Life will always have its share of dirt. Mucking up situations that should be clean, obscuring the right path forward, piling up little by little until it threatens to bury you if you’re not careful. Part of growing up, maybe the biggest part, is figuring out what you’re going to do about it.



The Unknown presents two options. The first is sung by the Beast as he serenades Greg’s weakening form, heard as the Woodsman slowly enters the woods, first as purely diegetic music but soon joined by piano and strings:

“Sorrow and fear are easily forgotten when you submit to the soil of the earth.”

The second option comes from a surprising source, a character who never interacts with the Beast but whose advice is good enough that when push comes to shove, knowingly or not, Wirt takes it. It might not be phrased with the elegance of the Beast’s lyrical argument for surrender, but that doesn’t stop it from being Over the Garden Wall’s most important lesson:

“Eat your dirt.”

There isn’t a simple dichotomy between letting problems consume you and consuming problems: after all, actively seeking misery isn’t great for you. And The Unknown provides two major examples of why the generic “never give up!” message on its own is ultimately flawed: Greg and the Woodsman’s determination is noble at its core, but it blinds them to the reality that the Beast is deceiving them. With conviction must come critical thinking and self-awareness, because it’s otherwise impossible to break stubborn bad habits and seek healthier ways to solve problems.

In other words, the best way to handle difficulty is to fully digest it and grow stronger from it, rather than shovel it in and get sick. Don’t gorge on your dirt, but don’t submit to it, either. Just eat it.

This message is fittingly hidden in an episode that showcases the full obfuscating power of the Beast. He’s able to twist truth and tropes alike to fit his needs: even something as basic as light representing the known and darkness representing the unknown gets warped, as the episode opens not in the usual shadows of the woods but a blindingly bright snowstorm. The Beast may be a creature of darkness, but this allows him to hide that his soul is a brilliant light. There’s an inescapable feel to the Beast’s machinations: neither the light or the dark can save you from his lies.



While his long-running trick to keep the Woodsman in his thrall may be the Beast’s cruelest lie, the one that hits harder for me is his method of trapping Greg. We don’t need to see Greg’s adventures to understand the fairy tale logic that drove his quest, where a brave child is given three impossible tasks and overcomes them using his wiles. The Beast gives Greg victories to build his confidence, and those victories are based on guile, allowing Greg to feel like he’s got one over on the villain. Our hero is already in a bad way, and it’s heartbreaking to see him persevere like the Little Match Girl as the cold intensifies.

We waste no time reuniting Wirt with Beatrice, and while we’ve had little time with the latter since Lullaby in Frogland, her search for her friends in the past few episodes is all we need to see to understand her desire to make things right. Wirt remains upset with her despite knowing that she saved his life, but is able to see the same fierce resolve to help that spurred him into the snow. Both of them are fueled by guilt and the need to make things right, so after a brief pause that speaks to how much her betrayal still hurts, Wirt takes her along and offers his thanks.



The third piece of the equation is introduced at the old grist mill, scrambling for more wood and finding the cracked stick he tossed away in our first episode. Like Wirt, the Woodsman is determined to save a loved one, and like Greg, his stubbornness allows him to be duped by the Beast. As a man who embodies both of the boys’ struggles, it makes sense that it’s from his perspective, not Wirt’s, that we first see the consequences of his actions. The singing that has haunted us since Songs of the Dark Lantern transitions to an eerily serene children’s choir as Greg is revealed to be covered in branches, and the horrible truth of the woods is made clear: like the suicides in Dante’s Inferno, the lost souls of the Unknown become trees.

What follows says everything about the Beast and the Woodsman alike. The Beast argues that his servant would have chopped the trees down even if he had known, assuming the worst in humanity, but even this reeks of more deception: if he truly believed that the lie was unnecessary, why lie in the first place? Either he knew that there was a risk in telling the truth and is manipulating the Woodsman now, or he had full faith that the Woodsman would do the unthinkable to help his daughter and is now reveling in his misery. Either way, the Woodsman’s doesn’t second-guess himself for a second, rushing to help Greg regardless of the consequences and renouncing his actions without hesitation. He meets every attempt at placation with fury, and shows that for all his faults, he truly did want to make the world a better place.

