Neil Rush CMT Blog for September 27-29, 2015- Gravity Falls "Roadside Attraction" Description, Review, and Speculation

September 27-29, 2015

Hello blogosphere, this is Neil Rush with another Gravity Falls description, review, and speculation post, this time on its most recent episode, "Roadside Attraction", which aired on September 21, 2015. The title when it was first announced in mid-August made me think that it would be a darker episode involving the Pines family getting kicked out of the Mystery Shack and having to go on the road while also learning secrets about Bill Cipher from the government. Of course, that was proven to be wrong by how in the previous episode, "The Last Mabelcorn", Ford's history with Bill is explained. Alex Hirsch also said in a tweet that he meant for this episode to be a continuity-free one-off that will not be important in the long run, and felt that the audience needed it because of how the last episode was pretty heavy, with scenes like the one in which we saw the haunting cinematic nightmare of Ford's featuring Bill and the scene in which Dipper believed that Bill was possessing Ford and was prepared to shoot him with a memory-eraser gun to erase Bill from Ford's mind, effectively "killing" him, only to realize that it was just the foggy glasses Ford was wearing that made Dipper think that Bill possessed him. Not only that, but the last four episodes of Season 2 are going to be, in Alex Hirsch's words, "OFF THE RAILS", so the audience could use a breather episode before they air.
The episode begins with Stan setting up an RV to take Dipper, Mabel, Soos, Candy, and Grenda on a road trip around the state of Oregon to revenge-prank the staff members of all of the other tourist traps that have ever pranked the Mystery Shack. It's probably not the best idea for the gang to go so far away from the Shack when they had recently Bill-proofed it and are only safe from Bill's mind manipulation when they're inside it, but seeing as to how Alex Hirsch said this was a "continuity-free one-off", this episode could be one that could fit almost anywhere within the series or be non-canon, so that really doesn't matter in the case of this episode. When bringing some things along, Mabel drops a box of Dipper's that it is discovered that it is full of pictures of Wendy. As a few lines of dialogue in "Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons" and "The Last Mabelcorn" revealed, Dipper still isn't truly over his crush on Wendy, in spite of the events of "Into the Bunker", where it seemed like he accepted that he and Wendy work better as friends because of their age difference and how they're more happy in each other's company when they try to keep things informal. What can I say? You never truly outgrow your first real crush. Regardless, Mabel and Soos recommend that Dipper use the opportunity of the road trip to find a new girlfriend. Their first stop is a giant ball of yarn that Stan intends to use the RV to rip apart. He warns the gang that a crazy old woman that once tried to set his car on fire runs this tourist trap, so they need to be inconspicuous while they tie part of the yarn ball to the RV. While the girls go inside the yarn ball, Dipper tries to talk to a cute girl, but his clear lack of confidence and accidentally introducing himself as "Dopper" due to his nervousness doesn't impress her. He asks for advice from Stan, who tells Dipper that he needs to be confident, funny-but-not-too-funny, and annoying in a funny way. Dipper worries that he'll come off as a little jerky if he does that, but Stan just tells him. "Jerky is a word used by non-jerks to badmouth innocent jerks." When the gang gets to their next stop, an upside-down house tourist trap, Dipper meets a cute and friendly Canadian girl with pigtails named Emma Sue and tries to use the techniques Stan recommended to get her to like him. She's friendly enough to let him take a picture of her pretending to fall off the building's ceiling, tells him that he seems alright, and writes her email address on his arm in case he ever wants to talk to her. Proud of himself for getting a girl's email, he excitedly compliments Mabel, Grenda, and Candy and saying how great they look today. Dipper's confidence leads Candy to develop a crush on him. Dipper asks Stan if he thinks he should email Emma Sue, but Stan says that Dipper should practice with a lot of other girls instead. While Stan spends the next few days destroying the business of multiple tourist traps in Oregon, Dipper uses his newfound confident personality to do various activities with different girls at those tourist traps, such as riding a log flume and finding his way around a corn maze, and getting their email addresses written on his arms. While stopping at a campground midway through the road trip, Stan congratulates Dipper for all of the girls' email addresses he got, even though Dipper has mixed feelings about flirting with so many girls at once, while Candy admits to Mabel and Grenda that she likes Dipper. Psyched that one of her best friends has a crush on her brother, Mabel tries to get Dipper and Candy alone together. After a little seat rearrangement the next day, Dipper and Candy are alone together in the back of the RV. The next and final tourist trap they're going to is called Mystery Mountain, which is five times the size of the Mystery Shack and has real paranormal and supernatural artifacts and creatures unlike the Shack. Candy asks Dipper if he wants to go off alone with her while they go to the Mystery Mountain, and while Dipper is not interested in Candy romantically, he takes up her offer in order to be nice. When the gang arrives at the Mystery Mountain, Dipper tells Stan that his dating tips worked too well, Candy is now interested in him, and he only likes her as a friend, but Stan says that it's just his lingering crush on Wendy keeping him from opening his mind to other girls. As if on cue, Stan sees a woman that works at the Mountain named Darlene (guest voiced by comedienne Chelsea Peretti) and tries to flirt with her. Pretending to be a ditzy woman, Darlene leads Stan off to pretend to go on a date with him, though any smart viewer would know that she has ulterior motives. When Dipper and Candy go into the Hall of Mummies together, Candy tries to cuddle up to Dipper when they're sitting on a bench, but it's just Dipper's luck that the girl from the corn maze, the girl from the log flume, and Emma Sue all show up there. Pressured to ask which one of them he actually likes, he says that he's not romantically interested in any of them and was only trying to learn how to talk to girls. Furious that Dipper was using them in such a manner, even though Dipper was not trying to be malicious and probably would've been a decent enough more-than-a-friend-less-than-a-boyfriend to whichever girl he picked in spite of being only twelve going on thirteen if he had gotten to know them through more legitimate means than Stan's bad advice, all four girls storm off, including Candy, who is genuinely heartbroken rather than just angry like the other