In this last hurrah of explicit homages to animation of the past, the most obvious discussion point is Merrie Melodies and its ilk: Babes in the Wood is essentially a full-episode reference to the bouncing musical shorts of yore, where everything can sing’n’dance and the villain is a blustery bozo who’s defeated with a sight gag. If we expand to children’s entertainment in general, as we did with Greg’s Beatrix Potter episode, then The Wizard of Oz is our logical next step: the song welcoming him to Cloud City owes everything to Dorothy’s introduction to Munchkinland, complete with the fact that our hero has just entered a dream.

And look, there’s nothing wrong with talking about the obvious. But as we near the end, I think it’s a little more interesting to instead explore the very beginning. So let’s go back to a newspaper cartoonist in New York—the one who inspired fellow New York newspaper cartoonist John Randolph Bray to become an animator, which in turn led fellow New York newspaper cartoonist Max Fleischer to become an animator, because it turns out that just like the history of superhero comics a few decades later, the history of American animation began with a bunch of commercial artists who dreamed big in the city that never sleeps.

A boy named Zenas was born in Michigan on September 26, 1871. Or maybe he was born there in 1869. Or maybe he was born in Canada in 1867. He said one thing, a biographer said another, and census data says another, and I wasn’t there. It’s similarly unclear when or why he started going by his middle name, but by the time he took his first job at age 21 (or 19 or 17) as a billboard and poster artist in Chicago, he was calling himself Winsor McCay. They sure did know how to name ‘em in the 19th century.

McCay began his newspaper career as a freelancer, but moved to New York in 1903 to work for the New York Herald, where he wrote a variety of comics before hitting it big with Little Sammy Sneeze. McCay’s art was always brilliant, but his gag work was formulaic to a fault: the joke for Sammy Sneeze was always the same, he would sneeze and ruin everything right before the last panel. That devotion to formula would continue in his second big comic Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, where a fantastical events would occur for ever-changing characters before the lead woke up in the last panel, revealing it was a dream.

That second formula was the basis of McCay’s masterpiece. Already a successful cartoonist in the two short years since he’d moved to New York, his fame skyrocketed with Little Nemo in Slumberland, which used the same “wake up at the end” formula but with recurring characters and a running story. He toyed with the medium like none had before, playing with panel arrangement and innovating the portrayal of motion in comics, and his art skills only improved with this full-color strip. His success led to the vaudeville circuit, where he turned the act of drawing into a performance, and this combination of stage entertainment and his continuing comic work led him to seek new ways to dazzle the crowds.

By 1910, the earliest animated shorts had already started to emerge, and McCay was inspired by pioneers like James Stuart Blackton and Émile Cohl to try animating the characters of Little Nemo. Under Blackton’s direction, McCay singlehandedly drew around four thousand fully colored frames to produce his first animated cartoon, presented at the tail end of a filmed short about said cartoon in 1911. As mentioned, animated shorts were already a thing. But none of them looked anything like this. (If you’re concerned that there might be racist caricatures in it, don’t worry, there definitely are, McCay had a lot of strengths but overcoming garbage prejudices was not one of them).

The sheer quality of his work, continuing with the legendary Gertie the Dinosaur, directly led to the invention of the rotoscope as a means to mass-produce cartoons of similar finesse. The influence of Winsor McCay over animation as we know it is hard to overstate (and let’s stress again that this was his side gig, and he was just as influential over comic art): as crazy as it sounds, it’s safe to say that Over the Garden Wall would not exist if not for a story about the whimsical adventures of a little boy who traveled across a land of dreams from his bed.

“Where’s Greg, Wirt?”

Babes in the Wood is delightful and goofy and lighthearted exactly once.

In the same way our fourth-to-last episode mirrored our fourth, this third-to-last episode mirrors our third: Chapters 4 and 7 focus on Wirt, but 3 and 8 are Greg’s. It’s not simply a matter of who the main character is, but what these episodes are about: Greg’s love of fun clashing with his drive to help others. Both times he’s spurred by the desire to help others to go off on his own, both times he gets distracted by whimsical wonders involving funny animals and physical humor, and both times he ends up deciding to help out anyway. But despite switching his goal from making the whole world a better place to just helping his brother, the stakes are actually far higher now, so the fun has to be that much more fun if we want the full horror of the ending to sink in.

