Recap / Nightmare Time S1E3: Jane's a Car and The Witch in the Web

"Jane's a Car and The Witch in the Web" is the third and final episode of Nightmare Time's first season, livestreamed on October 24, 2020, before being released on YouTube on February 14, 2021.

As with most Nightmare Time episodes, it's a Double Feature, consisting of two stories:

Jane's a Car

Jane's a Car

"I've traded in for new, but I come right back to you."

After a year and a half of repairs, widower Tom Houston is reunited with his newly restored 1986 Foxbody Mustang, only to find that the car now carries a ghostly passenger...

Musical sequences:
"Jane's a Car" performed by Dylan Saunders; directed by Dylan Saunders and Shashona Brooks

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• Accidental Adultery: 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 well over a year ago 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.
• Act of True Love: An extremely dark example — Jane refuses to accept that Tom truly loves her unless he's willing to commit murder for her in order to get her a human body again.
• Adam Westing: The fandom has made a lot of jokes about the portrayal of Tom in the Music Video being this for Dylan Saunders, who's owned up to sharing some of Tom's manly tastes — but he has also pointed out that 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. (Which is not to say he doesn't love it dearly in its own way.)
• Ambiguous Situation: 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^note It doesn't help that nearly everything Emma and Tom had previous said about the living Jane can, in retrospect, rather easily be twisted to paint her as someone who lived to torment them, whether Jane Came Back Wrong due to the evil ritual used to resurrect her or alternatively was Driven to Madness by her situation of being 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 Black Friday. Word of God on the matter is vague, but Nick Lang 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.
  • Word of God is that this story was also meant to leave it ambiguous whether the car is really haunted at all or Tom is imagining it all and going insane; however, most fans found Ethan's near-death experience at the beginning to be evidence enough that Jane is real, even before the Wham Line confirming it in the ending.
• Ambiguously Bi: A lot of the LGBT Fanbase got excited when Jane demanded Tom take her down to the beach to scope out chicks in swimsuits, only for this to turn sour when they realized what Jane's motive actually was. (Not that this is evidence she isn't bi; in fact, it just tees her up for the Depraved Bisexual trope.)
• AM/FM Characterization: Tom is described as a Classic Rock fan in the script, and the Title Sequence shows him listening to "Witchy Woman" by The Eagles on Spotify (and the song "Jane's a Car" itself is an Homage to classic Eagles Driving Songs like "Take It Easy").
• And I Must Scream: Some of Jane's behavior can at least theoretically be excused by the fact that, as she points out, she spent 18 months being worked on in Tony's garage, the equivalent of a human being spending all that time trapped in the hospital undergoing surgery, only worse because of her awareness that she isn't human anymore.
• Arc Words: Another Exactly What It Says on the Tin Title Drop — Jane repeatedly says "I'm a car", including a hilarious instance of I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder ("I'm not stupid, Tom, I'm a car").
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: When Jane gives her litany of (quite understandable) reasons she was upset to wake up in the form of a car, she ends with how humiliated she was that Lex made fun of her for being an older model and called her stereo obsolete.
• Artistic License – Cars: In the opening scene, obviously Lex is being framed for Ethan's near-death experience when the car shifted itself from Park to Drive, being haunted — but it was in fact still very irresponsible of her to be testing out a car's engine inside the garage without also setting the handbrake. (Indeed, for anyone working on classic cars that frequently only came with manual transmissions that have no "Park" gear, you have to get in the habit of setting the handbrake to park the car at all.) Yes, Jane is telekinetically controlling the car and could release the handbrake herself — but her doing so would've been much more noticeable to Lex than just moving the gearshift.
• Artistic License – Law: It strains credulity that the last scene of the story could've happened the way it's described — when a single parent like Tom gets arrested, it's a very high priority that the parent's child be taken care of, either held at the police station or placed in the care of his next of kin (Emma) or of a social worker like Duke Keane (introduced in "The Witch in the Web"). It would be extremely negligent to just leave Tim in bed at home for (Jane-as-)Becky — who is not in any sense Tim's next of kin or legal guardian — to come fetch him later on in the evening, although, yes, to be fair the Hatchetfield PD hasn't been known for their competence in the past.
• Auto Erotica: Becky fondly recalls when she and Tom used to get up to this in the back of his Mustang, and muses about doing so again. Tom, already suspecting the car is haunted by Jane's spirit, turns her down. Eventually, the haunted car begs Tom to make love to her, and he does his best, kissing and fondling every bit of the car's interior. In a deliberate parallel to the trope, Tim eventually comes knocking at the fogged-up window of the car and Tom acts sheepish.
• Back from the Dead: Jane's spirit returns, but not without consequences.
• Backseat Driver: The whole conceit of this story is a Stealth Pun about Jane being this to Tom.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Jane successfully takes over Becky's body and reunites with her son. The only snarl is that she doesn't get Tom back, but she doesn't seem particularly broken up over it.
• Bait-and-Switch: The opening scene of the episode foreshadows hard that Lex and Ethan are Tempting Fate by openly making fun of the haunted car for being old and busted while testing its engine, and that Ethan is about to continue Robert Manion's trend of being a Chronically Killed Actor by being the Sacrificial Lamb showing Jane Gaining the Will to Kill — only for the story to relent and allow Lex to save Ethan's life by slamming on the brakes at the last minute. (This was a last-minute writing change made in Real Life, because of the tongue-in-cheek fan petition to stop killing Robert's characters.)
