October 27, 2015
Hi, blogosphere, it's Neil. I posted a Top 10 list on this blog about my favorite episodes of the show I always talk about on this blog, Gravity Falls, to prepare for the three-part Season 2 and/or series finale to the show, the Weirdmageddon trilogy, but in order to more properly match the FCAs for this week's assignment, I decided to write an extra post as well. The FCAs mentioned taking a side of a debate and defending why you took the side you did. In order for it to be about media, I decided to go to the website known as TV Tropes and look up the tropes "Base Breaker" and "Broken Base". These terms are meant to describe divisions within fanbases and how people that hold different opinions on different aspects of the same thing and when it leads to people that common sense would dictate should get along fighting amongst each other for extremely petty reasons. Many things can break a base. It could be a character that is given excessive time in the story by the writers because of how much the creators or writers like them but many fans have grown to find very annoying. It could be a plot line done by a book, comic, film, TV show episode, video game, or whatever media the fandom in question is centered around that had a character do something that many fans believed was out of character, or just the very nature of the media in question leading people to like it for different reasons and believing those who do not like it for the exact same reasons as them to "not be true fans", and that's one of the nicer things said in these online debates. Because this is largely a Gravity Falls blog, I shall look into one of the base breakers for the show- the most relevant one at the current moment and who is at fault for the figurative and literal rift being opened causing the apocalypse at the end of "Dipper And Mabel Vs. The Future" that will go into "The Weirdmageddon Trilogy". Some blame Ford because of how he wouldn't tell anyone other than Dipper about the crack in the glass that held the interdimensional bubble together and for possibly trying to convince Dipper that Mabel is holding him back from his true potential, inadvertently projecting his own anger at Stan onto Dipper. Some blame Dipper because of how he didn't get Mabel's input before making a decision on whether or not he should stay behind after the end of the summer and become Ford's apprentice, a decision that would greatly impact both himself and Mabel. Some blame Mabel because she got mad at Dipper for simply exercising his right to take charge of his future and because she wants to freeze everyone in time all because she can't deal with her problems. Some even blame Stan for causing the apocalypse because of how his activating of the portal is how the rift problem got started in the first place. They ironically leave Bill out of all of this even though he's the one that caused the apocalypse on purpose. In addition, this episode got people saying that the show was better before Ford's introduction because it showed Dipper and Mabel as the ideal sibling relationship that should receive more of a focus like it did in the first season, and that the idea of Dipper leaving Mabel is awful because that was one of the main reasons why certain fans were interested at all, because it was one of the first shows to show a healthy and rarely confrontational sibling relationship without the sibling rivalry of most shows with characters that are brothers, sisters, or a brother and sister, and like many real-life sibling relationships. Those on the other side of that debate say that Dipper and Mabel's relationship has become codependent and that Mabel doesn't know how to be her own person without Dipper. She is comfortable in the idea that she's the fun one and Dipper is the smart one, and that they're an inseparable pair that compensates for each other's flaws. It's sometimes hard for twins to find self-identification because of their eternal ties to their sibling, and because of Stan and Ford's inability to to peacefully do this, their relationship as adults is heavily strained. So, what's my take on these two issues? With the first one, I think that it is Bill's fault, and that blame games do no one any good. And with the second one, I think that there can be a way for Dipper and Mabel to be close but not too close to Mabel when they're older. Maybe they try to find a balance between the amount of things they do with each other and with any new friendships and relationships they may form with other people. Designate one day a week for each other or something like that in the future? Alex Hirsch will think of something that will make sense and work for the characters, I'm sure. So when it comes to divisions in fanbases and base breakers, I only have one thing to say- can't we all just get along? We're supposed to like the same thing, so shouldn't that be all that matters, and not the little intricacies that might create rifts between fans? Let's all work together to not let petty differences in opinion and interpretations of moments in fictional works not create any more unnecessary conflicts.
Monday, October 26, 2015
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Neil Rush CMT Blog- October 27, 2015- Top 10 Gravity Falls Episodes
October 27, 2015
Hello, blogosphere, this is Neil again. I did an episode review of Gravity Falls Season 2 Episode 17, "Dipper and Mabel vs. The Future", last week before learning that no blog post will be due on October 20, 2015, simply because my teacher felt like giving my CMT class a break week. The next episode, "Weirdmageddon Part 1" will have aired the night before this one is due, October 27, 2015, which I don't see as enough time for me to write a review on that one. I'll review that one for next week's post that would be due November 3, 2015, but for now, I'm going to make a Top 10 list of my personal favorite episodes.
I didn't become a Gravity Falls fan until this past spring when I began to watch more Disney XD because of my expanded interest in animation and desire to go into that field as a career, but once I was in, I was all in. Centered around twin siblings Dipper and Mabel Pines (voiced by Jason Ritter and Kristen Schaal, respectively), it follows their adventures in the town of Gravity Falls, Oregon, where they've been sent to spend the summer before they turn thirteen with their great-uncle, or "Grunkle" Stan Pines (voiced by series creator Alex Hirsch), the ex-con owner of the Mystery Shack, a tourist trap/museum/gift shop that they live above. Stan may have very gray ethics, but he is kept on the side of good by his love of his great-nephew and great-niece. Dipper discovers three journals that contain information of all of the mysteries, monsters, ghosts, and everything discovered by their author, who is eventually revealed to be Stan's estranged twin brother, also named Stan, but he goes by Ford (as in Stanley and Stanford) (voiced by J. K. Simmons) to avoid confusion. In spite of their opposing personalities, Dipper and Mabel are best friends that love each other to the end. They spend the summer learning lessons about growing up, such as Dipper learning how to overcome his awkward crush on Wendy Corduroy (voiced by Linda Cardellini), the mellow and cool teenage girl that (apathetically so) runs the cash register at the Mystery Shack, and Mabel learning how to be not as self-centered in her quest for fun and boys. In three years (ironically set all over one summer of 2012), it became the smartest, funniest, most epic, most heartwarming, saddest, darkest, scariest, most innately progressive without being excessively preachy, creative, most mature and realistic, boundary-pushing, and all-around best animated series produced at Disney Television Animation in the 2010s. These ten episodes are the ones I find to be my personal favorites.
Honorable Mentions- S1E01 "Tourist Trapped" for starting it all, S1E04 "The Hand That Rocks The Mabel" for establishing Gideon Gleeful as one of the show's main antagonists, S1E05 "The Inconveniencing" for establishing Dipper and Wendy's precocious-crush-friendship, S1E07 "Double Dipper" for establishing Candy and Grenda, Mabel's two best friends for the summer, and Pacifica Northwest, Mabel and Dipper's spoiled-rich-girl frenemy, as characters, S1E09 "The Time Traveler's Pig" for establishing Blendin Blandin and Waddles as characters, S1E15 "The Deep End" for its fun pool-related plots, S1E16 "Carpet Diem" for its humor, playing with the body-switching story trope, and providing a conflict between Dipper and Mabel that they have to settle and make up on by the end, S1E17 "Boyz Crazy" for satirizing boy bands and when girls become too obsessed with them, S2E01 "Scary-oke" for introducing Agent Powers (guest-voiced by Nick Offerman) and Agent Trigger as characters, S2E02 "Into The Bunker" for being the darkest episode yet up to that point, guest-starring Mark Hamill as the shape-shifter, and allowing Dipper an opportunity to move on from Wendy, S2E06 "Little Gift Shop Of Horrors" for astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson guest-starring as "Smart Waddles" and showing just how creepy the show can get when it breaks the fourth wall, involving the viewer being turned into an exhibit at the Mystery Shack, S2E07 "Society of the Blind Eye" for making Old Man McGucket's involvement in the story more important and having some of the funniest (read: boundary-pushing) jokes in the entire series, S2E08 "Blendin's Game" for its realistically heartbreaking depiction of Soos having a dad that doesn't care to be involved in his life, S2E09 "The Love God" for giving Robbie character development and its parody of the Woodstock festival, S2E10 "Northwest Manor Mystery" for being one of the creepiest episodes of all and for giving Pacifica character development to turn from a stereotypical blonde mean girl to one of the good guys and a possible love interest for Dipper, and S2E16 "Roadside Attraction" for establishing Emma Sue as a playful quasi-love interest for Dipper, and she is my favorite possible love interest for Dipper, even if she's only a one-time character.
#10.) S1E10 "Fight Fighters". In this one, Robbie Valentino (voiced by T. J. Miller), Wendy's emo-goth-rocker-teenager stereotype boyfriend for the first season and Dipper's arch-rival calls Dipper out and challenges him to a fight. Keep in mind that Dipper is twelve and Robbie is either fifteen or sixteen. Most teens would laugh off a preteen that had a crush on their girlfriend, and Robbie does that as well, but he must see Dipper as a threat to his relationship with Wendy because of how Wendy, even though she obviously doesn't romantically like Dipper back, always tries to be nice to him, enjoys hanging out with him, and always stands up for him when Robbie bullies him. Because Dipper is a preteen with no muscle, he uses a special cheat code to summon a character from a game at the local arcade, Fight Fighters (an obvious parody of the video game series Street Fighter), the character being the main one, Rumble McSkirmish, to intimidate Robbie into not fighting Dipper. Rumble is a hilarious over-the-top parody of every fighting game character stereotype ever. He's hilariously overconfident, talks in a voice that mixes William Shatner syntax with old karate movie dialogue, and offers to help Dipper after he lies and says that Robbie killed Dipper's father, and thinks that himself and everyone that he allies himself with is seeking vengeance for their dead father. Dipper hopes that Rumble will intimidate Robbie into leaving him alone and possibly breaking up with Wendy, but Rumble instead proceeds to attempt to beat Robbie to death. Dipper now has to do the last thing that he'd ever want to do- save Robbie- in order to keep Wendy still liking him, as she would probably not be too happy to find out that Dipper was indirectly responsible for her boyfriend's untimely-yet-bizarrely-comical-to-the-audience death, and she even said she would hate to see her boys fight. Dipper admits to Rumble that Robbie didn't kill his father and fights Rumble in Robbie's place. He loses horribly, but Rumble's victory causes a game-over that turns him back into code. Robbie decides that it's not worth it to fight someone who's openly willing to accept a beating without fear, and they decide that, for Wendy's sake, they'll hate each other in secret, "like girls do", and pretend to laugh together when hanging out with Wendy while making angry gestures at each other when Wendy's back is turned. The video game references in this were really clever, and the absolute insanity the episode escalated to made this one of my favorite episodes.
#9.) S2E11 "Not What He Seems". This was quite the episode. Government agents come to arrest Stan under conspiracy to build a doomsday device. While they know that their great-uncle is a crook, Dipper and Mabel would never expect Stan to destroy the universe for kicks. They escape being sent to child services to sneak back into the Mystery Shack, which is now under government surveillance. Meanwhile, Stan uses the gravity anomalies caused by the portal under the Shack to escape the government agents that have arrested him and get back to the Shack in time for what he wants to be there for. Dipper, Mabel, and their friend Soos (also voiced by Alex Hirsch), the Mystery Shack's handyman and a man-child who is very close to the twins and admires Stan like a father figure due to the lack of one in his childhood, get under the Shack and find a variety of things that cause them to lose trust in Stan, such as a box full of fake IDs that he had assumed over the years and an old newspaper saying that Stan Pines had died in a car crash. They find the portal and attempt to shut it off, but Stan gets there just in time to yell for them to not touch it. The final gravity anomaly goes off before the portal does what Stan wants it to do, and everyone but Mabel gets pinned against the walls by cables. Mabel is floating on a cable in front of the switch that would turn the portal off, and while Stan tries to convince her to let it go, Dipper is positive that he's lying and begs Mabel to turn it off. Mabel looks into Stan's pleading eyes and lets the portal go. It doesn't destroy the universe (though Stan knew full well that it could, which is why throughout Season 1, he makes plenty of offhanded remarks about preparing for the apocalypse), but it brings someone into this dimension- Stan's twin brother. This was the episode that set up all of the other epic moments of Season 2, which makes it one of my favorites.
#8.) S2E12 "A Tale Of Two Stans". This was the extended flashback episode that established the character of Ford Pines. Originally believed to be nothing more than a fan theory, no one ever believed that the concept of Stan's twin brother would ever be worked into the story, let alone be made into one of the most important characters on the show. Stan and Ford had a relationship similar to Dipper and Mabel when they were kids living in a New Jersey beach town in the 1960s, but the fear of Ford leaving for a better college than him made Stan make a rash decision (ruining a project of Ford's) that cost him what little love from his parents he had and the trust of his brother, forcing him to become a conman and sending him down a path that got him banned from the entire East Coast and got him put in multiple Latin-American prisons. Meanwhile, Ford became a success regardless, and wrote the three journals that contained all of the information on the things discovered in the town. He tried building a portal to another dimension with his friend and colleague, Fiddleford McGucket, but when trying it out for the first time, Fiddleford was very clearly scarred from seeing some disturbing things on the other side, which began his descent into madness and becoming the town's crazy hillbilly Old Man McGucket. Ford calls Stan up to get rid of the journals for him, fearing what he has brought upon the world, but, furious that his brother would call him up after having not seen him for so long only to tell him to get as far away from him as possible, Stan gets in a fight with Ford and accidentally gets him sucked into the portal. Stan spent the next thirty years trying to bring Ford back and decided to live under the name of Stanford Pines (Ford's full name) rather than Stanley Pines (his real name) to avoid attracting the cops (yet still committed crimes in his brother's name), and fake a car crash to make the police believe that Stanley was dead. He converted Ford's lab into the Mystery Shack and set the events of the series in motion. Whether it's for almost destroying the universe, stealing his name and giving him a criminal record, or because of what happened between them all those years ago, Ford isn't quite ready to accept Stan back as his brother, and, out of hurt and in response, Stan tells Ford to stay away from the kids. Mabel begins to fear that hers and Dipper's relationship will "get stupid" like Stan and Ford's did, but Dipper tells her not to worry about it. This episode was one of the boldest and most dramatic episodes of the show, and I hope another one like it is done soon.
#7.) S2E13 "Dungeons, Dungeons, And More Dungeons". This was made even funnier by how I had started playing Dungeons And Dragons with a group of friends around the time this episode first aired. In this one, Dipper gets a game of Dungeons, Dungeons, And More Dungeons, the show's in-universe parody of Dungeons And Dragons, in the mail and gets Ford to play with him after Mabel and Stan both seem to act insulted by the game's existence (there's thinking that what your brother/great-nephew likes that you don't is lame, and then there's the kinds of overreactions that Mabel and Stan do) and Soos expresses a preference for FCLORPing (Foam And Cardboard Life Operating Role-Playing), a parody of LARPing (Live-Action Role-Playing). After a brief fight over what is lamer- Dungeons, Dungeons, And More Dungeons or Duck-tective, a cartoon Mabel and Stan like about a mystery-solving duck, Ford's Infinity-Sided Die, a die he got during his travels through the multiverse that has mystical properties, hits the box and brings the game's wizard, Probabilitor The Annoying (guest voiced by comedy musical artist "Weird Al" Yankovic), to life. Probabilitor captures Dipper and Ford and attempts to eat their brains, so Mabel and Stan have to play a game of Dungeons, Dungeons, And More Dungeons against Probabilitor to save them. After Probabilitor is defeated, the gang watches Duck-tective together and learns that Duck-tective has a twin brother, agreeing that the "mysterious twin brother reveal" trope is overused. Soos even says he knew this would happen a year ago. This is a reference to how the "Stan's Twin Brother" fan theory that was eventually made canon is actually pretty old, originating shortly after the end of Season 1 in August 2013. This was one of the funniest and most meta episodes ever aired. It is probably the most accurate depiction of a tabletop RPG in mainstream media that I've seen. The episode essentially turns Duck-tective into the in-universe equivalent of the show Gravity Falls, with Stan even saying that a lot of stuff goes over kids' heads and Grenda saying that she doesn't get most of the humor but enjoys watching cute cartoon animals do human things. Not the most important episode in the swing of things, though it does hint at the eventual importance of the interdimensional rift bubble and show that as Dipper and Ford grow closer and Mabel and Stan do the same, Dipper and Mabel grow further apart. This also established that the show is set in the dimension known as Dimension 46'\ in the multiverse, which I think was an indirect shoutout to Rick and Morty, a show on Adult Swim made by Alex Hirsch's friend Justin Roiland that returned for Season 2 around the initial airing of this episode and it's implied is set in the same multiverse as Gravity Falls. Definitely try to watch it if you're a fan of tabletop RPGs.
#6.) S2E14 "The Stanchurian Candidate". Stan is going through a mid-life crisis. Not much is going his way, and Ford seems to be the preferred great-uncle with the Pines family and Mystery Shack employees. Conveniently enough for him, Mayor Befufflefumpter, the 102-year-old mayor of the town, has died of old age overnight, and an open running for mayor is going across the town. Stan decides to run to feel liked again and to keep Bud Gleeful, Gideon's dad, from becoming mayor and using his political power to get Gideon out of prison so that he can take his revenge on the Pines family and once more rule over Gravity Falls with Mabel as his queen. Dipper and Mabel know that Stan lacks a filter and has no idea how to say the things that will make people like him, so Ford gives the twins a mind-control tie to make him the perfect candidate. When Stan learns that he's been being controlled, he fires the twins as his campaign managers and tries to go it alone. Dipper and Mabel decide to make Soos their candidate to stop Bud, who is also being mind-controlled by Gideon at this point. When Gideon/Bud ties Dipper and Mabel up in a monument to the previous mayor full of explosives, Stan throws the election to save the twins, which gives him enough praise to win... until his criminal record is taken into account, and they have to elect the only person who actually filled out the mayoral paperwork- local enthusiasm enthusiast Tyler Cutebiker (voiced by Will Forte), whose catchphrase is multiple variations of the phrase, "Git'em! Giiiiiiit'em!" Meanwhile, Gideon reveals a Bill Cipher Wheel hidden under a poster in his prison cell and expresses a desire to make another deal with him. This had plenty of funny political satire, made even funnier by some blatant references to Ronald Reagan (Ford apparently used the tie to help with his campaign in the 70s and 80s, which could definitely make Ford seem like more of a villain depending on your personal beliefs on Reagan) and the fact that this was around the time Donald Trump entered the running for the 2016 presidential candidacy and was making outlandish remarks of equal and/or greater absurdity to nearly everything Stan said. It also sets up a new alliance between Gideon and Bill in the future, which now seems like will happen in the upcoming three-part Season 2 finale. Sometimes, reality is stranger than fiction.
