History Recap / NightmareTimeS1E3JanesACarAndTheWitchInTheWeb

* SignificantDoubleCasting: In both this story and "Jane's a Car" Creator/JaimeLynBeatty plays an EvilMatriarch, although Pamela Foster is almost the exact opposite archetype of a "bad mom" as the ghost of Jane Perkins. (And unlike Pamela, Jane doesn't ever display any direct malice toward Tim himself, even if she puts him in an incredibly fucked up situation by the end of the story.)

* ArtisticLicense:: File this as possibly ArtisticLicenseBiology or ArtisticLicenseGeography -- Donna says that there's only "a few short months until Hatchetfield's Honey Festival", but also says this is "as the leaves fall and the jack-o-lanterns light up", i.e. this is October and the Honey Festival is in the ''dead of winter''. In RealLife, a "honey festival" is almost always at the height of summer, around August, which is when the peak honey harvest from beehives is -- whereas bees don't give any honey in winter, when all the flowers are dead, and when it's a terrible time to hold a festival in general (''especially'' winter in a lakeside community in Michigan). After ''Nightmare Time 2'', which revolved around the Honey Festival, Nick Lang confirmed that the festival does indeed happen in midsummer and the intended joke here was that Hatchetfield is already eagerly awaiting the next festival two months after the previous one.

* ArtisticLicense:: File this as possibly ArtisticLicenseBiology or ArtisticLicenseGeography -- Donna says that there's only "a few short months until Hatchetfield's Honey Festival", but also says this is "as the leaves fall and the jack-o-lanterns light up", i.e. this is October and the Honey Festival is in the ''dead of winter''. In RealLife, a "honey festival" is almost always at the height of summer, around August, which is when the peak honey harvest from beehives is -- whereas bees don't give any honey in winter, when all the flowers are dead, and when it's a terrible time to hold a festival in general (''especially'' winter in a lakeside community in Michigan). ''Nightmare Time 2'' goes some way toward explaining this, as that whole series surrounds the Honey Festival and explains that the event is held at a time of year when Hatchetfield is even more paranormal than usual, though [[ItsAlwaysSpring it doesn't come across as if it's happening in winter]].

* ThereAreNoTherapists: We find out that Duke has tried to get Pamela to take Hannah to "specialists" in the past but she refuses, thinking that she'd be blamed for Hannah's AmbiguousDisorder, meaning Hannah has made it to the age of 14 without any diagnosis or treatment. Pamela is just as stubborn about Miss Holloway -- a [[HotWitch very different kind of "specialist"]] -- but unlike the others, [[CompellingVoice Miss Holloway doesn't take no for an answer]].

As with all ''Nightmare Time'' episodes, it's a DoubleFeature, consisting of two stories:

* AccidentalAdultery: Tom begins seeing Becky, which Jane is ''not'' happy to hear. But no reasonable person could fault Tom for this, seeing as how Jane ''died'' and he had no way of knowing her soul was still around. Unfortunately, Jane is not a reasonable person, and treats it like Tom was actually having an affair.

* AmbiguousSituation: This story led to fierce debate over whether Jane was always a callous, abusive person and Emma and Tom just described her after her death through rose-tinted glasses, whether Jane CameBackWrong due to the evil ritual used to resurrect her or alternatively was DrivenToMadness by her situation of being [[AndIMustScream trapped with an inanimate object for a body]], or whether the spirit possessing the car isn't ''really'' Jane at all but some kind of demonic impersonator sent by the Lords in Black, like Ethan's "Bad Double" in ''Theatre/BlackFriday''. WordOfGod on the matter is vague, but Creator/NickLang generally talks about this episode as though Jane is in fact the "real" Jane but that we shouldn't judge Jane's actions in life by her actions after death.

* SpeakInUnison: Creator/JaimeLynBeatty and Kim Whalen do this for the final WhamLine to demonstrate to the audience that Jane is indeed possessing Becky's body.

* ArtisticLicense, Beekeeping: File this as possibly ArtisticLicenseBiology or ArtisticLicenseGeography -- Donna says that there's only "a few short months until Hatchetfield's Honey Festival", but also says this is "as the leaves fall and the jack-o-lanterns light up", i.e. this is October and the Honey Festival is in the ''dead of winter''. In RealLife, a "honey festival" is almost always at the height of summer, around August, which is when the peak honey harvest from beehives is -- whereas bees don't give any honey in winter, when all the flowers are dead, and when it's a terrible time to hold a festival in general (''especially'' winter in a lakeside community in Michigan).

* OpeningShoutOut: The TitleSequence for this story intersperses a simple shot of Hannah playing the ukulele with the same StockFootage of creepy-looking woods from the ''Nightmare Time'' main theme; it turns out this is supposed to be footage of the Witchwood Forest, whose OriginStory takes center stage in this story.

* OutOfFocus: No ''Theatre/TheGuyWhoDidntLikeMusicals'' characters appear in this story except for a brief {{Cameo}} from Dan and Donna on the Hatchetfield news. The rest of the cast of ''Theatre/BlackFriday'' is also mostly offstage, with Lex and Ethan having been PutOnABus (to prison) and Tom Houston and his family, the subject of the previous story, being entirely disconnected from this one. We don't get any returning characters other than Hannah, until Wiggly and Uncle Wiley make their surprise reappearance midway through, and until the appearance of Lex in the ending (who very quickly turns out to be an illusion cast by the Witch).
** People who were waiting for the stakes to get apocalyptic enough for General [=MacNamara=] and PEIP to show up in a ''Nightmare Time'' story... are still waiting. Notable because Uncle Wiley's OriginStory is intimately related to PEIP and [=MacNamara=] was presented as his ArchNemesis originally -- and yet neither is so much as mentioned here (possibly because this Uncle Wiley is only a LivingMemory of Miss Holloway's).