  • The final scene of the episode with Becky waking up in the hospital after being run over tries hard to tease the possibility that the car was never haunted and Tom just let his grief drive him mad, before the ending Wham Line lets us know Jane's ghost really was controlling the car and is now controlling Becky.
• Bait-and-Switch Credits: The lyrics of the Theme Tune, the Music Video created for it and the actual story are all only related in Broad Strokes. In particular, the lyrics of the Theme Tune go back and forth as to whether the song takes place in Hatchetfield, Michigan or in Southern California where the creators actually live (the lyrics describe driving along the Pacific Coast Highway), and the description of the car in the lyrics conflicts with the car in the story (it describes a "stick shift" while the car in the story is an automatic, it mentions an "8-track" while the car in the story has a compact cassette tape deck) and with itself (it says "the carburetor groans" and "the fuel injection moans", even though these are mutually exclusive systems that can't be on the same car — see Word Salad Lyrics).
  • Meanwhile, the Music Video very clearly does not take place in Hatchetfield and is more a Broad Strokes rendition of a cross between the character Tom Houston and Dylan Saunders in real life. It's a music video of Tom driving a modern Ford Mustang around Southern California (a black 2020 coupe, as opposed to the story's red 1986 hatchback, which Tom and Shashona rented to make this video) and enjoying all its features while in-character as Tom — including wearing a custom-made face mask saying "Tim's Daddy", even though the story takes place in 2019 before the COVID-19 Pandemic happened in Real Life.
  • In the more general sense of Bait-and-Switch, the Title Sequence is a very upbeat, Played Straight depiction of a man who loves his car "just a little too much", while the circumstances behind Tom's unhealthy fixation on his car in the story proper are far darker and more tragic.
• Beta Couple: A preview on Twitter revealed this episode brings back our favorite teen Beta Couple from Black Friday, Lex and Ethan, with the Alpha Couple in this episode being Tom and his dead wife.
• Big Entrance: Tim has good reason to be skeptical about his dad getting a new girlfriend who might try to replace his mom, but when he actually sees what Becky looks like — even though she's just walking into a dingy Suck E. Cheese's in her casual clothes after work — all he can manage is Stunned Silence followed by "Good job, Dad".
• Black Speech: The Magical Incantation enabling Jane's Body Surf is written in ominous-sounding Lovecraftian gibberish.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: The three major female characters in this story — Jane, when she was alive (and as we see her represented by Jaime Lyn Beatty as a ghost) was a brunette, the Greenpeace Girl is a blonde and Becky Barnes is a redhead. Lampshaded by Jane, who talks about how much she likes the Greenpeace Girl's hair when considering her as a host, and when she settles on Becky talks about looking forward to seeing what life is like with red hair.
• The Bus Came Back: Some social media waves were made by Mariah Rose Faith jokingly piggybacking on Robert Manion announcing the return of Ethan Green, announcing that she also had a returning character in "Jane's A Car": Her unnamed police officer from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, whom she'd joked on Instagram was named "Doug" and was non-binary.
  • Mariah's other character from TGWDLM, the Greenpeace Girl, also comes back and plays a major role in the plot (although she technically doesn't have a speaking role this time).
• Call-Back: Just as in Black Friday, Tom and Becky make love while the horrible holiday movie Santa Claus Is Goin' to High School is playing, although the circumstances this time are completely different.
  • When The Narrator describes Tom's Trauma Button related to the car accident he uses the words from "What Tim Wants" and "If I Fail You" from Black Friday — "Crash! Bang!"
  • When trying to find rationalize Jane's Evil Plan Tom proposes killing "someone who deserves it, like... Linda Monroe", the villain of Black Friday.
  • The Greenpeace Girl surprisingly comes back, still doing the same crappy job she was doing in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals.
  • A brief Mood Whiplash joke in the horrifying climax in the Witchwood has Becky consider climbing a tree to try to escape being run over by Jane but deciding against it "after what happened last time", alluding to the story Prof. Hidgens told in "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man" about Becky being "stuck up a tree for two days" that was never elaborated on.
  • A throwaway joke in Black Friday ("I don't have a drill press — and if I did, how could I fit it in the sedan?!") gets a Call-Back in the Title Sequence, with Tom trying and failing to put a drill press (or, rather, a picnic cooler with a paper label "DRILL PRESS" taped to it) into the backseat of his Mustang (which is actually a coupe).
  • Ethan's Know-Nothing Know-It-All tendencies where he "corrects" Lex's spelling of "liar" in "CaliforMIA" in Black Friday comes back in a much harsher form when he starts yelling at her about the difference between a gearshift in "Park" (with a "P") vs. "Drive" (with a "D"). In his defense, he has a right to be upset he was almost crushed and killed by what he thinks is Lex's carelessness.
• Car Fu: Jane didn't seem to have any significant experience with combat or violence while she was alive, but unfortunately the fact that the car is her body means she's far more skilled while trying to run down Becky in the woods than a typical human driver would be.
• Car Song: The song "Jane's a Car" is very much an Affectionate Parody of this genre of Classic Rock music and the tendency to drop Double Entendres everywhere making it ambiguous whether the subject of the song is actually a car or a woman. In this regard it's a Call-Back to the song "Fancy Machine" from pre-Starkid production Little White Lie, albeit a much more Played Straight high-quality example.