Only after the Woodsman and the Beast leave the scene do Wirt and Beatrice find Greg, guided by the same lantern that indirectly caused the kid to get captured in the first place. It’s a harrowing scene even when you know everything will work out okay, but it was especially disconcerting in first viewing: looking at it from a big picture, it was always unlikely that the show would actually allow Greg to die, but it was still possible, considering how close to death the boys are in the real world, how close to death Greg is here, and that Over the Garden Wall was already established as a finite miniseries with this episode as the conclusion. Greg coughing up leaves might be waved off as a joke, showing that he’s still got that childish sense of silliness, but it’s still a gruesome image given the circumstances. The Latin translation of Potatoes and Molasses sung in the background sounds like a ridiculous idea on paper, but turning a joyous highlight of Greg’s journey into a dirge that’s subsumed by the same eerie children’s choir as the Beast’s song works horrifically well.

But what sells the scene more than anything is the acting. Collin Dean layers Greg’s signature earnestness with exhaustion and pain, wringing sincere emotion from lines like “I’m a stealer” (which isn’t a bad line, but requires an actor of Dean’s skill to not come across as distractingly cutesy). Melanie Lynskey only has one major line in the scene, but her frantic confirmation that leaves are growing inside Greg amplifies the horror without gilding the lily, which isn’t easy when a character is telling us what we’re already seeing. But the absolute knockout comes from Elijah Wood, barely holding Wirt together as he struggles to comfort and free his brother. The guilt over getting Greg into this mess seeps out as Wood’s voice cracks and he forces himself to present a reassuring front.

Even this conversation, where Wirt owns up to his mistakes and takes responsibility for wronging Greg, is shrouded by the miscommunication that has plagued these characters throughout the series. Beyond the false alarm of Greg’s leaves, Wirt thinks Greg is apologizing for all the things Wirt blamed on him, when in fact he’s apologizing for stealing the Rock Facts Rock. Which adds an extra layer of tragedy when Greg appears to succumb after the brothers hit the same wavelength at last, after Wirt, not Greg, gives their frog a proper name.

Like Greg in Babes in the Wood, Wirt isn’t frightened when he first meets the Beast: both brothers are more focused on how to help the other when introduced to the show’s villain. Wirt’s concern is so great that he dismisses the Beast outright until he’s offered a deal to help Greg, and we see that as much as he’s grown, the old Wirt is still a part of him. For a moment, he allows hopelessness to guide his actions, assuming as he has before that things won’t turn out well. But that signature dithering makes a triumphant return as he changes his mind, impetuously calling the Beast’s plan “dumb,” because at long last he’s gained a greater sense of awareness. A version of Wirt as trapped in his own head as he was in Into the Unknown might’ve taken up the Woodsman’s burden, but this version of Wirt is finally wise enough to not believe his lies.

The Beast’s game is up the moment Wirt stumbles onto the lantern’s secret. Sure, he can put on a terrifying display of darkness, but a monster powered by deception is all but powerless against the truth. The Beast may succeed in scaring Wirt, but even if his voice cracks the first time around, all it takes is confidently calling a bluff to render the Beast helpless. And I love that this defeat ends all of the deception in the scene, even Wirt’s: he’s putting on a show when he tries for a badass one-liner before blowing out the lantern, but his derisive “pfft” at the Beast’s pleas is legitimately badass. What’s more, his secret possession of Adelaide’s scissors is revealed, the Woodsman realizes that his daughter’s soul was never in the lantern, and the Beast, already defeated, has his true form cast into a harsh light for one last scare.

(I’m not including the image because I think his true form has a lot more power as a glimpse, so here’s a picture of what happens next.)



The ambiguity of our return to the real world is something I cherish too much to try and make definitive claims over the “actual events.” Attempts to decipher the true nature of the Unknown sorta miss that the place literally tells you what it is by name. We can’t know whether it’s an alternate dimension or a dream with weird real-world implications or a time warp or literal magic or whatever, and it frankly doesn’t matter. What matters is that when Wirt awakens, he rushes down to Greg instead of swimming up: regardless of what happened or didn’t happen in the Unknown, Wirt has transformed from a child who blames others for everything to a young man capable of selflessly saving a life.