#5.) S2E05 "Soos And The Real Girl". This was the first Gravity Falls episode I saw in its entirety, so that definitely helps it be one of my favorites. Soos needs a date to go with him to his cousin Reggie's wedding, and nearly every woman he talks to runs away from him in fear because of his immaturity and absolute inability to talk and act like an adult. He buys a dating simulator computer game, "Romance Academy 7" to use to practice, and begins to communicate with the anime-style girl in the game, .GIFfany. It is revealed, however, that .GIFfany is actually alive within the game and wants Soos to be her actual boyfriend, and becomes possessive and stalks him even outside of the game as a result. Soos initially wants to date .GIFfany because she is the only girl to ever like him back and she's predictable, but Dipper and Mabel remind Soos that he can't take a computer game as his date to his cousin's wedding. He meets a young woman who is immature in a similar nature to himself, and kind and playful to Soos because of it, named Melody (guest voiced by comedy actress Jillian Bell), and asks her on a date to Hoot-Hoot The Owl's Pizza Place, the in-universe Chuck E. Cheese parody, which she happily accepts. Soos attempts to break up with .GIFfany, which she does not take well at all. .GIFfany follows Soos to his date with Melody and takes over the animatronics at the restaurant, forcing Soos, Dipper, Mabel, and Melody to fight the animatronics. .GIFfany tries to upload Soos's mind into a computer so that they can spend eternity together, but Soos "kills" .GIFfany by throwing the game disc for "Romance Academy 7" into the restaurant's pizza oven. Soos is afraid that Melody won't like him anymore after how bad that date went, but Melody says that she's had worse dates (and that you should never date a magician), but she has to go back up to her home in Portland. She offers to stay in touch with him over computer, and while Soos is hesitant to date a girl he can only communicate with through a computer again, he accepts her offer because while Melody is a woman-child, that's perfect for Soos, and she's not grossly possessive like .GIFfany. The references to Japanese culture were all really sharp and you'd have to be pretty well-versed in it to get them, such as when Soos says that .GIFfany's father is an octopus-man. This episode will probably always crack me up whenever I see it.
#4.) S2E15 "The Last Mabelcorn". While I don't like Mabel's story in this episode because it may have been meant as a criticism of those who don't like Mabel as much as Alex Hirsch, Dipper and Ford's story is one of the most intense plots the show has done so far. It begins with Ford having a nightmare in which Bill Cipher (voiced by Alex Hirsch), the interdimensional triangular dream demon with reality-warping abilities that plans on bringing the apocalypse upon the world just for his idea of fun, taunts Ford about his plans almost coming to fruition and says that Ford's efforts to keep Bill in the Nightmare Realm won't last forever. Ford sends Mabel to find unicorn hair, which will help them make a shield around the Shack that will keep Bill from possessing anyone inside. Dipper and Ford go to a secret room under the Shack that not even Stan knows about even after living in it for thirty years, and Ford prepares to "Bill-proof" Dipper's mind. The process is taking too long for Dipper's liking, so he tries to learn Ford's thoughts. Due to a bunch of Bill-themed tapestries in the room and Ford's foggy glasses and ominous manner of speaking, Dipper believes that Bill and Ford are in an alliance and that Ford is now a willing vessel of Bill's. Dipper takes a nearby memory-erasing gun and attempts to use it to "kill" Bill by erasing him from Ford's head. The beam ricochets off of Ford's glasses, and it's quickly revealed that Ford is only acting this way because his glasses are foggy and he's not possessed by Bill. He reveals his history with Bill and talks about how he initially believed that Bill was a benevolent spirit until his true nature was revealed and that he wants to destroy the universe. Mabel, Candy, Grenda, and Wendy return with the unicorn hair, which they use to make a shield around the Shack to protect them from being possessed by Bill. Of course, because Bill is almost always watching everything that goes on in the town from the Nightmare Realm, Bill is not phased by being shut out from the ability to possess Dipper, Mabel, Stan, or Ford, and says that if he can't possess anyone inside the Shack, he'll just have to possess someone on the outside, and his eye turns into a roulette wheel flashing images of all of the characters not in the Pines family that are available for him to turn into a pawn in his game. This episode shows just how unhinged Bill is and establishes him as one of the scariest villains in fiction today.
#3.) S2E04 "Sock Opera". Another episode to feature Bill. Dipper and Mabel are trying to crack the code to a laptop they found in the bunker two episodes earlier that is supposed to reveal many of the town's secrets, but none of the passwords that Dipper can think of are working, and Mabel won't help because she's distracted by trying to put on a sock puppet rock opera to impress her newest crush, a sock puppet enthusiast named Gabe (guest-voiced by Jorma Taccione of the comedy rap group The Lonely Island). Bill comes and offers to "help" Dipper in exchange for a "puppet", and convinces Dipper to make a deal with him by reminding him of all of the times Dipper was guilted into sacrificing his desires for Mabel and how she almost never returns the favor. The "puppet" Bill chooses, however, is Dipper's body. Dipper is now a ghost, and Bill is masochistically abusing Dipper's body now that he's in it and destroys the laptop. Dipper has to get Mabel's attention so that she can help him keep "Bipper" from getting Journal 3. Mabel almost gives Bill the journal when told that he will ruin the show, but when Bill boasts by saying "I mean, who would sacrifice everything for their dumb sibling?" Mabel responds with "Dipper would." She gets in a pretty rough fight with Bill and takes advantage of knowing all of the weak spots in Dipper's body and his apparent lack of knowledge and/or disregard for the human body's limitations. Bill can no longer remain in Dipper's fatigued body and is sent back to the Nightmare Realm, giving Dipper an opportunity to get back in his body. With the show ruined, Gabe won't speak to Mabel anymore, but after seeing Gabe make out with the puppets on his hands, Mabel decides that she probably dodged a bullet with him. Mabel may have her weirdness about her, but she's not romantically attracted to inanimate objects, and wouldn't want to date anyone that is. Mabel apologizes to Dipper for letting herself get distracted by a dumb guy "when the dumb guy I should care about is you." Dipper is appreciative of Mabel acknowledging this, but feels the need to get to a hospital immediately because of how Bill mutilated everything on his body that he possibly could when he was in control of Dipper's body. With Bill breaking into the real world through his possession tactics, the writers acknowledging that there's a little unevenness in the amount of times Dipper has had to give up his dreams for Mabel's happiness in the first season versus how many times Mabel has had to do it for Dipper and how it made many fans think that the writers were unfairly favoring Mabel with minimal justification and the writers showing that they, at least sometimes, are willing to admit that Mabel's not perfect, and some pretty funny jokes with Gabe, this is definitely one of the best episodes of the entire series.
#2.) S2E17 "Dipper And Mabel vs. The Future". This started out lighthearted, became really sad, and then became downright horrifying at the end. Dipper and Ford search for alien glue in an old UFO wreckage site and fight security drones that attempt to take Ford back to the planet of the UFO's origin. Dipper uses cleverness, resourcefulness, bravery, and his love of Ford to destroy the drones and save Ford. Ford wants Dipper to be his apprentice and stay behind while Mabel goes home at the end of the summer, which is only a week away, and while Dipper is initially hesitant to leave Mabel, Dipper decides to do so after feeling like a true hero from saving Ford (and seeing a larger reflection of himself in the destroyed drone, which can be a pretty strong confidence-builder). Meanwhile, Mabel prepares for Dipper and Mabel's thirteenth birthday party, which they'll throw on their birthday, the last day of summer, August 31. She tries to set up in the high school gym, but high school registrations keep that from happening, and Wendy telling Mabel horror-stories from high school lowers her high expectations of high school. To make matters worse, Candy and Grenda will be out of town for Dipper and Mabel's birthday weekend, preventing them from celebrating with her and from wishing her goodbye before she goes home for the summer. Stan comforts Mabel and reminds her that, unlike him, she'll always have her twin brother by her side through all of the hardships of life, which initially cheers her up, until she overhears Dipper agreeing to be Ford's apprentice over walkie-talkie. Dipper tries to tell Mabel about this best day of his life, but Mabel tells Dipper that this was the worst day of her life, and the worst part was hearing that her brother, the one person that's supposed to be there for her no matter what, is going to leave her for this, and how it comes off as a backstab. Dipper says that he'll stay in touch with Mabel and regularly visit and that things can't be the same forever, but Mabel won't hear any of it and runs into the forest crying. Mabel, while in "Sweater-Town", meaning pulling her sweater over her head, wishes that summer could last forever. Blendin Blandin (voiced by Justin Roiland, an animator and voice actor that is close personal friends and colleagues with Alex Hirsch, having worked with him on Cartoon Network's The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and Disney Channel's Fish Hooks, and who created Adult Swim's Rick and Morty, which Alex Hirsch has guest-starred on and Easter eggs referencing Gravity Falls have appeared in Rick and Morty) a time traveler that was initially an enemy to the Pines twins until S2E08 "Blendin's Game", when they spared his life, reinstated his job at the Time Anomaly Removal Crew, and got him his hair back, appears and offers to, in return for everything she and Dipper have done for him, allow summer to last as long as she wants. All he needs is the time bubble. Because Mabel accidentally took Dipper's backpack rather than her own while running out, she has the time bubble, which had not yet been sealed by Dipper and Ford's alien glue, and gives it to Blendin. Blendin begins to laugh maniacally and smashes the bubble, taking off his goggles and revealing himself to be possessed by Bill. Mabel begs "Bill-din" to stop, but he snaps his fingers to make Mabel pass out. Bill leaves Blendin's body, now that he can exist in the physical world, and flies up to the sky and proudly declares that the world is finally his and that the prophecy a billion years in the making has finally come to pass. Dipper and Ford run outside to watch in horror as "Weird-mageddon" begins. The image that appears over the credits is of an invitation to Dipper and Mabel's thirteenth birthday party laying on the ground as screams of horror and cracks of thunder are heard in the background before the invitation finally blows away in the nightmare-wind. This had some pretty funny jokes, such as a tongue-in-cheek reference to High School Musical. Wendy- High school is the worst. Classes get super-hard, your body totally turns against you, and worst of all, everybody hates you! Mabel- Really? Why aren't they singing songs about following their dreams? TV told me that high school was like some kind of musical. Wendy- TV lied, dude! Enough time has passed that Disney is willing to make fun of its most infamous asset from the mid-2000s, and most kids know now that high school isn't all "we're all in this together", so that made this exchange even better. While not exactly paralleling Stan and Ford's relationship falling apart, Mabel and Dipper's relationship falling apart also came from their own flaws and their lack of empathy for their twin sibling, both ways. And Mabel accidentally destroying the world because of her fear of change is one of the darkest emotional gut-punches the show could go for. This will definitely set up the next three episodes, the Weirdmageddon trilogy.
#1.) S1E19 "Dreamscapers" and S1E20 "Gideon Rises". These two episodes made a two-part Season 1 finale, which is why I included them together. The first part is Bill's first appearance, in which Gideon makes a deal with Bill to go into Stan's mind and look for the code to the safe with the deed to the Mystery Shack inside it in exchange for Gideon helping Bill later. We learn the extent of Bill's creepiness when he uses his powers to rip the teeth out of a deer's mouth, give them to Gideon to freak him out, and then put them back as if nothing ever happened. Dipper is feeling down about Stan always making him do the heavy lifting around the Shack, and when he, Mabel, and Soos go into Stan's Mindscape to stop Bill, with all of Stan's memories in it, and Dipper mishears a memory of Stan's saying that he just doesn't like Dipper because of his scrawniness, Dipper decides not to help anymore, but once hearing the memory in its entirety and learning that Stan is hard on Dipper because that's how Stan's father was with him and he wants to prepare him for a cold and hard world, Dipper loves Stan again and even learns that anything you imagine in the Dreamscape is possible. Because Mabel and Soos cost Bill the code and made Gideon call off the deal he made with Bill, Bill has a massive fight with the two of them, and when it seems like nothing will defeat Bill, Dipper returns and tells Mabel and Soos to just imagine themselves with any abilities of their choosing to beat Bill. They are too evenly matched, so Bill stops the fight and says "A great darkness approaches. A day will come where everything you care about will change. Until then, I'll be watching you. I'LL BE WATCHING YOU..." They wake up from Stan's Dreamscape only to learn that Gideon has the deed to the Shack, which begins Part 2. The Pines's try to expose Gideon's fraudulence and scheming, but Gideon paints the Pines's as the bad guys and makes them social pariahs in the town. They try living with Soos and his grandma, but that's not the best way for them to live, and after another fight with Gideon, Gideon takes Journal 3 from Dipper and says that he's nothing without the journal. Gideon plans on destroying the Shack and building a "Gideonland" theme park over its remains. This takes away all hope for the good guys, and the twins are sent back to California on a bus. Gideon thinks he is victorious, but learns that he has Journal 3 and not Journal 1, and, believing that Dipper has Journal 1, chases the bus that the twins are on in a giant robot he's controlling. Upon learning that Dipper doesn't have Journal 1, he tosses him aside and prepares to rule over the town with Mabel as his queen. Initially appearing to be without hope, having a bloody nose and just a kid whose sister has been taken by a psycho kid in a giant robot, Dipper walks back into the forest, appearing to be on the verge of tears... until he runs out of the forest and jumps through the eye of the robot, which is being controlled by Gideon in a motion-capture suit, and physically fights Gideon, even making Gideon punch his robot with his own fist. The robot crashes, and Mabel saves Dipper from being in a particularly bad wreck with her grappling hook. When the townspeople arrive at the area that the robot was destroyed at, Gideon tells them that Dipper and Mabel tried to kill him and demands that they be arrested, but Stan exposes Gideon by pointing out that he heard a ringing in his hearing aid, took a closer look, and learned that the pins that Gideon gave the townspeople are actually miniature video cameras that he has been using to spy on the townspeople and learn their secrets to use in his psychic acts and be like Big Brother. Gideon is arrested for conspiracy and breaking the townspeople's hearts. Stan takes the journals from the wreckage, and Dipper tries to get them back, but Mabel tells Dipper that he doesn't need them because of all of the heroic things he's done over the summer, and that he's destined for great things with or without the journals. Stan takes the journals to the basement and puts them with Journal 1, and now that he has all three, he activates a machine and says, "Here we go." When you know everything that happens after this, it doesn't have the exact same desired punch as it might've, but that doesn't make it any less well-made. These two episodes are everything the show should be- funny, epic, and heart-felt, and set up what the rest of the series has to hold.
So what happens next? The next few episodes, the Weirdmageddon trilogy, are going to be the boldest episodes of the show, as far as I can tell. Bill is bringing chaos upon the world and nothing will ever be the same. No matter what, I think that this show will be wrapped up neatly, and while I don't always like Alex Hirsch as a person, I think that he created one of the better shows out there now, and, at the very least, find it to be good material for inspiration within my own works. I may make some original stories on the Internet featuring their characters, but all slightly older, and living in the town of Gravity Falls year-round and not just in the summer. One of my original characters in my original production, "Fanz", is essentially Bill Cipher in the body of a Care Bear. Much of the humor in "Fanz" is similar to Gravity Falls, though I like to think of it as more TV-PG-LSV than the barely TV-Y7 of Gravity Falls. The show also taught me that, in the future, Disney XD may be more willing to air TV-PG-rated shows because of its increasingly more boundary-pushing content, and I would definitely like to get "Fanz" on Disney XD with a TV-PG-LSV rating, if I can. So put on a pine tree hat, bury your gold, and give praise to your cipher masters and watch Gravity Falls- on at least once a day on Disney XD at various times, or on Xfinity On Demand, iTunes, Google Play TV, or the Watch Disney XD app on iTunes and Apple TV. Thank you for reading, and see you next time with my review of "Weirdmageddon Part 1".
Hello, blogosphere, this is Neil again. I did an episode review of Gravity Falls Season 2 Episode 17, "Dipper and Mabel vs. The Future", last week before learning that no blog post will be due on October 20, 2015, simply because my teacher felt like giving my CMT class a break week. The next episode, "Weirdmageddon Part 1" will have aired the night before this one is due, October 27, 2015, which I don't see as enough time for me to write a review on that one. I'll review that one for next week's post that would be due November 3, 2015, but for now, I'm going to make a Top 10 list of my personal favorite episodes.
I didn't become a Gravity Falls fan until this past spring when I began to watch more Disney XD because of my expanded interest in animation and desire to go into that field as a career, but once I was in, I was all in. Centered around twin siblings Dipper and Mabel Pines (voiced by Jason Ritter and Kristen Schaal, respectively), it follows their adventures in the town of Gravity Falls, Oregon, where they've been sent to spend the summer before they turn thirteen with their great-uncle, or "Grunkle" Stan Pines (voiced by series creator Alex Hirsch), the ex-con owner of the Mystery Shack, a tourist trap/museum/gift shop that they live above. Stan may have very gray ethics, but he is kept on the side of good by his love of his great-nephew and great-niece. Dipper discovers three journals that contain information of all of the mysteries, monsters, ghosts, and everything discovered by their author, who is eventually revealed to be Stan's estranged twin brother, also named Stan, but he goes by Ford (as in Stanley and Stanford) (voiced by J. K. Simmons) to avoid confusion. In spite of their opposing personalities, Dipper and Mabel are best friends that love each other to the end. They spend the summer learning lessons about growing up, such as Dipper learning how to overcome his awkward crush on Wendy Corduroy (voiced by Linda Cardellini), the mellow and cool teenage girl that (apathetically so) runs the cash register at the Mystery Shack, and Mabel learning how to be not as self-centered in her quest for fun and boys. In three years (ironically set all over one summer of 2012), it became the smartest, funniest, most epic, most heartwarming, saddest, darkest, scariest, most innately progressive without being excessively preachy, creative, most mature and realistic, boundary-pushing, and all-around best animated series produced at Disney Television Animation in the 2010s. These ten episodes are the ones I find to be my personal favorites.