• Caught with Your Pants Down: Tom's rock-bottom moment in this story is when Tim walks in on him having sex with Jane, i.e. he walks in on his dad having stripped down to his underwear, writhing and moaning in the backseat of his car with the windows fogged up. Tom just barely manages to gather his composure and utter a brief non-excuse that, thankfully, Tim is old enough to know better than to ask follow-up questions about.
• Chronically Killed Actor: Averted. Robert Manion directly promised fans that Ethan Green would not die this time, breaking a trend for the fate of featured characters played by Robert in Starkid productions. Ethan is almost hit by the ghost car in the first scene in the story, but is saved at the last second. Indeed, behind the scenes he was meant to die in this story, but they decided against making a macabre Running Gag out of Robert getting killed.
• Comically Missing the Point: Tom continues his tendency of doing this from Black Friday, only in much direr circumstances. When he tells Becky that Jane is "in my car" and Becky asks, alarmed, if he means he dug up his wife's corpse, he scoffs and says he's not crazy — he's referring to the fact that his wife's ghost is possessing the car and he's hearing her voice telling him to do awful things.
• Contrived Coincidence: The whole plot of the episode happens because Jane happened to die in a car accident at the exact moment the car stereo was playing the soul transfer incantation from the Black Book being recited by her patient. (Presumably in every timeline where Jane doesn't come back as a haunted car, the timing was slightly off and this coincidence just didn't happen.)
• Cool Car: Tom's 1986 Fox-Body Mustang. (Having a whole half-episode about Tom's Cool Car could be a Call-Back to the swipes at Bill's AMC Pacer in "Watcher World".)
• Darkest Hour: Nick Lang has described this particular story as one designed to bring Tom Houston to the worst possible extreme of despair and dysfunction he could experience, and the scene where he agrees to have sex with Jane as a car only to be caught by his son as the specific moment he hits rock bottom.
• A Day in the Limelight: One for Black Friday's Tom Houston, played by Dylan Saunders, the heretofore Unseen Character of his wife Jane Perkins, their son Tim, and Tom's new girlfriend Becky Barnes. Episode Three is one in general for characters who originated in Black Friday rather than The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, with Lex and Ethan also showing up in the opening scene — and with TGWDLM characters Out of Focus, with Paul Matthews only being mentioned in passing and the Bit Character the Greenpeace Girl showing up later on.
• Diabolus ex Machina: The first half of the story takes us through a Hope Spot all the way to the point where Tom actually does have an Epiphany Therapy moment and makes the decision to move on from Jane's death and get his life back in order — only to suddenly manifest a voice in his head determined to stop him from doing this and make him destroy all the progress he's made for the sake of bringing his dead wife back.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: Moreso than previous Nightmare Time stories, this story's musical Call Backs imply that songs we've previously heard diegetically exist in the setting as songs the characters hear on the radio, albeit probably with different lyrics — "You Tied Up My Heart" from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, "CaliforMIA" from Black Friday, and "Jane's a Car", the Title Theme Tune of this story, all turn up as tunes people hear on the radio, and all of them make sense as songs the characters may have heard and adapted to their own circumstances.
• Distinction Without a Difference: Jane tries to argue that what she wants from Tom isn't murder because the goal isn't to actually kill the other woman's body, just damage it enough to "jar the soul loose" while leaving it in healthy condition for Jane to occupy. When Tom presses her on what exactly happens to the original soul, she admits she doesn't actually care but that it probably ends up in whatever afterlife may or may not exist — i.e., yes, she absolutely is talking about murder.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Jane's actions toward the women on the boardwalk at the beach at Starry Cove come across a lot like a creepy pervert — and pushing Tom to act like a pervert, as he's uncomfortably aware. It arguably gets worse when it turns out she's not making Tom stalk the Greenpeace Girl in order to creep on her or violate her but to murder her and steal her body, the worst violation of all.
  • It's ambiguous as to whether Jane's creepiness toward the women whose bodies she's considering stealing has any element of prurient interest, or whether in this situation that's even a meaningful distinction to make. (Stealing someone's body in order to become them is arguably the highest possible level of sexually violating somebody, and all.)
  • The Music Video for "Jane's a Car" does this very deliberately, showing Tom doing things like bringing a bouquet of flowers to the car that he turns out to be giving to the car itself, reaching out his arm as though to caress a passenger's hair only to caress the headrest of the empty passenger seat, slowly unbuttoning and taking off his shirt before going under the car's hood... It's even funnier knowing that this video was shot and directed by Shashona Brooks, Dylan's fiancée.
• Domestic Abuse: If the thing possessing the car is indeed Jane and not some other malevolent entity, a lot of her actions towards Tom veers uncomfortably close to emotional abuse, with constant guilt-tripping, condescension, possessiveness, and outright bullying, trying to force him into things he repeatedly expresses he is not comfortable with. Her wanting Tom to prove he loves her also reeks of emotional blackmail. And if it is Jane, it raises some unsettling questions about what their marriage was like — though, to be fair, it's heavily insinuated that Jane Came Back Wrong and that her negative qualities have been ramped up.
• Downer Ending: Especially for fans of Becky, since The Reveal that Jane's Kill and Replace scheme succeeded means poor longsuffering Becky either suffered Cessation of Existence or has her soul trapped in a wrecked car about to go to the junk heap. (And Tom's fate, being institutionalized as an attempted murderer for the foreseeable future, isn't great either.)
