Fridge subpages are Spoilers Off pages. You Have Been Warned.
- A Freeze-Frame Bonus if you look at Uncle Wiley's Randall Flagg outfit is that he's prominently wearing a wristwatch. Which wouldn't seem to be a big deal, if we hadn't had it hammered into our heads in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals that PEIP operatives consider it very important that "Time is a precious thread in the fabric of the universe! It deserves its own tool of measurement! WEAR A WATCH!" Consider it another major piece of evidence that Wiley really is Gen. McNamara's mentor Wilbur Cross.
- Emma is holding a paper cup from Starbucks in the first scene at Tom's house, which he even calls her out for wasting time stopping at when he wanted to see her at 6:00 am sharp. Which might seem like a contradiction with The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals where she worked at Beanie's, an independent coffee shop competing with Starbucks... except if you watched TGWDLM all the way to the end, you'd learn that Emma despises her coworkers and her boss, who owns the place, that she considers their coffee and pastries "shitty", and admits that she and her colleagues regularly spit in the coffee "because we didn't care". It's unsurprising that on her day off she'd choose to go elsewhere.
- Linda wears black and white clothing. Black and White.
- Sherman Young is willing to pay forty-five thousand dollars right at the cash register for the whole stock of Wigglies. Normally if you had to give someone that much money in a personal transaction you'd give them a check, but Frank just sang in "Our Doors Are Open" the store policy isn't to take checks at all. So either Sherman has a credit card with a daily spending limit of $45k or more (like an American Express black card), or he's just been chilling in front of the store for a week with a bundle of 450 $100 bills in his fanny pack, without being worried it'll get lost or stolen. (The fact that he grabs a handful of $100s out of his fanny pack when the bidding war starts suggests it's the latter.) We knew he had to be rich to spend this much money on toys in the first place, but to be able to do either of these things makes him (or his family) absurdly rich, even before the reveal that he's also one of Gary Goldstein's clients.
- One major Headscratcher for a bunch of people was how the hell Becky ended up with a syringe of anesthetic randomly in her pocket when she makes her Face–Heel Turn and starts to attack Hannah. It's not the thing you'd just carry around with you on your day off — or would be allowed to carry out of the hospital at all — nor is it something you'd find in the first aid kit at a movie theater. Some enjoy using it as fuel for a crack theory about Becky being evil all along, but there's a more obvious explanation — one of the powers people connected to the Black and White explicitly have is the teleportation of objects. People suddenly finding things in their pockets happens twice in the play at critical moments, and both times it's a weapon — Uncle Wiley teleports Linda's pepper spray from her purse to his pocket to demonstrate his power, and Lex summons McNamara's pistol from the Black and White. Who's to say that Wiggly couldn't have teleported a syringe — a weapon Becky would be familiar with, and one she'd be more willing to use than committing murder — into Becky's pocket at that moment, when Becky and Tom are most under his control, and when he's currently raging at Hannah having openly defied him? It's precisely because their perceptions are being distorted so much by Wiggly-madness that neither Becky nor Tom would question such a thing.
- The appearance of Paul's coworkers from TGWDLM in the ending might seem shoehorned in, since the Tickle-Me Wiggly is a children's toy and you'd expect most of the people shopping for one to be parents, and no one seemed to have or mention small children in TGWDLM. (Bill is the only character explicitly stated to be a parent, and his daughter Alice is 18.) But even leaving aside the fact that Wiggly obsession is a supernatural compulsion, there's good reasons for all of them to be there:
- Mr. Davidson is never explicitly stated to be a father, but he's a married middle-aged man who owns a company, and it would make more sense for him to have kids than not. Moreover, to the extent the lyrics of "What Do You Want, Paul?" reflect his real personality, they explicitly make him out to be a joiner who tries to get in on new trends just so he can feel like he's part of something (in direct contrast to Paul's kneejerk contrarianism). He would totally stand in line for a Wiggly doll just to be "a part of history".
- The "cult of comfort" side of Wiggly's influence — which really does seem to be Starkid calling out creepy tendencies in certain corners of adult fandom of children's media — would obviously be Charlotte's way into the cult. Her sweater with a cat print and her oversized bow were already meant to hint that she's a deeply troubled lady (with huge "holes in her heart") trying to fill the gap with cutesy accessories — of course she'd stand in line for hours to buy a Wiggly doll.