Honorable Mentions- S1E01 "Tourist Trapped" for starting it all, S1E04 "The Hand That Rocks The Mabel" for establishing Gideon Gleeful as one of the show's main antagonists, S1E05 "The Inconveniencing" for establishing Dipper and Wendy's precocious-crush-friendship, S1E07 "Double Dipper" for establishing Candy and Grenda, Mabel's two best friends for the summer, and Pacifica Northwest, Mabel and Dipper's spoiled-rich-girl frenemy, as characters, S1E09 "The Time Traveler's Pig" for establishing Blendin Blandin and Waddles as characters, S1E15 "The Deep End" for its fun pool-related plots, S1E16 "Carpet Diem" for its humor, playing with the body-switching story trope, and providing a conflict between Dipper and Mabel that they have to settle and make up on by the end, S1E17 "Boyz Crazy" for satirizing boy bands and when girls become too obsessed with them, S2E01 "Scary-oke" for introducing Agent Powers (guest-voiced by Nick Offerman) and Agent Trigger as characters, S2E02 "Into The Bunker" for being the darkest episode yet up to that point, guest-starring Mark Hamill as the shape-shifter, and allowing Dipper an opportunity to move on from Wendy, S2E06 "Little Gift Shop Of Horrors" for astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson guest-starring as "Smart Waddles" and showing just how creepy the show can get when it breaks the fourth wall, involving the viewer being turned into an exhibit at the Mystery Shack, S2E07 "Society of the Blind Eye" for making Old Man McGucket's involvement in the story more important and having some of the funniest (read: boundary-pushing) jokes in the entire series, S2E08 "Blendin's Game" for its realistically heartbreaking depiction of Soos having a dad that doesn't care to be involved in his life, S2E09 "The Love God" for giving Robbie character development and its parody of the Woodstock festival, S2E10 "Northwest Manor Mystery" for being one of the creepiest episodes of all and for giving Pacifica character development to turn from a stereotypical blonde mean girl to one of the good guys and a possible love interest for Dipper, and S2E16 "Roadside Attraction" for establishing Emma Sue as a playful quasi-love interest for Dipper, and she is my favorite possible love interest for Dipper, even if she's only a one-time character.
#10.) S1E10 "Fight Fighters". In this one, Robbie Valentino (voiced by T. J. Miller), Wendy's emo-goth-rocker-teenager stereotype boyfriend for the first season and Dipper's arch-rival calls Dipper out and challenges him to a fight. Keep in mind that Dipper is twelve and Robbie is either fifteen or sixteen. Most teens would laugh off a preteen that had a crush on their girlfriend, and Robbie does that as well, but he must see Dipper as a threat to his relationship with Wendy because of how Wendy, even though she obviously doesn't romantically like Dipper back, always tries to be nice to him, enjoys hanging out with him, and always stands up for him when Robbie bullies him. Because Dipper is a preteen with no muscle, he uses a special cheat code to summon a character from a game at the local arcade, Fight Fighters (an obvious parody of the video game series Street Fighter), the character being the main one, Rumble McSkirmish, to intimidate Robbie into not fighting Dipper. Rumble is a hilarious over-the-top parody of every fighting game character stereotype ever. He's hilariously overconfident, talks in a voice that mixes William Shatner syntax with old karate movie dialogue, and offers to help Dipper after he lies and says that Robbie killed Dipper's father, and thinks that himself and everyone that he allies himself with is seeking vengeance for their dead father. Dipper hopes that Rumble will intimidate Robbie into leaving him alone and possibly breaking up with Wendy, but Rumble instead proceeds to attempt to beat Robbie to death. Dipper now has to do the last thing that he'd ever want to do- save Robbie- in order to keep Wendy still liking him, as she would probably not be too happy to find out that Dipper was indirectly responsible for her boyfriend's untimely-yet-bizarrely-comical-to-the-audience death, and she even said she would hate to see her boys fight. Dipper admits to Rumble that Robbie didn't kill his father and fights Rumble in Robbie's place. He loses horribly, but Rumble's victory causes a game-over that turns him back into code. Robbie decides that it's not worth it to fight someone who's openly willing to accept a beating without fear, and they decide that, for Wendy's sake, they'll hate each other in secret, "like girls do", and pretend to laugh together when hanging out with Wendy while making angry gestures at each other when Wendy's back is turned. The video game references in this were really clever, and the absolute insanity the episode escalated to made this one of my favorite episodes.
#9.) S2E11 "Not What He Seems". This was quite the episode. Government agents come to arrest Stan under conspiracy to build a doomsday device. While they know that their great-uncle is a crook, Dipper and Mabel would never expect Stan to destroy the universe for kicks. They escape being sent to child services to sneak back into the Mystery Shack, which is now under government surveillance. Meanwhile, Stan uses the gravity anomalies caused by the portal under the Shack to escape the government agents that have arrested him and get back to the Shack in time for what he wants to be there for. Dipper, Mabel, and their friend Soos (also voiced by Alex Hirsch), the Mystery Shack's handyman and a man-child who is very close to the twins and admires Stan like a father figure due to the lack of one in his childhood, get under the Shack and find a variety of things that cause them to lose trust in Stan, such as a box full of fake IDs that he had assumed over the years and an old newspaper saying that Stan Pines had died in a car crash. They find the portal and attempt to shut it off, but Stan gets there just in time to yell for them to not touch it. The final gravity anomaly goes off before the portal does what Stan wants it to do, and everyone but Mabel gets pinned against the walls by cables. Mabel is floating on a cable in front of the switch that would turn the portal off, and while Stan tries to convince her to let it go, Dipper is positive that he's lying and begs Mabel to turn it off. Mabel looks into Stan's pleading eyes and lets the portal go. It doesn't destroy the universe (though Stan knew full well that it could, which is why throughout Season 1, he makes plenty of offhanded remarks about preparing for the apocalypse), but it brings someone into this dimension- Stan's twin brother. This was the episode that set up all of the other epic moments of Season 2, which makes it one of my favorites.
#8.) S2E12 "A Tale Of Two Stans". This was the extended flashback episode that established the character of Ford Pines. Originally believed to be nothing more than a fan theory, no one ever believed that the concept of Stan's twin brother would ever be worked into the story, let alone be made into one of the most important characters on the show. Stan and Ford had a relationship similar to Dipper and Mabel when they were kids living in a New Jersey beach town in the 1960s, but the fear of Ford leaving for a better college than him made Stan make a rash decision (ruining a project of Ford's) that cost him what little love from his parents he had and the trust of his brother, forcing him to become a conman and sending him down a path that got him banned from the entire East Coast and got him put in multiple Latin-American prisons. Meanwhile, Ford became a success regardless, and wrote the three journals that contained all of the information on the things discovered in the town. He tried building a portal to another dimension with his friend and colleague, Fiddleford McGucket, but when trying it out for the first time, Fiddleford was very clearly scarred from seeing some disturbing things on the other side, which began his descent into madness and becoming the town's crazy hillbilly Old Man McGucket. Ford calls Stan up to get rid of the journals for him, fearing what he has brought upon the world, but, furious that his brother would call him up after having not seen him for so long only to tell him to get as far away from him as possible, Stan gets in a fight with Ford and accidentally gets him sucked into the portal. Stan spent the next thirty years trying to bring Ford back and decided to live under the name of Stanford Pines (Ford's full name) rather than Stanley Pines (his real name) to avoid attracting the cops (yet still committed crimes in his brother's name), and fake a car crash to make the police believe that Stanley was dead. He converted Ford's lab into the Mystery Shack and set the events of the series in motion. Whether it's for almost destroying the universe, stealing his name and giving him a criminal record, or because of what happened between them all those years ago, Ford isn't quite ready to accept Stan back as his brother, and, out of hurt and in response, Stan tells Ford to stay away from the kids. Mabel begins to fear that hers and Dipper's relationship will "get stupid" like Stan and Ford's did, but Dipper tells her not to worry about it. This episode was one of the boldest and most dramatic episodes of the show, and I hope another one like it is done soon.
#7.) S2E13 "Dungeons, Dungeons, And More Dungeons". This was made even funnier by how I had started playing Dungeons And Dragons with a group of friends around the time this episode first aired. In this one, Dipper gets a game of Dungeons, Dungeons, And More Dungeons, the show's in-universe parody of Dungeons And Dragons, in the mail and gets Ford to play with him after Mabel and Stan both seem to act insulted by the game's existence (there's thinking that what your brother/great-nephew likes that you don't is lame, and then there's the kinds of overreactions that Mabel and Stan do) and Soos expresses a preference for FCLORPing (Foam And Cardboard Life Operating Role-Playing), a parody of LARPing (Live-Action Role-Playing). After a brief fight over what is lamer- Dungeons, Dungeons, And More Dungeons or Duck-tective, a cartoon Mabel and Stan like about a mystery-solving duck, Ford's Infinity-Sided Die, a die he got during his travels through the multiverse that has mystical properties, hits the box and brings the game's wizard, Probabilitor The Annoying (guest voiced by comedy musical artist "Weird Al" Yankovic), to life. Probabilitor captures Dipper and Ford and attempts to eat their brains, so Mabel and Stan have to play a game of Dungeons, Dungeons, And More Dungeons against Probabilitor to save them. After Probabilitor is defeated, the gang watches Duck-tective together and learns that Duck-tective has a twin brother, agreeing that the "mysterious twin brother reveal" trope is overused. Soos even says he knew this would happen a year ago. This is a reference to how the "Stan's Twin Brother" fan theory that was eventually made canon is actually pretty old, originating shortly after the end of Season 1 in August 2013. This was one of the funniest and most meta episodes ever aired. It is probably the most accurate depiction of a tabletop RPG in mainstream media that I've seen. The episode essentially turns Duck-tective into the in-universe equivalent of the show Gravity Falls, with Stan even saying that a lot of stuff goes over kids' heads and Grenda saying that she doesn't get most of the humor but enjoys watching cute cartoon animals do human things. Not the most important episode in the swing of things, though it does hint at the eventual importance of the interdimensional rift bubble and show that as Dipper and Ford grow closer and Mabel and Stan do the same, Dipper and Mabel grow further apart. This also established that the show is set in the dimension known as Dimension 46'\ in the multiverse, which I think was an indirect shoutout to Rick and Morty, a show on Adult Swim made by Alex Hirsch's friend Justin Roiland that returned for Season 2 around the initial airing of this episode and it's implied is set in the same multiverse as Gravity Falls. Definitely try to watch it if you're a fan of tabletop RPGs.
#6.) S2E14 "The Stanchurian Candidate". Stan is going through a mid-life crisis. Not much is going his way, and Ford seems to be the preferred great-uncle with the Pines family and Mystery Shack employees. Conveniently enough for him, Mayor Befufflefumpter, the 102-year-old mayor of the town, has died of old age overnight, and an open running for mayor is going across the town. Stan decides to run to feel liked again and to keep Bud Gleeful, Gideon's dad, from becoming mayor and using his political power to get Gideon out of prison so that he can take his revenge on the Pines family and once more rule over Gravity Falls with Mabel as his queen. Dipper and Mabel know that Stan lacks a filter and has no idea how to say the things that will make people like him, so Ford gives the twins a mind-control tie to make him the perfect candidate. When Stan learns that he's been being controlled, he fires the twins as his campaign managers and tries to go it alone. Dipper and Mabel decide to make Soos their candidate to stop Bud, who is also being mind-controlled by Gideon at this point. When Gideon/Bud ties Dipper and Mabel up in a monument to the previous mayor full of explosives, Stan throws the election to save the twins, which gives him enough praise to win... until his criminal record is taken into account, and they have to elect the only person who actually filled out the mayoral paperwork- local enthusiasm enthusiast Tyler Cutebiker (voiced by Will Forte), whose catchphrase is multiple variations of the phrase, "Git'em! Giiiiiiit'em!" Meanwhile, Gideon reveals a Bill Cipher Wheel hidden under a poster in his prison cell and expresses a desire to make another deal with him. This had plenty of funny political satire, made even funnier by some blatant references to Ronald Reagan (Ford apparently used the tie to help with his campaign in the 70s and 80s, which could definitely make Ford seem like more of a villain depending on your personal beliefs on Reagan) and the fact that this was around the time Donald Trump entered the running for the 2016 presidential candidacy and was making outlandish remarks of equal and/or greater absurdity to nearly everything Stan said. It also sets up a new alliance between Gideon and Bill in the future, which now seems like will happen in the upcoming three-part Season 2 finale. Sometimes, reality is stranger than fiction.
#5.) S2E05 "Soos And The Real Girl". This was the first Gravity Falls episode I saw in its entirety, so that definitely helps it be one of my favorites. Soos needs a date to go with him to his cousin Reggie's wedding, and nearly every woman he talks to runs away from him in fear because of his immaturity and absolute inability to talk and act like an adult. He buys a dating simulator computer game, "Romance Academy 7" to use to practice, and begins to communicate with the anime-style girl in the game, .GIFfany. It is revealed, however, that .GIFfany is actually alive within the game and wants Soos to be her actual boyfriend, and becomes possessive and stalks him even outside of the game as a result. Soos initially wants to date .GIFfany because she is the only girl to ever like him back and she's predictable, but Dipper and Mabel remind Soos that he can't take a computer game as his date to his cousin's wedding. He meets a young woman who is immature in a similar nature to himself, and kind and playful to Soos because of it, named Melody (guest voiced by comedy actress Jillian Bell), and asks her on a date to Hoot-Hoot The Owl's Pizza Place, the in-universe Chuck E. Cheese parody, which she happily accepts. Soos attempts to break up with .GIFfany, which she does not take well at all. .GIFfany follows Soos to his date with Melody and takes over the animatronics at the restaurant, forcing Soos, Dipper, Mabel, and Melody to fight the animatronics. .GIFfany tries to upload Soos's mind into a computer so that they can spend eternity together, but Soos "kills" .GIFfany by throwing the game disc for "Romance Academy 7" into the restaurant's pizza oven. Soos is afraid that Melody won't like him anymore after how bad that date went, but Melody says that she's had worse dates (and that you should never date a magician), but she has to go back up to her home in Portland. She offers to stay in touch with him over computer, and while Soos is hesitant to date a girl he can only communicate with through a computer again, he accepts her offer because while Melody is a woman-child, that's perfect for Soos, and she's not grossly possessive like .GIFfany. The references to Japanese culture were all really sharp and you'd have to be pretty well-versed in it to get them, such as when Soos says that .GIFfany's father is an octopus-man. This episode will probably always crack me up whenever I see it.
#4.) S2E15 "The Last Mabelcorn". While I don't like Mabel's story in this episode because it may have been meant as a criticism of those who don't like Mabel as much as Alex Hirsch, Dipper and Ford's story is one of the most intense plots the show has done so far. It begins with Ford having a nightmare in which Bill Cipher (voiced by Alex Hirsch), the interdimensional triangular dream demon with reality-warping abilities that plans on bringing the apocalypse upon the world just for his idea of fun, taunts Ford about his plans almost coming to fruition and says that Ford's efforts to keep Bill in the Nightmare Realm won't last forever. Ford sends Mabel to find unicorn hair, which will help them make a shield around the Shack that will keep Bill from possessing anyone inside. Dipper and Ford go to a secret room under the Shack that not even Stan knows about even after living in it for thirty years, and Ford prepares to "Bill-proof" Dipper's mind. The process is taking too long for Dipper's liking, so he tries to learn Ford's thoughts. Due to a bunch of Bill-themed tapestries in the room and Ford's foggy glasses and ominous manner of speaking, Dipper believes that Bill and Ford are in an alliance and that Ford is now a willing vessel of Bill's. Dipper takes a nearby memory-erasing gun and attempts to use it to "kill" Bill by erasing him from Ford's head. The beam ricochets off of Ford's glasses, and it's quickly revealed that Ford is only acting this way because his glasses are foggy and he's not possessed by Bill. He reveals his history with Bill and talks about how he initially believed that Bill was a benevolent spirit until his true nature was revealed and that he wants to destroy the universe. Mabel, Candy, Grenda, and Wendy return with the unicorn hair, which they use to make a shield around the Shack to protect them from being possessed by Bill. Of course, because Bill is almost always watching everything that goes on in the town from the Nightmare Realm, Bill is not phased by being shut out from the ability to possess Dipper, Mabel, Stan, or Ford, and says that if he can't possess anyone inside the Shack, he'll just have to possess someone on the outside, and his eye turns into a roulette wheel flashing images of all of the characters not in the Pines family that are available for him to turn into a pawn in his game. This episode shows just how unhinged Bill is and establishes him as one of the scariest villains in fiction today.