• Dramatic Irony: Lex, Ethan and Tony all make comments about not being able to imagine dealing with the grief Tom is feeling over losing his wife, none of them knowing that in the Alternate Timeline of Black Friday Ethan dies tragically — as he very nearly does in the opening scene of this story — forcing Lex and Tony to go through the same The Mourning After Tom did. (With Ethan himself, ironically, having argued that to do so is irrational and one should try to move on as quickly as possible.)
• Easily Forgiven: Ethan cements his Nice Guy status by being the one to comfort Lex after he has a near-death experience that, by all appearances, Lex caused through carelessness.
• Endearingly Dorky: Becky definitely has her moments, including when she's poking fun at her reputation as an All-Loving Hero by protesting she's bad at Zombie House because she'd rather help the zombies than shoot them.
• Epiphany Therapy: The moment when Tom suddenly realizes he has to move on from Jane and commit to his new relationship with Becky rather than keeping one foot in the past, for his son's sake if no one else's. (Just before a Diabolus ex Machina forces him off this path.)
  (Tom pulls back into the garage. He sits behind the wheel, thinking. He cooks dinner for Tim. Helps him with his homework. He lies awake in bed for hours. He remembers Becky’s face. Pizza Pete’s. Tim’s laugh. That night... Jane. He can’t go on like this. He gets out of bed. Looks in the mirror.)
  Tom: Tom. What're you doing? What the hell are you doing?
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Most fans expected it, but a few were still taken off guard by the fact that the title is completely literal — Jane, Tom's dead wife, really does come back as a car.
• Fantastic Arousal: The extended version of the Tom/Jane sex scene from the original script.
  Jane: Careful with my cupholders, Tom... they're sensitive... Yes, Tom, yes!
• Forced into Evil: Jane basically drags Tom kicking and screaming every inch of the way into complicity with her murderous Evil Plan, having to repeatedly slam Tom's Trauma Button about his guilt over her death and his feelings of inadequacy as a husband until he succumbs.
• Foreshadowing: The tape recording left by Jane's mysterious psychiatric patient primarily serves the function of reciting the soul transferrence ritual, but also features the utterance of five eldritch names: Pokotho, Bliklotep, T'Noy Karaxis, Nibblenephim, and Wiggog Y'wrath — the Lords in Black. The previous episode briefly used the name T'Noy Karaxis to refer to Tinky, and the second story in this episode confirms that Wiggog Y'wrath refers to Wiggly. This recording's mention of the Lords' names, as well as the name of their group and their exact numbers, thus comes one story before the story that fully reveals this information.
  • Tom reveals to Becky that part of Jane's Passive-Aggressive Kombat with him while they were married was trying to manipulate him into doing things for her that she was perfectly capable of doing herself, and that he's worried her forcing him to drive her around may be a manifestation of the same behavior. Sure enough, when he flat-out refuses to run over Becky Barnes, Jane reveals she's gained the ability to control all of the car's systems — accelerator and steering wheel included — and leaves Tom a helpless passenger in the driver's seat with a front-row view of his girlfriend's murder.
  • The Title Sequence has a very minor bit of foreshadowing with the specific song by The Eagles Tom chooses to listen to — "Witchy Woman", setting up the next story "The Witch in the Web".
• Frame-Up: Part of the inherent Nightmare Fuel of a haunted car situation is that Jane can blame all her crimes on whoever was in the driver's seat when she committed them — first Lex in her attempted murder of Ethan, then Tom in her successful murder of Becky.
• The Ghost: Linda Monroe from Black Friday is mentioned briefly as a possible new body for Jane, but, to many fans' frustration, nothing comes of it.
• Ghost in the Machine: Both literally describes Jane's situation and is the trope for how she's non-diegetically portrayed in this story — with Jaime Lyn Beatty dressed as Jane appeared in life, standing in front of a Zoom background depicting the car, but with no one in the story actually able to see her this way and Tom only hearing her as a voice.
• Harmful to Minors: Jane tells Tom not to tell Tim his mom has returned to life as a car, saying it will "scar him for life".
• Haunted Technology: The car is haunted by Jane's soul. Or is it? (Yes, it is. Probably.)
• Hearing Voices: Although we can see Jane's ghost being played by Jaime Lyn Beatty, Tom can't, and only experiences her presence as a voice in his ear telling him it's her ghost inside his car, which is a major reason he suspects she isn't real and he may be hallucinating. (Truth in Television — visual hallucinations are incredibly rare compared to auditory ones.)
• Heroic BSoD: Doug's final monologue describes Tom as having "a complete mental breakdown" after having to helplessly watch the woman he loves get hit by a car in a situation he's responsible for the second time. The story ends with him locked up in the psych ward at St. Damien's for the foreseeable future.
• Hero's Classic Car: Like the original Christine, this story ends up becoming a harsh Deconstruction of the trope.
• Hope Spot: The first half of this episode is a long Slice of Life examination of Tom slowly but surely overcoming his grief and PTSD in order to build a new life and family with Tim and Becky. It contains tons of minor Heartwarming Moments that are pure Fanfic Fuel for Barneston shippers... which is why, given that this is a Nightmare Time story following Sam Raimi's rules of horror, a supernatural event occurs that blows all of Tom's hopes for a happy ending to smithereens.
• It's Not You, It's My Enemies: Tom's final You Have to Believe Me! rant to Becky has him frantically warning her to stay away from him because if she doesn't, Jane will eventually force him to kill her.
• Laughing Mad: Jane lets out an exultant Evil Laugh once she finally gets her chance to run down Becky and begins chasing her through the Witchwood.
• Leitmotif: Matt Dahan said this episode was his favorite one to underscore, because it gave him the opportunity to do several Call Backs to Black Friday for the first time:
  • The opening scene with Lex and Ethan has a "smooth tune" playing on the radio, which is the tune of "CaliforMIA" from Black Friday.
  • An Ethereal Choir plays under the mad professor's incantation on the audio tape whenever it plays.