three. Dipper tries to call Stan to get advice on how to fix things, but Stan is a little wrapped up- literally, as Darlene turns out to be a giant spider-monster with the ability to take a human form and uses a floozy persona to lure men into a cave in which she wraps them in spider-webbing and makes them the mummies that are put on display in the Hall of Mummies. Dipper finds Mabel, Grenda, and Candy, and while Mabel and Grenda try to tell Dipper off for breaking Candy's heart, but Dipper says that they can kill him later, but for now they have to save Stan. While Stan prays to Paul Bunyan to save him, Dipper and the girls get to him and free him, but are chased onto the cable car by Darlene. The cable car is dreadfully slow, so they use an escape hatch to finally get away from Darlene, while Darlene is trapped under the boot of a Paul Bunyan statue. On the way back to Gravity Falls, Dipper and Stan talk about their mutual relationship problems. Stan was divorced from his first and only real human marriage after six hours and he's been slapped more times than he can count. He married a novelty mechanical dispenser (yeah, an inanimate object) called Old Goldie in a Las Vegas wedding because, you know, Vegas. Stan tells Dipper that because of his bad advice, he should follow his own guts. Regardless, Dipper thanks Stan for teaching him to be confident, and tells him that because of trying to meet other girls, he hadn't thought of Wendy the whole road trip, and that he should use confidence, but obviously not to the point where he leads multiple girls on. Because of Candy looking through Stan's pamphlets for other tourist traps throughout the trip, Dipper themes his apology to Candy to that, showing her a pamphlet he drew saying how dumb he was for what he did to her, asking for forgiveness, and saying she's a great friend. Candy forgives Dipper and says she's over her crush on him because of seeing him act like a scared little baby around the giant spider, but accepts his friendship offer. Hey, you'd probably be scared too if you were at risk of being turned into a spider-web mummy by a mutant shapeshifting spider-lady. The gang returns to the Mystery Shack only to find that it's been trashed by various double-revenge pranksters from the other tourist traps. I wonder if that affects the anti-Bill shield in any way, but, well, "continuity-free one-off." They say it won't be a big deal because Soos can always clean it up, only to realize that Soos was left behind at the corn maze. Soos remembers advice that his grandmother told him- that if he's ever lost, he should stay completely still until help arrives. That advice, if it's not obvious, is completely useless in this situation. One of the end-of-episode codes reveals that Soos found his way home eventually, and that he traveled home with a talking pug and a sassy cat, a reference to the classic 1990s Disney family adventure comedy Homeward Bound, about two lost dogs and a lost cat trying to get home.
One of the Gravity Falls Theorists I follow on YouTube, Vailskbaum94, shared his opinion that this was the weakest of Season 2, and that filler episodes that aren't too important in the long run can still be satisfying, but this was not, due to painfully average humor (that was, for once, all kid-friendly and working within a TV-Y7 rating, which may have been part of that issue), an overly familiar plot, and the feeling that the Candy-Dipper story was forced. While I don't entirely hate this episode, I understand where his feelings were coming from. I presume the writers wanted to make a Candy-Dipper episode to set up a relationship between them only to break it up at the end because of how Candy and Dipper were the first couple conceived by Gravity Falls fans on the Internet that are also "shippers", or people that like to imagine romances between fictional characters (and in some cases, real people) of their choice, and the writers wanted to both mess with them and contribute to the eventual confirmation of Dipper and Pacifica as a couple, which was hinted at in Season 2 Episode 10, "Northwest Mansion Mystery", by having Pacifica learn to become a nice girl and having her and Dipper become at least friends. However, Alex Hirsch will probably try to mess with those who support Dipper and Pacifica as well because these shippers are trying to imagine essentially an older teen-young adult relationship between twelve-year-olds, and Mr. Hirsch wants to teach kids to embrace your youth and not rush to worry about romance because it makes your relationships with your opposite-sex friends unnecessarily formal and not fun like they should be. This is a lesson that I think that, in this day and age, teens and young adults that either ship characters and people or try too hard to be in a relationship need to hear more than kids, and another reminder of how the show works on multiple levels for kids, teens, and adults (even though most Season 2 episodes you should probably be at least ten before watching them). While I agree that, in comparison with most other Season 2 episodes, it wasn't excellent, it works on its own, and wasn't trying to be a great episode. I feel like it was meant to be a throwback to the lighter and more heartwarming tone of Season 1, which is something really worth appreciating considering how dark Season 2 has been so far and how much darker it's going to get. I give the episode a 7/10.
So what happens next? The next episode is supposed to be called "Dipper And Mabel vs. The Future". This could mean a lot of things. Some fans speculate that it will be about Blendin Blandin, the member of the Time Anomaly Removal Crew that went from enemy to friend of Dipper and Mabel in Season 2 Episode 8, "Blendin's Game", bringing the twins to the future with him to help him defeat the tyrannical Time Baby, a giant psychic baby overlord in the future. Plenty of other things could easily happen in this episode as well. From Ford's Multiverse Bubble breaking to Gideon summoning Bill to Bill possessing Soos, Wendy, Candy, Grenda, Robbie, Pacifica, Mayor Tyler Cutebiker, or anyone else in town that might be important, any of these things could happen in the next four episodes, this next one included. Something that I also think might happen is Dipper and Mabel getting a look at themselves as adults and seeing that they've grown apart, then try to do things to prevent this when returning to the past only to seal them growing apart in the process, as self-fulfilling prophecies go, and that they'll do something to each other that won't be resolved until the Season 2 finale. Anything's possible when things get creepy in the sleepy state of Oregon, and the only way to learn what happens next is to watch the next Gravity Falls Monday, October 12 at 8:00 or 8:30 P. M. You can also catch up on whatever episodes are available on the Watch Disney XD app on the Apple App Store, Google Play Apps, and Apple TV, episodes available for purchase on iTunes and Google Play TV, and on Xfinity On Demand and the Xfinity TV Go App. Thanks for reading this post, and see you next week.

