessed more with the idea of Wendy than with the girl herself although Alex Hirsch is clarifying later that the actual subliminal message was not something that was actually hypnotizing Wendy she actually really liked the song and differ digging too far into the hidden meaning just happened to uncover the original band's backwards message the moral was about being truthful with intentions rather than some sort of manipulation on Robbie's account but it wasn't completely clear within the episode itself still the overall message about romance for the sake of yourself rather than the other person still holds true as something Dipper perhaps should have worked on Land Before Swine Mabel steps out of the house in order to buy something and leaves Stan in charge of watching Waddles but Stan not a fan of the pig leaves it outside so he can continue running his business only for it to get eaten by the creature Dipper and Zeus have been hunting they all convene and prepare to hunt down the monster that took Waddles with Stan lying about the fact that he put woggles out door to absolve himself from guilt in the whole situation they tracked the pig to a cave beneath an abandoned church full of dinosaurs that have been preserved in tree sap for all the years stand realizes it would make a good attraction and voices his pleasure at having left Wilds outside as it led to him discovering this new place but Mabel overhears this and decides she's never going to talk to her Grunkle again at the same time Dipper snaps at Seuss for breaking their Lantern and losing the trail as he had previously destroyed the photos Dipper took of the dinosaur and announces that he's sick of the mechanic's incompetence but all of that is put on hold when they finally track down Waddles and wind up stranded with a newly hedged baby dino in the process a dino who eats Old Man McGucket that he was there too it's not until they put their differences aside and prove their value to the group that everyone is able to escape together and the episode ends with everyone getting along again also McGucket ate his way out of the baby dinosaur it's somewhat of a tired Trope but this episode leans into characters undoing several episodes of neglect with the grand gesture that shows that they really do care it always feels a bit tiresome when a character has to be pushed to some sort of extreme before they start behaving in a way that makes them come across as worth being around the way Stan behave that made Mabel refuse to talk to him is the way that he acts a majority of the time and the actions he took to rescue Waddles were the uncharacteristic part of his personality and while it's possible to say that punching a dinosaur while wearing a pig is the kind of thing he does when stress forces him to reveal who he really is deep down it would be better if it didn't take some kind of life-threatening event for him to finally respect Maples once so can one good deed undo a pattern of behavior that ultimately causes harm if it's represented as a split between the amount of harm an individual is doing versus the amount of good they do then it comes out as even a great big good thing can balance out many small and bad things and ultimately this is why the Trope comes up so often in media it balances when balance is achieved the status quo can be maintained it's just a bit of a shame that Gravity Falls can fall into this cliche as it's a show that's normally very good at keeping the plot moving at an engaging pace dreamscapers unable to get the D to the Mystery Shack Gideon resorts to using Supernatural means to invade Stan's memories so he can get the safe combination he summons a being named Bill Cipher and makes a deal with him to steal the memory from Stan's mine in exchange for some unnamed price but Zeus and Mabel overhear this deal being made and they rush to warn Dippers or the trio can understand's mind and find the memory first but Dipper has some reservations about helping out as he's unsure whether it's worth it to save a man who's always so cruel to him once in their grunkle's head they split up as Dipper wants to know what Stan truly thinks of him and he ends up overhearing part of a memory that makes it seem as though his suspicions were true meanwhile soos and Mabel managed to track down a memory of Stan entering the safe combination only for Bill to have been one step ahead of them the entire time they're trapped by Bill who uses his powers to attack Susan Mabel with their worst nightmares meanwhile Dipper hears the rest of the memory that Stan was only really acting so tough on him to toughen him up as he reminds Stan of himself at that age reinvigorated to protect his Grunkle Dipper realizes that he can use his imagination as a weapon as they're inside somebody's mind and the trio fight back against Bill Bill's impressed by their tenacity and claims that they're too useful to defeat then and there and he leave them alone but then Stan wakes up to the sounds of an explosion as it turns out that while they were all distracted Gideon simply blasted the safe open with dynamite with the deed now in his hands he orders the destruction of the Mystery Shack and the episode ends on that cliffhanger Bill Cipher is ultimately the main antagonist of Gravity Falls even if his appearances in the first season are extremely Limited while he only shows up in the flesh sort of during this episode his appearance is alluded to multiple times throughout the first season whenever the Eye of Providence appears on screen as this symbol is adjacent to several real world conspiracy theories its inclusion in a show with so much a cool symbolism isn't something that would have much attention drawn to it in the first place and as such any foreshadowing of him could have been dismissed as a general spookiness by the showrunners and so when he does finally appear it makes all the earlier iterations seem like he was hiding in plain sight all along which considering his Grand ambition that I'll cover later adds to his characterization before we even know the guy the end of this episode is also rather fitting in the sense that despite all the esoteric occultism throughout the show thus far the real thing that the Pines family had to worry about came down to a mundane application of explosives we're led to believe for so long that Gideon's threat comes from his possession of the second Journal but in the end the Pines family is blindsided by his intrusion just as much as the audience is Gideon Rises Gideon Now controls the Mystery Shack and is planning to construct Gideon land on top of it but he divulges his real motivation and private to his father that he wants to control the shack so he can search the area for the other Journal as he has Journal number two Dipper and Mabel make one last plan to assault him and take the deed to the Mystery Shack back recruiting the Gnomes from the first episode to fight him for it but Gideon is one step ahead and turns to gnomes against the twins managing to steal the other book in the process Mabel and Tipper are sent back home to live with their parents in defeat when Gideon finds out that the journal he took was actually number three and that there must still be a journal one so he gets into a giant Gideon bot to hunt down the twins who he assumes must still have it their Chase leads them to the top of a cliff where Dipper is able to fight him without the use of the book careening them all to the ground below the town's full come to investigate the Ruckus and Gideon turns them against the twins claiming that they assaulted him and the police move into a rest but at the last moment Stan arrives with news and proved that Gideon has been spying on them for years and his psychic powers are fraudulent the fake psychic is arrested and the deed returns to the hands of the Pines family along with the journals in the end Dipper decides to tell the truth about the journal to Stan that he's been finding out about the Paranormal through it but Stan seems not to believe it and takes the book for himself hoping to get some ideas for attractions he takes it into a room underneath the Mystery Shack and puts it together with the remaining journals where he's finally able to complete the schematics for a mysterious machine this episode ends the first season and takes with it a lot of the more traditionally kid-friendliness that defined the show out of necessity Gideon was a dangerous person but more so because of his personality when it came to his control over the Paranormal he was no more skilled than Dipper was his downfall coming about due to Greed and assuming that the books were the only strength his foes had but in The Following Season the obstacles start to have a higher Threat Level instead of a vague notion of what threats may be at hand the Pines family must instead deal with people who know exactly what they're doing but this escalation shouldn't come as a big surprise Gideon was a regular villain for the Pines family and his removal as a force in the show means that something or someone has to take his place and in the interest of keeping escalating skill of threads to make a show retain interest the higher Stakes we see in the upcoming season are a necessity it just plays into the skill of the showrunners that it came across as natural instead of force season one it's ordinarily much easier to do a breakdown of an individual season of a TV show as the break in between seasons is often used by the writers to analyze what worked and what didn't if there's a particular Chemistry Between characters that didn't get picked