It's the apocalypse, who knew so many death metal album covers would be this accurate. This is the first part of what looks to be the Gravity Falls series finale, Mabel has been captured, Ford defeated, the journals destroyed and the apocalypse is in full effect. Within all this chaos Dipper and Wendy agree that the only way to defeat Bill is with the help of Mabel, so they set out to her bubble prison to go free her, but along the way they're chased down by Lil Gideon and his legion of Mad Max wannabees.So what stands out to me in this episode? Good god what doesn't stand out. Let's start off with some of the most fucked up imagery i've ever seen this side of David Cronenberg. Seriously the imagery in this episode is hauntingly beautiful for how fucked up and creative it is, Louis CK is a neurotic hand-face monster that wants to eat people, there's a giant purple loaf of bread with limbs, but the most disturbing visual was when Preston Northwest had all the parts of his face switched around. I know it's a cliche to say the animators were on drugs when coming up with this imagery but...i mean, c'mon guys. It's as if they just picked two words at random and decided to make a creature out of that, and i fucking loved it.
But within all the apocalyptic marvels happening, we still get a lot of great character pieces, no bigger than Wendy Flippin' Corduroy! I think most people will agree that Wendy has been severely underused in this show and only appearing in about half the episodes she should, well now she finally gets her proper time to shine, being the only person prepared for the apocalypse because her dad had them train every year instead of celebrating Christmas (Hilarious) she is the badass girl that can take on anyone and knows how to survive. Dipper also got plenty to to, having being pushed to his limit physically but of course in the end it's his smarty pants logic that saves the day, convincing Gideon to finally do the right thing and prove he loves Mabel. On one hand you could see this as cheap to have Gideon turn good at the last minute, but on the other hand he does legitimately love Mabel and his choice in sacrificing himself is really sweet, but on the third mutated hand he maybe should have had a bit more of an arc.
Oh and Soos showed up at the end, apparently there are folk songs about him now or something, but seriously where is Grunkle Stan? It feels like he's been on the back burner the past few episodes and hasn't been really involved that much. This is the man that beat up an entire army of zombies and nearly destroyed the world to save his brother, ya would have thought he would have more to do in the finale of the show than just show up for a joke and then disappear. And on a final note, this episode was hilarious, i know that's kinda redundant to say when it comes to Gravity Falls but hey, good comedic writing always deserves to be acknowledged. My personal favourite jokes were Soos' Grandma being a chair, Dipper and Wendy going through the weird bubbles and Ghost Eyes majoring in Philosophy.
This was an insanely fun episode, it was exhilarating from beginning to end, sets up a lot for this story with a lot of tension and drama while still having excellent comedy and you can tell that everyone had a tone of fun making this episode from the writers to the animators for having absolutely no limitations to what they could do with this set up. 10/10.
-Danny
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