Neil Rush CMT Blog September 21-22, 2015- The Current Direction My Original Productions Are Going

September 21-22, 2015

Hello, blogosphere, this is Neil Rush again. The next Gravity Falls does not air until tonight at 8pm, and that is why I will not write about that episode and my opinions on it until the next blog post. For now, I will instead talk about my original productions I have in mind to produce, whether as simple online stories or to actually produce in an actual media format for a mass audience. I have probably talked about this one before, but the creation of mine that I value more than anything else is "Fanz". I originally called it "Geekz" before a realization that there is no consistent definition for the term "geek" anymore, making my original intention for the show difficult to apply to a media format intended to gain a reasonably large fandom. The basic idea for "Fanz" is that in the world that it's set in, it's almost exactly like the real world, except that if someone likes a certain thing enough, that person has superpowers. The existence of superhumans causes history to be slightly different in the "Fanz" universe than it was in the real world and allows human society to be slightly more advanced in technology. The stories are generally centered around six young people, usually between the ages of ten and thirty, resolving to become a super-team, because in spite of a decent amount of the human population having superpowers, only a fraction of them try to be superheroes or supervillains. And I use the terms "superhero" and "supervillain" loosely, because no one really uses alter-egos or secret identities, their "costumes" are normal clothes, and the good guys are rarely depicted saving people, usually just fighting evil, and the bad guys are usually too guided by a more singular purpose to do stereotypically evil things, except for the few that act similar to the Joker and just want to spread chaos and terror. The people that have superpowers are different depending on the rules of the universe in each different version I have conceived, but common ones are fans of tabletop role-playing games, trading card games, history, science fiction, fantasy, horror, college and professional sports teams, music (usually you have to be a fan of one genre or a few similar genres for it to count), comic books and/or manga, computer and/or video games (whether it be playing them yourself or watching a Let's Player play them), cars, animation (somehow liking Japanese animation, or anime, makes one more powerful than liking only western animation, yet fans of only western animation are still capable of being very powerful), cooking, the newest technology, movies as art, TV shows (the kinds of TV shows depends on the network or company that picks "Fanz" up), toy collecting, and amusement/theme parks. I've thought of forty different alternate versions of "Fanz". The first eleven and one later on all start at different grades of my life, from fourth grade to the first year after high school, and focus on a fictionalized and more comically eccentric version of myself and different friend groups I've had in my life from those grades. Two of them are based off of my senior year because I had quite a lot of friends that year and wanted to make two versions for that in order to not rule out all of my options when it came to that. Some are only miniseries, while others are potentially lengthy series. Seven other versions are based off of the lives of friends of mine, with myself as a supporting character not part of the main team of six in each of those versions. Two are based on the lives of some of my cousins, which I have a lot of thanks to a large extended family on my mother's side. One is about one of my cousins and his friends, while the other is about five of my cousins trying to monitor the erratic behavior of one other cousin. Another version is about fictionalized versions of five of my favorite YouTube Let's Players- Chuggaaconroy, MasaeAnela, NintendoCapriSun, ProtonJon, and StephenPlays, with the version of myself in that one being a somewhat off-kilter fan of the five of them. In all of these versions with other people being the main characters and myself as a side character, it's usually only one thing per version that gives people superpowers in the universe of that specific version. One is even about fictionalized adult versions of myself and some of my friends all working in actual creative arts industries. In the case of the fictionalized version of myself in this specific version, it's working as a lower-credits position on the animated sitcom American Dad. Fans of that show are the people with superpowers in that version. The last eighteen versions are all about characters that are completely made-up by using different number, order, and decision-making systems to decide possible respective genders, races, ethnicities, identities, orientations, and other defining character traits to keep everyone more diverse than the people in most of the first twenty-two versions (Wyomissing is a predominantly white town, which certainly won't help some versions of "Fanz" in some progressive circles), yet still not make those aspects of the characters highly important in comparison to their overall personalities, interests, and desires. These last eighteen versions would follow different characters of different age groups in each one, ranging from age twelve to age twenty-nine. They'll also have fictionalized adult versions of myself and my friends as their mentors, with a different earlier version of "Fanz" meant to line up with a different later version and provide different versions of my friend groups to teach different versions of the original characters. After I've gotten through writing all of the blogs on wikis for the various things that I like (which has become much harder than before because of increased work for the technology center, a few new jobs, and family activities), I'll try to post images of the six main characters from each version of "Fanz" on websites such as Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Tumblr to hear anonymous opinions on which version I should put into production, in addition to sharing them with close friends and family members. I have my favorites, and I have a good idea of which one I'll pick if the voting ends in all-equal results, but I want to share them all just to be safe. Thanks to the now-more-commonly-used storytelling device of the multiverse, all of these versions will probably receive a shout-out in the show, regardless of which one is my final decision. Some other concepts I have in mind are a musical horror-comedy based on one of Shocktoberfest's past attractions, a film of some sort meant to satirize ideology mentality, a parody sitcom about the family of a president or another type of political leader, a superhero movie parody about a presidential cabinet, and a stage musical similar to Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone's "The Book of Mormon", but about a different religion or religion-type organization. In addition, I have plenty of original stories featuring characters from pre-existing things, or fan fiction, to create. I don't always like to call the stories fan fiction because of the negative stigma surrounding them in that they are all poorly written and about creating the most bizarre "romances" conceivable. I hope to slightly contribute to bringing things back to its most basic and original intention- creating original stories with characters I like. I've thought of something for almost everything that I like so that I can call them fan fiction without shame. Many stories would be continuations of now-ended or now-cancelled shows that myself and many others feel did not receive a proper conclusion. Some of the ones that aren't are these ones. My story based on the Cartoon Network show Adventure Time would be an extension of the episode "Simon and Marcy", which looks at the adult-child friendship between Ice King and Marceline the Vampire Queen a thousand years before the events of the show, or possibly what that storyline would be in the version of the show in which everyone is gender swapped and the show would be about the Ice Queen and Marshall Lee the Vampire King. My American Dad! fan fiction would attempt to reimagine the show as a comedy-drama. My Archer fan fiction would make fun of the recent decision to abolish the group in the show that Sterling Archer and his co-workers worked for, ISIS, which is used as an acronym for the International Secret Intelligence Service within the show, and was integrated into the CIA after the writers and FX made the decision to do that in response to the rise of the terrorist organization ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. It would feature the former-ISIS-now-CIA agents going toe-to-toe with the other ISIS in order to fight for the right to use that acronym without being mistaken for a terrorist organization. I might try to make one for the anime Attack on Titan, which would basically retell the story from the point of view of Sasha Blouse, a young woman on the Scout Regime that loves eating potatoes and serves as the closest thing to comic relief within the dreary world of the show. Another one I'd make would