up on until Parkways through a season it would be noticed and played up in the following one and if there's something that audiences complain about and wanted to see less of it would be reduced following the complaint most shows in their first season go through a discovery period where the staff working on the show has to figure out what it is that they're doing well and how they can build upon that but even from an early Point Gravity Falls with a show that had a lot of its later aspects a very thoroughly planned out characters with no role to serve in the narrative weren't added when they were needed they were planned from the start to serve the role they had with their exclusion being more to build suspense and mystery than because they didn't serve a role to the plot Not That season 1 had much of a plot in the first place while there's a lot of build up in establishing moments for the characters in setting the overall way that things develop from one episode to the next doesn't really lend itself to a long synopsis with episodes being largely self-contained stories so the real difference between the first and second seasons of Gravity Falls comes down less to anything external to the show and more of a conscious internal decision to divide it into a build up and cool down split season one is adding fuel season 2 lights in a flame that said there are a few things that are built upon in season 2 that are a response less so to the show Runners are learning about their work and more because of fan reactions and desires the Canon of the show is played pretty loose outside the bounds of the show itself with Alex Hirsch regularly confirming or denying usually the former random theories and character quirks and season 2 continues his Trend in a more concrete capacity by building on character relationships as directed by what the audience desired more again these are still things that flow logically from how season one set up the pieces just given an amount of attention that was more to quiet the audience than tell the intended story karaoke the Pines are preparing to celebrate getting their business back and defeating Gideon by throwing a big party but Stan is also busy putting together the last few pieces of the puzzle after copying the third journal he Powers up the machine made from the combined schematics which alerts the attention of two government agents powers and Trigger when the agents arrive on the doorstep of the Mystery Shack Stan is terrified they may find out his Secrets but Dipper is ecstatic that he can finally get some help piecing together the mysteries of the Town only for Stan to once again declare that the whole Supernatural thing is fake and made up to drama business so Dipper takes matters into his own hands and resurrects the dead in order to prove to the agents that everything in the journal is real which works too well as a zombie invasion soon attacks The Shack is back party ruining Mabel's hopes of doing Family karaoke but when the shack is overrun by the undead the family becomes trapped inside only for Stan to come out with the bat to defend his family from The Horde he reveals that he's known of the supernatural phenomenon all along and merely lied about it to stop Dipper from investigating things that couldn't lead to harm when a black light from the party Shines on the third journal invisible ink shows up revealing that there's an entire second half of the book with more information about the zombies namely that they can be destroyed by three-part harmonies and Mabel gets her wish as the family's karaoke is able to defeat The Horde after the miss the agents from before declare their intentions to ramp up the investigation while Stan and Dipper both lie to each other about their future intentions with the journal the second season brings with it a series of changes best signified by the invisible ink on the third journal itself being able to revisit early Concepts and ideas with a brand new perspective as more information is available and the increase in Stakes comes with an increase in the paranoia from the original author shifting to invisible ink to prevent anybody threatening from reading the entries shows not only that he's fearing being watched but that something capable of inspiring that fear is on the horizon this episode also introduces a new source of conflict to the Ambitions of the Pines family through the investigating government agent's power and Trigger and while these two largely only appear as background elements in future episodes the fact that the antagonistic Force replacing Gideon this season is immediately set up as a group of government agents instantly adds a sense of ambiguity that shows morality oil Gideon was unequivocally a bad guy the agents are merely investigating something that's rightfully dangerous and worth investigating so for people trying to do the right thing to oppose Stan's Ambitions raises questions as to whether what he's doing is worthy of the audience's support Into the Bunker Dipper plans to ask out windy but can't build up the nerve to do so and asks her on a mystery investigation with Zeus and Mabel instead that investigation turns out to be an investigation into the origins of the journal spurred on by the discovery that there may be an underground bunker near the location where Dipper first founded Wendy immediately proves herself useful by locating the entrant and finding a path inside but when Mabel finds a confession letter in Dipper's pocket she pushes her brother into confessing his feelings accidentally sending them into another room in the process there they're cornered by a monster and rescued by a mysterious individual who appears to be the author of the journals Dipper is excited to get to know him as he recruits their help for tracking down a shape-shifting monster that got loose inside the caves but Wendy is able to deduce that the man himself is the shapeshifter and they attempt to flee him meeting back up with Susan Mabel to catch up on the situation they set a trap for the monster but Wendy is separated from the group with it thinking that she's been injured Nipper lament over her unconscious body that he didn't confess earlier only for the real Winnie to overhear it when the monster comes too they scuffle and the two are mixed up Dipper and windy are able to communicate a secret sign between each other and the monster is soon injured enough to be placed back into cryostasis but not before giving Dipper a chilling warning about his fate should he continue to search for the author ultimately windy and Dippers stop to sort out their feelings on his confession and while she ultimately turns him down for being too young admits that he's at least a good enough person that she still enjoys spending time together with him this episode not only pushes the plot forward directly but does so as an intentional decision by the characters within the narrative it's extremely uncommon for a show of any type to have an episode where the characters just decide to progress the plot out of anything other than necessity with that progression not coming across as contrived but the strength of gravity falls as character writing makes it so that sort of thing can occur in a completely natural way but what also helps this episode not come across as plot for the sake of plot is the fact that a major relationship is effectively shot down in this episode Wendy and Dipper's relationship is put solidly into friend territory by this episode's conclusion but rather than this being a purely depressing story about Dipper losing out on love the episode is instead spent showing off how well the duo can cooperate as friends as if not to give a last hurray to their time together but instead to prove that they don't need romance for a happy relationship going into the future the Gulf War tired of a feud with Pacifica Mabel decides to cheer her up with a round of mini golf only for Pacifica to show up there as well and the two to continue their argument Anew they challenge each other to a mini golf tournament for bragging rights at midnight that night and Mabel breaks into the ground with Dipper in order to get some early practice in while there they discovered that the course is secretly controlled by a race of ball people named The lilliputchins Who are all feuding over which course is the best so Mabel decides to manipulate the Lila putchin by declaring that whoever assists her mini golf game the best will receive a sticker that declares them number one Pacifica arrives and the plan goes as normal until the other holes start to realize that Mabel doesn't seem to be favoring any one of them and that they can one up the rest by simply slaying Pacifica outright rather than sabotaging her golf game Maple declares that anybody who would kill for their cause doesn't deserve the sticker and she destroys it causing them to turn on her and Pacifica both so the girls have to team up in order to fight their way out and upon succeeding decide that perhaps their Feud was somewhat pointless in the first place using the Paranormal for personal vendettas has rarely gone right for any of the antagonistic forces in Gravity Falls and this still holds true even when it's our protagonist using them for ill purposes despite this sort of thing being shown again and again Mabel still fails to learn from these lessons and falls into the same mode of thinking that they've seen cause the downfall of characters like Gideon before although manipulating the liliputians despite not knowing their true temperament is less of an issue of Mabel not picking