Review: Gravity Falls – “Soos and The Real Girl”
The episode begins with the kids wondering what Soos does when he is not at the Mystery Shack. We quickly find out that he lives with his grandmother and plays a lot of video games. When Soos receives an invitation to his cousin’s engagement party, his grandmother begs him to find a girlfriend. In order to make her happy, Soos agrees. Even the video game says he is dead meat.
Soos arrives at the Mystery Shack the next day, planning on asking some girls out. After failing miserably, Mabel and Dipper offer to take him to the mall for flirting training. Unfortunately, Soos quickly learns that he is not very good at talking to women. After a few more epic fails, Soos sees his cousin, complete with fiance, and panics. Soos dives into a nearby video game store to hide. He finds a used dating simulator game in a pile of terrible games. Despite the clerk’s warnings, Mabel and Dipper agree that it may be worth a shot.
Once he starts playing the dating sim, Soos can’t get enough. He ends up spending a whopping eighteen hours talking to “Giffany.” Eventually, Mabel and Dipper drag him out of his darkened room and back into the mall.
However, Soos’ time with Giffany has made him even more uncomfortable around real women. Somewhat luckily for him, Giffany has come to life and zapped herself into the television screens at the mall. The two of them come upon a choo-choo-train children’s ride. As Soos and Giffany ride the train, a woman named Melody compliments him on unabashedly riding a train intended for children. After a short conversation, the two agree to go out later.
Meanwhile, Grunkle Stan is trying to find a new machine for the Shack. His old five-cent gold-miner is scaring everyone and really needs to be replaced. As he is throwing the gold-miner machine into a mall dumpster, he sees a bevy of children flocking into a storefront. Following them inside, he finds a place not unlike Chuck E. Cheese, complete with an animatronic band. Stan quickly falls into money-making love with the leader of the band, a rockstar badger. The old man decides that he needs the animatronic badger but the franchise owner will not sell. Of course, that means Stan has to steal it.
Yes, this is where the stories converge. Soos and Melody are at the same restaurant where Stan is stealing the badger. Giffany has gotten loose again. This time she is furious that Soos has dumped her for a real girl. She takes control of every animatronic animal in the restaurant, using them to try to kill Soos, Melody, Dipper, and Mabel. Since Stan is in the process of stealing the badger, he is also a target for death.
Soos saves the day when he throws the CD of Giffany’s video game into the pizza oven, effectively burning her to death. Stan, meanwhile, was slightly saved by the toothless bite of his old gold-miner machine.
And everyone lives happily ever after. Or at least as happy as they can be in Gravity Falls.
I love Soos episodes. He is absolutely hysterical. It is also pretty awesome that they gave him a love interest instead of keeping him the doofy sidekick. I hope that they will bring Melody back in some future episode, even if it is only as a long-distance relationship. Some other shows have handled it well. I think Gravity Falls could too.