be set in the universe of Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, and be about the life of one particular Avatar many years before the lives of Avatars Aang and Korra. My Ben 10 stories would be about one member of the main ten alien species from the original Ben 10 series forming a team and fighting evil on Earth. The one I'd write for Bob's Burgers would be written from the points of view of the Belcher kids, Tina, Gene, and Louise, and would be about the latter two trying to "co-write" (completely alter and ruin) stories about Tina's friends and crushes. For BoJack Horseman, I'd make it about a horse-boy in early adolescence who idolizes BoJack and has his own hard life. My Codename: Kids Next Door story would be about Nigel Uno in space as part of the Galactic Kids Next Door. I'd make one in which comic characters Deadpool and Harley Quinn fight for control over a superhero fan fiction. I'd make one for the Dragon Ball anime franchise which reimagines the story as a slapstick comedy. For the now-ended Comedy Central animated parody reality show Drawn Together, I'd make a version of it featuring characters that are meant to parody current trends in animation fandom. I may make one for the old Cartoon Network show Ed, Edd, and Eddy about their teenage years with a similar style of humor to the later Cartoon Network show Regular Show. My Fairly Oddparents one would be about Timmy Turner's kids and their own Fairy Godparents. The ones I'd write for Family Guy would be extensive crossovers with other adult cartoons or kids' cartoons that have a tendency to use subtle adult humor, meant to parody when crossovers try to think of too many absurd ways to make a bunch of unrelated things be set in the same universe. I'd make a series of Gravity Falls fan fictions about Dipper and Mabel as teenagers now living in the town of Gravity Falls permanently rather than just for the summer and facing both new supernatural mysteries and dealing with teen issues. The one for the old Disney cartoon Kim Possible I'd make would be about Kim and Ron in college. There'd be one for King of the Hill I'd try to write about Dale's younger life. I'd make a Pokemon fan fiction meant to lovingly parody the franchise that would follow the narrative of one of the main series video games, but with the main Pokemon Trainer and his/her traveling partners often commenting on the absurdity of the situations they get themselves into in the Pokemon world. There's one I'd want to write for Cartoon Network's Regular Show in which the characters are reimagined as humans dealing with problems in the criminal underworld. I'd write a few for Adult Swim's Rick and Morty focusing on different versions of the title characters across the multiverse in each different one. I might make one for the classic Nickelodeon show Rugrats, focusing on the main characters as adults and showing how things from their toddler and middle-school years come back to haunt them as adults. I would want to make one about South Park featuring the New Kid from the Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole video games as the main character and what his life is like when not playing make-believe fantasy or superheroes. The one I'd write for Cartoon Network's Steven Universe would be about Steven and the Crystal Gems traveling to the universes of other Cartoon Network shows to stop Uncle Grandpa from ruining the lives of other Cartoon Network characters. I'd write one for Total Drama about the contestants outside of the reality show environment. I'd make one for Disney's Wreck-It Ralph focusing on other video game characters living in the arcade. Lastly, I'd make a fan fiction for the Cartoon Network show We Bare Bears about the Bears becoming Let's Players. I may not have enough time to make all of these, but I at least like having the ability to think about them. Thanks for reading this post, and see you next time.

Neil Rush Communications Media Technology Blog Gravity Falls Analysis And Review- The Last Mabelcorn

September 14, 2015

Hello, blogosphere, this is Neil Rush. I've decided to just make this blog almost entirely about Gravity Falls because I just really enjoy typing detailed descriptions of episodes of that TV show on the Internet. The next blog post will probably not be about it due to how I'll have to write it before the next new episode airs on September 21, so this one will be on the episode that aired on September 7- The Last Mabelcorn.
The episode begins with Bill Cipher coming to Great-Uncle Ford in a nightmare and boasting of his plans to unleash armageddon upon Gravity Falls and later the world. The next morning, Grunkle Stan is doing one of his trademark crimes- what I thought was "pog trafficking" when it was mentioned in the previous episode I learned is actually "pug trafficking"- a pretty obvious pun on drug trafficking, made even more obvious when we find Stan speaking in Spanish to a Hispanic man telling him that he has twenty-four hours to get a bunch of barrels with pug dogs in them across the southern border in a pickup truck. How the show is still rated TV-Y7 is beyond me. Meanwhile, Ford asks Dipper and Mabel if they've ever seen the symbol of Bill Cipher, which they respond to by telling of their encounters with Bill in the episodes "Dreamscapers" and "Sock Opera". Ford knows how to protect the Mystery Shack from Bill's reality-warping abilities and mind manipulation, and one of the ingredients required to make a "demon-shield" is a piece of unicorn hair. Mabel, being the hyper-immature twelve-year-old girl that she is, is more than willing to go into an Enchanted Forest that is conveniently within walking distance, and brings Candy, Grenda, and Wendy along. Candy hopes to lick a unicorn's neck because of a legend that it would taste like her favorite flavor if she did, Grenda somehow believes she'll be able to become one, and Wendy, who doesn't believe in unicorns (considering all of the really bizarre things in the Gravity Falls world, unicorns seem like one of the more realistic things for the characters to come across), just wants to keep the girls safe. After Grenda sings a "troll song" to reveal the cave the unicorns live in, they come across one named Celestebellebethebelle (voiced by Sam Marin, the voice of Benson, Pops, and Muscle Man on Cartoon Network's Regular Show, and doing an exaggerated effeminate voice), a parody of Princess Celestia from the once-famous kids'-cartoon-with-a-surprisingly-large-adult-following My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. She appears to look into Mabel's heart and says that she'll only allow the gang to take a piece of her hair if she's pure-of-heart, and says that Mabel is not. Desperate, Mabel, Candy, Grenda, and Wendy do a variety of good deeds around Gravity Falls, such as helping snails on leaves, planting trees (and accidentally trapping people in their homes in the process by planting too close to their front doors), putting a smiley balloon on Stan's face (which we quickly discover is a major choking hazard), and donating more blood than is healthy for one sitting. And yet even after all of that, Celestebellebethebelle tells Mabel that she's still not pure-of-heart, that she shouldn't do good deeds just to get noticed, and that it's not her fault that Mabel's a bad person, which causes Mabel to run off crying and trying to think of the best good deed conceivable. Wendy can tell that something fishy is going on, so while Mabel is wallowing in self-pity and doubt, Wendy, Candy and Grenda raid a gnome tavern in the forest to get help finding a unicorn's weakness. They make a trade with a criminal gnome for knockout magic in exchange for "butterfly dust", but also manage to turn the exchange into a sting operation to get the gnome criminal arrested. What? The writers want to make sure that people know that Candy, Grenda, and Wendy are still the good guys/girls, so they kind of had to make them snitches when putting them in a situation that is essentially a sort-of-kid-friendly depiction of a drug deal (again, why isn't this show at least rated TV-PG?). The girls minus Mabel try to sneak into the unicorn cave at night to knock Celesebellebethebelle out and steal a piece of her hair, but Mabel tries to stop them because of how immoral that kind of thing would be under most circumstances. Celestebellebethebelle wakes up on her own and notices the pair of scissors that Mabel took from Wendy in her hands and believes that Mabel was the one who tries to steal a piece of her hair. Mabel weeps that she just wants to be good like Celestebellebethebelle, which is when two more male unicorns, who seem to be parodies of characters from the old YouTube video Charlie The Unicorn, come out from deeper within the cave and reveal that unicorn horns cannot actually see into your heart and measure how good you are. All they can do is make glitter, point at sunsets, and play rave music. They only pretend to be able to see into human's hearts because they want to be left alone, and boast that they have more hair than they know what to do with and refuse to share it to tick humans off. Furious that the unicorns are clearly much more immoral than Mabel ever could be, the girls get into a brutal (but mostly off-screen) fight with the unicorns.
Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, Ford takes Dipper to a secret laboratory beneath the Mystery Shack that not even Stan knows of. Ford tells Dipper that if they can't Bill-proof the shack, they'll have to Bill-proof their minds. Ford's mind is already Bill-proof thanks to a metal plate in his head, so he straps Dipper to a mind-reading contraption. Some of Dipper's thoughts laid out on the monitor are the lyrics to "Disco Girl" by BABBA, a parody of "Dancing Queen" by ABBA, how psyched he is to know the author of the journals, and a few potentially-inappropriate thoughts about Wendy. Ford wants to scan Dipper's mind so he'll know how to protect Dipper in a way that matches his mind perfectly. The process is taking a few hours, and Dipper feels that Ford is not sharing as much about his history with Bill as he ought to, so he attempts to put the mind-reading helmet on Ford. When that happens, the image of Bill appears on the mind-reading screen, some blankets on the wall are pushed away revealing what almost looks like things that would be found in a shrine to Bill, and Ford wakes up, but his glasses are all foggy and he's talking in a very ominous way. Dipper now believes that Ford is a voluntary host of Bill and that they are working together to achieve Bill's ultimate goal. He even thinks that when Ford is about to say "please" but trips over the word, Ford's going to say "pine tree", the name Bill calls Dipper because of his place on the Bill Cipher Wheel. Dipper tries to keep the multiverse bubble from "Bord" (Bill/Ford) and takes the memory-eraser gun in the lab and attempts to erase Bill from his great-uncle's mind, which is essentially killing Bill. After the laser blast from the gun bounces off of Ford's glasses and around the room, Ford unfogs his glasses and reveals that he was never under Bill control or working with him. He finally reveals his history with Bill to Dipper. When Ford was much younger, after first seeing the symbols that represent him in a cave, he took a nap and had a dream in which Bill came to him. At this point, Bill seemed like a benevolent entity to Ford, and was allowed in and out of his mind at will to help Ford with his research. However, after seeing the mental scarring Bill put on Fiddleford McGucket when he first tested the portal, Ford learned of Bill's true nature and knew he had to shut down the portal. It's why he was so mad at Stan for reactivating it and why he dismantled it and confined its energy to a bubble- he couldn't risk anything from Bill's Nightmare Realm making its way into the physical world, even if it meant never coming back to his home dimension. Dipper and Ford think that they have failed to Bill-proof either the shack or their minds, but that's when Mabel, Candy, Grenda, and Wendy return to the shack with a lock of unicorn hair- and covered in some glittery substance implied to be unicorn blood. They were even given treasure just so that they'd leave the unicorns alone. Dipper and Ford once more say that Mabel is the most pure-hearted person they know, but Mabel responds by saying that morality is relative- possibly the most potentially controversial message to ever be put out by a Disney cartoon with a youth audience- allowing Stan to, as if almost on cue, run on-and-off-screen grabbing as much of the treasure as his arms can carry while screaming "MONEY!!!" During the credits, Dipper and Ford make the shield that will keep Bill from getting to anyone inside the Mystery Shack, but because Bill is always watching from his realm, he sees this happen, and declares that if he can't possess or make a deal with anyone inside the Shack, he'll just have to possess or make a deal with someone on the outside. The episode's last image is Bill's eye turning into a slot machine wheel of all of the characters in Gravity Falls besides Dipper, Mabel, Stan, and Ford that he can rope into his game and turn against the Pines family.
Don't let all of the unicorns and glitter fool you, this is probably the darkest Gravity Falls episode to date, in terms of black comedy, adult references, and thematic intensity. From the super-freaky nightmare Ford has with Bill in it at the beginning to the pug trafficking to Mabel donating enough blood to make herself pass out to the mind-reading machine showing Dipper thinking about Wendy in a red bikini to the butterfly dust deal to Dipper being forced into what was essentially a kill-or-be-killed situation and handling a gun (even though it's a nonlethal memory eraser gun and not an extremely dangerous weapon) to Mabel and her friends being drenched in glittery unicorn blood with their usual smiles on their faces, it's surprising how at least Season 2 of the show isn't rated TV-PG-DV. You would think that the "Romance In Settler's Times" statue from Season 2 Episode 7 "Society of the Blind Eye" would've attracted the attention of Disney XD's TV rating board enough to make them bump the rating up, but, as it goes with the title, they turned a blind eye to that. Of course, the most shocking thing about "The Last Mabelcorn" was Mabel saying that morality is relative. While this is a message that I agree with to an extent, putting this message in a show that was at least at one point meant to be watched by kids has the potential to open a Pandora's Box of questions for parents from their kids that probably shouldn't be answered until the kids are at least forty. Mabel was meant to be a role model for girls and a symbol to have fun whenever you can, be yourself, and not be defined by controlling popularity standards, but now she could be a symbol for a new anarchist, Frederich Nietzsche-style anti-morality movement. OK, I know that's a major stretch, but Alex Hirsch and his writing team should probably think about who they're writing Gravity Falls for and what audience they want to speak to. Kids and up? Preteens and up? Teens and up? Adults? They'd be a lot less creatively stifled if Disney XD changed the rating to TV-PG-DV, if it were moved to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, or if Disney XD created its own Adult Swim-like nighttime block, because when the over-the-head jokes are not over the head in the slightest, you should probably think about whether your "kids's show" is really such. This was not a bad episode, in fact, it was one of my favorites of the entire series so far in terms of story, but not exactly my favorite because of how Bill only appeared in Ford's nightmare, in flashbacks, and at the very end, I'm just saying that they should've been a little more careful with the "morality is relative" message. 8/10.
