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Fridge Brilliance
The Hatchetfield Ape-Man
- Konk the Ape-Man somehow being unfamiliar with concepts like "rain" and "stars" despite having lived outdoors his whole life puzzled a lot of viewers on first watch — not only is this obviously implausible if Konk were real, it's such an obvious mistake it doesn't seem like someone intentionally playing a hoax could possibly get tripped up by it. But, of course, we then get the line that Ted is "terrible at improv", and that he's getting lost in roleplaying a naive Ingenue who needs Lucy to teach him everything (which apparently is the closest he's come to getting genuine love and tenderness from a woman for a long time). It makes perfect sense, in that context, that Ted/Konk would just thoughtlessly approach everything he comes across as new and scary and let Lucy introduce it to him (and Lucy is so similarly swept up in her emotions about Konk she's not thinking about it).
- The idea of Lucy instantly falling head-over-heels for Konk is, of course, Played for Laughs in this show with Ted smugly describing himself as an irresistible Kavorka Man. But obviously there's plenty of Starkid stans who could easily believe falling for Joey Richter on a physical level — and, moreover, Joey in his younger days absolutely has proven he could pull off playing an Ingenue like Konk Played Straight (think Bug singing "I Wanna Be" and "Status Quo" in Starship). Just imagine all of the bits of the Falling-in-Love Montage between Lucy and Konk we didn't see consisting of Joey reprising his role as a dorky non-human suffering from Become a Real Boy.
- Lucy's moments of Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping are, from a Doylist POV, just an understandable result of Angela Giarratana not having an RP British accent in her regular wheelhouse and very little time to rehearse. But it actually makes perfect sense in-universe when you realize that despite her English Rose characterization Lucy has probably been spending half of every year in Hatchetfield every year for twenty years, ever since her father died and she devoted her life to finding the Ape-Man — she's basically an Anglo-American at this point, with plenty of time for her accent to have become muddled.
Watcher World
- Bill hating on Dear Evan Hansen is just a friendly Take That! at Team Starkid's fellow UMich alums Pasek And Paul, but it also makes sense for his character — much as Bill claims to like musicals, his tastes seem to run toward the relatively wholesome and old-fashioned (like Mamma Mia! and Frozen (2013)). Not only is Dear Evan Hansen a musical with some pretty dark themes, Black Comedy and an arguable Villain Protagonist, it's also one that revolves around Evan's Disappeared Dad being the main cause of his psychological problems, something that would hit really close to home for Bill's insecurities.
- There's a ton of cynical stand-up comedy routines about how typical tourist traps, like the classic Crappy Carnival Watcher World is a parody of, advertise themselves as a way for families to bond and build memories but are in fact a machine engineered to make families despise each other to the point of homicidal rage. Watcher World, of course, makes all of this intentional (charged with a little bit of Blinky's supernatural oomph). It's especially notable seeing the "Test Your Strength" Game used to wipe out Bill's bank account and drive him to madness — the way the game is rigged to make him keep losing while letting little kids win so that he gets more and more insecure about his masculinity is, of course, Truth in Television (this kind of scam is the original meaning of the term Kayfabe).
Time Bastard
- A combination of Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Tearjerker. A lot of things about the Homeless Man fall into place when you take into account his backstory from "Time Bastard", like his desperate desire to join any group that will let him be a part of it — even as his old self Ted was a party crasher who, as Paul points out, never knew when he wasn't wanted, and in his broken state as the Homeless Man clearly Hates Being Alone because he's terrified of seeing one of his Tinky hallucinations again.
- Adding to the Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror of this — who's to say that some part of him didn't realize what he was doing in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and Black Friday, and offer his soul to one of the other Lords in Black because he figures what they have in store might be better than eternity in the Bastard's Box when he dies? Indeed, depending on how exactly assimilation to the Hive Mind works, TGWDLM might be the only timeline where he succeeded in escaping the Bastard's Box (and whether the Fate Worse than Death in the Hive is any better or worse is anyone's guess).
- The weird ways in which the Homeless Man's personality doesn't match up with Ted's also make sense in context — Ted may be a relentlessly "horny bastard", but the incident that drove him to madness and caused all his Repressed Memories was his horniness killing his One True Love and ruining everything. That's the kind of thing that'll kill your libido pretty quick, if seeing the inside of the Bastard's Box doesn't do it. It's notable that the Homeless Man desperately wants attention and approval from women still — he kisses Linda's feet reverently in Black Friday — but it's just the sex part that's been tainted for him.
- This gets even more heartbreaking when you realize why he's obsessed with Becky Barnes during "What Do You Say?" in Black Friday and gets offended at the idea of her having sex with Tom — as a Significant Green-Eyed Redhead played by Kim Whalen, she looks just like his Lost Lenore Jenny. The part of him that still remembers and desperately regrets his past wishes he could've just let Jenny be happy with someone else and is viscerally offended by people like the Man in a Hurry crudely lusting after her.