up on the mistakes of others and more so a result of her becoming enraged enough that she too would fall into such a habit her Feud with Pacifica makes her angry and the anger clouds her judgment to the point that she has this moral failing that results in the duo nearly being killed and so it makes sense that she attempts to rescue Pacifica in the end upon realizing that her hubris has caused an incident beyond what she's prepared to handle Mabel gets to experience firsthand with so many of the antagonists of Gravity Falls have already seen and so she herself gets to realize that she's becoming the bad guy because while Pacifica may be annoying that's a terribly small crime compared to seeking a group of tiny warhawks on your opposition until Maple can earn her trip on the high road by the end of the episode because she's seen the other side suck Opera Dipper and Mabel are trying to figure out the password to a laptop they found inside the journal author's secret bunker but Mabel is distracted by a guy with puppets and leaves Dipper to find out the password on his own she puts on a puppet show to impress the guy leaving very little time to assist Dipper who begins to face a countdown to all the data on the laptop destroying itself as a Fail-Safe then Bill Cipher appears and gives the boy an offer he'll open up the laptop if Dipper agrees to give him a puppet Dipper agrees thinking that bill will only take one of Mabel's sock puppets but he instead decides that he wants Dipper to be his puppet instead while inhabiting Dipper's body Bill destroys the laptop and proceeds to head out to destroy the journal which is currently being used as a prop in Mabel's puppet show but the addition body Dipper manages to take control of one of Mabel's puppets and warns her of the plot so after some hesitation she agrees to have her play ruined in exchange for keeping the book out of Bill's hands in the end she manages to expel bill from the body by exploiting her knowledge of her brother and the day is saved at the expense of maywall's Chances with the puppet guy here bill is more properly introduced as a villain for the second season of the show his first appearance was more of a one-off to tease his later involvement but by now he's become one of the primary antagonists to the mystery twins without the Restraint of Gideon we finally get to see a more in-depth look at what his methods are for influencing others not only his control over mind and the mindscape but how he uses their emotions to pry them apart before he negotiates details of his deals with him Dipper wouldn't normally do something that could put his sister in Jeopardy unless bill is able to first convince him that she'd do the same to him and in the end Mabel is willing to let go of something important to her to stop Bill's plans to destroy the journal through episodes like this we're able to ultimately see how Bill's end game will play out drive the twins apart so he can manipulate them individually as long as the family sticks together he's more or less powerless against them but the lone Target is much easier to get a foothold in the physical world where he can start to cause Mayhem so long as a close relationships of the cast are maintained he won't be able to do much but watch Zeus and the Real Girl foreign cousin Reggie is throwing an engagement party and his Abuelita wants him to find a date for it but since soos has never been in a relationship before he turns to Dipper and Mabel for help talking to a woman even with their assistant the attempts go poorly until he takes refuge in a game store and finds romance Academy 7. despite the cashier's warnings he buys the game and uses it to practice talking to giffany the main heroine of the title throughout the night to the point that he misses work the next day concerned the mystery twins coerce him out of the house to talk to real woman and while out there he manages to befriend Melody and the two organize a first date but giffany is enraged that the guy she's been talking to is now talking to real woman and she escapes the confines of the game to follow him around threatening Zeus while he's on his date she takes control of an animatronic chipmunk and uses the nearby Electronics to terrorize the group before suits finally takes matters into his own hands and throws the romance Academy 7 cd into a fire destroying the stonker in the B plot Stan throws out old Goldie A Primitive mechanical dispenser from the Mystery Shack and discovers the wonders of life-sized animatronics and their ability to get kids to give up their money trying to prove that he's not too old for the animatronic game he sets out to steal a robot Badger only for that Badger to start fighting him when giffany takes over all the machines in the building he's saved by old Goldie and the two take his celebratory trip to Vegas representative of the show as a whole this episode is inundated with pop culture references some even managing to predate several cultural icons with similar themes the episode title itself is a reference to Lars and the Real Girl a movie about Ryan Gosling dating a doll in a wheelchair with similar themes of social isolation leading to personality disorders it also has a crowd of animatronics trying to attack a group of children airing only a month after the release of Five Nights at Freddy's and being in production several months before that and also it shares similar themes and framing to Doki Doki literature Club a game about a dating Sim character that becomes sentient although that game was released three years after this episode and both of them borrow extremely heavily from Kimi tokano joke tokanojo nokoi also involving a yandere character archetype falling in love not with the player character but the player themselves this is the first real soos episode of the series a strange thing it took this long considering how pivotal of a role he's played in the series thus far behind the scenes he regularly shows up to help Dipper and Mabel and whenever they need an adult around for something like a car chase or if something needs to be fixed like the laptop from the bunker it's a bit of a shame that he sort of gets overshadowed in this own Episode by the impeccable Sprite work of Paul Robertson which is what this episode is remembered for probably a good thing considering Stan Mary's of the King statue in Vegas Little Gift Shop of Horrors a second Anthology episode told from a first person perspective of somebody stepping into the Mystery Shack at night for shelter only for Stan to tell them a series of tall tales in order to convince them to buy something the first tale is hands off the Pines family attends a local swap meet where Stan manages to Palm a watch from a woman who's clearly a witch but the next morning his hands are cursed to disappear he tries to hide this back from Dipper and Mabel for a while but eventually rolands and the trio head into the hand Witch's cave to get them back while there it's revealed that she only steals hands because she's lonely so Mabel gives her cave a makeover and they all have a happy ending with Stan getting his hands back and the witch managing to attract a lost him bow the next tale is Awakenings Dipper creates an intelligence serum so he can solve a puzzle but Waddles eats it all and becomes super intelligent as a result using a robotic Aid to move about and communicate Dipper and waddle start to create all sorts of gadgets while leaving Mabel out of more and more of their activities until eventually Waddles creates a massive machine that will surely lead to an international Fame and recognition but Mabel fears that he'll never have the time to be with her again and Waddles realizes that there's no point in making the world a better place if you can't make the world tolerable for his favorite person so he undoes his own intelligence and goes back to being a stupid Pig the third tale is clay day Mabel gets scared of an old claymation movie due to a phobia of hers and so different Stan tiger to the house of Harry Claymore an old-school claymation Legend to show her that it's all special effects in an attempt to get her over her fears but once there they're kidnapped by sentient clay creatures and Claymore tells them how he used magic to make the figures animate themselves in the end Mabel realizes that she can simply reshape the clay into something more appealing and uses this knowledge to free her friends and family in the end her phobia goes away as phobias are irrational fears and her fear is now very much rational after all of these stories Stan gets annoyed with the customer as he's not buying anything so he drugs the POV character and turns him into a mystery shack exhibit labeled the cheapskate Society of the Blind Eye Mabel is lamenting over her failed summer romances while Dipper is stressed over not knowing the identity of the author when Mabel finds a clue on the smashed laptop that hints at the fact that it was created by Old Man McGucket so they interrogate the man in his junkyard home finding out that he doesn't remember anything related to the journals and this directs them to the location of his first memory the museum while there they observe a few shadowy figures in the distance and followed them to a secret underground room where they observe a ceremony the hooded figures use a machine to erase the memories of the supernatural from the talent's folk before releasing them back into Gravity Falls the group follows the extracted memory to a hall full of them hoping to locate mcgucket's memories of the creation of the journals they're