Shirley Jones’s voice breaks me as we see these kids struggle to survive the aftermath of their near-drowning, adapting Beatrice’s theme to a lullaby as her false promise to take the boys home is fulfilled. Yes, we see the bell ringing within Jason Funderburker as Jason Funderberker confuses his relevance in the story, but it’s more important that Wirt calls the frog “our frog” and works up the nerve to ask Sara out. Greg is back to his old self, happy as a clam, and Wirt has one last moment of babbling to show he hasn’t grown all the way out of his confidence issues. Even if we don’t know what the future has in store for them, we at least get the sense that everything is going to be okay as our second Jones takes the stage.

Jack Jones’s final montage shows the scenes that began our journey resolving in reverse order, with three endings in quick succession: Beatrice’s family restored, Jason Funderburker revealed as the singer, and Greg returning the Rock Facts Rock. Any one of these could work as the show’s true ending, as all three involve a different form of truth prevailing. Beatrice’s family is back to their true forms, and her mother tells us a truer means of dealing with dirt than the Beast ever did. The frog’s identity wasn’t much of a secret when given a little thought, as Jack Jones provided his singing voice in Lullaby in Frogland, but confirmation is still gratifying as the show’s final “mystery” is solved. And Greg represents “truth” in the sense of being true to oneself and just to others, while at the same time ridding himself of a tool he used to tell fun fibs.

And yet, some mysteries remain. We have no idea what really happened with the Woodsman and his daughter, especially because he’s apparently been grinding up trees for years. Considering Beatrice’s family seems to live at the mill, does this mean they’ve also been birds for years, or did the Woodsman only recently take it as a means of production? What’s up with the black turtles? Are the frogs on a wind-up toy steamboat launched by two boys? Questions abound without answers, and it’s okay that we don’t have them. Accepting that certain things will always be unknown makes it easier to move past our fear of it, a skill that none of us will ever need to outgrow.

I can speak firsthand to how tempting it is to let the weight of your the unknown overcome you. In 2014, after realizing the path I’d committed to for years wasn’t going to end where I’d hoped, when I had no idea what the future had in store and the unknown was an overwhelming burden, the depression that had consumed my teens burst back into my life. I was incredibly fortunate to have parents willing and able to take me in, because I sincerely don’t know what I would’ve done to myself otherwise.

I spent the fall and winter with them as I tried to regain my bearings, but it took another stroke of fortune to really pull me back from the brink. Friends in New York offered me an open room in their apartment in March of 2015, and it’s impossible to overstate how much that shaped my life: hunting for apartments is hard enough without crippling despair, and it spurred me to get back to something resembling my old life. I started working at another bookstore, this time full-time, and in March of 2016 I applied to graduate school to become a librarian.

I was a school librarian part-time for the next two years as I went to library school, and absolutely loved it. I figured this would be my new path, but it turns out I wasn’t done with misplaced goals. Red flag after red flag sprouted up in the summer of 2018, and I was burnt all the way out after grad school and the grueling teacher’s licensing program, so I ended up turning down a sketchy-looking but secure job before the start of the schoolyear. I assumed I’d be able to find a public library job soon enough, a job that would allow me to work with other librarians rather than acting as a one-person library department: I had years of experience, I graduated from a school with a good local reputation, and I just plain knew what I was doing when it came to working with kids.

It wasn’t until March of 2019 that I finally landed at the job I have now. That’s a very short sentence for another very long fall and winter in my life, with numerous false starts and empty promises and a return to the feeling of total failure from 2014, now with the bonus of intense graduate school loans. It took two more existential crises than I would’ve liked, but I found my place and my people just in time for my twenties to finally be over. The dirt didn’t stop coming after my first career misfire, and I’m sure it won’t stop after the latest one, but I can’t tell you how grateful I am that I didn’t submit to the soil of the earth.

Eat your dirt, folks. Take care.