* PointOfDivergence: According to Uncle Wiley, his duel with Miss Holloway at the Starlight Theater is a major one -- it was a 50/50 chance which one of them would win, and "his half" of the resulting timelines are the ones that lead directly to TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt (which so far has happened as the climax to all of the Hatchetfield stage shows), while "her half" is the half where the apocalypse was prevented (leading to the ''Nightmare Time'' series).

* ShroudedInMyth: Miss Holloway is intentionally presented as a huge mystery to the audience when she appears, and the story ends with us still having more questions than answers about her. The same is true about the overall history of Hatchetfield and the Witchwood, what Willabella Muckwab got up to exactly before her execution, Uncle Wiley's own OriginStory and how he came to tangle with Miss Holloway, etc.

* {{Tuckerization}}: Creator/NickLang [[WordOfGod revealed in an interview]] that the puppy "Lex" pulls out of her backpack in this story would've been played by Nemo, the chihuahua owned by his brother Matt and Matt's girlfriend Rusty, if this story had been done as a fully-produced short film.

* AdamWesting: The fandom has made a lot of jokes about the portrayal of Tom in the MusicVideo being this for Creator/DylanSaunders, who's owned up to sharing some of Tom's RatedMForManly tastes -- but he has also pointed out that [[ButIPlayOneOnTV he's not actually that much of a classic car guy]], the car in the video is a rental (which is good because its license plate number is clearly visible in one shot) and his actual car is a much more sensible Nissan. ([[RunningGag Which is not to say he doesn't love it dearly in its own way.]])

* IdenticalGrandson: Played with; Willabella Muckwab and her distant descendant Lex Foster are both played by Angela Giarratana, but of course, this connection exists between [[LoadsAndLoadsOfRoles a ton of other characters in the franchise as well]]. Instead, Willabella sharing Lex's actress serves the function of making it emotionally impactful when Lex, in her only appearance in the story, is revealed to actually be Willabella in disguise and we witness the transformation onscreen. TheNarrator's description and the way Angela [[EvilIsHammy puts her all into contorting her face]] suggests that Willabella, in fact, does not much resemble Lex.

* VisibleInvisibility: Jane's human self is visible to the audience (superimposed on a [[GreenScreen Zoom backdrop]] of the Mustang her soul is inhabiting) but not anyone else -- even she doesn't actually experience her own body as anything but a car, which is a big part of what's [[AndIMustScream driving her to extreme measures]] to get her body back ([[IncrediblyLamePun so to speak]]).

* CoitusEnsues: A hilariously shocking moment of depravity when, in the depths of his guilt and internal conflict over Jane asking him to become an accomplice to murder, Tom goes along with Jane's offer to seal the deal by ''having sex with her'' to prove he still sees her as his wife. The original scene from the livestream had this scene ''[[OverlyLongGag just keep going]]'' and escalating the {{Squick}} the whole time before Tim mercifully interrupts it by [[CaughtWithYourPantsDown walking in and catching them]].

* ActorAllusion: The Three-Girl Creature is played by Creator/JaimeLynBeatty, Mariah Rose Faith and Creator/LaurenLopez -- the three female members of the ''Theatre/TheGuyWhoDidntLikeMusicals'' cast, a show that centered on the Starlight Theatre, the venue where Miss Holloway apparently confronted the Creature in her memory. (The three of them played teenage girls pulling a similar SpeakInUnison gag to the Creature during the "Not Your Seed" scene, a broadly similar situation where Alice, Deb and the unnamed third girl had become part of a supernatural HiveMind.)
** For once, a Starkid CreatorCouple play a couple onscreen in a show, if only an {{implied| love interest}} one in this case -- Curt Mega and Kim Whalen are married in RealLife and play Duke and Miss Holloway here.

-->'''Music:'''\\
"Jane's a Car" performed by Creator/DylanSaunders

-->'''Music:'''\\

* RefrainFromAssuming: There was a ''lot'' of confusion over the title of this story's ThemeTune. The original script does in fact give it the most obvious possible title, "She Lets Me Drive" (after the first line of the chorus), but Mariah Rose Faith and Angela Giarratana both said they couldn't think of it as anything other than the first line of the song, "Got My Foot on the Gas!". Eventually the soundtrack version followed the other story {{Theme Tune}}s and named it after the story itself, "Jane's a Car", which means if you listen to the song out of context it's a confusing NonAppearingTitle (one which [[DontExplainTheJoke directly explains the metaphor]] behind most {{Car Song}}s).

* {{Corpsing}}: In a story mostly devoid of overt jokes, we still surprisingly get some moments of this -- Creator/JeffBlim laughs out loud during Pamela's one-sided banter with Dan and Donna on her TV set at the beginning of the story, and we hear surprised and appreciative laughter when the five AdorableAbomination dolls come out in the climax (possibly because this was also the first time the cast had seen all five of them together -- there's particularly noticeable laughter when the cast sees Pokotho and puts together the visual clues that Pokotho is the true identity of ''Theatre/TheGuyWhoDidntLikeMusicals''' HiveQueen).