eventually caught by The cultists Who identify themselves as a society of the Blind Eye founded to erase unwanted memories of the Townsville so they can continue living regular lives despite the Paranormal Activity surrounding them mcgucket's memories are retrieved after a Chase and the cultists have their situation flipped around with Mabel and Dipper deciding to erase their memories of the society completely effectively dismantling the group once they're all alone they observe mcgucket's memories in order to find out what he knows and learn that he invented the device that wipes memories as well as founding the society so he could forget his involvement with some mysterious machine that the real author was working on a constant source of comic relief throughout the series has been from the antics of the various Side characters of Gravity Falls the Silly Ways they lead their lives fit in well with the esoteric monstrosities that live in the woods surrounding them it's part of the setting that seems to fit well nobody notices anything weird in the town's outskirts because everything inside the town itself is already weird but in this episode re-contextualizes everything for the behavior of the town's folk not to be considered some inherent wackiness but rather the result of years of memory altering takes away much of the earlier comedic tone to why the town of Gravity Falls is the way it is this episode then marks a turning point in the show's overall tone it's no longer as funny that life goes on with all the strengthness surrounding the town There's a subtle Darkness to every shenanigan that goes on in the background and the potential collateral damage insofar as traumatizing a bystander is much higher there's a reason that Stan didn't want Dipper and Mabel to be exposed to the Paranormal World throughout the last season and this episode also presents one of the antagonistic forces that have existed through the show's run up to this point dismantling it just as their deal is explained a force being mobilized to ensure nobody learns anything they shouldn't only makes those things much more Sinister from the framing against that backdrop that somebody is protecting the town from this knowledge for a reason foreign 's game Blendon Blandon from The Time Traveler's Pig has escaped time prison and invoked globnar a multi-dimensional set of challenges that serves as a sort of trial by combat he's fighting for his innocence against Dipper and Mabel with the winner deciding the fate of the loser and also receiving a time wish capable of anything but Dipper and Mabel are busy trying to figure out why Zeus doesn't want to celebrate his own birthday when they're taken through time to his Challenge and they escape in order to get back to their friend they overshoot their destination and wind up at the Mystery Shack 10 years ago where they meet a young Seuss and try to deduce why he doesn't like celebrating his birthday as it turns out his father never came to his parties and his birthday was the day he learned he'd never come back unable to fix this problem the bear and Mabel resolve to enter the globnar hoping to use their time wish to allow Zeus to see his father again after a victory they decide to not only give Linden his own job back and a full head of hair but they also give the time wish to Seuss so he can choose to see his father again on his own but soos doesn't wish for that as he's learned that if his father doesn't care about him then it's better to focus on spending time with the people who do an alternate version of this episode was pitched at one point where the time wish would have instead been a time orb that can see into the future it would have shown soos being a good father to his own children in spite of his own upbringing but was later changed to the ending that we got the overall message stays the same however that the value in family doesn't come from the fact that they are family but in how they act towards you instead Seuss's father was a deadbeat despite being related to him yet Dipper and Mabel are like siblings to him despite not having the blood relation considering the strong theme in Gravity Falls about Family Ties it makes sense there would also be a found family message thrown in there one thing that has changed between the first and second seasons of Gravity Falls is the amount of attention that side characters has received I've already mentioned before that Dipper and Mabel have a close relation since the beginning of this show and that strong togetherness is something that persists throughout the entire Series so the extra attention given to the Side cast isn't just a result of the Ensemble being more deserving of that Spotlight but the fact that there are only so many plots that can wind up the same way before it gets boring an exploration of the sign cast in Gravity Falls also allows for plots to follow different directions at the mystery twins possibly couldn't follow themselves the love God Wendy's Fern group has finally accepted Dipper and Mabel as regular members largely as a replacement for Robbie who still hasn't gotten over his crush on Wendy they make plans to go to woodstick a music festival near Gravity Falls but Mabel is hesitant to enjoy herself while Robbie is acting so miserable so she plans on playing Matchmaker hooking Robbie up with tambry the girl who never does anything but text these plans don't work out immediately though and soon Mabel turns to a celebrity rock musician who's playing at the concert named the love God who turns out to be an actual love God she steals a love potion from him and uses it to make the goth couple fall for each other but this has disastrous consequences when the rest of the group starts getting at each other's throat over the development so Maple has to sneak another potion away from the love God in order to undo her mistake only to later learn that perhaps it's better if they stay in love as messing with other people says has only brought misery so far in the end the friend group gets back together on their own anyway over their Mutual enjoyment of Thompson's misery in the B plot Stan tries to appeal to kids with a giant balloon of his head with the words I heart kids on the front though when it sets sail it catches fire and spells out I eat kids instead which leads Santa to deuce and it's better to be feared by children anyway despite her long history of heartbreak and failed relationships Mabel still views herself as an expert on the subject of love and matchmaking drawn indirect contrast to Dipper who has had one failure and called the whole thing off by this point this ultimately comes down to a difference in philosophy between the two that Mabel views the attempts as more successful than the outcome while Dipper cares more about the end result than what it took to get there reflected in this episode is Mabel's enthusiasm for matchmaking leading to an incident where the friend group is broken up as a result of not having planned out her foray as well as she could have she cares more than a couple was formed than the implication of those two going out could have been but this is far from being shown as inherently disastrous because while the new status quo at the end of this episode has the effects of the Love Potion persisting the old Norm is still something that comes back as far as group dynamics go purely because the status quo has a way of reinforcing itself as long as that initial Dynamic was something that should have existed in the first place if a friend group can permanently break up because of one obstacle then maybe that group shouldn't have been close together in the first place but if that same group really does have the proper chemistry then a single outside incident won't cause any irreparable harm Northwest Mansion mystery the Northwest Family is throwing a massive party exclusively for the Upper Crust of society when a series of paranormal Revenge begin to occur they call in Dipper to exercise the ghost as he seems to be an expert in this sort of thing but he refuses at first due to his hatred of the Northwest Family it isn't until they agree to allow Mabel Green Day and Canty into the party in exchange for his work that he agrees when he arrives it turns out that the ghost is the eventful Spirit of a lumberjack who helped to build the Mansion only to be turned away from its Gates despite their promise to allow the common folk into the ballroom after capturing the ghost Dipper learns of this promise and he soon tricked into freeing the spirit who then wreaks havoc on the party-goers including Mabel in the end it comes down to Pacifica to liberate all of the captured guests by allowing everybody into the Mansion against her father's wishes proving once and for all that she doesn't have to be like her family and the curse is finally lifted in the B plot Maple and Candy conspired to leave grinda out of their plan to flirt within Austrian Prince only for grinda's aggressive flirting style to wind up being the thing that wins him over I almost feel as though this episode didn't need AP plot the whole thing feels a bit tacked on Purely to give breathing room to the more involved and character-driven a plot the only real thing the b-plot does is give Dipper some reason to go back into the party after learning that Pacifica lied to him as he's interested in Saving his sister but if the pea plant was cut out there would have been more room for Dipper in Pacifica to get to know one another and then it would have tracked well enough for his character who have changed his mind on whether