- The combined Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror of the Cyberpunk 2104 Bad Future is that it proves Prof. Hidgens in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals was right. Miss Holloway successfully prevented the apocalypse by killing Uncle Wiley and creating the Nightmare Time set of timelines — and, because the world doesn't end in the early 21st century, all the mundane human problems Hidgens pointed out, like climate change and resource depletion, just keep on getting worse and worse thanks to human nature being what it is. Humanity may still be alive and kicking 85 years in the future but the life they live isn't one most of us would find worth living — and yet that's the best they can do, other than steal a time machine and try to hide out in the past.
- It's kind of a hilarious Fridge Logic-based joke that the residents of Hatchetfield hate Clivesdale so much that even though Clivesdale is only a short drive across the bridge, Hatchetfielders absolutely refuse to go to Clivesdale for any reason to the point where Jenny and Teddy both just accept that her moving to Clivesdale means they'll never see each other again, like she was moving across the ocean. (Also adds some humor to going back and seeing how Alice is constantly talking about only being able to see her old friends when she's visiting Bill in Hatchetfield and ever even brings up the possibility of her friends driving over the bridge to see her.)
- Of course Ted was moved by the pitch for Workin' Boys back in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals- it's the story of a man reminiscing about losing contact with close college friends he had heavily-implied unspoken romantic feelings for.
Jane's a Car
- This is a very minor one, but the fact that we can see Tom's Mustang is a hatchback (like the Title Theme Tune says, "Lovin' the hatchback!") gives a little more context to Tom's weird out-of-nowhere Comically Missing the Point comment about the drill press in Black Friday ("I don't have a drill press, and if I did, how would it fit in the sedan?!"). The story makes it clear Tom has two cars, the Mustang and a second, more practical car — the sedan — that was probably Jane's before she died. And while neither car is built for hauling large cargo, the hatchback has somewhat more flexibility — being able to put down the seats and combine the backseat area and "trunk" into one big space — than a sedan with a detached trunk would. Tom being traumatized by his Mustang being in the shop after the accident probably has him on edge about a lot of little annoyances he wouldn't normally notice, and one of them might be him obsessing over all the little things he hates about the sedan he's forced to rely on as his only vehicle, like the trunk space issue. (This is muddled slightly by the Music Video showing Tom struggling to fit the "drill press"/cooler into the car in the video, which is a two-door coupe, not a sedan, although the basic idea of this scene — it's not about how much total space the car has in it so much as how conveniently the space is configured — is accurate enough.)
Fridge Horror
The Hatchetfield Ape-Man
- How the hell does Professor Hidgens afford a gigantic Gothic mansion on a community college professor's salary? Even if he inherited it from his parents, the property tax and upkeep on a place like that is enormous — and it's not just the house, it's a whole estate — he owns a working stable with horses out back. It seems almost inevitable that this is not the first Get-Rich-Quick Scheme he's pulled, and that this isn't his first foray into con artistry — how many other people has Hidgens scammed into giving up all their assets to him, possibly fatally?
- This isn't just Fridge Horror at Hidgens' comically Dark and Troubled Past, but adds a hilarious bit of characterization to him — he's obviously really bad with money, hence budgeting $30 million for his shitty musical and thinking of that as a "reasonable request".
- The casualness with which Hidgens commits his first murder in the episode (of Jonathan Brisby) and then gleefully cackles to Lucy that there's no way anyone can hear her screaming for help in the middle of the Witchwood makes it seem pretty unlikely that this is his first foray into disposing of someone in the woods who got in his way.
- As sympathetic as Ted may come off by the end of "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man", it's pretty much explicit in the script that he's a fully educated adult man who's pretending to be ignorant/developmentally delayed (due to being an Ape-Man) so he can get away with sexually harassing Lucy, including the basic concept that he's getting away with being naked with an erection around her because she thinks he doesn't "know better". This is actually sinking pretty low even for the Ted we knew from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, even before we find out that Hidgens' original plan involved murdering her.
- hes not pretending to be brain dead hes pretending to be an animal those are different things
Watcher World
- "Watcher World" certainly gives plenty of opportunities for Fridge Horror given that the whole park exists for Blinky's amusement, and Blinky seems to take most of his amusement from turning loved ones against each other, violently if possible. How many deaths have happened at Watcher World in its decades of operation that got covered up by Mind Manipulation — and how many stories that didn't end in death still involved violent Domestic Abuse? How about those hints that being one of Blinky's employees at Watcher World is akin to being in a cult, with Resignations Not Accepted, and with "Angela", an actor who tried to quit, ending up an Unperson (who it's implied gets brainwashed into going back in the ending)? Did Alice shooting Blinky's physical form actually put a stop to any of this or is Watcher World going back to business as usual the next day?