  • The peppy tune playing over the scene at Pizza Pete's is "The Blinky Song" from "Watcher World".
  • Tom and Becky's Love Theme is "Take Me Back" from Black Friday. It plays under Becky's initial Big Entrance at Pizza Pete's, and under the parallel scene to Tom and Becky's first kiss in Black Friday where they make love in the living room while Santa Claus Is Goin' to High School plays on TV.
  • They also have a secondary cutesy, upbeat Love Theme for their interactions in public, which is "What Do You Say?" from Black Friday. "What Do You Say?" gets a Dark Reprise when Jane reveals that she's witnessed Tom and Becky hanging out and is plotting to kill her out of jealousy, and plays under Jane forcing him to drive to Becky's house to break it off with her.
  • When we see a glimpse of the Show Within a Show Santa Claus Is Goin' to High School we get a brief reprise of "Deck the Halls (of Northville High)".
  • Tim's Leitmotif is "What Tim Wants", which plays, appropriately, whenever Tom and Tim have a heart-to-heart about how Tim is feeling and if he's okay with Tom and Becky's relationship. The opening bars of this song also play when Tom is thinking about his memories of his wife and the accident.
  • Tony Green's motif is a reprise of Ethan's theme from his monologue to Hannah in Black Friday (where he's giving a similar comforting speech to the one Tony gives Tom in this story), which is the tune to the Cut Song "Somehow".
  • The gag with Tom and Jane fighting over the radio dial has the pop song Jane prefers be the tune of "You Tied Up My Heart" from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, while the Classic Rock song Tom likes is the Title Theme Tune "Jane's a Car" itself.
  • Tom's Epiphany Therapy moment when he finally makes the decision to move on and get rid of the Mustang and Jane's old possessions is set to the tune of "If I Fail You", the song where he had a similar moment of realization in Black Friday. Unfortunately, this time the epiphany is forcibly cut off by Jane's miraculous return.
  • "Jane's a Car" gets a minor-key Dark Reprise when Jane first forces Tom to drive her around town looking for women to murder.
  • When the Greenpeace Girl reappears, her theme tune is "La Dee Dah Dah Day" from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals.
  • Matt transitions into a "spooky" theme, a.k.a. "Jane's Theme" — an original composition for this episode — whenever the car does something sinister, which in Jane's big climactic monologue where she reveals herself transitions into the "Witchwood theme" that's been following us throughout all of Season One.
  • When Tom briefly floats the idea of killing "someone who deserves it, like Linda Monroe", Linda's theme from Black Friday, "Adore Me", briefly plays.
  • Tom's climactic You Have to Believe Me! rant to Becky warning her to stay away from him is a Dark Reprise mash-up of "What Tim Wants" and "Take Me Back", i.e. his two Love Themes for the two women in his life.
  • There's a "dramatic theme" that plays whenever violence breaks out — when Jane tries to kill Ethan, when Tom barely stops her from killing the Greenpeace Girl, when Tom confesses what's been going on to Becky, and in the final climactic scene when Jane finally hits Becky.
  • Doug's closing monologue is introduced with a somber Dark Reprise of "Show Me Your Hands" from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, transitioning into a final somber Dark Reprise of "Take Me Back".
  • The very last moments of the story are underscored with an epic piano rendition of "What Tim Wants" that is both a Dark Reprise and Triumphant Reprise, representing Jane's final victory.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: A large part of the episode's tension is wondering whether Jane is truly possessing the car, or if we're seeing this Through the Eyes of Madness, with the near-miss with Ethan at the start of the episode just being an accident and a coincidence. Tom's certainly unstable enough for it to be eerily plausible we can't trust his judgement, and even he begins to wonder. The final scene, however, confirms it really was Jane all along.
• The Mourning After: Tom starts the story in the throes of this, just as he was in Black Friday, and just beginning to pull himself out of it before his encounter with Jane's ghost yanks him back in.
• Mr. Fanservice: The "Jane's a Car" Music Video has some mild fanservice with Dylan Saunders slowly unbuttoning and removing his shirt while Spiking the Camera with a soulful, tender look in his eye. The circumstances make this slightly twisted, though, given that he's looking at his car (which he's about to go under the hood of). For extra hilarity, the Female Gaze in this shot was provided by Shashona Brooks, Dylan's Real Life fiancée who directed this video and was holding the camera.
  • We get to see Dylan take off his shirt again in the original, uncut version of the Auto Erotica sex scene in the story proper, only this time the situation is uncomfortable enough that it's hard to imagine anyone getting actual Fanservice from it.
• Murder Into Malevolence: Tom thinks Jane isn't "acting like herself" and that possibly she Came Back Wrong, although whether her actions make sense for someone truly desperate to become a human again is debatable (and hotly debated by the fandom). What's pretty clear though is that seeing a version of Jane this utterly unconcerned with anyone else's welfare but her own is a deeply chilling contrast to how highly Emma and Tom spoke of her when she was The Ghost in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and Black Friday.
• Mysterious Watcher: The final scene with Tom's You Have to Believe Me! rant to Becky is, in the final YouTube release of the episode, played with The Narrator Nick Lang and Jaime Lyn Beatty as Jane onscreen along with Dylan Saunders as Tom and Kim Whalen as Becky. Jane is a silent presence in this scene — presumably she can't actually see or hear Tom and Becky inside the house, but we get to watch her ghost stare intently at the house, wheels turning inside her head, as Tom talks — Foreshadowing for her Evil Plan springing into action as soon as Tom gets back inside her.
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: No one can hear Jane's voice except Tom, and Jane's actions involving controlling the Mustang's systems only occur with Tom in the driver's seat (minus the prologue with Lex and Ethan, which Tom didn't witness), making it seem awfully likely that the whole thing is just Tom's hallucination.
