Review: Gravity Falls – “Not What He Seems”

Spoilers Below

After a month-long break, we come back to find Grunkle Stan working on the mysterious machine under the Mystery Shack. Despite warnings about gravity anomalies, Stan starts the machine anyway. An 18-hour countdown begins. What it counts down to…we don’t really know.

In the morning, Mabel finds a stash of illegal fireworks in the closet. She insists that Dipper go to the roof with her to set them off. Before they can enact their scheme, Stan finds them with the open closet door. He insists that they all go to the roof to set off the fireworks! The family has fun shooting fireworks into the sky, which sets most of the immediate area on fire. To put out the fire, Mabel suggests a water balloon fight. Mabel and Dipper run around throwing water balloons at each other while Stan watches from his chair on the porch.

Suddenly, special agents swarm the Shack, tackling Stan, and taking him into custody. Agents Powers and Trigger appear to tell the children that Stan is accused to stealing toxic waste from a government site. While the video footage doesn’t show Stan’s face, the agents claim they know that Stan definitely stole the waste. Stan gets sent off to a detention center and the kids are taken away to child services.

While locked up, Stan uses his phone call to ask Soos to guard the vending machine in the Mystery Shack. Meanwhile, the children trick a truck driver into running their car off the road, allowing them to rush back to the Shack to clear Stan’s name. The twins sneak into the Shack and search Stan’s office. They find the Shack’s security tapes showing Stan restocking the shelves, as he claimed. However, they also find footage of him hauling the toxic waste into the Shack. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they also find a box of fake IDs and newspapers claiming that Stan Pines died. Mabel comes across a piece of paper with a strange code on it. She quickly realizes that the code is for the vending machine and the children rush out of the office.

As Stan uses a gravity anomaly to escape from the agents, Mabel and Dipper fight Soos in order to enter the code into the vending machine. Once the machine opens, revealing the stairway to the secret lab, the three friends head down to find out what Stan was hiding. Of course, Dipper finds the other two journals. He grows angry, wondering if Stan has been lying to them this entire time. Finally, Dipper opens the three books and uses his blacklight to read the hidden message. Unfortunately, the hidden message says that the machine will rip the universe apart. And there’s only about five minutes left on the countdown.

Shit.

Dipper finds an emergency shut-off switch. Just as he is about to push it, Stan rushes in, stopping him. A gravity anomaly appears, leaving Stan, Dipper, and Soos to fight in mid-air. Mabel, meanwhile, heads over to the switch. However, she can’t decide whether or not to push it. Dipper wants her to push it but she wants to trust Stan. In the end, she decides to trust Stan and not push the button.

The countdown finishes and an energy blast reverberates through the town. Thankfully, everyone seems to be OK. But then a mysterious cloaked man walks out of the portal. Stan tells the kids that this is the man that wrote the journals. His brother.

And, of course, this is where the episode ends. Well, OK, the episode actually ends with two small children, who seem to be Stan and his brother, swinging on a swing set as the sun sets.

I am so stunned by this episode that I’m not really sure what to think. I was expecting Bill Cipher to appear. I was expecting Mabel to get super magical powers because she was floating in front of the portal before it exploded. Neither of those happened. I really can’t wait to see what had happened to Stan’s brother and why he wrote the journals and where he was inside the portal and ARGH! So. Many. Questions. While I hope I can get answers quickly, Disney seems to be set on making us wait as long as possible before new episodes are released. Thanks, Disney.