There’s no tonal shift in the series that’s more devastating than Greg falling prey to the Beast after nearly ten minutes of goofiness in Cloud City. It turns a moment of welcome relief from the growing tension of Wirt’s despair into a dagger in the heart, and the knife is twisted when we learn in our next episode what the Unknown truly is.

That despair is evident well before Wirt explicitly gives up. We get our second opening in a row featuring Beatrice in a hopeless search, and things aren’t much better for the boys. All sense of progression from the first episode feels lost, with Wirt reverting to mumbling poetry and Greg reverting to Rock Facts. Their boat is an outhouse and Greg uses a guitar as an oar, because (if you’ll pardon my French) they’re up shit creek without a paddle. When they land, Greg’s victorious bugle is a ridiculous sign of hope, but he soon drops it in the same way he abandons the guitar: in Schooltown Follies he takes instruments to help others, but this time he loses them.

Wirt’s frustration with Greg threatened to boil over in The Ringing of the Bell, only to be cooled when the Woodsman interrupts them. This time there’s no such interruption, so after Greg’s total failure to read the room gets to be too much, his brother finally snaps. It crucially isn’t entirely unjustified, as Greg’s antics might be funny to us but have not been appreciated by Wirt, and despite Greg’s age excusing his lack of emotional intelligence, it’s still gotta be frustrating for a teen to deal with that behavior nonstop. And Wirt’s “tirade” reflects his depression, because he doesn’t even seem that angry: he doesn’t shout or rave, he’s just openly irritated as he argues that they’ll be lost forever. This is apathy and fatigue, because he’s lost the energy to be furious.

But the most chilling part of the exchange isn’t Wirt cruelly blaming Greg for their mess, or abandoning their search. It’s when, after Wirt asks if they can give up, Greg responds with a chipper “You can do anything if you set your mind to it!”, a sentiment that the Beast will fiendishly repeat verbatim while tricking Greg. It’s such a generic positive expression that Greg hangs a lampshade on it, but it shows the darker side of the power our minds have over our well-being. Sure, it’s a great lesson that focus and dedication can help us achieve our dreams, but if we use that focus and dedication towards self-destructive behavior, there’s no limit to how badly we can hurt ourselves.

After a goofy sort of prayer (incorporating lines from the classic Trick or Treat poem, which will become super relevant an episode from now), Greg is whisked away by so-creepy-it’s-funny cherubim to the score of a so-overwrought-it’s-funny song. His flight aboard the bed/cart pulled by a donkey across the sky feels legitimately magical, but we soon switch to the surreal world of 1930′s songs and physics.

Cloud City is such a stark contrast to the tone of the episode so far that it instantly feels delightful, and such a stark contrast to the tone of the entire series that it lends a special sort of wonder to Greg’s dreamland. References to old cartoons are everywhere in Over the Garden Wall, and before we delve into the tension of our last two episodes, we get one last gigantic celebration of the past with a sequence straight from the golden age of animation.

The transition alone is enough to make this scene hilarious, but the actual jokes help quite a bit: Greg’s growing impatience with the numerous Wizard of Oz reception committees is my favorite gag of the night. Everything is cute to the point of being cloying, including our three angels that look and sound an awful lot like Greg, and the parade that he leads seems like such a fun and peaceful affair after so much time wandering alone. It’s easy to get as roped into it as Greg when we first watch it. But considering the events of our next episode, the scene destroys me every time I rewatch it, because there’s a very specific place Greg is being welcomed to.

Babes in the Wood gets a lot less cute when it becomes clear that it’s a welcoming committee for a dying child. Greg and Wirt are drowning, and this is the episode where the cold starts to set in and the younger and weaker of the two looks into a bright light. Greg’s near-death experience is hammered in when we get to The Unknown, but for now it’s being rationalized in a way that brings him comfort.

