“Thank you for being my people.” Gravity Falls, after two seasons of the best-looking backgrounds, liveliest characters, and all-out most infuriating production schedules of all time, is off the air. It isn’t a perfect finale, nor is it a particularly daring one, but it has heart, horror, and an end-of-summer bittersweetness that gives its many indulgences […]
“Aaaand this is worse than the apocalypse.” Escape From Reality is officially the penultimate episode of Gravity Falls. The series will come to an end sometime in early 2016 with an hour-long finale, not a cancellation but a planned conclusion by creator Alex Hirsch. Here’s hoping the last hurrah has a little more oomph than this one. Escape From Reality is […]
“Fighting children is boring. Fighting a Chaos God sounds fun!” I’d bet good money that the storyboard for ‘Weirdmageddon Part I’ just reads “take it to the wall.” It’s twenty jam-packed minutes of phantasmagorical horror and oddness with an extended Road Warrior homage, Louis C. K. as a hapless and ravenous giant head with an arm growing out the […]
“TV lied, man. If you can avoid growing up: do it.” Gravity Falls took one of the final episodes in what might be its final season to speak directly to both the children and the young at heart who love it. When we cling to the dream of eternal youth, we sacrifice our futures on an […]
“Man, RVs are amazing. I can’t believe we’re sitting at a table in a moving vehicle.” Old men teaching young men to hit on women is a time-honored part of masculinity, but it isn’t hard to see the predatory undertones in teaching boys to pursue and charm. Gravity Falls comes at the institution with a man-eating […]
“All our dumb horns can do is glow, point toward the nearest rainbow, and play rave music.” ‘The Last Mabelcorn’ takes a long, hard look at how mistakes can shape us without destroying our essential goodness while also giving us a scene in which Mabel, Wendy, Candy, and Grenda double-cross a gnome in a crooked […]
“HOLD ON TO THAT BRANCH OR DIE, CAT!” Every place-setter episode risks biting off more than it can chew on the way to setting up future adventures. ‘The Stanchurian Candidate’ is fun and lively for the most part, but it never quite has time to land any of its threads in a satisfying place. The opening […]
“Is this the game that’s mostly math and writing and isn’t anything like the picture on the box?” Shows like Adventure Time, Steven Universe, and Gravity Falls exist in a grey area when it comes to who, exactly, they’re made for. Ostensibly they’re for kids, but anyone with a Tumblr or who’s been to a con knows […]
“Wherever we go, we go together.” ‘A Tale of Two Stans’ is an episode with a lot to live up to. The mid-season cliffhanger of ‘Not What He Seems’ left us staring at a doppleganger of the irascible and suddenly more-than-humorously-untrustworthy Grunkle Stan, a major upset to the show’s mystery of the week status quo. […]