she's worth saving in the end the episode still manages to work although the finale of Old Man McGucket regaining his memories and failing to warn Dipper of the impending danger gives this episode a quasi-c plot that ends up doing very little but feeling like attacked on to be continued Pacifica like so many other side characters started out as a OneNote stereotype of an archetype the kind of characters whose introduction can tell you exactly who they are so viewers can use existing cultural knowledge to have her role informed without needing quite so many establishing scenes but in the last few episodes we've seen more background given to McGucket Seuss and Robbie so it makes sense that we get an episode that humanizes Pacifica now as well it all builds up to the finale in a way that makes each character's involvement in that plot feel much less contrived and gives the level of significance that the finale does have a deserved sort of build up not what he seems the Pines family are enjoying themselves when the government agents from the beginning of the Season finally make their move acting on security footage of Stan stealing large amounts of nuclear waste among his other Shady behaviors they arrest Stan and prepare to take Dipper and Mabel into Child Protective Services but they escape as they don't believe any of the charges against their Grunkle as they run back home they're warned that their uncle is not what he seems and that he's been lying to the world as well as the kids his whole life but they refuse to believe these claims and collect the security footage of the incident which confirms the agent's story while searching for more proof the two come across evidence that Stan has been leading a double life with multiple fake IDs and newspaper clippings of his own death and tales of a similar looking con man on the loose when they finally discover his hidden cave Beneath The Shack all the pieces come together that there's some kind of doomsday device beneath the ground that's close to activation and the journals warn that it may have disastrous consequences if activated Stan enters and implores them not to use the emergency shutoff switch but Dipper no longer trusts the man in the end it comes down to Mabel whether to believe the evidence she's seen or to follow along with Dipper and she ultimately chooses to believe her uncle the machine activates any six-fingered figure steps out of a portal the author of the journals Twist of stand secret research is something that's been built towards since the very first episode of the show as early even as the opening credits at least the viewers Savvy enough to shift a brief flash of letters back three characters to read a hidden message much of the in-text foreshadowingtistan's true nature has been vague and unhelpful in determining what it was that he's actually planned to do it's not until you deeply engage with the word digging through the show frame by frame to find as many esoteric ciphers encoded message that you can truly figure out very little more than that but it's not as though this is inherently a Bad Thing any fan fervent enough to go on the hunt for these ciphers is clearly somebody obsessed with the thrill of Engagement more than the end result and giving them fuel to spoil future twists might only drive off casual viewers it's a bit like re-watching a show despite knowing how it ends the journey certainly has more value than the surprise of the destination but another thing that's been built up since the beginning of the series is the Thematic core of this episode the relationships and family members have to one another has informed the resolution to so many plots that the only way to have heightened Mistakes by this point is to put pre-established ideologies against one another if forced to choose between the happiness of her brother or anything else Mabel will choose her twin we've seen this time and time again but what happens if Mabel has to choose between two family members in the end she chooses a side of trusting someone even if there's sufficient evidence that he's not really related to her but what does that matter whether or not he's blood relation when he's clearly served the role of green Uncle by now A Tale of Two stands the episode is primarily toned through a series of flashbacks to Stanley and Stanford's childhoods told as a government agents are searching for the hidden portal room the Grunkle stand we've come to know being Stan Lee and his six-fingered twin brother as Stanford the two grew up with very little but each other not that they would mind Ford was the more brainy twin while Stanley was the Bronze of the two and they would set out on a series of adventures during their youth but it was clear that Stanford was more likely to accomplish things with his life and his newest science experiment was a clear indicator of his genius when a gel is Stanley who accidentally breaks it though the family views this as an act of jealousy and kicks him out or he's forced to adopt various con man identities to adapt and make a living while Stanford focuses on his science eventually winding up with the love of the Paranormal spurred on by his Superfluous finger Stanford sets up a Shack in the woods of Gravity Falls hoping to investigate the Mysteries surrounding the town and writing three journals to track his findings journals which ultimately contain the secrets to constructing a portal to open a dimensional Rift Between Worlds so that he can better study these phenomena but when McGucket not yet an old man is briefly sucked into the portal he's shaken enough to declare the project should be shut down and Stanford agrees but not wanting his life's work destroyed he instead calls upon his brother Stanley to hide the journal instead of outright destroying it in their argument the device is activated and Stanford gets sucked in just before it destroys itself unable to rebuild it and running out of money he eventually resigns to opening up the Mystery Shack to tourists in order to stay near the sight of the incident while also adopting the identity of his brother to avoid his questionable past catching up to him in the end the story catches up to the modern day where government agents are preparing to storm the secret room but Ford is able to amplify the memory eraser from Society of the Blind Eye to con the agents out of a continued Pursuit the relationship between Dipper and Mabel is reflected heavily in the relationship between Stan Lee and Stanford with the key difference being they're tying together versus their time apart Dipper and Stanford both appear to be the more cerebral of their Duos but it's that airheadedness that Lofton leads to trouble that Stanley or Mabel end up having to drag them out of and that unending support plays into a feedback loop that keeps both of them happy as long as they have each other while apart Stanford grows strange and paranoid while Stan Lee continues in a downward spiral of desperation and crime so the end result is at Stanford and Stan Lee have a strained relationship due to their disagreement but a relationship that was once close and purehearted a relationship not unlike to prevent Maples and this is why Grunkle Stan refuses to let Ford's paranormal research get near the kids it isn't just him trying to protect people he loves from danger but that he's trying to protect a relationship that reflects what he no longer has dungeons Dungeons and more dungeons Dipper gets a new board game titled dungeons Dungeons and more dungeons but due to the amount of meth involved can't find anybody willing to play it with him that is until he stumbles into Ford's lab despite being worn by Stan to avoid involving himself with whatever goes on in there but when Ford sees the iconic dive from the game he proclaims his love of the title and the two begin playing the ttrpg together this soon spreads to the living room much to the annoyance of the rest of the family and when they scuffle over who gets the floor space an accidental role of an infinity-sided die is performed which brings the villains from the game to life Dipper and Ford are kidnapped and Mabel grinda and Stan Lee have to team up in order to fight their way to the rescue this culminates in the trio facing probilator the annoying in a real-like version of the game for the rescue of the kidnapped nerds Mabel's imagination combined with Stanley's con artist skills enable a victory and everyone is reunited in the end Stanley decides that perhaps he's been too harsh with Dipper and that if they want to have a more friendly relationship with his twin brother there's no harm in doing so despite the close relationship between Dipper and Mabel there are still quite a few differences between the Twins differences that lead to a majority of their conflicts these arguments are never enough for the duo to break things off indefinitely but as they still exist there's still the potential for a more perfect Duo of the two to form while Dipper may not share all of his interest with Mabel he does have significantly more in common with Ford and so this leads to a proper challenge to the twins's relationship what kind of kinship remains when you find another person you get along with even better is it probable for Dipper to abandon his closest companion in favor of a person who understands him more the finale of the show ultimately asked these questions on a grander scale and an episode like this one helps to set up how that conflict might get put into the heads of the characters as well as the audience another thing this episode does is