The cold is Greg’s enemy, and the same childish tone is used to show that he’s willing to fight for his life: thus, the North Wind segment is ironically more hopeful to me than the parade’s warm welcome of death. This third song sounds enough like a Randy Newman number that I’m honestly still convinced it’s an uncredited Randy Newman performance, and it jolts us back to reality for a moment as we see the effect this bitter wind has on our babes in the woods. The boys are starting to freeze, and we again see Beatrice searching for them, getting so close before an owl that looks remarkably like the one we saw in our first episode scares her off. The episode doesn’t want to lose us completely to the sky, and this grounding helps keep the stakes clear as we complete Greg’s dream.

The Popeye-esque battle between Greg and Ol’ Windbag is a hoot, between the latter’s grumbling anger and the former rolling up his sleeve to get back into the brawl. Its conclusion is hidden from us, so we have no idea how Greg gets him in a bottle, but that fits right in with the weird logic of this throwback and allows us to meet the Queen of the Clouds.

I ought to bring up the theory that everything we see here is an illusion created by the Beast, even though I don’t really subscribe to it myself. The most obvious “hint” is that this sequence directly leads to Greg deciding to join the Beast with an off-screen promise, but we also have the old man in the welcoming march wearing an outfit just like Wirt’s and holding a lantern, perhaps a reference to the Beast’s intended fate for Greg’s brother. Plus there’s lines in the songs that seem like they’re luring Greg in, especially the assurance that the wonders of Cloud City “ain’t gonna lie,” which sounds a lot like what a liar would say. Both the Queen of the Clouds and the Beast pointedly call him Gregory instead of Greg, but so does Old Lady Mrs. Daniels (and Wirt when introducing him in Songs of the Dark Lantern).

While it’s a neat enough idea, I think the Queen of Clouds is pretty clearly on Greg’s side for real: she seems upset at his fate in a way that doesn’t make much sense for an ally of the Beast. I also think it’s more meaningful for Greg to truly have the choice between happiness and responsibility, between the possible peace of rest and the definite struggle of life, and for him to choose the latter right as his brother is giving in. But I’ve got no beef with folks whose interpretation of the show is enhanced by this theory, so believe what you want to believe about this ambiguous situation.

Either way, we cut back to Wirt instead of Greg when the dream ends, and he’s still annoyed as he’s trying to sleep. Greg’s strange new seriousness is already cause for concern, and asking Wirt to take care of the frog is even more alarming, but even that doesn’t compare the horror of realizing where he’s actually going. Or rather, with whom.

This is another reason why I think the Queen is an ally: while it’s obviously dangerous for Greg to go with the Beast, that’s what it takes for Wirt to snap out of his funk. It’s a hell of a gambit, but as soon as he starts to awaken, he’s immediately concerned for Greg’s safety despite whatever anger or resentment he had, sparing no time or thought to the branches creeping over him as he runs after his brother.

The quiet distortion as we follow his frantic search is soon met by the Beast’s song, but even as he blames himself for Greg’s plight, Wirt is no longer content to wallow in despair. Because it turns out that these brothers are more similar than they seem, and neither is truly capable of letting the other suffer. In the folk tale for which this episode is named, two children abandoned in the woods eventually die and are covered in leaves by small birds (with some versions seeing them enter heaven), but as we’ll see in our next episode, this isn’t a folk tale.

The thrumming noise intensifies as Wirt slips on the ice, then we add visual distortion as he plummets into the freezing water. He’s saved, but this isn’t water that sees him reborn: the distortion finally breaks as Beatrice asks the episode’s terrible question, and we’re left in the cold.

Every even-numbered episode of Over the Garden Wall, perhaps by virtue of airing twice per night, ends in a mood-setting cliffhanger of gradual intensity (or at least it does until the end). First we got a leaf symbolically caught in a fence, then the Beast’s introduction, then the fallout of Adelaide, and now the capture of Greg. Getting trapped has always been a threat for these roving heroes, but the greatest threat of all, that of Wirt trapping himself, has been handled. Things look bleaker than they ever have, but despite the glee of Greg’s dream contrasting with the harshness of reality, Wirt’s ability to climb out of the pit of despair keeps hope alive: even in absence, Greg’s influence looms large.

Rock Factsheet

Dinosaurs had big ears, but everyone forgot because dinosaur ears don’t have bones.

Where have we come, and where shall we end?