#3.) S2E04 "Sock Opera". Another episode to feature Bill. Dipper and Mabel are trying to crack the code to a laptop they found in the bunker two episodes earlier that is supposed to reveal many of the town's secrets, but none of the passwords that Dipper can think of are working, and Mabel won't help because she's distracted by trying to put on a sock puppet rock opera to impress her newest crush, a sock puppet enthusiast named Gabe (guest-voiced by Jorma Taccione of the comedy rap group The Lonely Island). Bill comes and offers to "help" Dipper in exchange for a "puppet", and convinces Dipper to make a deal with him by reminding him of all of the times Dipper was guilted into sacrificing his desires for Mabel and how she almost never returns the favor. The "puppet" Bill chooses, however, is Dipper's body. Dipper is now a ghost, and Bill is masochistically abusing Dipper's body now that he's in it and destroys the laptop. Dipper has to get Mabel's attention so that she can help him keep "Bipper" from getting Journal 3. Mabel almost gives Bill the journal when told that he will ruin the show, but when Bill boasts by saying "I mean, who would sacrifice everything for their dumb sibling?" Mabel responds with "Dipper would." She gets in a pretty rough fight with Bill and takes advantage of knowing all of the weak spots in Dipper's body and his apparent lack of knowledge and/or disregard for the human body's limitations. Bill can no longer remain in Dipper's fatigued body and is sent back to the Nightmare Realm, giving Dipper an opportunity to get back in his body. With the show ruined, Gabe won't speak to Mabel anymore, but after seeing Gabe make out with the puppets on his hands, Mabel decides that she probably dodged a bullet with him. Mabel may have her weirdness about her, but she's not romantically attracted to inanimate objects, and wouldn't want to date anyone that is. Mabel apologizes to Dipper for letting herself get distracted by a dumb guy "when the dumb guy I should care about is you." Dipper is appreciative of Mabel acknowledging this, but feels the need to get to a hospital immediately because of how Bill mutilated everything on his body that he possibly could when he was in control of Dipper's body. With Bill breaking into the real world through his possession tactics, the writers acknowledging that there's a little unevenness in the amount of times Dipper has had to give up his dreams for Mabel's happiness in the first season versus how many times Mabel has had to do it for Dipper and how it made many fans think that the writers were unfairly favoring Mabel with minimal justification and the writers showing that they, at least sometimes, are willing to admit that Mabel's not perfect, and some pretty funny jokes with Gabe, this is definitely one of the best episodes of the entire series.
#2.) S2E17 "Dipper And Mabel vs. The Future". This started out lighthearted, became really sad, and then became downright horrifying at the end. Dipper and Ford search for alien glue in an old UFO wreckage site and fight security drones that attempt to take Ford back to the planet of the UFO's origin. Dipper uses cleverness, resourcefulness, bravery, and his love of Ford to destroy the drones and save Ford. Ford wants Dipper to be his apprentice and stay behind while Mabel goes home at the end of the summer, which is only a week away, and while Dipper is initially hesitant to leave Mabel, Dipper decides to do so after feeling like a true hero from saving Ford (and seeing a larger reflection of himself in the destroyed drone, which can be a pretty strong confidence-builder). Meanwhile, Mabel prepares for Dipper and Mabel's thirteenth birthday party, which they'll throw on their birthday, the last day of summer, August 31. She tries to set up in the high school gym, but high school registrations keep that from happening, and Wendy telling Mabel horror-stories from high school lowers her high expectations of high school. To make matters worse, Candy and Grenda will be out of town for Dipper and Mabel's birthday weekend, preventing them from celebrating with her and from wishing her goodbye before she goes home for the summer. Stan comforts Mabel and reminds her that, unlike him, she'll always have her twin brother by her side through all of the hardships of life, which initially cheers her up, until she overhears Dipper agreeing to be Ford's apprentice over walkie-talkie. Dipper tries to tell Mabel about this best day of his life, but Mabel tells Dipper that this was the worst day of her life, and the worst part was hearing that her brother, the one person that's supposed to be there for her no matter what, is going to leave her for this, and how it comes off as a backstab. Dipper says that he'll stay in touch with Mabel and regularly visit and that things can't be the same forever, but Mabel won't hear any of it and runs into the forest crying. Mabel, while in "Sweater-Town", meaning pulling her sweater over her head, wishes that summer could last forever. Blendin Blandin (voiced by Justin Roiland, an animator and voice actor that is close personal friends and colleagues with Alex Hirsch, having worked with him on Cartoon Network's The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and Disney Channel's Fish Hooks, and who created Adult Swim's Rick and Morty, which Alex Hirsch has guest-starred on and Easter eggs referencing Gravity Falls have appeared in Rick and Morty) a time traveler that was initially an enemy to the Pines twins until S2E08 "Blendin's Game", when they spared his life, reinstated his job at the Time Anomaly Removal Crew, and got him his hair back, appears and offers to, in return for everything she and Dipper have done for him, allow summer to last as long as she wants. All he needs is the time bubble. Because Mabel accidentally took Dipper's backpack rather than her own while running out, she has the time bubble, which had not yet been sealed by Dipper and Ford's alien glue, and gives it to Blendin. Blendin begins to laugh maniacally and smashes the bubble, taking off his goggles and revealing himself to be possessed by Bill. Mabel begs "Bill-din" to stop, but he snaps his fingers to make Mabel pass out. Bill leaves Blendin's body, now that he can exist in the physical world, and flies up to the sky and proudly declares that the world is finally his and that the prophecy a billion years in the making has finally come to pass. Dipper and Ford run outside to watch in horror as "Weird-mageddon" begins. The image that appears over the credits is of an invitation to Dipper and Mabel's thirteenth birthday party laying on the ground as screams of horror and cracks of thunder are heard in the background before the invitation finally blows away in the nightmare-wind. This had some pretty funny jokes, such as a tongue-in-cheek reference to High School Musical. Wendy- High school is the worst. Classes get super-hard, your body totally turns against you, and worst of all, everybody hates you! Mabel- Really? Why aren't they singing songs about following their dreams? TV told me that high school was like some kind of musical. Wendy- TV lied, dude! Enough time has passed that Disney is willing to make fun of its most infamous asset from the mid-2000s, and most kids know now that high school isn't all "we're all in this together", so that made this exchange even better. While not exactly paralleling Stan and Ford's relationship falling apart, Mabel and Dipper's relationship falling apart also came from their own flaws and their lack of empathy for their twin sibling, both ways. And Mabel accidentally destroying the world because of her fear of change is one of the darkest emotional gut-punches the show could go for. This will definitely set up the next three episodes, the Weirdmageddon trilogy.
#1.) S1E19 "Dreamscapers" and S1E20 "Gideon Rises". These two episodes made a two-part Season 1 finale, which is why I included them together. The first part is Bill's first appearance, in which Gideon makes a deal with Bill to go into Stan's mind and look for the code to the safe with the deed to the Mystery Shack inside it in exchange for Gideon helping Bill later. We learn the extent of Bill's creepiness when he uses his powers to rip the teeth out of a deer's mouth, give them to Gideon to freak him out, and then put them back as if nothing ever happened. Dipper is feeling down about Stan always making him do the heavy lifting around the Shack, and when he, Mabel, and Soos go into Stan's Mindscape to stop Bill, with all of Stan's memories in it, and Dipper mishears a memory of Stan's saying that he just doesn't like Dipper because of his scrawniness, Dipper decides not to help anymore, but once hearing the memory in its entirety and learning that Stan is hard on Dipper because that's how Stan's father was with him and he wants to prepare him for a cold and hard world, Dipper loves Stan again and even learns that anything you imagine in the Dreamscape is possible. Because Mabel and Soos cost Bill the code and made Gideon call off the deal he made with Bill, Bill has a massive fight with the two of them, and when it seems like nothing will defeat Bill, Dipper returns and tells Mabel and Soos to just imagine themselves with any abilities of their choosing to beat Bill. They are too evenly matched, so Bill stops the fight and says "A great darkness approaches. A day will come where everything you care about will change. Until then, I'll be watching you. I'LL BE WATCHING YOU..." They wake up from Stan's Dreamscape only to learn that Gideon has the deed to the Shack, which begins Part 2. The Pines's try to expose Gideon's fraudulence and scheming, but Gideon paints the Pines's as the bad guys and makes them social pariahs in the town. They try living with Soos and his grandma, but that's not the best way for them to live, and after another fight with Gideon, Gideon takes Journal 3 from Dipper and says that he's nothing without the journal. Gideon plans on destroying the Shack and building a "Gideonland" theme park over its remains. This takes away all hope for the good guys, and the twins are sent back to California on a bus. Gideon thinks he is victorious, but learns that he has Journal 3 and not Journal 1, and, believing that Dipper has Journal 1, chases the bus that the twins are on in a giant robot he's controlling. Upon learning that Dipper doesn't have Journal 1, he tosses him aside and prepares to rule over the town with Mabel as his queen. Initially appearing to be without hope, having a bloody nose and just a kid whose sister has been taken by a psycho kid in a giant robot, Dipper walks back into the forest, appearing to be on the verge of tears... until he runs out of the forest and jumps through the eye of the robot, which is being controlled by Gideon in a motion-capture suit, and physically fights Gideon, even making Gideon punch his robot with his own fist. The robot crashes, and Mabel saves Dipper from being in a particularly bad wreck with her grappling hook. When the townspeople arrive at the area that the robot was destroyed at, Gideon tells them that Dipper and Mabel tried to kill him and demands that they be arrested, but Stan exposes Gideon by pointing out that he heard a ringing in his hearing aid, took a closer look, and learned that the pins that Gideon gave the townspeople are actually miniature video cameras that he has been using to spy on the townspeople and learn their secrets to use in his psychic acts and be like Big Brother. Gideon is arrested for conspiracy and breaking the townspeople's hearts. Stan takes the journals from the wreckage, and Dipper tries to get them back, but Mabel tells Dipper that he doesn't need them because of all of the heroic things he's done over the summer, and that he's destined for great things with or without the journals. Stan takes the journals to the basement and puts them with Journal 1, and now that he has all three, he activates a machine and says, "Here we go." When you know everything that happens after this, it doesn't have the exact same desired punch as it might've, but that doesn't make it any less well-made. These two episodes are everything the show should be- funny, epic, and heart-felt, and set up what the rest of the series has to hold.
So what happens next? The next few episodes, the Weirdmageddon trilogy, are going to be the boldest episodes of the show, as far as I can tell. Bill is bringing chaos upon the world and nothing will ever be the same. No matter what, I think that this show will be wrapped up neatly, and while I don't always like Alex Hirsch as a person, I think that he created one of the better shows out there now, and, at the very least, find it to be good material for inspiration within my own works. I may make some original stories on the Internet featuring their characters, but all slightly older, and living in the town of Gravity Falls year-round and not just in the summer. One of my original characters in my original production, "Fanz", is essentially Bill Cipher in the body of a Care Bear. Much of the humor in "Fanz" is similar to Gravity Falls, though I like to think of it as more TV-PG-LSV than the barely TV-Y7 of Gravity Falls. The show also taught me that, in the future, Disney XD may be more willing to air TV-PG-rated shows because of its increasingly more boundary-pushing content, and I would definitely like to get "Fanz" on Disney XD with a TV-PG-LSV rating, if I can. So put on a pine tree hat, bury your gold, and give praise to your cipher masters and watch Gravity Falls- on at least once a day on Disney XD at various times, or on Xfinity On Demand, iTunes, Google Play TV, or the Watch Disney XD app on iTunes and Apple TV. Thank you for reading, and see you next time with my review of "Weirdmageddon Part 1".
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Neil Rush CMT Blog- Gravity Falls Review, Speculation, and Analysis- "Dipper And Mabel vs. The Future"
October 20, 2015
Hello blogosphere, it's Neil with the review of Gravity Falls Season 2 Episode 17, "Dipper And Mabel vs. The Future". This episode was possibly the boldest and darkest episode yet, and that's saying something with all of the other dark things the show has done.
The beginning is pretty light. One morning, Mabel wakes Dipper up with her alter-ego of "Mr. Upsidedownington", a personality she took on by sticking googly eyes on her chin and used to do in third grade. Dipper asks, in a deadpan voice, if "Mr. Upsidedownington" woke him up to tell him that Mabel is getting too old for that, which Mabel ironically points out that it is what she woke him up to tell him. Dipper and Mabel's thirteenth birthday, August 31, 2012, which is also the last day of summer before the twins leave Gravity Falls and return to Piedmont, California, is only a week away. Mabel prepares to organize a party, but Stan won't let her throw a party at the Mystery Shack after the zombie attack they caused in the Season 2 premiere, "Scary-oke", so she prepares to set it up in the high school gym. Meanwhile, Ford sends Dipper on a new mission with him. The interdimensional rift is beginning to crack, and the only thing that can fix it is an alien glue in the wreckage of a UFO that crashed in Gravity Falls many years ago and may be responsible for the town's paranormal and supernatural activity. Mabel says she's OK with Dipper going on a mission with Ford rather than help her prepare for their party because of the whole week they have, but there is some pretty clear uncertainty in her voice while saying it. She gives Dipper a walkie-talkie to use to communicate with her while Dipper goes on his mission, but you can't expect the reception to be too good with where Dipper and Ford are going. The great-uncle-great-nephew duo go to a pair of cliffs with the shape of a UFO carved in between them, and then inside the cliff, where a bunch of old alien technology is laying. Dipper and Ford discuss their plans for the future. Dipper says he wants to create his own ghost-hunting show, but is tempted by the proposition to stay behind in Gravity Falls and become Ford's apprentice. Dipper doesn't want to have Mabel go home without him, but Ford tells him that sometimes, your siblings can hold you back from your true potential, as he accuses Stan of doing. Dipper finds the alien glue, but also activates the security system in the process, and two floating metal bubble-shaped robots with red triangles in their centers come out of the shadows (I thought the triangles made them related to Bill Cipher, as I've learned to never trust anything triangular in Gravity Falls, but we'll only know for sure if they return in the show at some point). Ford says that they can't detect people if they have good control over their fear and keep their fear levels low, but how can you seriously ask that of a kid who thinks he's going to die? Ford jumps to protect Dipper from the lasers of the robots, but gets himself captured in the process. Dipper hold on to the robot with a magnet gun while the robot begins to fly into orbit to take Ford to the home planet of the aliens, and with the magnet gun, Dipper manages to make the robot crash. Believing that Ford is dead when the robot with him inside it crashes, Dipper stands up to the other robot and prepares to shoot it with the magnet gun in weaponized form. Because Dipper's anger is stronger than his fear in that moment, the robot believes the threat was neutralized and shuts down. Ford thanks Dipper for saving his life and congratulates him for being able to do what other twelve-going-on-thirteen-year-olds only dream of and fight alien robots, which makes Dipper decide to take up Ford's offer to become his apprentice. Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, Mabel tries to begin setting up the party in the high school gym, but all of the teenagers are in lines getting their classes registered there. Mabel explains that TV told her that high school would be a happy place where everyone sang songs about following their dreams, and Wendy, who's there getting her classes registered, bluntly tells Mabel that TV lied. This is a pretty clever tongue-in-cheek reference to High School Musical, the movie series that was Disney's most infamous asset in the mid-2000s, and a reminder that in the 2010s, most kids are smart enough to know that high school is not the fake-happy musical place that kids raised in the mid-2000s may have been conditioned to see it as. Mabel witnesses two girls giving each other death stares, Robbie freaking out about his barely-under-control hormones, and Thompson, a teenager who lets Wendy and her friends haze him so that he can feel a part of a group of friends, is curled up in a fetal position in the middle of the gym floor saying over and over again that he can't do another year of high school. When Mabel goes to give Candy and Grenda invitations to the party, they say that they won't be able to come to the party nor be able to say bye to Dipper and Mabel at the end of the summer, as Labor Day weekend is the weekend that Candy goes to music camp, and Grenda is going to visit Marius, her Austrian boyfriend introduced in Season 2 Episode 10, "Northwest Mansion Mystery", that weekend. Mabel goes back to the Shack to look through her scrapbook full of pictures of memories from the summer, and Stan comes into hers and Dipper's room to comfort her as she vents about not wanting to have summer end, leave Gravity Falls, or grow up. Stan reassures her that growing older doesn't have to take away who you are, and that no matter where she goes, she'll always have her brother, something he wishes he could say for himself. Mabel is cheered up from hearing that, until she hears Dipper on her malfunctioning walkie-talkie saying how he's going to stay behind in Gravity Falls and become Ford's apprentice. When Dipper comes back to the Shack around sunset, he is excited to share with Mabel about the best day of his life. Mabel already knows, however, and feels that she had the worst day of her life with everything that happened that day, now including that her brother, after everything they've been through together, would want to leave her, which is almost like a backstab. Dipper tells her that he'll still visit her from time to time, that they'll stay in touch through the Internet, and that people grow up, things change, and summer ends. Not wanting to hear any of it, Mabel runs into the forest crying, looks through what she thinks is her backpack for "party chocolate" only to find that she accidentally grabbed Dipper's backpack instead, and curls up against a tree to go into "Sweater-Town", in which she pulls her sweater over her head, and wishes that summer could last forever. Blendin Blandin (voiced by professional animator and voice actor, creator and star of Rick and Morty, and close personal friend of Alex Hirsch, Justin Roiland), the time traveler from Season 1 Episode 9 "The Time Traveler's Pig" and Season 2 Episode 8 "Blendin's Game", who was initially an enemy of Dipper and Mabel until they spared his life when having the chance to kill him in a futuristic gladiator game, reinstated his job at the Time Anomaly Removal Crew, and gave him his hair back, appears. He says that an eternal summer can be arranged, and in return for everything Dipper and Mabel did for him, he'll allow Mabel to make summer last as long as she wants. All she needs to do is give him the time rift bubble. Dipper, back at the Shack, finds out too late that his bag and the rift bubble are gone, and Mabel gives Blendin the rift. Blendin proceeds to throw it on the ground and laugh maniacally, sounding disturbingly familiar to a certain character. He then takes off his goggles and reveals the yellow eyes of someone possessed by Bill Cipher. Mabel realizes what is happening, and before she can say anything, "Bill-din" snaps his fingers to make Mabel pass out. Bill leaves Blendin's body and proudly boasts of how the prophecy one billion years in the making has finally been realized. The sky turns red, and a cross shape forms in it, with demons of all sorts coming out of it. Dipper and Ford come outside to witness the beginning of "Weird-mageddon". The final image of the episode that plays over the credits is of an invitation to Dipper and Mabel's birthday party laying on the ground, with sounds of thunder and screaming in the background, only for the invitation to blow away in the nightmare wind.