more thoroughly explore the Dynamics between the two sets of twins insofar as Dipper and Stanford's curiosity being tempered by Mabel and Stanley respectively while the latter pair in return often helps to facilitate the dreams of the other were Dipper and forward to remain alone they would certainly end up releasing some kind of weirdness onto the world but they have their twin to keep their flights a fancy to a more realistic minimum Stan Lee warns Dipper about spending time with his brother as he's aware of the potential damage his imagination can cause he spent the last 30 years dealing with the Fallout of one of his experiments and so the ending to this episode while heartwarming is a concerning important of what's to come the Stan turian candidate the elderly mayor of Gravity Falls dies leaving the position of Mayor open for the taking Stan tired of being disrespected by his family in favor of Ford decides to run for the position to get a bit of respect as well as to leave a legacy he runs against Bud gleeful among a few others and is quickly demolished in the polls so Dipper turns to Ford for advice and the researcher gave them a mind control tie that allows Dipper and Mabel to control his actions and make him more personable this plan works and Bud is pressed into a corner where it's revealed that his plan to run for mayor was just deployed by Gideon to get pardon down to prison Gideon turns to the supernatural to take control of his father and uses his Charisma to pull ahead in the election just as Stanley finds out about the mind control and rejects the mystery twins's assistance blood Gideon begin to win in the polls with the Dipper and Mabel being attacked and tied to a bunch of fireworks set to go off at the end of the final debate but Stan finding out his family is in danger gives up on campaigning to go rescue them and this wins over the support of the town's folk after saving their lives he's given the overwhelming majority of the vote only two in the end have it revealed that he's committed so many crimes he's ineligible and so the position of Mayor passes to the only candidate who filled out the right paperwork the get him guy [Music] Stan's insecurities come up in this episode and somewhat understandably so while he was once the fun-loving irresponsible Uncle to the mystery twins okay whatever hijinks they got up to he's now no longer the chill adult in their lives that role being replaced with Ford as the latter is able to facilitate dyes into the esoteric Mysteries of the town of Gravity Falls now the stern responsible one he starts to lose the respect of Dipper and Mabel as they have a new cooler Uncle to spend their time with and with him only being allowed to temporarily Squad in Stanford's house until the end of the summer he's a guy who's about to lose everything he had so a run for mayor is perhaps the only Refuge of his impending ousting from the society he's come to love the scam over the last few decades the childhood trauma of being the bad twin is now coming back this episode also serves as the breaking point for Gideon a character who was previously assumed written out of the show his status as an act 1 only antagonist still holds pretty fast though with limited options to influence the outside world due to his imprisonment he's placed into a position of desperation and is much more willing to become a puppet for a more menacing character like mill Cipher his replacement by another darker villain is put into comparison with the overall darker aspects of the latter half of the show even lampshaded during his reveal to the twins as he points out how evil they've become resorting to mind control tactics to get their way the last Mabel corn in order to safeguard the Mystery Shack from Bill's influence Ford needs unicorn hair to erect a barrier but the unicorns are in his words frustrating despite this Mabel volunteers to retrieve the hair as she believes that she is pure enough of heart to Parlay with them she recruits the help of Wendy Grenda and Candy to find and speak with them and they soon come across Celeste Bella bet the Bell The Last Unicorn but Mabel's heart is not deemed as pure enough and so she sets out to perform enough Good Deeds to earn that honor but when even this isn't enough the other girls go behind her back to take the hair by force in the end it's revealed that unicorns can't actually read people's hearts and that Celeste Bell about the Bell simply made that up to keep humans out and keep the hair for itself so the girl simply resort to violence tired of the high expectations on them meanwhile Ford is planning to keep the denizens of the Mystery Shack safe through other means encrypting their thoughts so Bill can't read them but while Dipper is undergoing the Mind scanning process he gets the idea to use the scanner on a passed out forward if only so he can learn a few of his secrets but when the scan reveals that Ford has made a deal with the bill in the past Dipper turns on him and prepares to erase his memories only for Ford to admit that while he did make a deal with Bill before he regrets it and his work is now to seal away the potential for Bill to enter their world this episode plays with the stories surrounding society's expectations of girls and people in general by using the high barrier of Entry the unicorns have placed arbitrarily as an obstacle to self-esteem Mabel is constantly told during this episode that she isn't good or pure enough to be allowed to approach the Unicorn which ends up causing her distress As She searches for some other way to satisfy the Unicorn seemingly impossible standards it's not until the other girls of the group finally decide not to play by the rules that they're able to get what they want and Mayo can get the self-esteem boost she wants through the praise of her Grumble Ford if you attach your self-worth to other people's opinions of you especially the opinions of people who are gatekeeping's objective things from you then you'll never be satisfied as these are people who will never be content with the kind of person you are it's only by rejecting the standards of other people and taking the emotional satisfaction that you want for yourself that you can finally find inner peace as inner peace is obviously something that you have to produce internally likewise Dipper also seeks some sort of validation from Ford who has been his Idol since he discovered the journals and wants to get closer to the guide to show that he's worthy of that praise he reads his great uncle's mind in an attempt to figure out more of the Mysteries that he might become more involved in the fight against Bill Cipher only to prove that he wasn't truly ready for that information as he takes it badly and yet in the end Ford laments that it's possibly his own fault round opening up to differ as much as he could have showing the difference between himself as a positive role model and Celeste de bella Bethel as a negative one foreign attraction stand is going on an RV trip around Oregon to destroy all of his competitions tourist traps and he invites the kids along so Dipper can get over his obsession with Wendy while there he attempts to flirt with various girls as a method of distraction but Dipper's attempts fail so he turns to stand for Aid and gets a few tips on confidence that wind up with him getting a series of phone numbers yet this newfound confidence also attracts the attention of Mabel's friend candy who announces her Crush to the others in the end Dipper winds up reuniting with all the different girls you've been flirting with and the secret of his womanizing is out something which causes candy to lose interest meanwhile Stan starts flirting with the owner of mystery Mountain who turns out to be a shape-shifting spider intent on turning him into the newest attraction the kids team up to save him giving candy a moment to have the spotlight while also dissolving her crush on Dipper when she sees him running away from the giant spiders like a little girl Gravity Falls as a show is a metaphor for growing up and this episode sins Dipper through an exploration of the idea that one has to be a womanizer in order to be a man he takes the advice of one of his role models Stan and starts mimicking the guy's Behavior this gives him the confidence boost he was looking for but also has he expected realistic outcome that Dippers should have seen coming Stan is an unspecified number of years old but still elderly there's no mention of him having a successful relationship in the past and he's currently single so for Dipper to take advice from him should have come with the obvious warning of what was to come in the end he grows much closer to his Grunkle by experiencing the same heartbreak that he has this kind of flirting and leading people on will end up hurting them so don't act shocked if they aren't happy to see you again but truthfully this episode is just one last light-hearted comedy before the show begins to wrap itself up from this point on the comedy elements of the show wind down and a more serious tone is taken as each plot and character thread wraps itself up coinciding with this is the ending of Dipper and Mabel's childhood as they prepare for their 13th birthday and the end of summer but that's for the next episode Dipper and Mabel versus the future Dipper and Mabel are preparing for their 13th birthday party which is only a week away and Mabel has planned a final party to celebrate not only their ending childhood but their ending summer in Gravity Falls but when Dipper is called a way to search for an extraterrestrial