September 27-29, 2015
Hello blogosphere, this is Neil Rush with another Gravity Falls description, review, and speculation post, this time on its most recent episode, "Roadside Attraction", which aired on September 21, 2015. The title when it was first announced in mid-August made me think that it would be a darker episode involving the Pines family getting kicked out of the Mystery Shack and having to go on the road while also learning secrets about Bill Cipher from the government. Of course, that was proven to be wrong by how in the previous episode, "The Last Mabelcorn", Ford's history with Bill is explained. Alex Hirsch also said in a tweet that he meant for this episode to be a continuity-free one-off that will not be important in the long run, and felt that the audience needed it because of how the last episode was pretty heavy, with scenes like the one in which we saw the haunting cinematic nightmare of Ford's featuring Bill and the scene in which Dipper believed that Bill was possessing Ford and was prepared to shoot him with a memory-eraser gun to erase Bill from Ford's mind, effectively "killing" him, only to realize that it was just the foggy glasses Ford was wearing that made Dipper think that Bill possessed him. Not only that, but the last four episodes of Season 2 are going to be, in Alex Hirsch's words, "OFF THE RAILS", so the audience could use a breather episode before they air.
The episode begins with Stan setting up an RV to take Dipper, Mabel, Soos, Candy, and Grenda on a road trip around the state of Oregon to revenge-prank the staff members of all of the other tourist traps that have ever pranked the Mystery Shack. It's probably not the best idea for the gang to go so far away from the Shack when they had recently Bill-proofed it and are only safe from Bill's mind manipulation when they're inside it, but seeing as to how Alex Hirsch said this was a "continuity-free one-off", this episode could be one that could fit almost anywhere within the series or be non-canon, so that really doesn't matter in the case of this episode. When bringing some things along, Mabel drops a box of Dipper's that it is discovered that it is full of pictures of Wendy. As a few lines of dialogue in "Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons" and "The Last Mabelcorn" revealed, Dipper still isn't truly over his crush on Wendy, in spite of the events of "Into the Bunker", where it seemed like he accepted that he and Wendy work better as friends because of their age difference and how they're more happy in each other's company when they try to keep things informal. What can I say? You never truly outgrow your first real crush. Regardless, Mabel and Soos recommend that Dipper use the opportunity of the road trip to find a new girlfriend. Their first stop is a giant ball of yarn that Stan intends to use the RV to rip apart. He warns the gang that a crazy old woman that once tried to set his car on fire runs this tourist trap, so they need to be inconspicuous while they tie part of the yarn ball to the RV. While the girls go inside the yarn ball, Dipper tries to talk to a cute girl, but his clear lack of confidence and accidentally introducing himself as "Dopper" due to his nervousness doesn't impress her. He asks for advice from Stan, who tells Dipper that he needs to be confident, funny-but-not-too-funny, and annoying in a funny way. Dipper worries that he'll come off as a little jerky if he does that, but Stan just tells him. "Jerky is a word used by non-jerks to badmouth innocent jerks." When the gang gets to their next stop, an upside-down house tourist trap, Dipper meets a cute and friendly Canadian girl with pigtails named Emma Sue and tries to use the techniques Stan recommended to get her to like him. She's friendly enough to let him take a picture of her pretending to fall off the building's ceiling, tells him that he seems alright, and writes her email address on his arm in case he ever wants to talk to her. Proud of himself for getting a girl's email, he excitedly compliments Mabel, Grenda, and Candy and saying how great they look today. Dipper's confidence leads Candy to develop a crush on him. Dipper asks Stan if he thinks he should email Emma Sue, but Stan says that Dipper should practice with a lot of other girls instead. While Stan spends the next few days destroying the business of multiple tourist traps in Oregon, Dipper uses his newfound confident personality to do various activities with different girls at those tourist traps, such as riding a log flume and finding his way around a corn maze, and getting their email addresses written on his arms. While stopping at a campground midway through the road trip, Stan congratulates Dipper for all of the girls' email addresses he got, even though Dipper has mixed feelings about flirting with so many girls at once, while Candy admits to Mabel and Grenda that she likes Dipper. Psyched that one of her best friends has a crush on her brother, Mabel tries to