• Obliviously Evil: Jane's perspective is so warped — whether because she Came Back Wrong or because she was Driven to Madness by being trapped in a car's body for 18 months — that she actually doesn't seem to realize her actions are morally questionable. For all her The Chessmaster traits this is a detriment to her Evil Plan, with her obliviously prattling on to Tom about picking a woman to murder and steal the body of without any awareness this might shock or upset him.
• Ominous Crack: When Tim accidentally reveals Tom and Becky are dating with Jane in the garage, her rearview mirror suddenly cracks.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Tom seems to repeatedly refuse to take the hint from Jane that the reason she's making him choose the girl he finds most attractive at the beach is she's looking for a new body to Kill and Replace — possibly because he's intentionally in denial about how evil she's become. Unfortunately, this means he lets her talk him into stalking the Greenpeace Girl all the way up to the point of almost running her over before he balks (which, predictably, leads to her calling the cops and turning him into a suspect for attempted murder).
• Orgasmic Combat: Jane's ghost has a look of pure bliss on her face when the car finally hits Becky.
• Out of Focus: Episode Three puts the characters from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals (who've dominated the Call Backs in the first two episodes of Nightmare Time) Out of Focus — the only one who appears is former Bit Character the Greenpeace Girl. Notably, "Uncle Paul" is only mentioned in passing, and Paul's girlfriend Emma — Jane's sister — is never mentioned nor appears at all. (This is regarded by some fans as a Plot Hole, since Emma is Tim's actual next of kin after Tom and the scenario at the end of the episode should logically involve her in some way.)
• Parent with New Paramour: Tom, after mourning his wife Jane for over a year, begins to date Becky Barnes, who he's introduced to his son. In a twist on the usual trope usage, Tim doesn't mind at all that his dad is moving on, and actually likes Becky a lot. It's Tom's dead wife that has objections.
• Parodies for Dummies: Tom goes to the bookstore to buy a "Neurology for Dummies" book to try to figure out if it's possible Jane's voice is a Hallucination caused by PTSD or brain damage. He lampshades that even the "for Dummies" version of this subject is a bit beyond his usual reading level and that self-diagnosis from a book isn't really a great idea — unfortunately, ironically, the person he'd normally ask about this kind of thing is the person he's hallucinating about (his dead wife Jane).
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Tom desperately suggests doing this when he finds himself forced into Jane's Evil Plan, asking if she can't Kill and Replace "someone who deserves it, like Linda Monroe?" Jane, who seems to be having a hard time grasping Tom's moral objections to this plan, takes this as evidence that Tom has always had a crush on Linda. (Note that this is still Black Comedy, since, given that this is an Alternate Timeline from Black Friday, as far as Tom knows Linda is a Rich Bitch but hasn't done anything deserving of death.)
• Police Are Useless: For once averted with the Hatchetfield PD, who actually do listen when Greenpeace Girl calls them about Tom's attempted vehicular homicide on her and show up to arrest him shortly after his car runs over Becky Barnes. It helps that this time they're represented by Mariah Rose Faith's character of Doug rather than Charlotte's awful husband Sam.
• The Professor: One of Jane's patients at St. Damien's is a former literature professor (played with aplomb by Jeff Blim) who claims to have been studying the Magical Incantations of the Black Book when he went mad and was institutionalized. Her obsession with his case leading her to listen to the audio tape he made of one of these incantations is the Contrived Coincidence that causes this story to happen.
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: Jane, after having her soul put inside a car becomes this when getting murderous around women Tom might like, having the goal to escape her automobile prison and possess their bodies at every opportunity. And at the end, she succeeds in doing so with Becky, even if Tom isn't around to see it.
• Psycho Psychologist: This story reveals that Jane's profession in life was as a psychiatrist at St. Damien's, and the version of Jane we meet seems perfectly willing to use her general analytical skills re: the human psyche and her specific knowledge of Tom's inner demons to get herself back in a human body, regardless of the cost.
• Reaction Shot: The YouTube release has a brief but blatant cut back to Zoom's full gallery view immediately after Tom and Jane's sex scene so we can see the whole cast's reaction to it.
• Sanity Slippage: Tom fears he's going insane when he first hears the car talk, and later, her actions and what she asks him to do drive him off the deep end for real... though not enough to actually try and harm Becky, as everyone assumes.
• Self-Punishment Over Failure: Black Friday revealed that Tom thinks of Jane's death as the result of his own incompetence and hates himself over it as deeply as if he were a murderer; in this story, Jane seems aware of this guilt and exploits it in order to make Tom feel like he has no choice but to go along with her plan to undo it and bring her back, no matter the cost to himself or to others. Doug harshly sums up what looks from the outside like a purely irrational decision to throw away the life he'd been building before Jane came back:
  Maybe the guy just didn't want to be happy.
• Sentient Vehicle: Tom's Cool Car comes back from the shop with a mind of its own and the ability to talk, because Jane's soul is possessing it.
• Shout-Out: Hatchetfield's local Suck E. Cheese's, Pizza Pete's, shows up again in this story, as does Tim's favorite game at Pizza Pete's, Zombie House (an obvious Bland-Name Product for House of the Dead).
  • The Narrator spends a lot of time emphasizing the make and model of Tom's Cool Car (a 1986 Ford Fox-body Mustang), to the point where we can safely conclude there's some Author Appeal going on — and the Title Sequence Music Video could easily serve as an actual Ford Mustang commercial (if an unusually unsubtle one).