So what happens next? The next episode is called "Roadside Attraction". This time around, Stan is going to take Dipper, Mabel, Candy, Grenda, and possibly some others on a road trip to sabotage the business of all of the other tourist traps in the county, because as many businessmen believe, true success only comes from the failure of all possible competition. The ads for this episode make it look like a much lighter episode than the past episode, but the character that's being introduced may change that perception. Comedienne Chelsea Peretti, a frequent high-ranker on lists of funniest Twitter accounts, is supposed to guest-star as a new character named Darlene, who was mentioned by Alex Hirsch in an interview to preview the second half of Season 2 as one of the scariest characters ever conceived by the Gravity Falls writing team. To me, she sounds like either the owner of a rival tourist trap, a potential love interest for Stan, or both of these things rather than a super-scary woman. Perhaps she'll be all three of these things. We'll see when it airs on Monday, September 21 at 8:30 P. M. (cue end of Gravity Falls theme song). But first off, who will Bill make a deal with and/or possess? It would probably be one of the more important characters. Some dialogue and codes from the episode imply that it might be Soos because of the code at the end of this episode that, when decoded, says "The simple man with many fears will often listen to what he hears." However, Bill has implied that Soos may not really be as "simple" as he lets on, and may only be pretending to be dumb to mess with everyone and, in a way, have control over them. It could be Wendy because of her importance and how many believe that the ice bag on the Bill Cipher Wheel is meant to represent her because she's as cool as ice and is given ice to heal her eye in Season 1 Episode 9 "The Time Traveler's Pig", though she's probably safe because of how often she is in the Mystery Shack. Candy and Grenda's frequent appearances may make them suspect to Bill-harassment, but they don't seem important enough for any serious arcs of the show, so I won't count them too high. Old Man McGucket seems like a likely candidate because of his history with Bill, and it will be interesting if he remembers Bill or not considering how he erased his memory of Bill because of the trauma of seeing the Nightmare Realm and Bill's desires ("When Gravity Falls and Earth become sky, fear the beast with just one eye"). Gideon seems very likely because of how at the end of Season 2 Episode 14 "The Stanchurian Candidate", he tried to summon Bill in his prison cell. Many believe that Pacifica Northwest, the spoiled-mean-girl-turned-half-decent-girl-and-potential-love-interest-for-Dipper, will be possessed in order to emotionally wreck those who want to see Dipper and Pacifica get together, which does seem like something Alex Hirsch would do. Robbie may be a candidate because of his increasing importance and character development, though he may not as well because it's unclear what his relationship with the other main characters is at this point, considering how he's moved on from his hopeless crush on Wendy and most likely has ended his rivalry with Dipper for that very reason. Perhaps Bud Gleeful, though Gideon would probably keep that from happening. Maybe Agent Powers and/or Trigger (Powers is voiced by comedy actor Nick Offerman), two government agents that have tried to arrest Stan for allegedly building a doomsday device that was the portal in Season 2 Episode 11 "Not What He Seems" but had their memories of that erased in the following episode "A Tale of Two Stans" because they have unlikely dealt with anything like Bill in their careers before, so they could be caught off-guard into making a deal. Anything's possible in Gravity Falls. Let's hope that the rest of the season stays as good as it has been. Thank you for reading, and see you next time.

Another post on Gravity Falls- What I have learned about it and what has happened since I last wrote about it here.

September 1, 2015

Hello, blogosphere, this is Neil Rush again. I took the summer off from blogging for Communications Media Technology, but now it's back and will be published on an almost-weekly basis. As you could tell from one of my previous posts, Disney XD's Gravity Falls has become something of an obsession for me. Even while liking cartoons genuinely intended for older audiences rather than kids, their parents, and animation-loving young adults, sometimes you get bored with the same old things and want something new (or, in my case with South Park, decided that the environment of the fandom was becoming too contentious and that it was losing its identity in order to keep it in line with the ideology of the rest of the majority of Comedy Central's programming), and that new thing was initially Star vs. The Forces of Evil, but then became Gravity Falls due to its deeper story, actually pretty surprising edgier jokes (especially in Season 2 Episode 7, "Society of the Blind Eye"), and heavy use of meta-humor that is much more modern than most other "adult" cartoons. Maybe I'll grow bored with the show, but hype is still up for it, so that does not seem likely for a little while.
I would like to make a few corrections from my previous posts about the show. The show premiered on Disney Channel on June 15, 2012, and the first season ended in July 2013. The show was formally moved to Disney XD because of Disney realizing that cartoons worked better on that channel so that older fans don't have to endure ads for their sitcoms intended for mostly pre-teen girls (yet still have to endure ads for live-action action shows produced on a sitcom budget intended for nine-year-old boys, and even worse than ads, cross-promotions between the animated and live-action shows on the channel). For the year between that, multiple micro-series of three-minutes shorts aired- Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained, Mabel's Guide to Life, and Gravity Falls Public Access TV. Season 2 premiered on Disney XD on August 1, 2014, and episodes have aired a few weeks apart to build up anticipation, and therefore viewership, and so that Alex Hirsch can let fans make theories about what will happen in coming episodes and the backstories of various characters. Also, "Not What He Seems" was not Part 1 of a two-part Season 2 finale, but rather the mid-season finale of Season 2, with the episode afterwards, "A Tale of Two Stans," serving as the Season 2 mid-season premiere. This episode was half an hour long without commercials, requiring subsequent airings to be forty minutes with commercials.
It's still a little weird how we're seeing the events of the show take place all in the summer of 2012 yet be shown over the course of 4+ years, but the bold mystery of the story kind of requires dragging the story out. Alex Hirsch said that he is unsure whether or not the show will last for two seasons, three seasons, two seasons and a movie, or three seasons and a movie, but he knows that he intends on telling a story with a legitimate end.