adhesive to patch up the dimensional Rift Mabel is left to play in the party on her own and she not only finds out that none of her friends are going to be around for the end of summer but that high school isn't all it's cracked up to be but she takes some comfort in the fact that she'll at the very least have Dipper to help her through it all yet Dipper's journey into a crashed UFO in this center of town proves successful enough that Ford offers him as a position as his Apprentice even though that will separate him from his twin sister when Maple overhears the exchange or Dipper declares his intentions to leave her she goes into the woods accidentally taking Dippers bag with her there she meets Blendon Blandon who offers her the ability to stay in Gravity Falls forever with an eternal Summer in exchange for the dimensional Rift she hands it over and blynden is revealed to be a vessel for Bill Cipher who smashes the rift and brings about the apocalypse of weirdmageddon Mabel and Stanley are both the charismatic twins of their respective pairs with a Charisma that doesn't translate directly into worldly success both are left behind by the opportunities afforded to their sibling who doubles as their closest friend and grow resentful that they're not good enough to stay in a peaceful period of their life with the person closest to them but the love they have of their respective twin is not enough to actively attempt to sabotage Stan Lee demolishing Ford's perpetual motion machine with something done accidentally but not something he's willing to immediately ask about as he anticipates a positive outcome for himself Mabel hands over the dimensional Rift despite knowing it doesn't belong to her again something she expects will be good for her despite the potential harm it might cause for her family Bill Cipher has spent enough time in Ford's mind in the past to know to expect this outcome although he isn't able to directly contact or possess the Pines family he is able to hit them where they're the weakest in their emotions bill is able to exploit the pain of losing somebody close in order to manipulate Mabel into making a selfish mistake as he knows that Stanley would have at some point been vulnerable enough to make the same error until we get to see how that dependence that the Pines family has on each other is able to be exploited as a weakness weirdmageddon part one weirdmageddon has begun and Bill Cipher begins terrorizing the town of Gravity Falls unleashing incomprehensible Horrors on its former inhabitants differ in Ford plan on taking out the triumphant triangle but the weirdness of the event throws off Ford's shot and he's captured turned into a golden statue and kept as a back scratcher by Bill who follows this up by destroying all of the journals Dipper now on his own seeks out the rest of his family but ends up reuniting with Wendy instead the two make a plan to rescue Mabel from the clutches of an imprisoning sphere guarded by Gideon who is finally happy to control the woman he loves despite their best efforts they're eventually chased down and surrounded only for Dipper to talk person to person to Gideon where he convinces the guy not to hold Mabel prisoner as she wouldn't want that and that he should strive to be a better person instead of taking what he wants by force so Gideon relent allowing Dipper to enter the weirdness fear encircling his sister while he takes his force of former convicts to fight Bill directly the first part of a three-part finale to the show weirdmageddon serves as the culmination of everything that's been built up to from the beginning near the beginning of the plot Bill takes and destroys the journals while also capturing their author before forgetting about Dipper assuming he'll be killed off with ease it mirrors the season 1 finale when Gideon similarly assumes that Dipper will be worthless without the journal and leaves him be and like the season 1 finale this episode has Dipper take a final exam of sorts where he uses the things he's learned to prove that he's worth something without the guides but where season one had him show off a newfound confidence and courage season 2 instead focuses on the relationship he's built over the summer it's not a loan that he charges in to save Mabel it's alongside Wendy ensues and in the end it's not defeating Gideon that gives him the last obstacle overcome before his sister but befriending him teaching him an honest lesson about self-improvement that comes from his own personal experience the primary purpose of this episode is largely to show the damage to the town of Gravity Falls how much it has fallen and how certain landmarks have become unrecognizable the third part of the finale is about the people of Gravity Falls the second part is about Dipper and Mabel's relationship and this part the town itself as in the geography and the Paranormal things surrounding it these things exist as a character in their own right and it's fitting that they would get the same amount of Spotlight as a major relationship weirdmageddon 2 escape from reality Wendy Seuss and Dipper enter Mabel land the land where everything is controlled by Mabel and nobody's problems ever matter Wendy and Seuss are both tempted by the things that they've always wanted out of life and abandoned their quest to rescue Mabel but Dipper stays headstrong and tries to convince her that she needs to leave the bubble and go back into the real world to save Gravity Falls but this ends up drawing the ire of Mabel land's inhabitant who forced Dipper to defend reality in a trial during this trial several of Mabel and Dipper's worst memories are put on display showing off the negative aspects of the real world but Dipper ultimately convinces Mabel that these terrible moments were all made better by the two of them sticking together he finishes off his argument by declaring that he no longer has any intention of spending the rest of the year with Ford's research as he would prefer to spend it with his twin sister instead Babyland turns against the group revealing itself as a trap set by Bill all along and he barely managed to escape before returning to the mystery check where they find grunkle's Stan in a few of the town's folk hiding in secret meanwhile Bill attempts to take his domination worldwide but is stopped by a force field containing his minions to Gravity Falls Unsure how to break out he decides to unfreeze Horrors for interrogation Dipper and Mabel's relationship has been the backbone of the series from the Inception through to the very end despite everything that happens to them individually they always come out together at the end of it all and solve the issue as a Duo it's fitting that weirdmageddon only came about as a result of an argument between the two just as much as it's fitting that the finale would begin to wrap up purely because the two were reunited which also sensible is that Ford's initial plan to take out bill in the previous episode would fail as it's one that while not contradictory to the universe is contradictory to the story that's been set up thus far his plan was to take out bill first then save his family after the fact but anyone who's been paying attention will know that plots have never worked that way it's understandable why Ford of all people would make that mistake considering his fractured relationship with his brother a Dipper only goes along with it at first due to a misguided reverence for the guy but it's Mabel's dreams that are a hindrance to the plot's progression at this point she needs to be rescued from her own nature of wanting things to remain the same thus far Mabel has been greatly concerned with the unfamiliar but is always ready to face it anyway as she knows Dipper has got her back but to not only move on from childhood but to do so alone is a step too far outside her comfort zone and so she Retreats back inside of it as far as she can go even creating an alternate version of her brother out of what she wants him to be but the real Dipper wins out in the end not the version of him she wants but the version of him she needs to help guide her through the uncomfortable weirdmageddon 3. take back the falls Dipper and Mabel join the cowering masses inside the Mystery Shack which has become a shelter due to the Unicorn hair barrier that Mabel and four directed a few episodes back and they work together to motivate everybody to rescue Ford as she's the only one with the knowledge of how to defeat bill Stan resents that his authority is being overlooked to rescue a guy he already saved once but the plan goes underway without him and the shack is transformed into a Mech piloted by the combined efforts of everybody remaining in Gravity Falls who hasn't been turned into a chair they have sold Bill Cipher's giant pyramid and managed to distract him long enough to free most of the people enough to perform a ritual that will seal him away with a combined efforts of a few key players in the show leading up to this point but Stanley refuses to make up with his brother and in the end their bickering prevents the Ritual from working long enough to accomplish anything everybody is captured as a result with only Dipper and Mabel managing to escape but Bill hunts them down and decides to torture them to get forward to agree to let him inside his mind so that he can learn the way out of Gravity Falls 4 degrees only for Bill to enter and learn that he's really Inside the Mind of Stanley the two switch close earlier and the memory eraser is used to destroy bill as well as all of Grunkle Stan's memories of