  • The Title Sequence gives a quick double plug by showing Tom listening to The Eagles' The Very Best Of (2003) on Spotify.
• Significant Double Casting: In both this story and "The Witch in the Web" Jaime Lyn Beatty plays an Evil Matriarch, 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.)
• Speak in Unison: Jaime Lyn Beatty and Kim Whalen do this for the final Wham Line to demonstrate to the audience that Jane is indeed possessing Becky's body. Since they're videoconferencing with each other, which makes successfully speaking in unison virtually impossible, they pull it off by drawing out the line as slowly as they possibly can.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Robert Manion plays both Ethan Green and his father Tony.
• Sudden Sequel Heel Syndrome: Jane, although if you look back at certain elements of her description in hindsight (like Emma calling her a Control Freak or Tom describing her incessant need to poke at his Trauma Buttons) it's arguably not that sudden.
• There Are No Therapists: There are mental health professionals in this world, as Tom is well aware, since he was married to one; Becky urges him to contact a friend of hers who works in the psych wing at St. Damien's, but unfortunately he won't hear of it because Jane has browbeaten him into accepting that she's real and her secret must be kept.
  • Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of Tom's issues come from the fact that he was married to a psychiatrist and was used to leaning on her for all his mental health support, which means when she was gone he was unable to open himself up that intimately to anyone else — and meant that when her ghost came back as a Psycho Psychologist he was completely open to all her manipulations. (This is Truth in Television, except for the ghost part — mental health professionals will generally tell you that this is why treating a loved one you have a personal relationship with as a therapist is a bad idea, and a healthy therapeutic relationship requires a certain professional distance.)
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: This story introduces the Hatchetfield universe's version of the Necronomicon, known simply as "The Black Book".
• Tragic Keepsake: Tom's Mustang — the car Jane died in — has become this for him. Lex and Ethan have an animated conversation about whether his quixotic — and very expensive — quest to restore it to exactly as it was before the accident is an understandable decision or not, and whether it's healthy to indulge the romantic impulse to hang onto a loss from your past and never fully let it go. This story ends up literalizing the metaphor about how a reminder of grief like this can keep you from moving on, in a disturbingly visceral way.
• Trauma Button: Tom and Tim's first scene reveals that Tom still feels significant discomfort after the accident from looking at video games involving car crashes — on top of his existing PTSD from Iraq over games that involve gun violence. Later on, Jane reveals her awareness of Tom's more specific Trauma Button of being blamed for her death in the accident and accused of not really caring about her enough to prevent her death, and uses it shamelessly to guilt him into obeying her orders.
• Trauma Conga Line: Tom already had a hell of one before this story began and the events of "Jane's a Car" push him all the way to his breaking point — and beyond. Jane intentionally doing this, knowing how fragile Tom's psyche is and where all his weak points are, makes her very very difficult to forgive.
• Unseen No More: This story finally brings Posthumous Character Jane Perkins — about whom we've heard a lot but never seen — onstage, and has her played by fan favorite actress who's been relatively Out of Focus in Hatchetfield, Jaime Lyn Beatty.
• Verbal Backspace: Becky never confessed to killing her ex-husband Stanley in this timeline, and when she almost does so she quickly walks it back.
  Becky: I was with my ex-husband for fifteen miserable years. I thank God every day that he's dead... to me. Dead to me. I don't know where he is.
• Visible Invisibility: Jane's human self is visible to the audience (superimposed on a 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 driving her to extreme measures to get her body back (so to speak).
• Watch Out for That Tree!: The Witchwood is somewhat thickly planted and not a safe place to drive, and unfortunately for all of Jane's Car Fu she isn't able to avoid hitting the tree directly behind Becky after running her over, setting up the (initially) ambiguous ending.
• Wham Line: "Mommy's home."
• Whole-Plot Reference: A very obvious one for Stephen King's Christine, although Christine was just a Sinister Car with no real explanation for why she was sentient and evil. A car that's specifically haunted by the ghost of a woman who died in it is the subject of R. L. Stine's The Haunted Car, and a benevolent version of the "haunted car" trope is the premise of My Mother the Car.
  • The macabre situation of going "shopping" for new bodies to put his dead wife's consciousness in has been done before in The Brain That Wouldn't Die and The Man with Two Brains, although Tom is a lot less enthusiastic and proactive about the process than the Mad Scientist protagonists of those movies were.
• Word Salad Lyrics: The lyrics of "Jane's a Car" don't really make sense when talking about an actual car, just tossing off names of car parts at random — including the immediate contradiction of saying the car both has a "carburetor" and "fuel injection". It makes it very clear very quickly that the lyrics aren't really about a car, especially the lyrics saying "I've traded in for new.../I come right back to you..." (It's possible to keep on trading in a used car and then tracking it down and re-purchasing it, but much more logistically difficult than if he's really talking about a Relationship Revolving Door with a person.)
• You Have to Believe Me!: Tom doesn't do a very good job of explaining to Becky what's going on in a way that doesn't make him sound crazy — and, in fact, his confession that he's a danger to himself or others, i.e. "Sooner or later Jane's gonna make me run someone over", is a major tactical error in that it obligates her as a medical professional to call the police. But it's hard to really chide someone in his circumstances for not being in the clearest state of mind.