get Dipper and Candy alone together. After a little seat rearrangement the next day, Dipper and Candy are alone together in the back of the RV. The next and final tourist trap they're going to is called Mystery Mountain, which is five times the size of the Mystery Shack and has real paranormal and supernatural artifacts and creatures unlike the Shack. Candy asks Dipper if he wants to go off alone with her while they go to the Mystery Mountain, and while Dipper is not interested in Candy romantically, he takes up her offer in order to be nice. When the gang arrives at the Mystery Mountain, Dipper tells Stan that his dating tips worked too well, Candy is now interested in him, and he only likes her as a friend, but Stan says that it's just his lingering crush on Wendy keeping him from opening his mind to other girls. As if on cue, Stan sees a woman that works at the Mountain named Darlene (guest voiced by comedienne Chelsea Peretti) and tries to flirt with her. Pretending to be a ditzy woman, Darlene leads Stan off to pretend to go on a date with him, though any smart viewer would know that she has ulterior motives. When Dipper and Candy go into the Hall of Mummies together, Candy tries to cuddle up to Dipper when they're sitting on a bench, but it's just Dipper's luck that the girl from the corn maze, the girl from the log flume, and Emma Sue all show up there. Pressured to ask which one of them he actually likes, he says that he's not romantically interested in any of them and was only trying to learn how to talk to girls. Furious that Dipper was using them in such a manner, even though Dipper was not trying to be malicious and probably would've been a decent enough more-than-a-friend-less-than-a-boyfriend to whichever girl he picked in spite of being only twelve going on thirteen if he had gotten to know them through more legitimate means than Stan's bad advice, all four girls storm off, including Candy, who is genuinely heartbroken rather than just angry like the other three. Dipper tries to call Stan to get advice on how to fix things, but Stan is a little wrapped up- literally, as Darlene turns out to be a giant spider-monster with the ability to take a human form and uses a floozy persona to lure men into a cave in which she wraps them in spider-webbing and makes them the mummies that are put on display in the Hall of Mummies. Dipper finds Mabel, Grenda, and Candy, and while Mabel and Grenda try to tell Dipper off for breaking Candy's heart, but Dipper says that they can kill him later, but for now they have to save Stan. While Stan prays to Paul Bunyan to save him, Dipper and the girls get to him and free him, but are chased onto the cable car by Darlene. The cable car is dreadfully slow, so they use an escape hatch to finally get away from Darlene, while Darlene is trapped under the boot of a Paul Bunyan statue. On the way back to Gravity Falls, Dipper and Stan talk about their mutual relationship problems. Stan was divorced from his first and only real human marriage after six hours and he's been slapped more times than he can count. He married a novelty mechanical dispenser (yeah, an inanimate object) called Old Goldie in a Las Vegas wedding because, you know, Vegas. Stan tells Dipper that because of his bad advice, he should follow his own guts. Regardless, Dipper thanks Stan for teaching him to be confident, and tells him that because of trying to meet other girls, he hadn't thought of Wendy the whole road trip, and that he should use confidence, but obviously not to the point where he leads multiple girls on. Because of Candy looking through Stan's pamphlets for other tourist traps throughout the trip, Dipper themes his apology to Candy to that, showing her a pamphlet he drew saying how dumb he was for what he did to her, asking for forgiveness, and saying she's a great friend. Candy forgives Dipper and says she's over her crush on him because of seeing him act like a scared little baby around the giant spider, but accepts his friendship offer. Hey, you'd probably be scared too if you were at risk of being turned into a spider-web mummy by a mutant shapeshifting spider-lady. The gang returns to the Mystery Shack only to find that it's been trashed by various double-revenge pranksters from the other tourist traps. I wonder if that affects the anti-Bill shield in any way, but, well, "continuity-free one-off." They say it won't be a big deal because Soos can always clean it up, only to realize that Soos was left behind at the corn maze. Soos remembers advice that his grandmother told him- that if he's ever lost, he should stay completely still until help arrives. That advice, if it's not obvious, is completely useless in this situation. One of the end-of-episode codes reveals that Soos found his way home eventually, and that he traveled home with a talking pug and a sassy cat, a reference to the classic 1990s Disney family adventure comedy Homeward Bound, about two lost dogs and a lost cat trying to get home.
