Foreshadowing / Gravity Falls

Gravity Falls

Foreshadowing in this series.

---

WARNING: This page is meant to describe events as they related to much later, very significant ones. Thus this page will have no spoiler marks at all. So, please, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

---

Examples:

• In "Tourist Trapped", when Dipper is trying to warn Mabel about Norman, he accidentally opens up to the gnome page of the journal instead of the intended zombie page. Turns out his first guess was more accurate — Norman is not a zombie, he’s a bunch of gnomes in disguise.
  • In that same conversation, Dipper tells Mabel, "I'm telling you, Norman is not what he seems." To Dipper, Norman seems like a zombie, but he's actually not. Dipper also happens to be Title Dropping the episode in which he, Mabel, and Soos find out about Stan's double life.
  • The Pines do end up facing against zombies for real, exactly one season later.
• At the end of "Tourist Trapped", Stan uses a vending machine to access a secret room. In "Gideon Rises", it's revealed that behind that vending machine is a secret passage to a laboratory containing the Universe Portal.
• In "Headhunters", Mabel unveils Grunkle Stan's old wax figures, plus the wax figure she made of Grunkle Stan, to the townsfolk who came to see it at the Mystery Shack, and she takes audience questions. Old Man McGucket asks her if the wax figures are alive, and how he can survive the wax man uprising. Later, the wax figures come to life and reveal that they do so whenever the moon is waxing.
  • In the same episode, when Stan is showing off the wax figures to the twins, he realizes that wax Abraham Lincoln melted at some point because a curtain was open, exposing it to sunlight. Dipper later uses sunlight to defeat wax Sherlock Holmes.
• During Lil' Gideon's song in "The Hand that Rocks the Mabel", he gets everyone to stand up after holding his amulet. Dipper has a throwaway line questioning why he, a firm non-believer in Gideon's abilities, stood up with everyone else. Turns out, Gideon's amulet gives him Telekinesis, allowing him to force everyone to their feet.
• At the end of "The Hand that Rocks the Mabel", Gideon reveals he has Journal #2, setting him up to be the Arc Villain for season 1.
• In "Irrational Treasure", a top secret document mentions a giant, evil, time-devouring baby from another dimension being frozen in a glacier in Antarctica. During "The Time Traveler's Pig", Dipper and Mabel briefly encounter the Time Baby's conquest of the world while traveling through time. This conquest is elaborated upon in "Blendin‘s Game".
• If you watch all the shorts and put the images together, you get this◊. This hints at the Blind Eye society, who become the subject of season 2's episode, "Society of the Blind Eye".
• In the "Voice Over" segment from "Bottomless Pit!", when Dipper first reveals his new voice to Mabel, she flips out and thinks he switched bodies with somebody. In "Carpet Diem", Dipper and Mabel do precisely that.
• For a season and a half, there were several hints to the reveal that Stan had a twin brother.
  • It also explains why many of the weird things found in the Shack that are actually real and work have to do with duality. A cloning copy machine, a body-swap carpet, a shapeshifter... they're all about two different bodies: the cloning copy machine makes two or more clones, the body-swap carpet needs two bodies to work, the shapeshifter can become an almost identical copy of everything he sees, making two of the same body appear... The show even finds sneaky ways to place two Stans in one panel, and during most of these scenes, he feels misery... convenient foreshadowing indeed.
  • In "The Legend of the Gobblewonker", we see that Stan's license plate reads "STNLYMBL" ("Stanley Mobile"), despite his name being Stanford. Turns out his real name is Stanley.
  • In "Headhunters", Stan becomes obsessed with the wax duplicate of himself Mabel made and is distraught when he's "killed". At the time, it just seems like a joke about his huge ego. Alex Hirsch later pointed out in an interview how having a life-sized model of someone who looked like him, who was then 'killed', would mess with Stan's head. Of course, this refers to him lamenting over Ford.
    • Notably, Stan was terribly startled once he walked in on the newly-finished Wax Stan. He certainly hadn't expected to find a nearly identical copy of himself back in the Shack.
  • Why doesn't Stan believe Gideon has psychic powers? Because Gideon keeps addressing him as 'Stanford'. If Gideon had powers, he would've known that this was not Stan's real name.
    • In addition, Stan's mother was a fake psychic. Stan probably recognizes the tricks.
