September 14, 2015
Hello, blogosphere, this is Neil Rush. I've decided to just make this blog almost entirely about Gravity Falls because I just really enjoy typing detailed descriptions of episodes of that TV show on the Internet. The next blog post will probably not be about it due to how I'll have to write it before the next new episode airs on September 21, so this one will be on the episode that aired on September 7- The Last Mabelcorn.
The episode begins with Bill Cipher coming to Great-Uncle Ford in a nightmare and boasting of his plans to unleash armageddon upon Gravity Falls and later the world. The next morning, Grunkle Stan is doing one of his trademark crimes- what I thought was "pog trafficking" when it was mentioned in the previous episode I learned is actually "pug trafficking"- a pretty obvious pun on drug trafficking, made even more obvious when we find Stan speaking in Spanish to a Hispanic man telling him that he has twenty-four hours to get a bunch of barrels with pug dogs in them across the southern border in a pickup truck. How the show is still rated TV-Y7 is beyond me. Meanwhile, Ford asks Dipper and Mabel if they've ever seen the symbol of Bill Cipher, which they respond to by telling of their encounters with Bill in the episodes "Dreamscapers" and "Sock Opera". Ford knows how to protect the Mystery Shack from Bill's reality-warping abilities and mind manipulation, and one of the ingredients required to make a "demon-shield" is a piece of unicorn hair. Mabel, being the hyper-immature twelve-year-old girl that she is, is more than willing to go into an Enchanted Forest that is conveniently within walking distance, and brings Candy, Grenda, and Wendy along. Candy hopes to lick a unicorn's neck because of a legend that it would taste like her favorite flavor if she did, Grenda somehow believes she'll be able to become one, and Wendy, who doesn't believe in unicorns (considering all of the really bizarre things in the Gravity Falls world, unicorns seem like one of the more realistic things for the characters to come across), just wants to keep the girls safe. After Grenda sings a "troll song" to reveal the cave the unicorns live in, they come across one named Celestebellebethebelle (voiced by Sam Marin, the voice of Benson, Pops, and Muscle Man on Cartoon Network's Regular Show, and doing an exaggerated effeminate voice), a parody of Princess Celestia from the once-famous kids'-cartoon-with-a-surprisingly-large-adult-following My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. She appears to look into Mabel's heart and says that she'll only allow the gang to take a piece of her hair if she's pure-of-heart, and says that Mabel is not. Desperate, Mabel, Candy, Grenda, and Wendy do a variety of good deeds around Gravity Falls, such as helping snails on leaves, planting trees (and accidentally trapping people in their homes in the process by planting too close to their front doors), putting a smiley balloon on Stan's face (which we quickly discover is a major choking hazard), and donating more blood than is healthy for one sitting. And yet even after all of that, Celestebellebethebelle tells Mabel that she's still not pure-of-heart, that she shouldn't do good deeds just to get noticed, and that it's not her fault that Mabel's a bad person, which causes Mabel to run off crying and trying to think of the best good deed conceivable. Wendy can tell that something fishy is going on, so while Mabel is wallowing in self-pity and doubt, Wendy, Candy and Grenda raid a gnome tavern in the forest to get help finding a unicorn's weakness. They make a trade with a criminal gnome for knockout magic in exchange for "butterfly dust", but also manage to turn the exchange into a sting operation to get the gnome criminal arrested. What? The writers want to make sure that people know that Candy, Grenda, and Wendy are still the good guys/girls, so they kind of had to make them snitches when putting them in a situation that is essentially a sort-of-kid-friendly depiction of a drug deal (again, why isn't this show at least rated TV-PG?). The girls minus Mabel try to sneak into the unicorn cave at night to knock Celesebellebethebelle out and steal a piece of her hair, but Mabel tries to stop them because of how immoral that kind of thing would be under most circumstances. Celestebellebethebelle wakes up on her own and notices the pair of scissors that Mabel took from Wendy in her hands and believes that Mabel was the one who tries to steal a piece of her hair. Mabel weeps that she just wants to be good like Celestebellebethebelle, which is when two more male unicorns, who seem to be parodies of characters from the old YouTube video Charlie The Unicorn, come out from deeper within the cave and reveal that unicorn horns cannot actually see into your heart and measure how good you are. All they can do is make glitter, point at sunsets, and play rave music. They only pretend to be able to see into human's hearts because they want to be left alone, and boast that they have more hair than they know what to do with and refuse to share it to tick humans off. Furious that the unicorns are clearly much more immoral than Mabel ever could be, the girls get into a brutal (but mostly off-screen) fight with the unicorns.
Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, Ford takes Dipper to a secret laboratory beneath the Mystery Shack that not even Stan knows of. Ford tells Dipper that if they can't Bill-proof the shack, they'll have to Bill-proof their minds. Ford's mind is already Bill-proof thanks to a metal plate in his head, so he straps Dipper to a mind-reading contraption. Some of Dipper's thoughts laid out on the monitor are the lyrics to "Disco Girl" by BABBA, a parody of "Dancing Queen" by ABBA, how psyched he is to know the author of the journals, and a few potentially-inappropriate thoughts about Wendy. Ford wants to scan Dipper's mind so he'll know how to protect Dipper in a way that matches his mind perfectly. The process is taking a few hours, and Dipper feels that Ford is not sharing as much about his history with Bill as he ought to, so he attempts to put the mind-reading helmet on Ford. When that happens, the image of Bill appears on the mind-reading screen, some blankets on the wall are pushed away revealing what almost looks like things that would be found in a shrine to Bill, and Ford wakes up, but his glasses are all foggy and he's talking in a very ominous way. Dipper now believes that Ford is a voluntary host of Bill and that they are working together to achieve Bill's ultimate goal. He even thinks that when Ford is about to say "please" but trips over the word, Ford's going to say "pine tree", the name Bill calls Dipper because of his place on the Bill Cipher Wheel. Dipper tries to keep the multiverse bubble from "Bord" (Bill/Ford) and takes the memory-eraser gun in the lab and attempts to erase Bill from his great-uncle's mind, which is essentially killing Bill. After the laser blast from the gun bounces off of Ford's glasses and around the room, Ford unfogs his glasses and reveals that he was never under Bill control or working with him. He finally reveals his history with Bill to Dipper. When Ford was much younger, after first seeing the symbols that represent him in a cave, he took a nap and had a dream in which Bill came to him. At this point, Bill seemed like a benevolent entity to Ford, and was allowed in and out of his mind at will to help Ford with his research. However, after seeing the mental scarring Bill put on Fiddleford McGucket when he first tested the portal, Ford learned of Bill's true nature and knew he had to shut down the portal. It's why he was so mad at Stan for reactivating it and why he dismantled it and confined its energy to a bubble- he couldn't risk anything from Bill's Nightmare Realm making its way into the physical world, even if it meant never coming back to his home dimension. Dipper and Ford think that they have failed to Bill-proof either the shack or their minds, but that's when Mabel, Candy, Grenda, and Wendy return to the shack with a lock of unicorn hair- and covered in some glittery substance implied to be unicorn blood. They were even given treasure just so that they'd leave the unicorns alone. Dipper and Ford once more say that Mabel is the most pure-hearted person they know, but Mabel responds by saying that morality is relative- possibly the most potentially controversial message to ever be put out by a Disney cartoon with a youth audience- allowing Stan to, as if almost on cue, run on-and-off-screen grabbing as much of the treasure as his arms can carry while screaming "MONEY!!!" During the credits, Dipper and Ford make the shield that will keep Bill from getting to anyone inside the Mystery Shack, but because Bill is always watching from his realm, he sees this happen, and declares that if he can't possess or make a deal with anyone inside the Shack, he'll just have to possess or make a deal with someone on the outside. The episode's last image is Bill's eye turning into a slot machine wheel of all of the characters in Gravity Falls besides Dipper, Mabel, Stan, and Ford that he can rope into his game and turn against the Pines family.
