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.
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