Wow. Just wow. That actually happened just now. What begins as an episode full of tugs at the heartstrings turns into one of the most disturbing situations to ever happen in anything related to Disney ever. The good guys are losing. Bill has entered the real world with all of the powers he has in the Dreamscape and then some. Mabel hates Dipper. And it's almost impossible to tell whether this is the beginning of the end of Season 2 or the entire series. The next episode, "Weird-mageddon", will involve things such as Soos' grandmother being turned into a chair, Bill turning into a three-dimensional pyramid-shaped form in the sky, Wendy and the teenagers leading a resistance against the demon hordes, Dipper and Ford plan to go to the literal ends of the earth together, and Gideon breaking out of prison and trying to get Bill's help in killing Dipper and Stan and forcing Mabel to be his girlfriend. Many fans predict different things about where this episode will go. Doug Mackerel, the man who runs the YouTube channel The Order of the Holy Mackerel, a Gravity Falls fan channel, believes that there are equal amounts of evidence for both the idea that this is the beginning of the end of the series and the idea that a third season will be made. At a convention in Texas, Alex Hirsch seemed weary of making the show and ready to move on to something new (I think when he's done with Gravity Falls, he may end up making an older-audience-oriented animated series for Fox) and trying hard to wrap it up within the time Disney XD has given him, and that Disney wants it gone because it's not selling enough merchandise. However, there is merchandise set to be released in 2016, such as actual print copies of the three journals, a choose-your-own-adventure style book about Dipper and Mabel traveling through the past, present, and future with Blendin Blandin, and a Gravity Falls video game, Legend of the Gnome Gemulet, due for release on the Nintendo 3DS this November, so Disney clearly still sees commercial potential in the franchise. Mackerel went on to explain that if the show were to have a third season, then the show would have a structure similar to the original Star Wars movies, with Season 1 working like A New Hope, Season 2 working like The Empire Strikes Back, and Season 3 working like Return Of The Jedi. Season 1 of Gravity Falls works like A New Hope in that it establishes the main characters and the basic plot and ends with a major villain, Gideon, being defeated in epic fashion and with the window left open for many more stories to be told. Season 2 has worked like The Empire Strikes Back in that the struggles are getting harder for the good guys, a new mentor character (Ford in GF, Yoda in SW) is introduced and adds a new layer of mystery and depth to the mythos of the story, and it doesn't seem like the victory will be entirely satisfying for the good guys at the end of the season. Mackerel said that since Han Solo was frozen in carbonite, another character in GF, most likely Stan, will have a "carbonite" situation in the later episodes of Season 2 that will keep him out of the story until midway through Season 3, if he's allowed to return to the series at all. Since Luke Skywalker learned of his deeper connection to the main villain, Darth Vader, in The Empire Strikes Back, Dipper could learn of a deeper connection to Bill Cipher. Obviously, Bill won't be Dipper's father, but since the pine tree symbol on the Bill Cipher Wheel is meant to represent Dipper, he's clearly part of a prophecy more ancient than he could know, just like nine other characters. There are theories that Bill is not the main villain and that he's just a secondary antagonist to someone else. Some believe that Bill's "Weird-mageddon" is just a distraction to keep attention away from something even worse in the works. Mackerel said that one of the ways that Season 3 could happen is if Ford were to gather the important good guys, who, at this point, seem to be himself, Dipper, Mabel, Stan, Soos, Wendy, McGucket, Pacifica, and Robbie, along with Gideon, even though he's not one of the good guys; he'd come because he has a symbol representing him on the Bill Cipher Wheel; and take them to a parallel dimension to rethink their strategy on how to defeat Bill and learn if he has any weaknesses. Mackerel also thinks that another possibility is that, because of the introduction of aliens, the good guys will go to space, and even keep the town in a bubble in which most of the townspeople will be unaware of the fact that they're in space and play a large-scale game of keep-away with Bill in keeping the town safe from him. Some also believe that soon, Ford will be revealed to be the main villain of the rest of the series, and that he has darker reasons for wanting Dipper as his apprentice. That would be a very interesting twist, though at this point, Ford seems pretty good. Flawed, but good. I'll just wait and see until October 26, when "Weird-mageddon" airs on Disney XD. Dipper And Mabel vs. The Future was everything a bombshell episode of Gravity Falls should be. It was reasonably funny, clever, heartwarming, heartbreaking, shocking, and downright horrifying at the end, and I think that Alex Hirsch will find a satisfying way to wrap the series up, be it at the end of the year or in a few years. 9/10. Watch it on Xfinity On Demand, the Watch Disney XD app on the App Store, Google Play Apps, or Apple TV, or on iTunes or Google Play. Thank you for reading, and see you next time.
Hello blogosphere, it's Neil with the review of Gravity Falls Season 2 Episode 17, "Dipper And Mabel vs. The Future". This episode was possibly the boldest and darkest episode yet, and that's saying something with all of the other dark things the show has done.
The beginning is pretty light. One morning, Mabel wakes Dipper up with her alter-ego of "Mr. Upsidedownington", a personality she took on by sticking googly eyes on her chin and used to do in third grade. Dipper asks, in a deadpan voice, if "Mr. Upsidedownington" woke him up to tell him that Mabel is getting too old for that, which Mabel ironically points out that it is what she woke him up to tell him. Dipper and Mabel's thirteenth birthday, August 31, 2012, which is also the last day of summer before the twins leave Gravity Falls and return to Piedmont, California, is only a week away. Mabel prepares to organize a party, but Stan won't let her throw a party at the Mystery Shack after the zombie attack they caused in the Season 2 premiere, "Scary-oke", so she prepares to set it up in the high school gym. Meanwhile, Ford sends Dipper on a new mission with him. The interdimensional rift is beginning to crack, and the only thing that can fix it is an alien glue in the wreckage of a UFO that crashed in Gravity Falls many years ago and may be responsible for the town's paranormal and supernatural activity. Mabel says she's OK with Dipper going on a mission with Ford rather than help her prepare for their party because of the whole week they have, but there is some pretty clear uncertainty in her voice while saying it. She gives Dipper a walkie-talkie to use to communicate with her while Dipper goes on his mission, but you can't expect the reception to be too good with where Dipper and Ford are going. The great-uncle-great-nephew duo go to a pair of cliffs with the shape of a UFO carved in between them, and then inside the cliff, where a bunch of old alien technology is laying. Dipper and Ford discuss their plans for the future. Dipper says he wants to create his own ghost-hunting show, but is tempted by the proposition to stay behind in Gravity Falls and become Ford's apprentice. Dipper doesn't want to have Mabel go home without him, but Ford tells him that sometimes, your siblings can hold you back from your true potential, as he accuses Stan of doing. Dipper finds the alien glue, but also activates the security system in the process, and two floating metal bubble-shaped robots with red triangles in their centers come out of the shadows (I thought the triangles made them related to Bill Cipher, as I've learned to never trust anything triangular in Gravity Falls, but we'll only know for sure if they return in the show at some point). Ford says that they can't detect people if they have good control over their fear and keep their fear levels low, but how can you seriously ask that of a kid who thinks he's going to die? Ford jumps to protect Dipper from the lasers of the robots, but gets himself captured in the process. Dipper hold on to the robot with a magnet gun while the robot begins to fly into orbit to take Ford to the home planet of the aliens, and with the magnet gun, Dipper manages to make the robot crash. Believing that Ford is dead when the robot with him inside it crashes, Dipper stands up to the other robot and prepares to shoot it with the magnet gun in weaponized form. Because Dipper's anger is stronger than his fear in that moment, the robot believes the threat was neutralized and shuts down. Ford thanks Dipper for saving his life and congratulates him for being able to do what other twelve-going-on-thirteen-year-olds only dream of and fight alien robots, which makes Dipper decide to take up Ford's offer to become his apprentice. Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, Mabel tries to begin setting up the party in the high school gym, but all of the teenagers are in lines getting their classes registered there. Mabel explains that TV told her that high school would be a happy place where everyone sang songs about following their dreams, and Wendy, who's there getting her classes registered, bluntly tells Mabel that TV lied. This is a pretty clever tongue-in-cheek reference to High School Musical, the movie series that was Disney's most infamous asset in the mid-2000s, and a reminder that in the 2010s, most kids are smart enough to know that high school is not the fake-happy musical place that kids raised in the mid-2000s may have been conditioned to see it as. Mabel witnesses two girls giving each other death stares, Robbie freaking out about his barely-under-control hormones, and Thompson, a teenager who lets Wendy and her friends haze him so that he can feel a part of a group of friends, is curled up in a fetal position in the middle of the gym floor saying over and over again that he can't do another year of high school. When Mabel goes to give Candy and Grenda invitations to the party, they say that they won't be able to come to the party nor be able to say bye to Dipper and Mabel at the end of the summer, as Labor Day weekend is the weekend that Candy goes to music camp, and Grenda is going to visit Marius, her Austrian boyfriend introduced in Season 2 Episode 10, "Northwest Mansion Mystery", that weekend. Mabel goes back to the Shack to look through her scrapbook full of pictures of memories from the summer, and Stan comes into hers and Dipper's room to comfort her as she vents about not wanting to have summer end, leave Gravity Falls, or grow up. Stan reassures her that growing older doesn't have to take away who you are, and that no matter where she goes, she'll always have her brother, something he wishes he could say for himself. Mabel is cheered up from hearing that, until she hears Dipper on her malfunctioning walkie-talkie saying how he's going to stay behind in Gravity Falls and become Ford's apprentice. When Dipper comes back to the Shack around sunset, he is excited to share with Mabel about the best day of his life. Mabel already knows, however, and feels that she had the worst day of her life with everything that happened that day, now including that her brother, after everything they've been through together, would want to leave her, which is almost like a backstab. Dipper tells her that he'll still visit her from time to time, that they'll stay in touch through the Internet, and that people grow up, things change, and summer ends. Not wanting to hear any of it, Mabel runs into the forest crying, looks through what she thinks is her backpack for "party chocolate" only to find that she accidentally grabbed Dipper's backpack instead, and curls up against a tree to go into "Sweater-Town", in which she pulls her sweater over her head, and wishes that summer could last forever. Blendin Blandin (voiced by professional animator and voice actor, creator and star of Rick and Morty, and close personal friend of Alex Hirsch, Justin Roiland), the time traveler from Season 1 Episode 9 "The Time Traveler's Pig" and Season 2 Episode 8 "Blendin's Game", who was initially an enemy of Dipper and Mabel until they spared his life when having the chance to kill him in a futuristic gladiator game, reinstated his job at the Time Anomaly Removal Crew, and gave him his hair back, appears. He says that an eternal summer can be arranged, and in return for everything Dipper and Mabel did for him, he'll allow Mabel to make summer last as long as she wants. All she needs to do is give him the time rift bubble. Dipper, back at the Shack, finds out too late that his bag and the rift bubble are gone, and Mabel gives Blendin the rift. Blendin proceeds to throw it on the ground and laugh maniacally, sounding disturbingly familiar to a certain character. He then takes off his goggles and reveals the yellow eyes of someone possessed by Bill Cipher. Mabel realizes what is happening, and before she can say anything, "Bill-din" snaps his fingers to make Mabel pass out. Bill leaves Blendin's body and proudly boasts of how the prophecy one billion years in the making has finally been realized. The sky turns red, and a cross shape forms in it, with demons of all sorts coming out of it. Dipper and Ford come outside to witness the beginning of "Weird-mageddon". The final image of the episode that plays over the credits is of an invitation to Dipper and Mabel's birthday party laying on the ground, with sounds of thunder and screaming in the background, only for the invitation to blow away in the nightmare wind.
Wow. Just wow. That actually happened just now. What begins as an episode full of tugs at the heartstrings turns into one of the most disturbing situations to ever happen in anything related to Disney ever. The good guys are losing. Bill has entered the real world with all of the powers he has in the Dreamscape and then some. Mabel hates Dipper. And it's almost impossible to tell whether this is the beginning of the end of Season 2 or the entire series. The next episode, "Weird-mageddon", will involve things such as Soos' grandmother being turned into a chair, Bill turning into a three-dimensional pyramid-shaped form in the sky, Wendy and the teenagers leading a resistance against the demon hordes, Dipper and Ford plan to go to the literal ends of the earth together, and Gideon breaking out of prison and trying to get Bill's help in killing Dipper and Stan and forcing Mabel to be his girlfriend. Many fans predict different things about where this episode will go. Doug Mackerel, the man who runs the YouTube channel The Order of the Holy Mackerel, a Gravity Falls fan channel, believes that there are equal amounts of evidence for both the idea that this is the beginning of the end of the series and the idea that a third season will be made. At a convention in Texas, Alex Hirsch seemed weary of making the show and ready to move on to something new (I think when he's done with Gravity Falls, he may end up making an older-audience-oriented animated series for Fox) and trying hard to wrap it up within the time Disney XD has given him, and that Disney wants it gone because it's not selling enough merchandise. However, there is merchandise set to be released in 2016, such as actual print copies of the three journals, a choose-your-own-adventure style book about Dipper and Mabel traveling through the past, present, and future with Blendin Blandin, and a Gravity Falls video game, Legend of the Gnome Gemulet, due for release on the Nintendo 3DS this November, so Disney clearly still sees commercial potential in the franchise. Mackerel went on to explain that if the show were to have a third season, then the show would have a structure similar to the original Star Wars movies, with Season 1 working like A New Hope, Season 2 working like The Empire Strikes Back, and Season 3 working like Return Of The Jedi. Season 1 of Gravity Falls works like A New Hope in that it establishes the main characters and the basic plot and ends with a major villain, Gideon, being defeated in epic fashion and with the window left open for many more stories to be told. Season 2 has worked like The Empire Strikes Back in that the struggles are getting harder for the good guys, a new mentor character (Ford in GF, Yoda in SW) is introduced and adds a new layer of mystery and depth to the mythos of the story, and it doesn't seem like the victory will be entirely satisfying for the good guys at the end of the season. Mackerel said that since Han Solo was frozen in carbonite, another character in GF, most likely Stan, will have a "carbonite" situation in the later episodes of Season 2 that will keep him out of the story until midway through Season 3, if he's allowed to return to the series at all. Since Luke Skywalker learned of his deeper connection to the main villain, Darth Vader, in The Empire Strikes Back, Dipper could learn of a deeper connection to Bill Cipher. Obviously, Bill won't be Dipper's father, but since the pine tree symbol on the Bill Cipher Wheel is meant to represent Dipper, he's clearly part of a prophecy more ancient than he could know, just like nine other characters. There are theories that Bill is not the main villain and that he's just a secondary antagonist to someone else. Some believe that Bill's "Weird-mageddon" is just a distraction to keep attention away from something even worse in the works. Mackerel said that one of the ways that Season 3 could happen is if Ford were to gather the important good guys, who, at this point, seem to be himself, Dipper, Mabel, Stan, Soos, Wendy, McGucket, Pacifica, and Robbie, along with Gideon, even though he's not one of the good guys; he'd come because he has a symbol representing him on the Bill Cipher Wheel; and take them to a parallel dimension to rethink their strategy on how to defeat Bill and learn if he has any weaknesses. Mackerel also thinks that another possibility is that, because of the introduction of aliens, the good guys will go to space, and even keep the town in a bubble in which most of the townspeople will be unaware of the fact that they're in space and play a large-scale game of keep-away with Bill in keeping the town safe from him. Some also believe that soon, Ford will be revealed to be the main villain of the rest of the series, and that he has darker reasons for wanting Dipper as his apprentice. That would be a very interesting twist, though at this point, Ford seems pretty good. Flawed, but good. I'll just wait and see until October 26, when "Weird-mageddon" airs on Disney XD. Dipper And Mabel vs. The Future was everything a bombshell episode of Gravity Falls should be. It was reasonably funny, clever, heartwarming, heartbreaking, shocking, and downright horrifying at the end, and I think that Alex Hirsch will find a satisfying way to wrap the series up, be it at the end of the year or in a few years. 9/10. Watch it on Xfinity On Demand, the Watch Disney XD app on the App Store, Google Play Apps, or Apple TV, or on iTunes or Google Play. Thank you for reading, and see you next time.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Neil Rush CMT Blog- Rick and Morty Review, Analysis, and Speculation- "The Wedding Squanchers" and Season 2 in General
October 8-13, 2015
Hello blogosphere, it's Neil. The new Gravity Falls will air the evening before this post is due, so I'll wait until next week to review it. For now, I'd like to write about something that affected me in a way I never expected. I didn't initially want to talk about anything that is being majorly covered in my senior project because I want to make sure that I'm not always writing about the same thing, but there's nothing major that's media related that is really important to me right now besides this. It is the Rick and Morty Season 2 finale, "The Wedding Squanchers." I guess it's OK to talk about that show here because I'm not going to be able to go as in-depth as I would like in the senior project as much as I can here because of the need to focus on the "sadcom" element in the senior project and talk about it relatively briefly to make room for other shows. Here I can talk at length about any media thing on my mind with the freedom to go on as many tangents as possible as long as they are controlled and at least try to flow with the rest of the paper. Rick and Morty has gone from a creative show that lampoons sci-fi tropes, utilizes the multiverse as a plot element, and features the creator of the sitcom Community, Dan Harmon, as a showrunner, into possibly the best adult cartoon on TV. It was one of the first to prove that character depth and emotional storytelling could work alongside animated obscenity and surreality. Rick Sanchez, the sixty-four-year-old first of the title characters voiced by series co-creator Justin Roiland, is a sociopath, a psychopath, a narcissist, and many other things, who drags everyone he influences down with him, and Morty Smith, the second of the title characters and his fourteen-year-old grandson also voiced by Roiland, is an awkward, stammering, barely-pubescent mess who is put in constant danger by Rick, barely has the ability to save himself, is required by Rick to be used as a "cloaking device" to keep him from being discovered by intergalactic and interdimensional police that he has a history with, and is somehow still one of the only people Rick genuinely cares about. I believe that they were both meant to be somewhere on the autism spectrum because of many of the traits they have and Dan Harmon, the series' co-creator, being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome himself. Beth, Rick's daughter and Morty's mom voiced by Sarah Chalke, allows Rick to live with her family in spite of his extreme instability because of how her mother divorced Rick and she hadn't seen Rick for twenty years and is desperate to have at least one of her parents in her life, even if it's the worse of the two. Jerry, Morty's dad, Beth's husband and high-school sweetheart, and Rick's son-in-law voiced by Chris Parnell, is in a dead-end marriage with Beth that should probably end because of Jerry and Beth's constant arguing and incompatibility but won't because of the fact that they are codependent, made worse by how Jerry hates Rick for being a bad influence on Morty and an even worse human being, often wishing Rick were dead. Summer, Morty's seventeen-year-old sister, Jerry and Beth's initially-illegitimate daughter, and Rick's granddaughter voiced by Spencer Grammer, daughter of actor Kelsey Grammer, begins the series as a pretentious teenage girl that cares too much about popularity and getting attractive boys to like her, even ones that attempt to shank Morty, attempts to run away after learning that she was an unwanted pregnancy but is stopped by Morty after he convinces her not to dwell on what might have been and live in the here and now, has serious attention issues with Rick because of his favoritism of Morty (relatively speaking), and eventually becomes the most moral and pure of the entire Smith family in the show. She tries to convince assimilated members of a species to overcome their mind control, only to learn that nearly all of the members of that species were violent sociopaths once they're briefly freed from their assimilation, is the fastest member of the family to join a new religion "Headism", after giant heads from the outer reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy begin to surround Earth, and is reasonably scarred by the attempts by Rick's spaceship's AI to "keep Summer safe" while Rick and Morty goes into a microverse inside the spaceship's battery, because the ship brutally eliminates the entire police force in order to obey its functioning. Rick's sociopathy was hinted at even in the pilot episode's opening scene. In that scene, Rick comes into Morty's bedroom in the middle of the