The past three episodes of the show were some of the best ones yet. "A Tale of Two Stans" aired on July 13, 2015 and was one of the biggest bombshells of the series. Grunkle Stan's twin brother, the real Stanford Pines (voiced by famous actor J. K. Simmons), came out of the destructive portal and the brother's pasts were revealed. In the 1960s, Stanley and Stanford Pines were twin brothers and best friends, looking for mysteries in their beachside town and always looking out for each other. However, when Stanford had the chance to earn a scholarship to a prestigious university, Stanley was afraid of losing his best and only true friend, so he "accidentally" sabotaged Stanford's project. Upon learning about what Stanley did, his and Stanford's parents abandoned him, and with few options, Stanley became a conman, selling scam products under multiple aliases, getting arrested for every crime that it would be OK to mention and play for sort-of-dark humor on a show with a high TV-Y7 rating, and becoming forbidden from entering thirty states and a few countries. Meanwhile, Stanford was studying bizarre occurrences in the town of Gravity Falls, Oregon, and wrote the journals that were key McGuffins throughout the series, drawing outlines of his trademark six-fingered hands on them to signify them as his work. In the year 1982, he created a portal to the multiverse and tested it out with his college friend, Fiddleford McGucket (who would later become the town's crazy hillbilly, Old Man McGucket), but one brief look in the portal scarred Fiddleford for life, and he tried to wipe his memory of it all. As shown in "Society of the Blind Eye," he began to use the memory-wiper gun on himself so many times that it damaged his mind almost entirely beyond repair and turned him into the crazy hillbilly seen on the show. Realizing what horrors he had potentially unleashed on the world, Stanford sent an anonymous message to Stanley to come take the journals and hide them where they can never be found. Offended that his twin brother would call him for the first time in years only to tell him to run away from him, Stanley attempted to burn the journals, which led to a brief argument and physical altercation about who ruined whose life more of the two twin brothers, ending in the portal accidentally being activated and Stanford getting sucked in. Wracked with guilt and shame over getting in a fight with his brother that got him sent to who-knows-where, Stanley needed a way to make money to keep the portal going, so he took the name of his brother, Stanford Pines, and turned his brother's lab into a tourist trap/museum-of-the-macabre/gift shop known as the Mystery Shack, entertaining some and disgusting the rest with his cheap monster models and overpriced merchandise. Every night for thirty years until the events of the "Not What He Seems", Stan checked the portal's progress to see if he was any closer to getting his brother back. Stanford, who chose to go by Great-Uncle Ford to avoid confusion between the two Stans, had not forgiven Stan for getting him sent into the portal, let alone taking his house and turning it into a tourist trap and using his name to cover his hide, and demanded that he close the Mystery Shack and give him his house and name back at the end of the summer. In response, Stan told Ford to stay away from Dipper and Mabel, saying that they were the only family that he still had as far as he was concerned. Mabel expressed concern that she and Dipper might turn out like Stan and Ford, but Dipper advised her not to worry about it. While I do think that this episode tossed the dramatic weight of "Not What He Seems" aside so that the show could go on as humorously as before but with Ford living with them now, it was still good to learn about Stan's past and part of why he appears to have such gray morals, and it makes sense that things don't immediately get better between Stan and Ford, when most kids' cartoons would just have things like that improve with no payoff.
Then came "Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons", which initially aired August 3, 2015. In this episode, Dipper gets the newest version of the titular parody of "Dungeons and Dragons" in the mail, but Mabel and Stan don't want to play a game that involves extensive math and long-winded fantasy terminology, and Soos prefers FCLORPing (Foam, Cardboard, and Long Object Role-Playing), a parody of LARPing (Live-Action Role-Playing). Ford, however, is more on the same page with Dipper about tabletop RPGs, and is more than willing to play with him. Dipper and Ford's love of D&D&MoreD creates a conflict of interest with Mabel and Stan's love of the cartoon "Duck-Tective", which leads to one of the funniest meta-references ever done on the show.
Stan- Can't you play your nerd-game in another room?
Ford- Hey, at least I'm not keyed up to watch a kids' show!
Stan- Duck-Tective is not just a kids' show, Ford! It's full of mystery and a lot of things go over kids' heads!
Grenda (Mabel's best friend)- I don't get a lot of it, but I like seeing animals doing human things!
When another physical altercation breaks out between Stan and Ford (they really have too many of these), Ford's Infinity-Sided Die, an artifact he found during his travels in the multiverse that allows for fantastical occurrences whenever rolled, gets knocked onto the game board and brings the game's wizard, Probabilitor (guest-voiced by comedy musician "Weird Al" Yankovic) to life. Probabilitor captures Dipper and Ford, takes them into the Gravity Falls Woods, ties them to a tree, and prepares to eat their brains to gain their knowledge, forcing Mabel, Stan, and Grenda to go on an "epic wizard quest" to save their fantasy-loving family members. Mabel and Stan must play a real version of D&D&MoreD, in which Ford and Dipper are shrunk, dressed in fantasy clothes, and used as game pieces, to defeat Probabilitor. Dipper tells Mabel and Stan of the imagination and risk involved in the game to motivate them, and they create creatures such as a Centaur-taur, a centaur with another centaur body in place of a head, to fight things such as Probabilitor's Ogre-Nado, made to be a parody of Sharknado. Probabilitor summons an Impossi-beast, which can only be defeated by rolling a perfect 38 on the game's 38-sided die. Stan manages to do so by sticking a wad of gum to the die before rolling it, defeating Probabilitor and sending him back into the box art. Stan apologizes to Dipper for belittling him about his geeky hobbies (but not Ford, even though Ford probably needs it more), and Dipper says that with everything that has happened, he really would rather not play anything like the game for a while, prompting everyone to go back and watch Duck-Tective. The twist at the end of the Duck-Tective episode about who shot him at the end of the last episode is his twin brother. Ironic, huh? Everyone is underwhelmed by the twist, and Soos even says that he knew about this a year ago, referencing that the Stan's-twin-brother theory was first thought of over a year before "Not What He Seems" even aired. In essence, Soos has become a personification of the Gravity Falls fandom, and Duck-Tective is the in-universe equivalent of the show. Ford shares with Dipper that he dismantled the portal and contained its multiverse energy to a bubble, and makes him promise to not tell anyone, not even Stan or Mabel, out of fear that they may try to mess with it. With the exception of the announcement of the multiverse bubble, this episode is not too important in the overall scope of the show, though it has plenty of funny jokes and references and was one of the more accurate depictions of a Dungeons and Dragons-type game in media.
