Welcome back to Gravity Talks, our review series for Gravity Falls with a release schedule that’s just as sporadic as the show. This week, “Soos and the Real Girl” gives us some continuity nods, Grunkle Stan’s adventures in Las Vegas, and Soos’s first waifu.
As always, spoilers ahead.
After slowly but surely usurping Stanford’s spot, Soos pretty much just goes ahead and takes the role of “third main character” from him by starring in his own episode, “Soos and the Real Girl”, which regrettably didn’t involve Ryan Gosling and or a body pillow. Sort of. But before we get to that, I think this is the first episode of Gravity Falls that barely featured the Mystery Twins; I’m not complaining, as lots of people have compared the town of Gravity Falls to Springfield from The Simpsons in terms of its huge yet compelling supporting cast. I am all for handing over the spotlight to supporting characters if it means we get a Tambry episode in season 3.
For now though, the episode begins with a cold open featuring Soos and his abuelita, who honestly deserves a one-off more than anyone. Soos’s cousin Reggie is holding an engagement party, which means Soos needs a date so his grandmother can die happy. Now Soos has to learn how to talk to women in order to get a date by the end of the week by taking lessons from a murderous Japanese dating sim. Meanwhile in the B-plot, Stan simply wants to steal an animatronic badger from a pizzeria owner voiced by Paul Scheer for the sole reason of money. Guess which character’s plot I like more.
“Soos and the Real Girl” is an entertaining episode of Gravity Falls, but Soos’s quest to learn how to talk to girls seems almost too conventional for a show that had a straight up horror show out of nowhere last time. Soos works great as a bumbling sidekick but one of the major reasons he can hold an episode here is with the supporting cast around him – specifically Wendy whose few moments here are killer. Compared to Dipper and Mabel, who have had whole episodes dedicated to how crappy they can be, Soos seems like the type of character who the creators seem afraid to really dig into; for example, while Dipper has received a massive amount of emotional development over the course of the first season leading to “Into the Bunker”, everything just sort of falls into place for Soos. Mabel and Dipper often overcome the monsters of Gravity Falls by recognizing their shortcomings, but here Soos just threw the monster into a fire and got a girlfriend, the traditional endgame that Gravity Falls has usually strayed away from.
“Gravity Falls” is often at its best when it rips into its characters, and we did get some of that this week. Soos, having recently finished a 13 hour dating simulator session, saying “Undo!” after knocking into a woman only for her to growl “You can’t undo who you are” is easily one of my favorite moments of the week. In fact, there were plenty of great moments in this episode, but the biggest issue I take is that there wasn’t any sense of consequence that’s often present in the show. New character Melody, voiced by Jillian Bell, is one of the many instantly likable cast members the show churns out and it’d be great to see her gain a presence as more than Soos’s girlfriend, which is likely on a show with a town full of rather fleshed out characters. But at the end of the show she casually mentions moving to Portland which means Soos, and by extension us viewers, have gained nothing. Melody came off as character with a ton of potential, and in a show that often brings back the most obscure of characters, it’d be a real shame if they didn’t stretch her out into more than a prop for Soos.
Speaking of, this week’s villain Giffany also had a lot of potential but was shortchanged to better serve Soos’s story. That said, for a Monster of the Week type villain, she was absolutely horrifying in the quirky way many of the villains of Gravity Falls are. The transformation from adorable mistranslated Japanese dating sim to an omniscient digital goddess was unnerving and the confrontation at the pizzeria was compelling, even if it ended pretty simply. Also, I wish I had posted this review three minutes after the airing ended so any Five Nights at Freddy’s jokes I could make would still be fresh. C’est la vie.
Continued belowAll in all, “Soos and the Real Girl” was an intriguing experiment in shifting the focus away from the main two and shining some light on the rest of the cast. There were some stumbles here, but not in any way that would turn me away from seeing another “day in the limelight” episode. Everything that makes Gravity Falls fun was here – scary monsters, snappy dialogues, dating sims – but the show didn’t delve deep enough into Soos’s character to justify making him the star of this episode. With some tweaking, it could have easily been another Dipper episode. And it’s not like we need more Dipper; instead we should be getting a more in-depth look into Soos’s world.
And by Soos’s world, I mean his grandma. Holy moly does she deserve an entire episode.
Final Verdict: 7.2 – Another pretty solid episode, but one that regrettably pulls back some punches.