night, heavily drunk, and takes Morty onto his spaceship with him, saying that he intends on blowing up the world with a neutrino bomb and sparing only himself, Morty, and Jessica, Morty's high-school crush. He says he wants the world to start over and create a new Adam and Eve with the two of them. Morty gets control of the ship to stop Rick, and once they land, Rick tries to say that it was just a test to make Morty more assertive, even though it's clear that that's just an excuse. In spite of the humorous way this scene is played out, it's a lot more disturbing in hindsight. It shows that Rick believes Morty is the only human good enough to keep living and wishes everyone else were dead because of the direction humanity has taken. There are plenty of other surprisingly-serious things in the show. The B-plot of Season 1 Episode 5, "Meeseeks and Destroy", has Morty get attacked in a bathroom by a creepy old jellybean man in an alternate reality he and Rick are visiting for a mission that Morty is supposed to lead to win a bet with Rick, and seems to deal with it rather seriously for the genre, or at least doesn't deny how horrifying such a situation would be in real life. Season 1 Episode 6 , "Rick Potion #9" has Morty make Rick make a love potion for him to use to make Jessica become attracted to him in time for the Annual Flu Season Dance, which goes wrong after the potion's reaction with the flu virus going around causes everyone in school, then the country, and then everyone in the world outside the main Smith family, to be psychotically in love with Morty. Rick attempts to make a cure out of praying mantis DNA, but all this does is make everyone that is psychotically in love with Morty also want to eat his head, because mantis females usually eat their partner's head after laying their eggs. Rick makes one last cure, and while it does make everyone fall out of love with Morty, it also turns them into mutant monstrosities referred to as "Cronenbergs" due to their resemblance to monsters from David Cronenberg-directed body horror films of the 1980s. Morty and Rick argue over who is more to blame- Morty for asking Rick to make the potion or Rick being unable to make a stable cure. Once they agree that they are both at fault, Rick looks for an alternate universe in which they did manage to make a stable cure but also conveniently died after it was synthesized so that they can take the place of their dead selves in that universe. While Morty is usually traumatized by what happens to him on his and Rick's adventures, this time is much more serious than usual, with Morty doing a thousand-yard-stare while burying his own dead body and being forced to settle into a life in which his parents and sister are not actually his parents and sister (though for all intents and purposes in every episode after this one are) along with the implication that Rick has done this a few times before. Ironically, Cronenberg versions of Rick and Morty arrive in the universe that Rick and Morty left after turning everyone in their original universe populated by Cronenbergs into normal people. The next top moment in this section of the blog post is in Season 1 Episode 8, "Rixty Minutes." Rick gets an interdimensional hookup attached to the family's cable box allowing them to watch various bizarre TV shows from other dimensions, but Jerry, Beth, and Summer are more interested in a headset allowing them to look at their lives in other dimensions. In the universe Jerry and Beth are focused on, Jerry is the Tom Hanks of that universe and Beth is a successful surgeon for humans rather than horses as she is in the main reality. When Summer looks for alternate universes with herself in them, she's disappointed to find out that they're all just as mundane as her normal life in the main universe, and even more so to find out that her parent's more successful lives in that other universe is because Beth's pregnancy with her was aborted. Blaming herself for her parent's painfully-average lives, Summer attempts to run away to New Mexico. Morty tries to stop Summer by telling her that he and Rick are from another dimension that they ruined, that the Rick and Morty she knew are dead and buried in the yard, and that he learned something pretty important from abandoning his old universe and coming to this one. "Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everyone's going to die. Come watch TV?" Morty tells Summer, which, in this situation, means that bad things may happen in the world, and some people might be "accidents", but that doesn't mean you should dwell on what might have been and leave your family because you don't think that they were supposed to have you. Everyone's an accident, and therefore no one is. Her faith restored in her family, Summer returns to watch interdimensional TV with her grandpa and little brother, and after seeing their successful lives fall apart in the alternate universe they were watching, Jerry and Beth reconcile from the other argument they had after Summer threatened to run away and also decide not to dwell on what might have been and that watching other dimensions is more fun when you're not watching yourself. It's much more entertaining to watch Gazorpazorpfield, an angry alien version of Garfield from one of the parallel dimensions. Season 1 Episode 10, "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind", had a fairly dramatic revelation. While trying to escape the Interdimensional Council of Ricks, an organization made up of various alternate versions of Rick and their Morties that believed that Rick was killing other Ricks and kidnapping their Morties, Rick explains to Morty that Morties are meant as cloaking devices for Ricks to keep those who would want to capture and/or kill Ricks from finding them because the genius brainwave patterns in the air Rick creates are counteracted by Morty's "Morty-waves", making Rick unable to show up on most detector technology. Furious that he's little more than an invisibility cloak in the grand scheme of things, Morty attempts to abandon Rick, but when the two of them are captured by Evil Rick and Evil Morty, the versions of Rick and Morty that are responsible for the crimes against the Ricks, Morty decides to change his plans. Evil Rick's lair has a wall of Morties constantly being poked in the hips in front of it to make sure that Evil Rick can never be found by the Council, and the main Rick tells Morty that he doesn't even need as many as he has to avoid detection, which makes a certain fact that will be revealed shortly all the more ironic. He attempts to lead an uprising against the Ricks with the various captured Morties, who are all even more wimpy and cowardly than the main Morty and worship Morty as "the one true Morty", but his conscience gets to him, and he frees Rick before a machine he's strapped to can kill him, even though Morty tells Rick that he's lucky he's not a Rick while freeing him. Meanwhile, before the Morties began to fight Evil Rick and Evil Morty, the main Rick's memories are put up on a monitor, one of which is Rick playing with Morty as a baby, making Rick start to cry, though he denies it almost immediately. When Evil Rick is killed and Evil Morty escapes in disguise with the other freed Morties, the Council attempts to reward Rick with a coupon good for one free Morty in the event that he loses his Morty on an adventure, but Rick refuses to accept it when Morty is there because he wants Morty to at least think that he genuinely cares about him as a person and not just as a prop. Rick explains that a cocky Morty is never a good thing, but he won't tell Morty why until he's older. Rick also explains that he doesn't participate in the Council's activities because the "Rickest Rick", which he says is him, doesn't listen to any authority besides his own, and also reassures Morty of at least some of his worth by saying that the "Rickest Rick" would have the "Mortiest Morty". The Council learns that Evil Rick was just a robot, and it is then revealed that Evil Morty was controlling the robot through his eyepatch, which he takes off in order to blend in with the liberated Morties. Evil Morty is expected to return in Season 3 and become the show's main antagonist, and it may confirm the fan theory that this was Rick's original Morty before that Morty was abandoned at one point by Rick and Rick found the original universe with the show's main Morty. Evil Morty attempted to frame Rick for murdering other Ricks, and used the Morty-Wall to make the Council believe that this was the work of an Evil Rick and not an Evil Morty. Regardless, Evil Morty will be back with a major vengeance. The Season 1 finale, "Ricksy Business", while not very dramatic overall, has a pretty dark character revelation about Rick. Summer and Rick throw house parties while Jerry and Beth are away on a second honeymoon, with Summer's having high school students and Rick's having almost all aliens, including Rick's old friend Bird Person (the only major character voiced by Dan Harmon). Bird Person explains to Morty that Rick's seemingly-nonsense catchphrase, "Wubba-Lubba-Dub-Dub!" actually means "I am in great pain. Please help me." in the Bird People language. Ironically enough, in this episode, Rick decides to stop using that catchphrase, though that doesn't mean he's over the pain he's in as a person. He's far, far, far from over that. The Season 2 premiere, "A Rickle In Time", has Rick, Morty, and Summer attempt to restart time after freezing it to give themselves extra time to clean up after their parties, and then leave it frozen for six theoretical months (I say theoretical because obviously no time has passed, but that's how much time would've passed if they hadn't frozen time). Rick tells them not to hug Jerry or Beth or touch each other for a little while until time has stabilized, but when Morty and Summer get into an argument, followed by a shoving match, over who's the better grandkid, they accidentally separate the area of time and space around the house into two parallel pocket dimensions surrounded by Schrodinger's Cats that simultaneously do and do not exist. Attempts at fixing the problem only separate the two timelines into four, then eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four. Various versions of Summer and Morty end up falling into the abyss of no time and space, and one of the sixty-four Ricks dives in after and sacrifices himself to save his Morty, even saying "Be good, Morty. Be better than me." while doing it, only for time and space to be restabilized just in time for all sixty-four of the alternate possible impossibilities to warp back into one. Season 2 Episode 3 had the second darkest ending of Season 2, behind the Season 2 finale. In this one, Rick reunites with an old flame, a hive mind named Unity that has assimilated an entire species to bring peace to it, at the cost of the free will of its members. While Rick begins to hang out and party with a handful of women and men of the alien species that Unity has assimilated, Summer tries to convince everyone to regain their individuality, only to learn that they're better off assimilated when Unity's partying causes it (being a genderless hive mind that assimilates males and females of many species, Unity is referred to as an "it") to lose control of some of the aliens it assimilated and they revert to their violent, sadistic selves that are in a race war between members of their species with flat belly buttons and members with pointy belly buttons. Now deciding that Rick is a worse influence on Unity than Unity on Rick, Morty and Summer try to make Rick come home with them, but Rick refuses to come home with them and simply sends them home themselves. Later, after Rick returns from a brief bathroom break, all of the aliens that Unity had assimilated are gone, leaving a string of notes saying that as fun as Rick is to hang out with, Unity cannot be with Rick because he brings out its worst tendencies and how, in a way, Rick is even better at doing what Unity does than Unity, meaning taking who you are out of your body and replacing it with something potentially destructive. Depressed and guilt-ridden when coming home, Rick doesn't even argue when Beth tells him to get rid of the prison-laboratory he built beneath the garage that she and Jerry learned about in the B-plot of this episode, and attempts suicide in the garage with a homemade laser meant to go around the head, but his head falls and he passes out right before the laser goes off, and he remains unconscious for what appears to be a few days. In Season 2 Episode 7, "Big Trouble In Little Sanchez", Rick puts his brain in the body of a teenage clone of himself to infiltrate Morty and Summer's high school and slay their vampire lunch lady upon learning that she's a vampire. Rick, however, doesn't seem to want to leave his clone body even after the vampire has been slain. "Tiny Rick" becomes popular at school, and his popularity and family connections to Morty and Summer help them get in the good graces of their respective crushes, Jessica in Morty's case, and a new character named Toby Matthews (voiced by close friend of Justin Roiland and Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch) in Summer's case. However, a song that Tiny Rick sings, a drawing that he makes, and a dance that he creates imply that the real Rick is trapped inside the Tiny Rick body and being "killed" by the younger Tiny Rick personality that wants to become dominant. After Tiny Rick is expelled from the high school for what he did to the vampire lunch lady, he blames Summer for getting him expelled and turns the student body against her. When Morty and Summer get home, they find Rick's adult body in a stasis vat in the garage, and get in a fight with Tiny Rick, who continually denies that he wants to be old again. Morty holds Tiny Rick down, and Summer puts earbuds in Tiny Rick's ears and plays a sad song about fear of growing older and drowning your sorrows in alcohol. This brings the real Rick's personality back to Tiny Rick, who returns to his old man body and admits that this was a failed attempt at becoming young again so he could live forever. Rick goes down to the lab underneath the garage and hacks up other gestating clones of himself at different ages with an axe. All of these sad moments interspersed with comedy has helped make Rick and Morty one of the most innovative shows on television. The duo seems to exhibit traits of Asperger's Syndrome as well, a condition series co-creator Dan Harmon was diagnosed with as an adult. Morty has the more innocent kind, involving awkwardness, high emotional sensitivity, and awkwardness with talking to girls, while Rick has the much darker kind, involving a lack of empathy for certain people even when they're not bad people, not being able to see outside his own narrow worldview, a desire to be alone or only with others very much like him (i.e. certain alternate universe versions of himself) because of finding most others inferior to him at what he does, a lack of a vocal-mental filter, and a disregard for social norms because of not seeing any practical use for them. The episode that this entire season has been building towards is what I really wanted to talk about- Season 2 Episode 10, "The Wedding Squanchers". The episode begins with the Smith family receiving an invitation to the wedding of Bird Person to Tammy, an old friend of Summer's that he met in "Ricksy Business". Rick initially refuses to go because of his belief that marriage is stupid (which largely stems from the fact that his first marriage failed), but a misunderstanding on the part of the robot that sent the invitation causes it to take Jerry to the planet that the wedding is on, giving the rest of the family no real choice. At the post-wedding dinner, Rick gives Bird Person a toast saying that while he thinks that marriage, kindness, and love are all beneath those who devote their lives to the pursuit of intelligence like himself, he is still proud of his friend for being a good person through the years. Tammy, while giving a bride's toast and seeming to begin to say how much she loves Bird Person and her family and friends for being there for her on the most important day of her life, reveals that she is an agent of the Galactic Federation that married Bird Person as part of an extended honeypot operation to find and arrest and/or kill the quasi-anarchists that attempted to overthrow them years before, who most of the alien wedding guests, Rick, Bird Person, and Rick's old friend Squanchy all are. Bird Person, Squanchy, and most of the Freedom Fighters at the wedding were motivated by justice against an oppressive and dystopian intergalactic government, while Rick was mainly motivated by his hatred of authority and wanting a good excuse to bust the heads of those in power. She kills Bird Person and most of the wedding guests in cold blood, and Squanchy uses a special serum in one of his teeth he ripped out and injected into one of his veins called "Squanch-roids" to turn into a Hulk-like version of himself and hold off the Galactic Federation forces attacking to give the Smith family time to escape. Rick explains that they can't return to Earth because the Federation will be looking for them, so Rick asks his ship's Syri-equivalent to seek out planets in the Milky Way Galaxy with a similar atmosphere to Earth that are outside of the Federation's jurisdiction, and three come up. One is extremely small, one has everything on a cob like corn-on-the-cob (strawberries-on-a-cob, flowers-on-a-cob, mountains-on-a-cob, and even molecules-on-a-cob, which prompts Rick to scream in horror and yell at everyone to get off the planet immediately, and whether it's because they'll mutate into people-on-cobs if they stayed on the planet any longer or if Rick just has an irrational fear of cobs is unknown), and one has a sun with a face that constantly lets out an obnoxious scream with daytime lasting for forty-two hours on that planet. The Smiths decide that the tiny planet is the best bet. It's small enough that its day and night cycles are only a few minutes at a time long and it takes even less time to walk around the entire planet. When Rick takes a walk to the planet's South Pole, he falls into a hole and ends up directly beneath the log cabin the family is staying in on the planet. The Smiths discuss what they should do about their current situation. Jerry wants to turn Rick in because of everything Rick has done to them in the past, but Morty and Summer refuse to do that because they know by now through everything that they've done with him the past two seasons that even though Rick has a weird way of showing it, he does care about them and wants the best for them. Beth refuses to turn Rick in as well because she doesn't want him to leave again like he did before the events of the series. Rick feels guilty for ruining his family's lives, so he prepares to leave. He tells Morty that he's going to go get ice cream, and Morty asks if he needs him to come along to be brainwave camouflage, but Rick says he'll be fine. Morty now knows that Rick intends on leaving and not coming back, and says that while he can handle Rick leaving, Beth couldn't, and Morty wouldn't forgive Rick for breaking his mom's heart, but Morty knows that he can't stop him regardless. With the Nine Inch Nails version of the song "Hurt" playing in the background, Rick flies away on the spaceship, call the Galactic Federation's Direct Hotline, and says that he's Jerry Smith, that Rick Sanchez kidnapped him and his family and left them on an island planet and that Rick was going to an off-planet bar, and also asks if his family can be allowed to return to Earth and have a normal life. This is Rick's way of turning himself in and making sure that his family can return to a normal life. The Galactic Federation finds the Smiths and takes them back to Earth, where they are given anti-depressants and are allowed to go to an employment office so that Jerry can have a new job after being unemployed for the entire season. Jerry is overjoyed to finally have his life back, but Morty, Summer, and Beth are all ill at ease from Rick being gone. Meanwhile, Rick looks at a picture of himself, Bird Person, and Squanchy in happier times before surrendering to the Federation as they surround the bar he has his last drink at, and spends the rest of the episode in bitter resolve as he's taken to Federation Prison to spend either a life sentence or a death sentence. When a fellow prisoner asks Rick the inaugural "what're you in for" question, he responds, with a mixture of defeat, self-loathing, and negative self-acceptance, "Everything." As the credits roll, Mr. Poopy Butthole, the happy-go-lucky joke character from Season 2 Episode 4, "Total Rickall", that is simultaneously a parody of really dumb characters with too many catchphrases, an always-happy attitude, and is inexplicably loved by the rest of the cast, and an actual one of those characters, is watching "Rick and Morty" on interdimensional cable, because thanks to the multiverse and interdimensional cable, the show "Rick and Morty" is a TV show within the Rick and Morty universe/multiverse/omniverse, just not in the universe of the main Rick and Morty. Mr. Poopy Butthole breaks the fourth wall and tells the audience that he thinks that was a pretty intense finale, then asks a pizza delivery guy that doesn't get anything he's talking about what he felt about the finale, and then asks the audience to watch the Rick and Morty Season 3 premiere in the next year and a half or longer to see how the cliffhanger is resolved. Adult Swim shows usually have very long gaps between seasons, and in the specific case of Rick and Morty, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon once said in an interview that as ideal as "good, fast, and cheap" sounds, you only actually finish if you sacrifice one of those three, so they said that they had to sacrifice fast in favor of good and cheap. This episode of "Rick and Morty" got to me in ways shows don't really get to me. It must've been the effective combination of one of the most selfish characters in fiction doing the most selfless thing he could possibly do and sacrifice what little happiness he had left for the sake of his family, the use of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt", the similarities between myself and both Rick and Morty that I notice, and the fact that people in my family were talking about how they couldn't connect to the show and how it somehow hurt me to hear them say that all contributed to it. Rick is not a bad person. He certainly isn't a good person either, and he does do bad things with awareness of how bad what the things he does are and a lack of caring towards them, but he will do anything for his daughter and grandkids, and more than might be expected for his son-in-law. Guess that's what got to me- the idea that someone can do something like that for their family even when it's not in their immediate nature to do something like that for their family, and how I don't know how to truly connect with my family because of my own Asperger's-fueled personality that makes me want to do kind things for friends, peers, cousins, crushes, fellow fans of things I like, Let's Players I like that I don't even personally know, and even certain celebrities in things I like that I don't even personally know, but limits me from having the immediate drive to do good by my parents, sister, grandparents, uncles, and aunts. Good for them is something I can think about and talk about, but it's not something that feels good like it does when I do good things for the other above people. As crazy as it is to say, I can admire Rick for being a better man than me, and Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon for writing him to be that way. Rick and Morty has gone from a slightly more intellectual diversion from most Adult Swim shows to one of the best animated television series ever made, and I think that Season 3 will have been worth the wait when it premieres in April 2017. Thanks for reading all of this, and see you next time with the review of Gravity Falls Season 2 Episode 17, "Dipper And Mabel Vs. The Future".