Lastly is "The Stanchurian Candidate", which initially aired on August 24, 2015. It begins with various things showing Stan feeling down-on-his-luck with bad luck constantly getting in his way, getting insulted by Wendy's teenager friends Robbie (a recurring character voiced by comedy actor
T. J. Miller, who dresses in a sort-of-emo-sort-of-goth style and was a rival with Dipper for Wendy's affections until Season 2 Episode 8, The Love God), Tambry (Wendy's best friend since childhood and Robbie's girlfriend since The Love God), Lee, and Nate for being old and thinking he pays for everything with "pennies and war bonds", and Dipper, Mabel, and Soos thinking that Ford is cooler than him for doing things such as making lightbulbs that last a thousand years and make your skin softer when touched. When Stan tries to forget his sorrows by watching TV, the news comes on and announces that Mayor Befufflefumpter, the 102-year-old mayor of Gravity Falls, had passed away the previous night, and due to the extremely lax nature of politics in this universe (for humorous sake, satirical purposes, simplicity for kids' understanding, and a need to avoid being blatantly ideological in order to invite as many audiences as possible even though most people working on the show are generally socio-politically progressive), the position of mayor is open to anyone interested. Bud Gleeful, Gideon Gleeful's dad and the town's used car salesman, is the first to throw his hat in the ring (literally, as you signify that you're running by throwing your hat into a hula hoop in the middle of town hall), and after hearing Dipper and Mabel say that if Ford came to the town hall meeting he would run and win because of his intelligence and likability, Stan dares to compete against Bud and convinces some of the other townspeople to do so as well. Knowing that Stan will say and do plenty of dumb things on the campaign trail, and desperate to keep Bud out of power out of a fear that he'll somehow get Gideon released, Dipper and Mabel try to mold him into the perfect candidate. They try writing a speech for him to read, but he refuses to say anything that isn't his words, which makes his first radio interview go totally wrong and recommend very bad ideas to solve educational issues such as get kids to learn survival tactics by stranding them on an island and teaching kids swears. Desperate to keep Stan's image alive, Dipper goes to Ford for help, who gives him a mind-control tie he invented years ago and claims to have used to help Ronald Reagan's campaign managers with the 1980 presidential election. Dipper and Mabel get Stan to wear the tie and control him into becoming the perfect candidate, gaining support from almost everyone in town and costing Bud approval ratings. Gideon, whom Bud communicates with over a video screen from prison, is making Bud run to bust him out of prison and help him accelerate his plans of getting revenge on the Pines family, forcing Mabel to be his girlfriend, and ruling over the town. Bud asks Gideon to just be patient and wait until he can find a way to regain approval ratings, but patience is not in Gideon's vocabulary, and he uses a spell on a page he took from one of Ford's journals back when he had one in Season 1 before we knew the identity of The Author (which is just the phrase "spooky evil spells" said backwards) to take control of his father's mind. Stan is confident of his victory now in spite of not even truly knowing why he's leading the polls, and Dipper and Mabel try to convince him to wear his "lucky tie" for the next debate, but Stan is so confident he doesn't feel the need to wear a "lucky tie." When Dipper gets mad while trying to convince Stan to wear the tie, he lets slip that it's a mind-control tie, and upon that revelation, Stan fires Dipper and Mabel as his campaign managers and announces his intentions to win on his own. Dipper and Mabel then try to turn Soos into their perfect candidate, but that doesn't turn out so well. The final speech involves an old Gravity Falls tradition of throwing birdseed at the best candidate and releasing a bald eagle to bestow a "birdly kiss" upon the candidate with the most birdseed, declaring them the winner (as Dipper says when this is first described at the beginning of the episode, "I could not make this up if I wanted to", but Alex Hirsch and the writing team clearly can, so...). Mabel and Dipper argue over how Soos should act while in control of Soos, so that ruins Soos's chances, Stan recommends even more bad ideas like waging war against neighboring cities to stimulate the economy, and Bud, now being controlled by Gideon, does a song-and-dance routine to win over the audience. In between segments of the debate, Gideon discovers Dipper and Mabel's plan and ties them to chairs in the monument being built in honor of Befufflefumpter in the side of a cliff full of explosives set to blow. Learning of the danger the kids are in, Stan throws the debate to save them, and the heroic actions he performs make the townspeople like him enough to shower him with the most birdseed and gets the eagle to kiss Stan, declaring him the winner... until the Gravity Falls Parliament disqualifies him after performing a criminal background check and learning of Stan's laundry list of crimes, including but not limited to first-degree "llamacide", a crime he invented called "burgle-bezzlement", and unlicensed possession of pogs. "At least they didn't say any of the bad ones", says Stan after turning off the TV while his crimes are being listed. The winner of mayor is the only candidate who actually bothered to fill out the paperwork, Tyler Cutebiker, a man who is known for his catchphrase, which is different variations of the saying "Git'em, giiiiiiit'em!" With nothing better to do, Dipper, Mabel, and Stan go off to vandalize Tyler's newly-christened City Hall. Meanwhile, Gideon, in his cell at night, says to himself that this "motivational" cat poster is the only thing keeping him going... except it's not the cat poster, but rather a Bill Cipher Wheel he drew that he hides under it. The Bill Cipher Wheel is a variation of an alchemy circle, with Bill Cipher drawn in the center and various symbols representing the main characters surrounding him (another major mystery of the show is which characters represent each symbol, which has been revealed for some but not all of the symbols). Gideon draws an eye in the center to finish the wheel off, announcing that he's finally ready to make another deal with him (besides the one he made in Part 1 of the Season 1 finale, "Dreamscapers") as the wheel begins to glow. This episode is one of my favorites because of the soft political satire and other modern pop culture references such as Stan being turned into various Internet memes in response to his gaffes on the radio such as "One Does Not Simply Teach Kids Swears", a parody of the "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor" meme, the return of Gideon, and the last-second twist that no one saw coming and is meant to set up the next episode.
So where does the show go from here? As of this writing, the next episode is set to air on Labor Day, September 7, 2015 and is called "The Last Mabelcorn." The two plots, according to most early synopses, are that Mabel learns that unicorns are real in the GF universe and sets out with Wendy and her two best friends Candy and Grenda to save them from extinction, while Dipper learns of Ford's history with Bill Cipher and a potential weakness as he returns to the physical world to prepare to bring the apocalypse to Gravity Falls. Other possibilities for this episode are Bill possessing Gideon, an epic battle between Ford and Bill, and Mabel losing trust in Dipper and Ford after learning of the secrets they're keeping from her and Stan. Many things are supposed to happen as Season 2, and possibly the series, ends this year. Alex Hirsch said in a tweet that someone will die this season. Was Mayor Befufflefumpter the death he was speaking of, or will a death with more emotional weight occur later in the season? And who would it be? Also, Hirsch announced at San Diego Comic-Con International 2015 at the Gravity Falls panel that contrary to popular belief, Bill Cipher will not be the main antagonist of the season, even though he will still be a major one. Many people believe that Ford will end up being the main antagonist because of his attitudes about various things and continued refusal to forgive Stan for what happened between them in 1982, and that spite could turn him into a threat to the Pines family. Dipper and Mabel, similar to Stan and Ford, may also have a falling out that the usual Disney-style end-of-episode apology won't be able to fix until possibly the series finale. As Dipper and Ford as well as Mabel and Stan become closer, Dipper and Mabel will drift farther apart. Nothing is certain in Gravity Falls, everything is open to interpretation and questioning, and no matter what happens this season, Fallers will get hit in the feels (look that up if you don't know what it means). Thank you for reading, and watch Gravity Falls Monday nights at 8:30 PM on Disney XD, as well as on Xfinity On Demand, the Watch Disney XD app available on the iTunes app store, Google Play Store, and Apple TV, and individual episodes are available for purchase on iTunes and Google Play.