  • In "The Inconveniencing", if the backwards-talking dog's speech is played in reverse it sounds like it's saying "Must distrust Grunkle." This refers to the dilemma the twins face when Stan opens the portal to another dimension.
  • In "Double Dipper", Stan appears ignorant of the magical properties surrounding the Mystery Shack's copier, because he used it before.
  • In "Carpet Diem", Stan once again demonstrates ignorance of the supernatural artifacts within the Shack. He also discovers a pair of glasses in a sealed-off room he may not even have known existed, which he quickly swipes. He can later be seen remorsefully staring at the glasses, as though in mourning.
  • In "Land Before Swine", Stan's made-up story about how Waddles was "forcibly kidnapped" involves the line "From heck's heart, I stab at thee!" How else could he have known that?
  • In "Little Gift Shop of Horrors", Stan makes up a story which is about Waddles becoming a super-genius and eventually abandoning his project to stay with Mabel. An accurate idea of what Stan wanted to happen with his brother a long time ago.
  • The top of the Mystery Shack Totem Pole depicts not the Thunderbird, but Kolus, the Thunderbird's similar younger brother who often imitates his older brother. The real Thunderbird is seen in the basement right in the room that Stan's brother returns into.
  • During "The Time Traveler's Pig", Mabel and Dipper quickly flash past a Mystery Shack covered in snow, while a younger Stan looks out in confusion at the sudden noise. However, a fair number of people later compared this version of Stan with ones we saw from his memories and pointed out that there were some subtle differences in appearance... a hint to the fact that while this was *a* Stan, it wasn't the same one.
  • In "Dreamscaperers", we get a flashback of a child Stan fighting in a boxing ring. A bunch of people are watching from the bleachers, including, a boy with the Pines hair tuft, face buried in a book, and his hand hidden in a boxing glove. Young Ford!
  • Retroactively lampshaded in "Dungeons, Dungeons, & More Dungeons", in which the episode's protagonists watch a show called "Duck-tective", where the main character is revealed to have a twin brother.
    Mabel: He had a twin brother all along?! That's the big twist we've been waiting for?!
    Grenda: What a ripoff!
    Soos: I predicted that, like, a year ago.
• In "The Last Mabelcorn", Dipper thought Ford was possessed by Bill Cipher and was about to shoot him with the Memory Gun. Fortunately, it was all a misunderstanding, but Ford noted that it would have been an excellent idea if he was possessed. In the finale, Bill met his end by being erased with the very same gun.
• Translated, the meaning of incantation to enter Stan's mind in "Dreamscaperers" is the advice Dipper hears from Stan on how to defeat Bill.
• The Zodiac Ten — ten individuals who have the power to destroy Bill Cipher — are represented by ten symbols around a large wheel. Clues as to who represents which symbol are scattered throughout the series: Soos, the Question Mark, wears a shirt with a large question mark on it; Gideon, the Pentagram Eye, has that symbol on the Tent of Telepathy; etc. Bill himself provides some of this — when he first encounters Dipper and Mabel, he calls them "Pine Tree" and "Shooting Star", which turn out to be their symbols on the Zodiac.
• In "Into the Bunker", before the Shapeshifter is refrozen in his cryo-chamber he warns Dipper about attempting to find the author of the journals, saying "If you keep digging, you'll encounter a fate far worse than you can imagine, and this will be the last form you'll ever take!" and turns into Dipper screaming right before he freezes. The pose he makes is the exact pose that Dipper makes when he's turned into wood in "Northwest Mansion Mystery".
• There's a part of the intro where the gravity in Dipper and Mabel's room is inverted, which seemed like just a random gag to highlight the abnormalities of Gravity Falls until "Not What He Seems", where anti-gravity is a side effect of Stan activating Ford's portal.
• Ford having a connection with Bill Cipher is foreshadowed multiple times throughout the series until the reveal in "The Last Mabelcorn."
  • In "A Tale of Two Stans" he checks Stan's pupils when he enters the house in the flashback. He says that he just wanted to be sure he wasn't somebody before trailing off. However, as we know from the events of "Sock Opera", having your body possessed by Bill Cipher changes your eyes to be similar to him.
  • Bill's symbol is hidden throughout Gravity Falls, even throughout the Mystery Shack. As we learn in "The Last Mabelcorn", Ford believed that Bill was a muse, or an inspirational god, and kept his symbol throughout his house the same way a Christian might keep the Crucifix in their home.