Hello blogosphere, it's Neil. The new Gravity Falls will air the evening before this post is due, so I'll wait until next week to review it. For now, I'd like to write about something that affected me in a way I never expected. I didn't initially want to talk about anything that is being majorly covered in my senior project because I want to make sure that I'm not always writing about the same thing, but there's nothing major that's media related that is really important to me right now besides this. It is the Rick and Morty Season 2 finale, "The Wedding Squanchers." I guess it's OK to talk about that show here because I'm not going to be able to go as in-depth as I would like in the senior project as much as I can here because of the need to focus on the "sadcom" element in the senior project and talk about it relatively briefly to make room for other shows. Here I can talk at length about any media thing on my mind with the freedom to go on as many tangents as possible as long as they are controlled and at least try to flow with the rest of the paper. Rick and Morty has gone from a creative show that lampoons sci-fi tropes, utilizes the multiverse as a plot element, and features the creator of the sitcom Community, Dan Harmon, as a showrunner, into possibly the best adult cartoon on TV. It was one of the first to prove that character depth and emotional storytelling could work alongside animated obscenity and surreality. Rick Sanchez, the sixty-four-year-old first of the title characters voiced by series co-creator Justin Roiland, is a sociopath, a psychopath, a narcissist, and many other things, who drags everyone he influences down with him, and Morty Smith, the second of the title characters and his fourteen-year-old grandson also voiced by Roiland, is an awkward, stammering, barely-pubescent mess who is put in constant danger by Rick, barely has the ability to save himself, is required by Rick to be used as a "cloaking device" to keep him from being discovered by intergalactic and interdimensional police that he has a history with, and is somehow still one of the only people Rick genuinely cares about. I believe that they were both meant to be somewhere on the autism spectrum because of many of the traits they have and Dan Harmon, the series' co-creator, being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome himself. Beth, Rick's daughter and Morty's mom voiced by Sarah Chalke, allows Rick to live with her family in spite of his extreme instability because of how her mother divorced Rick and she hadn't seen Rick for twenty years and is desperate to have at least one of her parents in her life, even if it's the worse of the two. Jerry, Morty's dad, Beth's husband and high-school sweetheart, and Rick's son-in-law voiced by Chris Parnell, is in a dead-end marriage with Beth that should probably end because of Jerry and Beth's constant arguing and incompatibility but won't because of the fact that they are codependent, made worse by how Jerry hates Rick for being a bad influence on Morty and an even worse human being, often wishing Rick were dead. Summer, Morty's seventeen-year-old sister, Jerry and Beth's initially-illegitimate daughter, and Rick's granddaughter voiced by Spencer Grammer, daughter of actor Kelsey Grammer, begins the series as a pretentious teenage girl that cares too much about popularity and getting attractive boys to like her, even ones that attempt to shank Morty, attempts to run away after learning that she was an unwanted pregnancy but is stopped by Morty after he convinces her not to dwell on what might have been and live in the here and now, has serious attention issues with Rick because of his favoritism of Morty (relatively speaking), and eventually becomes the most moral and pure of the entire Smith family in the show. She tries to convince assimilated members of a species to overcome their mind control, only to learn that nearly all of the members of that species were violent sociopaths once they're briefly freed from their assimilation, is the fastest member of the family to join a new religion "Headism", after giant heads from the outer reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy begin to surround Earth, and is reasonably scarred by the attempts by Rick's spaceship's AI to "keep Summer safe" while Rick and Morty goes into a microverse inside the spaceship's battery, because the ship brutally eliminates the entire police force in order to obey its functioning. Rick's sociopathy was hinted at even in the pilot episode's opening scene. In that scene, Rick comes into Morty's bedroom in the middle of the night, heavily drunk, and takes Morty onto his spaceship with him, saying that he intends on blowing up the world with a neutrino bomb and sparing only himself, Morty, and Jessica, Morty's high-school crush. He says he wants the world to start over and create a new Adam and Eve with the two of them. Morty gets control of the ship to stop Rick, and once they land, Rick tries to say that it was just a test to make Morty more assertive, even though it's clear that that's just an excuse. In spite of the humorous way this scene is played out, it's a lot more disturbing in hindsight. It shows that Rick believes Morty is the only human good enough to keep living and wishes everyone else were dead because of the direction humanity has taken. There are plenty of other surprisingly-serious things in the show. The B-plot of Season 1 Episode 5, "Meeseeks and Destroy", has Morty get attacked in a bathroom by a creepy old jellybean man in an alternate reality he and Rick are visiting for a mission that Morty is supposed to lead to win a bet with Rick, and seems to deal with it rather seriously for the genre, or at least doesn't deny how horrifying such a situation would be in real life. Season 1 Episode 6 , "Rick Potion #9" has Morty make Rick make a love potion for him to use to make Jessica become attracted to him in time for the Annual Flu Season Dance, which goes wrong after the potion's reaction with the flu virus going around causes everyone in school, then the country, and then everyone in the world outside the main Smith family, to be psychotically in love with Morty. Rick attempts to make a cure out of praying mantis DNA, but all this does is make everyone that is psychotically in love with Morty also want to eat his head, because mantis females usually eat their partner's head after laying their eggs. Rick makes one last cure, and while it does make everyone fall out of love with Morty, it also turns them into mutant monstrosities referred to as "Cronenbergs" due to their resemblance to monsters from David Cronenberg-directed body horror films of the 1980s. Morty and Rick argue over who is more to blame- Morty for asking Rick to make the potion or Rick being unable to make a stable cure. Once they agree that they are both at fault, Rick looks for an alternate universe in which they did manage to make a stable cure but also conveniently died after it was synthesized so that they can take the place of their dead selves in that universe. While Morty is usually traumatized by what happens to him on his and Rick's adventures, this time is much more serious than usual, with Morty doing a thousand-yard-stare while burying his own dead body and being forced to settle into a life in which his parents and sister are not actually his parents and sister (though for all intents and purposes in every episode after this one are) along with the implication that Rick has done this a few times before. Ironically, Cronenberg versions of Rick and Morty arrive in the universe that Rick and Morty left after turning everyone in their original universe populated by Cronenbergs into normal people. The next top moment in this section of the blog post is in Season 1 Episode 8, "Rixty Minutes." Rick gets an interdimensional hookup attached to the family's cable box allowing them to watch various bizarre TV shows from other dimensions, but Jerry, Beth, and Summer are more interested in a headset allowing them to look at their lives in other dimensions. In the universe Jerry and Beth are focused on, Jerry is the Tom Hanks of that universe and Beth is a successful surgeon for humans rather than horses as she is in the main reality. When Summer looks for alternate universes with herself in them, she's disappointed to find out that they're all just as mundane as her normal life in the main universe, and even more so to find out that her parent's more successful lives in that other universe is because Beth's pregnancy with her was aborted. Blaming herself for her parent's painfully-average lives, Summer attempts to run away to New Mexico. Morty tries to stop Summer by telling her that he and Rick are from another dimension that they ruined, that the Rick and Morty she knew are dead and buried in the yard, and that he learned something pretty important from abandoning his old universe and coming to this one. "Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everyone's going to die. Come watch TV?" Morty tells Summer, which, in this situation, means that bad things may happen in the world, and some people might be "accidents", but that doesn't mean you should dwell on what might have been and leave your family because you don't think that they were supposed to have you. Everyone's an accident, and therefore no one is. Her faith restored in her family, Summer returns to watch interdimensional TV with her grandpa and little brother, and after seeing their successful lives fall apart in the alternate universe they were watching, Jerry and Beth reconcile from the other argument they had after Summer threatened to run away and also decide not to dwell on what might have been and that watching other dimensions is more fun when you're not watching yourself. It's much more entertaining to watch Gazorpazorpfield, an angry alien version of Garfield from one of the parallel dimensions. Season 1 Episode 10, "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind", had a fairly dramatic revelation. While trying to escape the Interdimensional Council of Ricks, an organization made up of various alternate versions of Rick and their Morties that believed that Rick was killing other Ricks and kidnapping their Morties, Rick explains to Morty that Morties are meant as cloaking devices for Ricks to keep those who would want to capture and/or kill Ricks from finding them because the genius brainwave patterns in the air Rick creates are counteracted by Morty's "Morty-waves", making Rick unable to show up on most detector technology. Furious that he's little more than an invisibility cloak in the grand scheme of things, Morty attempts to abandon Rick, but when the two of them are captured by Evil Rick and Evil Morty, the versions of Rick and Morty that are responsible for the crimes against the Ricks, Morty decides to change his plans. Evil Rick's lair has a wall of Morties constantly being poked in the hips in front of it to make sure that Evil Rick can never be found by the Council, and the main Rick tells Morty that he doesn't even need as many as he has to avoid detection, which makes a certain fact that will be revealed shortly all the more ironic. He attempts to lead an uprising against the Ricks with the various captured Morties, who are all even more wimpy and cowardly than the main Morty and worship Morty as "the one true Morty", but his conscience gets to him, and he frees Rick before a machine he's strapped to can kill him, even though Morty tells Rick that he's lucky he's not a Rick while freeing him. Meanwhile, before the Morties began to fight Evil Rick and Evil Morty, the main Rick's memories are put up on a monitor, one of which is Rick playing with Morty as a baby, making Rick start to cry, though he denies it almost immediately. When Evil Rick is killed and Evil Morty escapes in disguise with the other freed Morties, the Council attempts to reward Rick with a coupon good for one free Morty in the event that he loses his Morty on an adventure, but Rick refuses to accept it when Morty is there because he wants Morty to at least think that he genuinely cares about him as a person and not just as a prop. Rick explains that a cocky Morty is never a good thing, but he won't tell Morty why until he's older. Rick also explains that he doesn't participate in the Council's activities because the "Rickest Rick", which he says is him, doesn't listen to any authority besides his own, and also reassures Morty of at least some of his worth by saying that the "Rickest Rick" would have the "Mortiest Morty". The Council learns that Evil Rick was just a robot, and it is then revealed that Evil Morty was controlling the robot through his eyepatch, which he takes off in order to blend in with the liberated Morties. Evil Morty is expected to return in Season 3 and become the show's main antagonist, and it may confirm the fan theory that this was Rick's original Morty before that Morty was abandoned at one point by Rick and Rick found the original universe with the show's main Morty. Evil Morty attempted to frame Rick for murdering other Ricks, and used the Morty-Wall to make the Council believe that this was the work of an Evil Rick and not an Evil Morty. Regardless, Evil Morty will be back with a major vengeance. The Season 1 finale, "Ricksy Business", while not very dramatic overall, has a pretty dark character revelation about Rick. Summer and Rick throw house parties while Jerry and Beth are away on a second honeymoon, with Summer's having high school students and Rick's having almost all aliens, including Rick's old friend Bird Person (the only major character voiced by Dan Harmon). Bird Person explains to Morty that Rick's seemingly-nonsense catchphrase, "Wubba-Lubba-Dub-Dub!" actually means "I am in great pain. Please help me." in the Bird People language. Ironically enough, in this episode, Rick decides to stop using that catchphrase, though that doesn't mean he's over the pain he's in as a person. He's far, far, far from over that. The Season 2 premiere, "A Rickle In Time", has Rick, Morty, and Summer attempt to restart time after freezing it to give themselves extra time to clean up after their parties, and then leave it frozen for six theoretical months (I say theoretical because obviously no time has passed, but that's how much time would've passed if they hadn't frozen time). Rick tells them not to hug Jerry or Beth or touch each other for a little while until time has stabilized, but when Morty and Summer get into an argument, followed by a shoving match, over who's the better grandkid, they accidentally separate the area of time and space around the house into two parallel pocket dimensions surrounded by Schrodinger's Cats that simultaneously do and do not exist. Attempts at fixing the problem only separate the two timelines into four, then eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four. Various versions of Summer and Morty end up falling into the abyss of no time and space, and one of the sixty-four Ricks dives in after and sacrifices himself to save his Morty, even saying "Be good, Morty. Be better than me." while doing it, only for time and space to be restabilized just in time for all sixty-four of the alternate possible impossibilities to warp back into one. Season 2 Episode 3 had the second darkest ending of Season 2, behind the Season 2 finale. In this one, Rick reunites with an old flame, a hive mind named Unity that has assimilated an entire species to bring peace to it, at the cost of the free will of its members. While Rick begins to hang out and party with a handful of women and men of the alien species that Unity has assimilated, Summer tries to convince everyone to regain their individuality, only to learn that they're better off assimilated when Unity's partying causes it (being a genderless hive mind that assimilates males and females of many species, Unity is referred to as an "it") to lose control of some of the aliens it assimilated and they revert to their violent, sadistic selves that are in a race war between members of their species with flat belly buttons and members with pointy belly buttons. Now deciding that Rick is a worse influence on Unity than Unity on Rick, Morty and Summer try to make Rick come home with them, but Rick refuses to come home with them and simply sends them home themselves. Later, after Rick returns from a brief bathroom break, all of the aliens that Unity had assimilated are gone, leaving a string of notes saying that as fun as Rick is to hang out with, Unity cannot be with Rick because he brings out its worst tendencies and how, in a way, Rick is even better at doing what Unity does than Unity, meaning taking who you are out of your body and replacing it with something potentially destructive. Depressed and guilt-ridden when coming home, Rick doesn't even argue when Beth tells him to get rid of the prison-laboratory he built beneath the garage that she and Jerry learned about in the B-plot of this episode, and attempts suicide in the garage with a homemade laser meant to go around the head, but his head falls and he passes out right before the laser goes off, and he remains unconscious for what appears to be a few days. In Season 2 Episode 7, "Big Trouble In Little Sanchez", Rick puts his brain in the body of a teenage clone of himself to infiltrate Morty and Summer's high school and slay their vampire lunch lady upon learning that she's a vampire. Rick, however, doesn't seem to want to leave his clone body even after the vampire has been slain. "Tiny Rick" becomes popular at school, and his popularity and family connections to Morty and Summer help them get in the good graces of their respective crushes, Jessica in Morty's case, and a new character named Toby Matthews (voiced by close friend of Justin Roiland and Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch) in Summer's case. However, a song that Tiny Rick sings, a drawing that he makes, and a dance that he creates imply that the real Rick is trapped inside the Tiny Rick body and being "killed" by the younger Tiny Rick personality that wants to become dominant. After Tiny Rick is expelled from the high school for what he did to the vampire lunch lady, he blames Summer for getting him expelled and turns the student body against her. When Morty and Summer get home, they find Rick's adult body in a stasis vat in the garage, and get in a fight with Tiny Rick, who continually denies that he wants to be old again. Morty holds Tiny Rick down, and Summer puts earbuds in Tiny Rick's ears and plays a sad song about fear of growing older and drowning your sorrows in alcohol. This brings the real Rick's personality back to Tiny Rick, who returns to his old man body and admits that this was a failed attempt at becoming young again so he could live forever. Rick goes down to the lab underneath the garage and hacks up other gestating clones of himself at different ages with an axe. All of these sad moments interspersed with comedy has helped make Rick and Morty one of the most innovative shows on television. The duo seems to exhibit traits of Asperger's Syndrome as well, a condition series co-creator Dan Harmon was diagnosed with as an adult. Morty has the more innocent kind, involving awkwardness, high emotional sensitivity, and awkwardness with talking to girls, while Rick has the much darker kind, involving a lack of empathy for certain people even when they're not bad people, not being able to see outside his own narrow worldview, a desire to be alone or only with others very much like him (i.e. certain alternate universe versions of himself) because of finding most others inferior to him at what he does, a lack of a vocal-mental filter, and a disregard for social norms because of not seeing any practical use for them. The episode that this entire season has been building towards is what I really wanted to talk about- Season 2 Episode 10, "The Wedding Squanchers". The episode begins with the Smith family receiving an invitation to the wedding of Bird Person to Tammy, an old friend of Summer's that he met in "Ricksy Business". Rick initially refuses to go because of his belief that marriage is stupid (which largely stems from the fact that his first marriage failed), but a misunderstanding on the part of the robot that sent the invitation causes it to take Jerry to the planet that the wedding is on, giving the rest of the family no real choice. At the post-wedding dinner, Rick gives Bird Person a toast saying that while he thinks that marriage, kindness, and love are all beneath those who devote their lives to the pursuit of intelligence like himself, he is still proud of his friend for being a good person through the years. Tammy, while giving a bride's toast and seeming to begin to say how much she loves Bird Person and her family and friends for being there for her on the most important day of her life, reveals that she is an agent of the Galactic Federation that married Bird Person as part of an extended honeypot