Don't let all of the unicorns and glitter fool you, this is probably the darkest Gravity Falls episode to date, in terms of black comedy, adult references, and thematic intensity. From the super-freaky nightmare Ford has with Bill in it at the beginning to the pug trafficking to Mabel donating enough blood to make herself pass out to the mind-reading machine showing Dipper thinking about Wendy in a red bikini to the butterfly dust deal to Dipper being forced into what was essentially a kill-or-be-killed situation and handling a gun (even though it's a nonlethal memory eraser gun and not an extremely dangerous weapon) to Mabel and her friends being drenched in glittery unicorn blood with their usual smiles on their faces, it's surprising how at least Season 2 of the show isn't rated TV-PG-DV. You would think that the "Romance In Settler's Times" statue from Season 2 Episode 7 "Society of the Blind Eye" would've attracted the attention of Disney XD's TV rating board enough to make them bump the rating up, but, as it goes with the title, they turned a blind eye to that. Of course, the most shocking thing about "The Last Mabelcorn" was Mabel saying that morality is relative. While this is a message that I agree with to an extent, putting this message in a show that was at least at one point meant to be watched by kids has the potential to open a Pandora's Box of questions for parents from their kids that probably shouldn't be answered until the kids are at least forty. Mabel was meant to be a role model for girls and a symbol to have fun whenever you can, be yourself, and not be defined by controlling popularity standards, but now she could be a symbol for a new anarchist, Frederich Nietzsche-style anti-morality movement. OK, I know that's a major stretch, but Alex Hirsch and his writing team should probably think about who they're writing Gravity Falls for and what audience they want to speak to. Kids and up? Preteens and up? Teens and up? Adults? They'd be a lot less creatively stifled if Disney XD changed the rating to TV-PG-DV, if it were moved to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, or if Disney XD created its own Adult Swim-like nighttime block, because when the over-the-head jokes are not over the head in the slightest, you should probably think about whether your "kids's show" is really such. This was not a bad episode, in fact, it was one of my favorites of the entire series so far in terms of story, but not exactly my favorite because of how Bill only appeared in Ford's nightmare, in flashbacks, and at the very end, I'm just saying that they should've been a little more careful with the "morality is relative" message. 8/10.
So what happens next? The next episode is called "Roadside Attraction". This time around, Stan is going to take Dipper, Mabel, Candy, Grenda, and possibly some others on a road trip to sabotage the business of all of the other tourist traps in the county, because as many businessmen believe, true success only comes from the failure of all possible competition. The ads for this episode make it look like a much lighter episode than the past episode, but the character that's being introduced may change that perception. Comedienne Chelsea Peretti, a frequent high-ranker on lists of funniest Twitter accounts, is supposed to guest-star as a new character named Darlene, who was mentioned by Alex Hirsch in an interview to preview the second half of Season 2 as one of the scariest characters ever conceived by the Gravity Falls writing team. To me, she sounds like either the owner of a rival tourist trap, a potential love interest for Stan, or both of these things rather than a super-scary woman. Perhaps she'll be all three of these things. We'll see when it airs on Monday, September 21 at 8:30 P. M. (cue end of Gravity Falls theme song). But first off, who will Bill make a deal with and/or possess? It would probably be one of the more important characters. Some dialogue and codes from the episode imply that it might be Soos because of the code at the end of this episode that, when decoded, says "The simple man with many fears will often listen to what he hears." However, Bill has implied that Soos may not really be as "simple" as he lets on, and may only be pretending to be dumb to mess with everyone and, in a way, have control over them. It could be Wendy because of her importance and how many believe that the ice bag on the Bill Cipher Wheel is meant to represent her because she's as cool as ice and is given ice to heal her eye in Season 1 Episode 9 "The Time Traveler's Pig", though she's probably safe because of how often she is in the Mystery Shack. Candy and Grenda's frequent appearances may make them suspect to Bill-harassment, but they don't seem important enough for any serious arcs of the show, so I won't count them too high. Old Man McGucket seems like a likely candidate because of his history with Bill, and it will be interesting if he remembers Bill or not considering how he erased his memory of Bill because of the trauma of seeing the Nightmare Realm and Bill's desires ("When Gravity Falls and Earth become sky, fear the beast with just one eye"). Gideon seems very likely because of how at the end of Season 2 Episode 14 "The Stanchurian Candidate", he tried to summon Bill in his prison cell. Many believe that Pacifica Northwest, the spoiled-mean-girl-turned-half-decent-girl-and-potential-love-interest-for-Dipper, will be possessed in order to emotionally wreck those who want to see Dipper and Pacifica get together, which does seem like something Alex Hirsch would do. Robbie may be a candidate because of his increasing importance and character development, though he may not as well because it's unclear what his relationship with the other main characters is at this point, considering how he's moved on from his hopeless crush on Wendy and most likely has ended his rivalry with Dipper for that very reason. Perhaps Bud Gleeful, though Gideon would probably keep that from happening. Maybe Agent Powers and/or Trigger (Powers is voiced by comedy actor Nick Offerman), two government agents that have tried to arrest Stan for allegedly building a doomsday device that was the portal in Season 2 Episode 11 "Not What He Seems" but had their memories of that erased in the following episode "A Tale of Two Stans" because they have unlikely dealt with anything like Bill in their careers before, so they could be caught off-guard into making a deal. Anything's possible in Gravity Falls. Let's hope that the rest of the season stays as good as it has been. Thank you for reading, and see you next time.
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