Ignoring Anne’s and Hop Pop’s warnings about the dangers of night driving, Sprig and Polly stay up all night to drive the family home.
Full Recap
TBA...
Tropes:
- Big "NO!": Anne lets one out in her nightmare when she finds out the only flavor for the yogurt is black licorice.
- Boring Return Journey: Instead of showing the places Anne and the Plantars visited on their road trip to Newtopia, this episode shows them traveling across the road on their way home.
- Call-Back: The reason Hop Pop will let Anne drive the wagon but not Sprig or Polly is because Anne is the only one who read Bessie's manual.
- Creepy Good: Zechariah Nettles. He has scars on his face, a glowing eye, a scythe for a hand, a permanent smile on his face... and he genuinely wanted to guide Sprig and Polly back to Wartwood.
- Dark Is Not Evil: The Hitchhiker looks like a villain from a slasher movie, but he is only trying to help travelers get through the mountain pass safely.
- Dead All Along: The Hitchhiker ends up being a ghost.
- Exhausted Eye Bags: Anne and Hop Pop have heavy eye-bags from staying up late at night driving the cart.
- Eye Scream: The Yogurt Man's eyes fall out when Anne's dream turns into a nightmare.
- Faux Horrific: Anne dreams of being in a land of bug free yogurt... but it's all black licorice-flavored.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: If you look in the fog, you can see the robot walking through it.
- Good All Along: The creepy, hook-handed hitchhiker turns out to be the ghost of Zechariah Nettles, a guide who helps travelers stay safe even in death.
- Heavy Sleeper: Anne and Hop Pop are so tired they stay fast asleep until morning, no matter what chaos Sprig and Polly drive the fwagon into.
- Mood Whiplash: Hop Pop's nightmare about his mortality suddenly turns lucid, and he turns the hideous bandy-legged monsters into colorful Ridiculously Cute Critters. Meanwhile, Anne has the opposite problem, when her dream of a cute and colorful land made out of yogurt turns into a creepy nightmare.
- Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: This title is a clear reference to Knight Rider, with spelling and word substitutions.
- Production Throwback:
- Anne's candy dream has echos of Sugar Rush.
- The scene where Anne's dream turns into a nightmare is very similar to a scene from the Gravity Falls episode "Weirdmaggedon Part 2: Escape From Reality".
- Anne is shown to dislike black licorice.
- The Punishment Is the Crime: Hop Pop starts scolding Sprig and Polly for night-driving, but when Anne points out how delirious and sleep-deprived they are, she convinces him to go easy on them.
- Sequel Hook: The episode ends with the robot still following the Plantars - now heading towards Wartwood.
- Shout-Out:
- The long-legged creatures from Hop Pop's nightmare are based on Salvador Dalí's The Temptation of St. Anthony
. - When Sprig and Polly are driving through a foggy area and can only see the silhouettes of giant monsters in fog is a reference to a similar scene in The Mist.
- The long-legged creatures from Hop Pop's nightmare are based on Salvador Dalí's The Temptation of St. Anthony
- Two Roads Before You: Sprig and Polly come at a fork on the road. The hitchhiker points at one path, but they, still thinking he's evil, choose the other path, which turns out to be dangerous, and would have likely died had the hitchhiker not saved them. When they look back at the path they would have taken, it turns out to have been safe and very pleasant.