operation to find and arrest and/or kill the quasi-anarchists that attempted to overthrow them years before, who most of the alien wedding guests, Rick, Bird Person, and Rick's old friend Squanchy all are. Bird Person, Squanchy, and most of the Freedom Fighters at the wedding were motivated by justice against an oppressive and dystopian intergalactic government, while Rick was mainly motivated by his hatred of authority and wanting a good excuse to bust the heads of those in power. She kills Bird Person and most of the wedding guests in cold blood, and Squanchy uses a special serum in one of his teeth he ripped out and injected into one of his veins called "Squanch-roids" to turn into a Hulk-like version of himself and hold off the Galactic Federation forces attacking to give the Smith family time to escape. Rick explains that they can't return to Earth because the Federation will be looking for them, so Rick asks his ship's Syri-equivalent to seek out planets in the Milky Way Galaxy with a similar atmosphere to Earth that are outside of the Federation's jurisdiction, and three come up. One is extremely small, one has everything on a cob like corn-on-the-cob (strawberries-on-a-cob, flowers-on-a-cob, mountains-on-a-cob, and even molecules-on-a-cob, which prompts Rick to scream in horror and yell at everyone to get off the planet immediately, and whether it's because they'll mutate into people-on-cobs if they stayed on the planet any longer or if Rick just has an irrational fear of cobs is unknown), and one has a sun with a face that constantly lets out an obnoxious scream with daytime lasting for forty-two hours on that planet. The Smiths decide that the tiny planet is the best bet. It's small enough that its day and night cycles are only a few minutes at a time long and it takes even less time to walk around the entire planet. When Rick takes a walk to the planet's South Pole, he falls into a hole and ends up directly beneath the log cabin the family is staying in on the planet. The Smiths discuss what they should do about their current situation. Jerry wants to turn Rick in because of everything Rick has done to them in the past, but Morty and Summer refuse to do that because they know by now through everything that they've done with him the past two seasons that even though Rick has a weird way of showing it, he does care about them and wants the best for them. Beth refuses to turn Rick in as well because she doesn't want him to leave again like he did before the events of the series. Rick feels guilty for ruining his family's lives, so he prepares to leave. He tells Morty that he's going to go get ice cream, and Morty asks if he needs him to come along to be brainwave camouflage, but Rick says he'll be fine. Morty now knows that Rick intends on leaving and not coming back, and says that while he can handle Rick leaving, Beth couldn't, and Morty wouldn't forgive Rick for breaking his mom's heart, but Morty knows that he can't stop him regardless. With the Nine Inch Nails version of the song "Hurt" playing in the background, Rick flies away on the spaceship, call the Galactic Federation's Direct Hotline, and says that he's Jerry Smith, that Rick Sanchez kidnapped him and his family and left them on an island planet and that Rick was going to an off-planet bar, and also asks if his family can be allowed to return to Earth and have a normal life. This is Rick's way of turning himself in and making sure that his family can return to a normal life. The Galactic Federation finds the Smiths and takes them back to Earth, where they are given anti-depressants and are allowed to go to an employment office so that Jerry can have a new job after being unemployed for the entire season. Jerry is overjoyed to finally have his life back, but Morty, Summer, and Beth are all ill at ease from Rick being gone. Meanwhile, Rick looks at a picture of himself, Bird Person, and Squanchy in happier times before surrendering to the Federation as they surround the bar he has his last drink at, and spends the rest of the episode in bitter resolve as he's taken to Federation Prison to spend either a life sentence or a death sentence. When a fellow prisoner asks Rick the inaugural "what're you in for" question, he responds, with a mixture of defeat, self-loathing, and negative self-acceptance, "Everything." As the credits roll, Mr. Poopy Butthole, the happy-go-lucky joke character from Season 2 Episode 4, "Total Rickall", that is simultaneously a parody of really dumb characters with too many catchphrases, an always-happy attitude, and is inexplicably loved by the rest of the cast, and an actual one of those characters, is watching "Rick and Morty" on interdimensional cable, because thanks to the multiverse and interdimensional cable, the show "Rick and Morty" is a TV show within the Rick and Morty universe/multiverse/omniverse, just not in the universe of the main Rick and Morty. Mr. Poopy Butthole breaks the fourth wall and tells the audience that he thinks that was a pretty intense finale, then asks a pizza delivery guy that doesn't get anything he's talking about what he felt about the finale, and then asks the audience to watch the Rick and Morty Season 3 premiere in the next year and a half or longer to see how the cliffhanger is resolved. Adult Swim shows usually have very long gaps between seasons, and in the specific case of Rick and Morty, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon once said in an interview that as ideal as "good, fast, and cheap" sounds, you only actually finish if you sacrifice one of those three, so they said that they had to sacrifice fast in favor of good and cheap. This episode of "Rick and Morty" got to me in ways shows don't really get to me. It must've been the effective combination of one of the most selfish characters in fiction doing the most selfless thing he could possibly do and sacrifice what little happiness he had left for the sake of his family, the use of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt", the similarities between myself and both Rick and Morty that I notice, and the fact that people in my family were talking about how they couldn't connect to the show and how it somehow hurt me to hear them say that all contributed to it. Rick is not a bad person. He certainly isn't a good person either, and he does do bad things with awareness of how bad what the things he does are and a lack of caring towards them, but he will do anything for his daughter and grandkids, and more than might be expected for his son-in-law. Guess that's what got to me- the idea that someone can do something like that for their family even when it's not in their immediate nature to do something like that for their family, and how I don't know how to truly connect with my family because of my own Asperger's-fueled personality that makes me want to do kind things for friends, peers, cousins, crushes, fellow fans of things I like, Let's Players I like that I don't even personally know, and even certain celebrities in things I like that I don't even personally know, but limits me from having the immediate drive to do good by my parents, sister, grandparents, uncles, and aunts. Good for them is something I can think about and talk about, but it's not something that feels good like it does when I do good things for the other above people. As crazy as it is to say, I can admire Rick for being a better man than me, and Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon for writing him to be that way. Rick and Morty has gone from a slightly more intellectual diversion from most Adult Swim shows to one of the best animated television series ever made, and I think that Season 3 will have been worth the wait when it premieres in April 2017. Thanks for reading all of this, and see you next time with the review of Gravity Falls Season 2 Episode 17, "Dipper And Mabel Vs. The Future".
Friday, October 2, 2015
Neil Rush CMT Blog October 6, 2015- The Splat
October 6, 2015
Hello, blogosphere, it's Neil. This will not be a Gravity Falls post because there have been no new episodes since "Roadside Attraction". All I have to say about the show this post is that the next episode, "Dipper and Mabel vs. The Future", looks like it will be the saddest episode of the second half of Season 2, as it deals with Dipper and Mabel being a week away from both the end of summer and their thirteenth birthday, and how they initially think it will be awesome to be thirteen, only to have the reality of what's happening dawn upon them, with having to deal with leaving the friends they made this summer, no longer having the freedoms of childhood, and the very likely possibility of Dipper and Mabel going the way of Stan and Ford and losing the loving bond they share. But enough about that until after it airs, or until after the next TV spot airs. Today, I would like to talk about a new thing announced by Nickelodeon and Viacom called The Splat. Referencing the time from the late 1980s to September 28, 2009 when their logo was multiple variations of a splat of orange slime with the word "Nickelodeon" in the middle before it was changed to the word in orange writing with the "N's" looking like humps rather than "N's", it was announced in August but kept deliberately mysterious. The Twitter account for TeenNick's late-night block, "The 90s Are All That" (named for Nick's classic sketch comedy show "All That"), a block that airs reruns of 90s and early 2000s Nick shows, started talking about it. With the cancellation of TeenNick's only remaining original show, "Degrassi", and the show primarily airing reruns of Nick's live-action teen sitcoms, some expected this to be a renaming of TeenNick with reruns of 90s shows running throughout the day. Others thought it would be a new block, a new channel, or a new streaming service. It ended up being the block option, but not in the expected way. Starting on October 5, it will be a nightly block on TeenNick, not the main Nickelodeon channel as many expected, that will air from 11PM to 6AM. It will air shows such as Rocko's Modern Life, Rugrats, The Wild Thornberries, and many other classic Nick shows, in addition to reviving old promotions done in the 90s in a way that would allow them to work for the audience Viacom is targeting with this new block. The network seems to be a way for Viacom to rival Cartoon Network's Adult Swim by taking advantage of 90s nostalgia with classic cartoons and such, rather than airing adult-oriented animation. Many believe that some of Nick's older shows, such as Ren and Stimpy and Rocko's Modern Life, worked better as adult cartoons than kids' cartoons due to the former's grotesqueness and the latter's subtext. I'm surprised that both Nick and Disney haven't already made their own rival blocks to Adult Swim. Plenty of Nick's shows, such as Invader Zim, use more black comedy than would be expected for kids' animation, and Disney's Gravity Falls probably only gets away with some of the "over-the-head" jokes because of the heartwarming brother-sister relationship between Dipper and Mabel and how it almost always has a good message about growing up to share. I would gladly support Disney XD and any of the Nickelodeon networks having their own nighttime blocks for teen and adult oriented animation. In addition to this, Viacom is considering reviving some of its 90s shows for a modern audience. As good of an idea as it may seem for some fans of those shows, it says something kind of bad about Nick's current slate of original animated shows when they have to fall back on shows from the 90s in order to attract good Nielsen ratings. The current Nicktoons haven't really gained much of an audience even with kids, with Harvey Beaks, Rabbids Invasion, and Breadwinners being largely ignored by kids, Sanjay and Craig and Pig Goat Banana Cricket serving as rage fuel for old-fashioned animation enthusiasts such as The Mysterious Mr. Ender on YouTube, its Ninja Turtles show only being considered alright because most won't call it a Nicktoon, and SpongeBob and Fairly Oddparents being the only Nicktoons that keep an audience, and more for reruns of older episodes rather than because people like the new episodes. SpongeBob and Fairly Oddparents have been on since 1999 and 2001, respectively, and should've ended in 2004 and 2006, respectively, because their newer episodes are only really watched by hate-watchers that know that both shows have jumped many sharks in the past few years. Unfortunately, Nickelodeon has even more radical plans for SpongeBob, such as a third movie, a SpongeBob-themed Nascar race series, and even a Broadway musical. Yeah. Really. They claim that it will get kids interested in the art of stage musicals at a younger age, but seriously? A SpongeBob Broadway musical? Licensed by Nick? Meant as an extension of the brand and not as a parody? Maybe reviving older shows would be a better idea, if this is what they'll do to both their still-running old shows and their newer shows. I, for one, would like a revival of Invader Zim, Jhohen Vasquez's cult classic science fiction black comedy about an inept alien trying and constantly failing to take over Earth and the paranoid conspiracy theorist human kid who tries to prove to everyone around him that the title character, Zim, is an alien, but is never believed. I would rather it be on a channel like MTV, however, to attract a teen and young adult audience, because of the high level of black comedy and grotesque situations in the show, because it seems that Vasquez prefers making shows for older audiences, and the show was more popular with teens and young adults than kids, anyway. I also think that Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Koinetzko, the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender and its sequel series The Legend of Korra, which are considered by many to be the best Nicktoons ever made because of its anime-based animation style, relatable heroes and villains, and willingness to tackle many real-world social issues throughout both runs of their shows, should return to create another show set in the Avatar universe. It could be a prequel about an older Avatar, an interquel series set between both shows about Aang as an adult, another sequel show about the Avatar after Korra, or a show about people outside the Avatar's main group of allies and what their perspective of the world is like. A show like one of those might work better on something like Amazon Prime Instant Video, the streaming service that both of those shows are currently available most conveniently on, however. Also, it seems like Mike and Bryan have moved on from Avatar, and, if they were to go back to TV at all, would probably make an adaptation of Threadworlds, the graphic novel series that Bryan is currently working on. If Nick does revive any of their older shows with new episodes, such as Rugrats, Ren and Stimpy, Rocko's Modern Life, Hey Arnold, Angry Beavers, CatDog, Wild Thornberries, or Rocket Power, I would find it downright awesome if Alex Hirsch, the Gravity Falls man himself, to serve as the showrunner for one of them after Gravity Falls ends. He knows how to almost perfectly blend (mostly) family-friendly irreverence with genuine heart and respect for his audience (as long as you don't read any Ask Me Anything sessions he does on Reddit, because he very much takes advantage of how he's not monitored by Disney when he's on that website to say some pretty ideologically sensitive things, but that's not what this is about, now is it?), and Nick could certainly use some heart nowadays. Other projects I would want him to work on are making a new show for any network that picks it up, be it Disney XD, Nick, Cartoon Network, or Adult Swim. If he returns to Disney, I might want him to be a part of the DuckTales revival set to happen in 2017, if he doesn't make a new original concept. Some would want him to make a sequel series to Gravity Falls, though that doesn't seem too likely for a lot of reasons, the most prevalent in my mind being the extremely confusing timeframe of the show. It's set in the summer of 2012, yet has been going on for four years, so I don't know exactly when a sequel series would be set. If he were to move to Cartoon Network, I'd want to see him become a writer/storyboarder/director of episodes of Adventure Time, Regular Show, Steven Universe, or We Bare Bears, or revive one of the classic Cartoon Cartoons with his own style worked into it, if he doesn't make his own show. If he were to work at Adult Swim, I would want him to work with Justin Roiland, the co-creator of Rick and Morty and voice of many of its characters, including the two title characters, who is also a friend of Hirsch's from going to college together at CalArts and working on Disney's Fish Hooks together from 2010 to 2014, with Hirsch serving as showrunner in the earlier episodes until he left to make Gravity Falls, in addition to voicing minor character Clamantha, and Roiland voicing main character Oscar. He could provide writing and voice acting for Rick and Morty, as he had guest voiced on the Rick and Morty episode "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez", and the fact that Gravity Falls and Rick and Morty are possibly in the same mulitverse, as shown by the three items that Stan lost to the portal in the Gravity Falls episode "Society of the Blind Eye" showing up in the Rick and Morty episode "Close Rick-Counters Of The Rick Kind". Or Hirsch and Roiland could collaborate on their own new show for Adult Swim that mixes their personal styles to make something to truly unite all fans of both Gravity Falls and Rick and Morty. The one other thing I would want Hirsch to do would be to write, produce, and/or direct a new movie for either Walt Disney Animation Studios or Pixar Animation Studios, because he has acknowledged both Disney Renaissance films and Pixar films as influences on his work. Bill Cipher is essentially a mixture of the Disney Hercules version of Hades, the Eye of Providence, William Beale, character actor David Lynch, and the Christian Devil. He also judges what he can get away with putting in Gravity Falls by considering what could be put into a Pixar film, and while Pixar films do have a fair amount of over-the-head jokes and occasional boundary-pushing violence (and against children, no less, as seen in The Incredibles), I don't think that John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, and the rest of the Pixar team would even think of putting some of the things that Alex Hirsch has put into Gravity Falls into their movies. Now back to the Nick news. Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies have recently announced an intention to release a new theatrical film called "Nicktoons" that is supposed to blend traditional animation, CGI, and live-action in, according to the press release, an Avengers-style crossover similar in style to movies such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Space Jam, and Wreck-It Ralph, in that it intends to feature old and new Nicktoon characters in both major roles and cameos and play off of the nostalgia many people have for these characters. There is reason to be skeptical about this, seeing as how they haven't given an idea of what the plot will be like, and the decision to make it in a live-action-CGI-traditional animation mix is largely considered to be unnecessary and based in a misguided belief that it will make more money if it's at least partially in live-action. Mary Parent, president of the newly-founded Paramount Animation and producer of both the recent film "The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water" and this "Nicktoons" movie, says that they have no intent to update any characters in a way that would be untrue to their spirit and simply want to put them in a film that will please old fans and create new ones. Of course, the end result is more important than a press release meant to calm angry fans down. So will I watch The Splat? Sure, if it's available On Demand, because it will be on in the middle of the night most nights and I'm still going to a school that I have to come early to. Maybe on weekend nights I'll have the chance to see it in real time. Would putting older Nickelodeon shows back into production be a good idea? If SpongeBob and Fairly Oddparents don't stop churning out new episodes and the rest of the current Nicktoons continue to be as base-level for kids' cartoons as they are and don't do anything to make them worth watching like Cartoon Network and Disney know how to do with at least a few of their shows, then I guess this is all they can do. If Alex Hirsch works on a revived 90s Nicktoon, I will absolutely watch whichever one(s) he works on. And would a Nicktoon crossover movie work? Again, we can't know for sure until it comes out, so I'll be cautiously neutral. Thank you for reading, and I hope you read next week's post. Good-bye for now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)