Gravity Falls isn’t serialized in the sense that this season can really be viewed as a one continuous story. While individual elements may carry over from episode to episode, and the subtle shifts in the status quo have remained largely consistent over the course of the show’s first year, the typical Gravity Falls story is self-contained. And yet, the show has suggested enough big mysteries and larger narratives lurking just below the surface that this season finale really can’t be just another random episode; it somehow has to marshal the season’s disparate threads into a fittingly epic conclusion. “Gideon Rises” takes an ingenious approach to this creative challenge, as the episode focuses on bringing the season full circle. That means a series of callbacks, most of which go back to the very first episode, “Tourist Trapped.” The creepy gnomes are back, and the grappling hook makes its triumphant return. Plus, the series premiere’s most important mystery is, if not exactly solved, then at least clarified in crucial, intriguing ways. This episode represents an end to what began way back in June of last year, but it also ultimately suggests where the show could be headed next.
Like “Dreamscaperers,” this finale has to offer an emotional arc for Dipper that feels like a natural extension of what the audience has seen all year. “Gideon Rises” is rather more successful in that pursuit, as it doesn’t so much force an emotional conflict where one didn’t really seem to exist—as “Dreamscaperers” did with Dipper’s sudden frustration with Stan—but rather draws attention to and then inverts a relationship the audience likely took for granted. Until this episode, the journal was an unambiguously good thing; after all, it provided the initial narrative impetus for all the craziness that followed. But “Gideon Rises” suggests that it’s a crutch, something that Dipper hides behind so that he doesn’t have to be truly brave all by himself. That’s not an entirely compelling argument, because Dipper has already shown his courage and decency on far too many occasions, but then it isn’t really supposed to be. After all, it’s Gideon who makes this argument to Dipper, and it’s only Dipper’s natural pre-teen insecurity that allows the little creep’s words to fester. But Gideon is hardly an objective observer; indeed, his harsh dismissal of Dipper seems far more tied up in his own feelings of inadequacy than any real interest, however slanted, in Dipper’s worthiness as a hero.
Still, Gideon’s words remove Dipper’s last shred of resolve, and so much of the power of “Gideon Rises” comes from watching the world collapse beneath the Pines family. Even when facing the fearsome, otherworldly likes of Bill Cipher, the Summerween trickster, or the Gremloblin, there was never even the slightest suggestion of the nuclear option: namely, calling Dipper and Mabel’s parents. Beyond their arms-only cameos in the opening minutes of “Tourist Trapped,” the Pines parents have been completely ignored this season, which makes Stan’s desperately reassuring phone call to them all the more shocking. As a defeated Stan observes, summer is over, and grim reality is beginning to seep into this magical world. The smash cut from Dipper and Mabel wondering what else they can do to them dejectedly getting on the bus out of town is a heartbreaking moment, and no attempt is made to undercut that sorrow with a quick visual gag or a Soos one-liner (even though he’s perfectly situated to provide such a joke). Gravity Falls earns its ultimate triumph by making its heroes stare long and hard at their defeat.
The divergent paths for Soos and Wendy suggested by “Dreamscaperers” is also very much on display here, and they represent the shakiest territory for the show, albeit in different ways. Wendy pops up a couple times to confirm that she doesn’t want to lose the Shack either and that she has no interest in getting back together with Robbie. These feel like perfunctory check-ins, acknowledgments that the show has to make because she’s still technically a main character, but they could be excised without affecting the episode’s story in the slightest. Then again, if Wendy has become problematic for Gravity Falls—which I’m not necessarily sure is the case, but it’s a distinct possibility—then it’s not really the job of the season finale to bring her back into the fold. “Gideon Rises” needs to finish off the stories the show has spent the year developing; season two can work out how best to reintegrate Wendy into the show as it is now. It’s instructive to see how this episode organizes its vast ensemble: the townspeople become one crazed, Springfield-style mob, with the Pines family and Soos angled as disrespected outsiders and Gideon as the manipulative villain. Wendy’s teenage slacker personality makes it difficult for her to truly join up with Dipper and company, yet she’s also clearly too sane to join the mob. The show can more organically include her father, the crazed lumberjack Manly Dan, than it can find a place for her.