the last summer but rather than his mind being completely lost Mabel is able to use her scrapbook of the events to jog his memory bringing him back to just in time for a final goodbye while I've spoken at length on the strength of the relationship between Dipper and Mabel this episode's conclusion ultimately comes as a result of every other connection the two have made thus far while the mystery Twins were close that closeness by itself means very little without a world to share the feeling with and this fact ends up being represented when they're togetherness serves as a motivating force first to the town of Gravity Falls itself needing that spark of motivation to stand and fight and later to Stanley and Stan Ford who finally reconcile their differences enough to make a sacrifice for the sake of family so the bond between the Twins isn't just reflected in how they treat each other but how others treat each other if something really is good and worth fighting for then the people will naturally be drawn towards defending that thing the town of Gravity Falls helps out the pints twins just as much as the Pines twins have helped out Gravity Falls and of course the finale isn't simply the town declaring to never mention that summer again before moving on the last real obstacle that needs to be overcome is the wiping of Stanley's memories of the family because that love they shared with him is something worthless if it's forgotten about and moved on from so the town of Gravity Falls can say goodbye to the Pines twins despite claiming that they won't think about anything that happened that summer because they can't forget the people who meant that much and Grunkle Stan has to regain his memories because without the memories of those closest to us we may as well have wasted the whole summer on nothing season two season two can be thought of as having two parts to it the first is largely a consequences Arc for the various unresolved points of the first season the resolution of the animosity towards Pacifica soos finally growing into his designated role and explanations of why the people of Gravity Falls behave the way they do the second half starting at the introduction of Ford involves much more in the way of resolving the internal conflicts of characters we learn of the disagreement between Ford and Stanley that led to their separation and we learn how this separation led to the events of weirdmageddon as together both brothers would have made a more effective team than a part without Stanley and his life Stanford was unable to recognize a con man when he met Bill and without Stanford in his life Stanley found so little meaning as to have spent the last 30 years working through the night to bring him back but these differences in the characters and their work towards a resolution all serve a large role in the end we've seen time and time again how Dipper and Mabel's ability to work together has led to Greatness in the past but it takes the whole town to finally beat down bill and it's their interactions with the Pines twins that lets them be the version of themselves that they need to Wendy would not have had the savviness to avoid the Supernatural and get Dipper to his sister if she had never met the guy she would have been hiding out with her family Gideon's desire to become a better person is the only reason he's able to turn his back on Bill after turning to him for help in the first place and of course if Dipper and Mabel hadn't taunt Pacifica humility then she never would have had the ability to do what her parents never could and touch a hillbilly so the town of Gravity Falls is ultimately in the character who received the most development throughout the series it's not so much that Dipper and Mabel needed to grow up as since they had each other they would be ready to face the Future No Matter What but it's the fact that the town was able to band together under the strength of their bond that a happy ending could finally be achieved and since we've spent so much time with the town that growth is hopefully reflected in the audience a person's relationship to a work of media is in the best case scenario something that lasts long after this Series has finished its run and as such the impact of Gravity Falls is something that will stay with its audience much in the same way that the impact of Dipper and Mabel's childhood will stay with the town outro foreign there's a lot of secondary material like shorts and unaired episodes that I never brought up in this video and even more tertiary materials like ciphers and amas that didn't get broached either and while at the beginning of the retrospective I said that this was primarily to keep the video focused it was also a decision meant to add a sense of mystery to a first or even second viewing for anybody who still wants some of the original appeal of the show to remain because while I stated that I left things out as the show was able to stand on its own merits without outside knowledge the weekly mystery and fandom surrounding the show was a big part of what made its earring so special so hopefully you the viewer can still find some enjoyment if you go back to the show after watching this video or somehow you watch this video without having seen Gravity Falls in the first place there's some demand for a potential return to gravity falls in the form of a third season or even a spin-off but this is mostly wishful thinking as many of the head Minds working on the show have gone their separate ways following its conclusion that's not to say that the show's Spirit isn't alive and well though for those who want more gravity falls I highly recommend looking at the other shows that the staff have moved on to I've covered both Rick and Morty as well as inside job on this channel before but a closer comparison can likely be made to amphibia or the owl house both of which have finished their run somewhat recently and the show's style is something that isn't only new either prior to his work on Gravity Falls series Creator Alex Hirsch worked on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and Fish Hooks so while the show has reached a logical conclusion and therefore likely won't see a Mainline continuation in the future fans don't have to worry about some sort of void being left in their lives I think it's for the best and a lot of the questions never truly got answered the mystery element is so much elevated by the fact that we still don't know precisely why the weirdness magnet seems to exist around the town of Gravity Falls and being able to preserve the memory of the mystery I think is a much better alternative than having every single question answered because when every question has an answer you stop asking questions and when you stop asking questions you stop reliving the moments that meant so much I appreciate that you've stuck around long enough to see the conclusion of this video or if you just skipped around to the individual episode reviews and wound up here I at least appreciate that you bothered engaging with my Channel at all if this is holding your attention or serving as decent background noise I have quite a few other videos in the same vein as this one over shows with in my opinion a very similar vibe in addition I also have plans to continue making these for as long as I have the motivation to continue making them which is looking like a long time going forwards for every video idea I finished two more ideas pop into my head and get added to the list although if you have a suggestion for that list feel free to leave it in the comments below I read through every single one of them even if I don't leave a heartfelt reply to all of them and of course you can also comment below if you have any miscellaneous feelings on Gravity Falls or my video about it in general Gravity Falls to me was a show that I only really watched to keep up with the online discourse surrounding it the discussions people were having looked interesting enough that there was a sense of fomo or fear of missing out that made me want to see what the discussion was before it inevitably got spoiled something about args and ciphers and vague allusions to Greater Mysteries really speaks to me as an audience member these videos tend to be pretty time consuming to make and as a result they come out in a period of time that causes the algorithm to lose its attention span and forget that you ever watched the others so if you want to see my next videos as they come out subscribing is a much more effective way than simply letting this website determine what you should watch next I try to upload on the first of every month so if you're watching this video around that time be sure to look out for content to see next I'm assuming by the fact that you're still listening that you have an interest in this sort of thing so apologizing in advance I'm just going to do a little bit of a channel update thingy here this was not a video about The Simpsons I am currently working on that and have decided that it's best to alternate doing three seasons every other month so that this channel doesn't become a Simpsons channel but also so I can metaphorically stretch my legs I usually only vaguely tease my next video right before it comes out but in this case I'm spoiling it well in advance oh well see you all in a month

Channel: viedo gaems

Views: 217,393

Keywords: Gravity Falls, Dipper Pines, Mabel Pines, Retrospective, Review, Listenable, Video Essay, Disney Channel, Disney XD

Id: 2lDqW2bJ9Bo

Length: 120min 0sec (7200 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023