- Paul directly tells us Bill tried to buy a doll for Alice as a Christmas gift, which doesn't really make much sense, even taking into account that some 18-year-old girls are fans of children's toys and brands (and it's more socially acceptable for them than for the Sherman Youngs of the world). After all, Lex and Ethan are Alice's age and Lex tells us that they never even considered doing anything with their Wiggly but selling it. But the whole point of "Not Your Seed" is that Bill isn't really a thoughtful father, he's kind of lost track of what Alice does or doesn't like as she grew up too fast for him, and that most of what he does for her now is trying to performatively one-up his ex-wife. The latter, especially, would be a huge motivation for him to go to extreme lengths to pull off something difficult and dangerous like buying a Wiggly on Black Friday just to show her up.
- Bill wanting to get a Wiggly for Alice doesn't have to make sense, he just has to be under the spell just like every other parent who's been exposed to Wiggly. Alice, being the same age as Lex, is likely neither interested in dolls nor under the spell, but there's no reason for Bill to have any more awareness of this than Tom does.
- Ted seems like the most unlikely member of the Wiggly cult, and he indeed doesn't actually show up as a cultist at any point (since Joey Richter was instead playing the Crazy Homeless Mannote ). But his Jerkass tendencies would certainly motivate him to buy a Wiggly to try to resell it or just for bragging rights, he does seem to have Hidden Depths in the "Showstoppin' Number" scene, and perhaps the most interesting Fanfic Fuel — what if he knew Charlotte was shopping at Toy Zone that day, saw the news about the riots, and when he couldn't get in touch with her, went down to the mall to check if she was all right? (There's a major moment for Ted/Charlotte shippers where he tenderly puts his arms around her when they find each other during "What If Tomorrow Comes?")
- And then there's the surprise reveal of Curt Mega in the ending as "Papa Ed", the military veteran who took in Peanuts the Pocket Squirrel and nursed him back to health. The fact that he became Peanuts' dad because he has a soft spot for cute fluffy animals probably makes him likely to fall under Wiggly's spell for the same reasons as Charlotte.
- Or they were at the mall during Black Friday for a different reason since there are different stores the only ones of Paul's co-workers that we see on the toy line is Charlotte. Also Ted was only there in the recorded version as a Easter Egg in the other shows Joey plays the Cineplex Teen showing that he escaped the mall.
- The real-life versions of the Wiggly dolls can't talk— because the dolls in the play couldn't talk. They were almost certainly spoken through by Wiggly. This is supported by the conversation it has with Hannah, and when it responds to Tom even though Tom doesn't tickle the toy. This also leads to the funny image of an outer being having to repeat his lines over and over when someone takes a doll
- Why did MacNamara not get affected by Wiggly's influence but failed to fight the apotheosis? Easy. Wiggly takes the capability of violence in a person while the apotheosis convinces its victims that they're creating peace, so because MacNamara was more of a soldier than a murderer, he was above Wiggly's influence, but not the apotheosis'. (In other words, the Hive Mind infects the Lawful to make them Lawful Evil, and Wiggly infects the Chaotic to make them Chaotic Evil.)
- MacNamara's New-Age Retro Hippie spiel in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals now seems like less of a joke — if he's aware of the "nature of the cosmos and our place in it", and now follows "a higher law" of "the universal truth of love and the strength of the human heart", it seems like this must have been because of his awareness of the Black and White (possibly the "White" that opposes Wiggly's "Black").
- The play seems to provide a downer ending— everyone looks up as we hear an engine from overhead, strongly insinuated to be a Russian bomb. Thing is, why would Russia bomb Hatchetfield? They have no reason to assume it's important, it's a small town near nowhere anything. It's far more likely that it was just a normal plane, and furthermore, there doesn't seem to be anything overtly stopping them from surviving the night.
- Some people think it the meteor from the TGWDLM, but it might still be the nuke but bombing a different place (like DC).
- None of the frenzied fighting destroyed the dolls, another hint that there's a supernatural power behind them.
- Technically, Lex, and Ethan are adults. Yet neither of them succumbs to the Tickle-Me Wiggly. Why? Because, as Lex wisely puts it, they have "holes" they need to fill, but were riding on Ethan's unbridled optimism. Ethan was saying, even when it seemed things were bad, that their lives would get better. Thus, the Tickle-Me Wiggly had no effect on him since he and Lex were going to sell it to the highest bidder.
- Look at one of the above entries — most of the people with a reason to stand in line for a Wiggly doll are parents. The majority of the people who were brutally beaten to death in that riot had kids waiting for them at home — and the ones who survived have the memory of going feral with bloodlust and possibly becoming a murderer when they do go back to their kids. To say nothing of the ones who failed to get a Wiggly and therefore became part of Linda's cult, being willing to participate in the Human Sacrifice of a 13-year-old girl despite having kids themselves, and subsequently burning to death in the mall. ...Of course, all of the above may be moot because World War III is going to kill everyone in the world anyway, but it's a particularly grim thought that adds context to the Humans Are Bastards events prior.