- There's the Fridge Horror carried over from The Trail to Oregon! where the "Watchers With a Thousand Eyes" represent the audience, only with Hatchetfield being a more serious Horror Comedy show the meta implications of this are a lot worse (if you think about them). As Cabin In The Woods pointed out, being in the audience of a horror movie makes you the equivalent of a dark god who demands people suffer according to some aesthetic sense you have that their suffering is satisfying. At least in "Watcher World" a good portion of the Real Life audience was merciful and felt Bill and Alice had earned their happy ending.
Forever and Always
- After Emdroid notices she now has mismatched eyes after her impromptu transplant, The Narrator casually mentions "she'll fix it later". "Fixing" her new blue eye could mean getting colored contact lenses to cover it up... but judging by Emdroid's actions so far, it likely means she's going to kill a completely random stranger with brown eyes and the right skull size, just to maintain her disguise.
Time Bastard
- The head scientist in charge of the Emdroid project says the new synthetic organisms will make all normal human labor obsolete... and everyone cheers. Even though this is a Bad Future with One Nation Under Copyright where basic civil liberties and human rights no longer exist, and people only have value at all as employees of the corporations. She just announced that, most likely, 98% of the human race will be genocided (or at best "passively" allowed to starve to death after being fired) and replaced with robots, and everyone cheers anyway because they're so brainwashed into thinking of corporate profits as the only thing that matters. It's hard to imagine a darker Cyberpunk satire of capitalism.
Jane's a Car
- At the end of "Jane's a Car," Tom is arrested and Jane's soul is in Becky's body... except Becky has no legal claim over Tom's son, since they're not married. Which means, in all likelihood, Tim will likely be sent either to foster care or (if she's back in Hatchetfield at this point) to live with his Aunt Emma. While the latter option at least keeps him with his family and in his hometown, either way, finding out his dad is going to jail for (allegedly) trying to run down "Miss Becky," and losing both his parents within a span of two years is certainly going to traumatize the poor boy. There's also the very real possibility that Jane will just straight-up kidnap him and leave Hatchetfield, and that does beg the question of whether she intends to tell him who she is or not...
- Look at it from poor Tim's perspective — not only is his mom dead, his dad has now gone completely insane, and "Miss Becky", whom he used to trust and look up to, is now acting weird and possessive and undergoing Sanity Slippage too. The kid now has zero adults in his life he feels he can trust and rely on — ending up with Aunt Emma, who's made it pretty damn clear she's not ready to be a parent anytime soon might be the best case scenario for him (and one that Jane-as-Becky will fight tooth and nail to undermine, using every nasty secret she knows about Emma to do it).
- Adding onto the above — the Grand Theft Me of Becky was clearly an impulsive Batman Gambit for Jane, and one whose outcome wasn't totally ideal for her. With Tom arrested and institutionalized, she now has no familial connection to Tim, and as someone who just started dating his dad recently, trying to make the case to adopt him is going to be an uphill battle for her... But Jane is The Chessmaster and, at least post-Came Back Wrong, The Sociopath and is going to be willing to pull out all the stops to form a plan to gain custody of her son. Which means the Gaslighting and manipulation we just saw her put Tom through is going to be turned full force on Tim himself to make him pick her as an adoptive parent — and on anyone who might get between her and Tim by having a stronger legal claim to being his guardian, like Emma. Don't forget that Jane knows all about what an irresponsible loser Emma was for the first thirty years of her life, and will feel no hesitation about using it to smear her reputation in court and/or pressure and blackmail her directly into admitting she's unfit to take care of a child. Jane might not win her battle to get her claws into Tim — especially if a social worker who knows about the supernatural like Duke gets involved — but she can sure make life hell for everyone opposing her before giving up.
- The above scenario suggests the possibility of Jane-as-Becky going up against Miss Holloway as an opponent, which is delightful Fanfic Fuel.
- Even assuming the plan doesn't succeed and Tim ends up with his Aunt Emma, what if the events of "Jane's a Car" take place in the same timeline as "Forever and Always"? In that case, the battle for custody over Tim could very well be a case of Evil vs. Evil.
Honey Queen
- With both Linda and Gerald dead, it seems likely that their sons will be Raised by Grandparents—and, since we never see Gerald's parents, our best guess is that the boys will be raised by Roman Murray. Even without the fact that he heads up a goddamn human sacrifice cult, Roman is cruel, vindictive, and uncaring, and given his view that Might Makes Right, and how he won't hesitate to let his own flesh and blood suffer, you can bet he won't do a thing to stop River's brothers from tormenting him. If anything, he'll likely encourage it. So now the three of the Monroe boys that are bullies will likely have no chance at growing out of it and will probably be indoctrinated into the cult, and the sweet-natured River will have no one to protect him.
