Welcome back to Gravity Talks, the Gravity Falls review column that sounds like we stole some podcast’s name. Massive spoilers are ahead as we talk about “A Tale of Two Stans”. Oh hell, the title itself is a spoiler. Let’s just do the review.
Gravity Falls has always been about mysteries, from cases of zombie gnome boyfriends to that time a small boy dressed as Billy Graham took over an entire town. Through it all, there’s been one central mystery, one that began in the first episode when Stan opened the hidden entrance into his basement. It was a mystery that the fans latched onto and, amazingly enough, solved like two years ago. Stan having a twin brother was the go-to crazy Gravity Falls theory, right behind Mabel having an evil doppelgänger. And then a couple months ago, Stanford Pines walked out of the big portal in the Mystery Shack and validated years of crackpot conspiracies. Gravity Falls definitely knows how to reward its dedicated fans and it did just that with “A Tale of Two Stans.”
Before I explain why “A Tale of Two Stans” was so good, it’s important to highlight the show’s relationship with its fans. Alex Hirsch and his crew are ultra self-aware of their fanbase and have actively curated the mania that comes with each new episode. Hell, Hirsch leaked a photo of Old Man McGuckett as the author onto 4Chan for the express purpose of throwing everyone off the twin theory. As such, the Gravity Falls team knows that having an episode where they just reveal what’s been going on with the Stans would have been lackluster. In fact, there weren’t many moments in “A Tale of Two Stans” you could really call “shocking”, at least if you followed the online fan community. Soos even voiced the fans by saying that if Stanford’s history didn’t match his fan-fiction, he would not be pleased. During its ungodly amount of hiatuses, Gravity Falls’s fans dissected the show like a dead frog, so the origin story that actually ended up matching everyone’s fan fiction was hardly full of twists. Instead, “A Tale of Two Stans” succeeded because it didn’t try to reveal anything crazy about Gravity Falls‘s lore, but about its characters.
“A Tale of Two Stans” focuses on the author of the journals (Stanford AKA Ford Pines) and OG Stanford (actually Stanley) explaining their background. The twins grew up in New Jersey (REPRESENT!) and were best friends until Stan ruined Ford’s science project and cost him his admission into a prestigious university. After earning a grant at Backsupmore University and studying the town of Gravity Falls, Ford contacts his traveling salesman brother to hide one of his journals but ends up getting sucked into a portal after a fight with Stan. Afterwards, Stanley changed his name to Stanford and, with nothing but a peso in his pocket, transformed Ford’s research lab full of oddities into the Mystery Shack we know and love. Pretty simple stuff as far as secret origins go, with no sign of Bill Cipher who was a prime suspect to be involved in the Pines backstory. In fact, it’s a little mundane compared to some of the other episodes. After all, you can’t get more mundane than New jersey.
But “A Tale of Two Stans” doesn’t need the high-concept strangeness that has accompanied other wham episodes like “Dreamscaperers” or even “Not What He Seems”. The human story of two brothers who found themselves at odds brings an incredibly grounded backstory to a show with an evil triangle as its main villain. Plus, it pulls back the curtain on Stan so much. It’s very easy to think of Stan as the worst (dude went to jail in three different countries before hitting 30) but there’s so much humanity to him here. Kicked out of his family until he could make up the fortune he made his brother lost, working desperately to bring his brother back, living as a dead man for the past twenty years. Seriously, Mabel and Dipper’s parents thought they were sending their kids to live with their scientist Great Uncle Stanford, not their not-spoken-about-and-also-dead con-artist Great Uncle Stanley. You want to know why Dipper and Mabel never heard of Ford? Because their parents thought they were living with him for the whole summer.
Continued belowWhile the Pines Boys story did give fans a whole lot of little revelations (Stan’s tattoo, how Susan became Lazy Susan, the first time the Cute Biker was told to “git ’em”) it did sort of kill the momentum at the end of “Not What He Seems.” To be fair so did the four month hiatus. “Not What He Seems” felt very reminiscent to the final episodes of Breaking Bad, specifically “Ozymandias” in that it featured a main character’s entire life and family come crashing down around him. While Mabel wasn’t shot in the head by a Nazi biker in the desert, it was still an indication that Gravity Falls would be facing an entirely new status quo, specifically due to the season-long threat of the FBI coming to knock down Stan’s door. Ford and Stan telling their story actively distracts from that development, to the point where, at the end, Soos straight up says he forgot about all the agents raiding their house. With a quick deus ex machina, Ford is able to turn everyone away, robbing the series of one radically changed status quo, yet offering a much more ominous one.
I mentioned that “A Tale of Two Cities” offers a lot of revelations on Stan and that’s certainly true. Stan Pines become more of a defined character than he ever has and went from the possible villain he seemed to be in the last season finale to a brother trying his best. What “A Tale of Two Cities” also does is offer little information on Ford, voiced by everyone’s favorite yellow M&M, JK Simmons. We get that he called McGuckett out of Steve Wozniak’s basement to be his lab partner and he became more and more paranoid as his work in Gravity Falls continued, but not much else. What happened to Ford in his thirty years in the portal? Did he discover the source of strangeness in Gravity Falls? Did he make an alliance with Bill Cipher? Did he join the Council of Ricks? No matter what happened, there has to be something Ford is hiding. There’s a moment in the end when he and Stan are talking and Stan leaves while Ford goes near a mirror. It cuts back to Mabel and Dipper, but I fully expected Ford to re-enact the finale of Gravity Falls’s parent show, Twin Peaks (spoilers for a show that ended over twenty years ago).
Speaking of Mabel and Dipper, it was pretty disheartening to see them notice themselves in Stan and Ford. They were just two happy teens until adulthood happened, splitting them apart. And there’s nothing saying the same won’t happen to Mabel and Dipper. “A Tale of Two Stans” answered a lot of the show’s major mystery, but left so much more for its cast to deal with. The scarier thoughts aren’t “What’s Bill Cipher up to?” or “Will Gideon return?” They’re “Has Ford actually forgiven Stan?” and “Can the twins actually remain best friends forever?” No one knows for sure, but the events of “A Tale of Two Stans” have set a horribly grim precedent for both questions.
Final Verdict: 9.1 – Despite a weak resolution to the FBI storyline, “A Tale of Tow Stans” blew the lid on the cast of Gravity Falls and proved why its one of the most relevant cartoons of the 10’s and why its hiatuses are the most unfair things in animation. Speaking of which, we’ll see you in three weeks for the next episode.