  • The journals each contain extensive information on Bill - on how to summon him, how to exorcise him, etc. How would the Author know of such information without coming into contact with him at least once or twice?
    • Also, the information on how to summon Bill is found in Journal #2, while Journal #3 is the one that warns of how dangerous Bill is. Which would indicate that the Author only found out how dangerous Bill was long after determining how to summon him.
  • In "Dreamscaperers", after Gideon tells Bill to enter the mind of "Stanford Pines", Bill starts to ponder, until an image flashes of Grunkle Stan. He appeared as though confused, perhaps until he realized Ford had a living twin brother.
  • In "Dungeons, Dungeons, & More Dungeons," Ford tells Dipper, "In my time, I've made many powerful enemies," without specifying who those enemies are. It's worth noting that he described Bill in the Journal as the most powerful being he ever encountered.
• Throughout the series, there have been signs that the Mystery Shack is not what it seems; a copying machine that duplicates people, shag carpeting that swaps minds, the fact that Journal 3 and the Author's bunker were found within walking distance of the Shack, to say nothing of the Universe Portal hidden in the basement. Come "A Tale of Two Stans" and we learn that the Shack was originally used as the Author's research lab.
  • In the first TV short, Grunkle Stan's horrible advertisement for the Mystery Shack includes a sequence where a double of Stan shows up, claiming to be "the real Mr. Mystery". Stan used to have a twin, who was the one who founded the Mystery Shack in the first place.
• In "The Stanchurian Candidate", we see Ford flipping through one of the journals, and for a second a ripped out page is visible. It's likely the same single page Gideon kept with him while locked up in prison that listed the mind control spell, seen later in the same episode.
• In "Boyz Crazy", Dipper and Wendy joke that the members of Sev'ral Timez are mass-produced or grown in pods. Not long after, the latter turns out to be true.
  • In the same episode, Stan is seen stocking canned meat for the apocalypse, then when Dipper breaks up Robbie and Wendy but also causes Wendy to swear off men, Stan tries to make Robbie feel better by saying that the apocalypse is coming soon. While it sounds like mindless paranoia at first, he ends up being pretty on the money in the end.
• In The Stinger of "The Last Mabelcorn", after the Mystery Shack has been Bill-proofed, Bill starts searching for potential candidates to possess outside the shack. One of the pictures is of Blendin Blandin, the same person he possesses in "Dipper and Mabel vs. the Future" to get the rift from Mabel.
• In "Dipper and Mabel vs. the Future", when Mabel is upset Dipper considers staying with Ford, she can be seen grabbing Dipper's backpack as she runs out of the room, which contains the interdimensional rift Bill needs to destroy so he can initiate Weirdmageddon.
  • In the same episode when Mabel encounters Blendin Blandin, his camouflaging ability worked perfectly when in most episodes, he has trouble using it. Turns out, Bill is possessing him.
• Throughout the series, Stan is associated with fire and heat and every effigy of him is destroyed in such a way; the wax statue of him in "Headhunters" is melted, the puppet of him in "Sock Opera" is destroyed by Mabel's pyrotechnics, and the balloon of him in "The Love God" catches fire. In the climax of "Weirdmageddon Part 3: Take Back the Falls", after Stan punches Bill to pieces, his mindscape is engulfed in blue fire.
• Due to his close friendship with Justin Roiland, Alex Hirsch managed to get foreshadowing into Rick and Morty. In the episode "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind", while in a field with several portals on a cliff wall, a pen, a notepad, and a mug with the Mystery Shack's question mark randomly fall out of one portal and into another. This foreshadowed Grunkle Stan losing those objects to a portal in "Society of the Blind Eye", which wouldn't air for another 6 months.
• When Mabel asks Soos if he's ready to "explode the charm bomb" and get a date in "Soos and the Real Girl", there's a sweeping shot of the mall which ends with the woman operating the Meat Cute cart visible. That woman, Melody, will ultimately become Soos' date and later, girlfriend.
• In "Fight Fighters", one of Dipper's complaints about Robbie is that he 'posts an annoying amount of status updates', suggesting that he has something in common with the chronically-online Tambry. In "The Love God", they end up dating.

---