- It's not clear exactly how much "Evil Ethan" is lying when he appears to Hannah. It's implied that Wiggly does, in fact, consume the souls of anyone who falls into his domain and then make use of them for his own purposes, as he did with Wilbur Cross/Uncle Wiley. And the reason he chose Hatchetfield for his evil plot may be what Nick Lang has said in his Twilight Zone-style narration about how Hatchetfield is an Eldritch Location where the boundaries of reality are thin, and they become even thinner on Black Friday... so who's to say that Evil Ethan isn't right that the real Ethan's soul was swallowed up by Wiggly because he happened to be killed in Lakeside Mall on Black Friday? This really is a Fate Worse than Death, especially for someone Too Good for This Sinful Earth who never had any interest in Wiggly beyond wanting to support Lex's dreams in the first place. What's worse is that this means all of the implicitly many people who died in the mall that day (besides Frank and Linda, whose deaths we see onstage) also got eaten by Wiggly, considering it's unlikely any of them had whatever training or psychic gifts let McNamara survive in the Black and White with his identity intact.
- Even if President Goodman and the forces of PEIP were somehow able to convince their opposite numbers in what remains of the Russian government that the bombing of Moscow was unintentional, the Russian counterstrike is, in fact, inevitable — the Dead Hand
project is designed to make a counterstrike automatic and impossible to countermand in the event of exactly this kind of decapitation strike. (As was unwittingly predicted in the film Dr. Strangelove, which Team Starkid has almost certainly seen.) - The fact that Becky prefers using a syringe of anesthetic on Hannah rather than just physically wrestling her down might make her seem like she's not fully corrupted by Wiggly's power. But in Real Life a dose of anesthetic capable of knocking a grown woman out like that so quickly would be extremely dangerous to inject into a child who, petite as Becky is, is still like half her size. And Becky, a nurse, would know this if she were in her right mind at the time. Luckily Hannah's magic hat was there to protect her.
- Kind of a Harsher in Hindsight Tear Jerker that's the result of Real Life Writes the Plot — Tom's son Tim can't be in the last scene because he's played by the same actor as Hannah. But that means that even though Tom came to a Heel Realization that all of his bad actions were misguided because what Tim really wants is just to have a relationship with him, and Tim was willing to risk dying in a nuclear bombing rather than leave his dad behind, they don't ever reunite before the end of the show, when a nuclear bomb (ambiguously) kills them all. There's some Black Comedy in the idea that Tom missed out on his last chance to hug his son before their deaths and left him sitting a few feet away in the car because he just had to stand there and listen to Hannah finishing her song.
- Most likely no because even if there was a nuke it likely didn't hit Hatchetfield as stated above. If it is still the end of the world it confirmed they spend the last of it in Higgins house.
- It is very, very lucky for Tom — to say nothing of the as-yet-uneaten souls of the human race, of course — that Lex finds him when she does. Leaving aside that it may be a moot point if everyone was about to die in a nuclear war, what would've happened if he did escape the mall and get Tim the Wiggly doll he sacrificed everything for, only to find out Tim "doesn't even want that piece of shit"? And then has to deal with the realization that one of those sacrifices was leaving Becky Barnes for dead while in the throes of his obsession? Right after he'd reconnected with her as his second chance at love, after confessing to her that he will never forgive himself for being the reason Jane died? And the lyrics of "If I Fail You" make it very clear that Tom thinks the next time he experiences a trauma that painful... it will likely be the last.
- Potential fridge horror: Was Black Friday the first time someone was hurt because of those dolls?
- Thankfully, this can't be the case. In the Tickle-Me Wiggly Jingle, both the Sniggles and Uncle Wiley specify that the doll is hitting the shelves on Black Friday (in order to build up as much fervor around the doll as possible).
- Linda keeps Gerald at an arm and a hand distance via the phone. Yet imagine what he is going through: four kids in the car, avoiding the riot because of his ban from the mall and his overbearing wife. Then through the phone he hears a riot starting, his wife sobbing and she says she's fine but she didn't get a doll. She also becomes a cult leader, and gets shot. Gerald must have had one heck of a bad day.
- Here's something else: both Linda and her lawyer are able to call Gerald, and they carry on a conversation with him. Paul reveals at the end of the musical, however, that the phones went out a while back owing to the end of the world meaning no cell service. Wait a minute, was that actually Gerald on the phone??