One of the Gravity Falls Theorists I follow on YouTube, Vailskbaum94, shared his opinion that this was the weakest of Season 2, and that filler episodes that aren't too important in the long run can still be satisfying, but this was not, due to painfully average humor (that was, for once, all kid-friendly and working within a TV-Y7 rating, which may have been part of that issue), an overly familiar plot, and the feeling that the Candy-Dipper story was forced. While I don't entirely hate this episode, I understand where his feelings were coming from. I presume the writers wanted to make a Candy-Dipper episode to set up a relationship between them only to break it up at the end because of how Candy and Dipper were the first couple conceived by Gravity Falls fans on the Internet that are also "shippers", or people that like to imagine romances between fictional characters (and in some cases, real people) of their choice, and the writers wanted to both mess with them and contribute to the eventual confirmation of Dipper and Pacifica as a couple, which was hinted at in Season 2 Episode 10, "Northwest Mansion Mystery", by having Pacifica learn to become a nice girl and having her and Dipper become at least friends. However, Alex Hirsch will probably try to mess with those who support Dipper and Pacifica as well because these shippers are trying to imagine essentially an older teen-young adult relationship between twelve-year-olds, and Mr. Hirsch wants to teach kids to embrace your youth and not rush to worry about romance because it makes your relationships with your opposite-sex friends unnecessarily formal and not fun like they should be. This is a lesson that I think that, in this day and age, teens and young adults that either ship characters and people or try too hard to be in a relationship need to hear more than kids, and another reminder of how the show works on multiple levels for kids, teens, and adults (even though most Season 2 episodes you should probably be at least ten before watching them). While I agree that, in comparison with most other Season 2 episodes, it wasn't excellent, it works on its own, and wasn't trying to be a great episode. I feel like it was meant to be a throwback to the lighter and more heartwarming tone of Season 1, which is something really worth appreciating considering how dark Season 2 has been so far and how much darker it's going to get. I give the episode a 7/10.
So what happens next? The next episode is supposed to be called "Dipper And Mabel vs. The Future". This could mean a lot of things. Some fans speculate that it will be about Blendin Blandin, the member of the Time Anomaly Removal Crew that went from enemy to friend of Dipper and Mabel in Season 2 Episode 8, "Blendin's Game", bringing the twins to the future with him to help him defeat the tyrannical Time Baby, a giant psychic baby overlord in the future. Plenty of other things could easily happen in this episode as well. From Ford's Multiverse Bubble breaking to Gideon summoning Bill to Bill possessing Soos, Wendy, Candy, Grenda, Robbie, Pacifica, Mayor Tyler Cutebiker, or anyone else in town that might be important, any of these things could happen in the next four episodes, this next one included. Something that I also think might happen is Dipper and Mabel getting a look at themselves as adults and seeing that they've grown apart, then try to do things to prevent this when returning to the past only to seal them growing apart in the process, as self-fulfilling prophecies go, and that they'll do something to each other that won't be resolved until the Season 2 finale. Anything's possible when things get creepy in the sleepy state of Oregon, and the only way to learn what happens next is to watch the next Gravity Falls Monday, October 12 at 8:00 or 8:30 P. M. You can also catch up on whatever episodes are available on the Watch Disney XD app on the Apple App Store, Google Play Apps, and Apple TV, episodes available for purchase on iTunes and Google Play TV, and on Xfinity On Demand and the Xfinity TV Go App. Thanks for reading this post, and see you next week.
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