The Witch in the Web

The Witch in the Web

"A witch is a witch for a reason."

When Hannah Foster's dreams are haunted by an evil witch, and her friend, Webby, goes missing, she'll need the help of a mysterious woman with strange powers to escape her own nightmare time...

Musical sequences:
"The Witch in the Web" performed by Kendall Nicole
"The Web I Spin For You" performed by Mariah Rose Faith

---

• The '80s: This decade comes up multiple times in the story — Miss Holloway is a Disco Dan whose fashion senes and lifestyle seem stuck in the 1980s, and the first Tree-Person from an earlier time period we meet in the Witchwood is Casey, a teenage girl who was "planted" in 1986.
• Absurdly Sharp Claws: Willabella's One-Winged Angel form has long, jagged fingernails as sharp and hard as knives.
• Abusive Parents: Pamela Foster, to extremes, although it's abuse born of general negligence (tied to her depression and drug addiction) rather than concentrated malice. She makes it very clear she doesn't see her kids as much more than an annoyance she'd be happy to be rid of, though.
• Actor Allusion:
  • The Three-Girl Creature is played by Jaime Lyn Beatty, Mariah Rose Faith and Lauren Lopez — the three female members of the The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals 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 Speak in Unison 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 Hive Mind.)
  • For once, a Starkid Creator Couple play a couple onscreen in a show, if only an implied one in this case — Curt Mega and Kim Whalen are married in Real Life and play Duke and Miss Holloway here.
  • Hannah's ukulele is represented as the ukulele Team Starkid actually gave Kendall Nicole as a gift after a performance of Black Friday that fell on her birthday. In a twist on the usual version of this trope, Kendall's real ukulele, which is black, represents the false ukulele Willabella swaps out for her real one to take her power away. Hannah's real ukulele, which is a shining, pristine white, is never physically seen during the show — it's represented by the black ukulele held so we can't clearly see its body.
• All There in the Script: The script and the end credits confirm the hints in Black Friday that Uncle Wiley used to be Colonel Wilbur Cross, though this is never brought up in the actual story.
• Apocalypse Maiden: Hannah turns out to be a classic example of this trope — she's The Chosen One, with inborn Psychic Powers so immense that if her evil ancestor's Evil Plan to possess and replace her succeeds, she will effectively become The Antichrist.
• Artistic License: File this as possibly Artistic License – Biology or Artistic License – Geography — 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 Real Life, 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 eagerly looking forward to the next one ten months in advance.
• Bad Liar: Hannah isn't particularly good at lying to adults.
  Duke: She inside?
  Hannah: No.
  Duke: She tell you to say that?
  Hannah: Uh-huh.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: We get a one-two punch of these — Miss Holloway has a "rematch" with a Living Memory of her Arch-Nemesis Uncle Wiley, which serves to awaken Hannah's Psychic Powers and serve as a prelude for Hannah's Final Battle against Willabella Muckwab in her own mind.
• Best Served Cold: There's a lot of this going around in the Hatchetfield setting, but this story reveals that in particular Willabella Muckwab has been waiting two hundred years to return to Earth and take her revenge against the town of Hatchetfield and the rest of humanity for her first death. The last remnants of Uncle Wiley have likewise been waiting for the opportunity to do the same to Miss Holloway for killing him several years ago. And Webby herself, according to the lyrics of "The Web I Spin for You", has been waiting untold eons of time as The Chessmaster to finish her plan to finally get Wiggly back for betraying her long ago.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Miss Holloway gestures to this concept when talking to Hannah; we never see her do anything actually ethically questionable onscreen, but she tells us that she's "mostly" a good witch and that, even though she knows using the Black Book "has a price", she willingly pays it because "sometimes we have to use something bad to do something good". Similarly, Webby, the Big Good of the setting, comes off very much as Good Is Not Nice, taking visible satisfaction in finally killing the Witch (and being ambiguously involved in the creation of the Witchwood, which at some points required actual murder of those with a "touch of the Gift" who weren't willing to be Human Sacrifices).
• Blatant Lies: Pamela does this whenever cornered about her abominable neglect of Hannah, and Duke obviously sees through it but the rules governing his job mean he has to accept it.
  Pamela: I cannot believe Hannah would just steal one of my beers! I taught you better 'n that, young lady!
  (later)
  Duke: She needs to be engaged with something! Where is her ukulele?
  Pamela: What?
  Duke: The instrument you took from her?
  Pamela: Me? Take from my own child?
  Duke: That's what she said.
  Pamela: Well, we've already established she's a lying little turd.
• Body Horror: The Three-Girl Creature is one of the most shocking examples in a Hatchetfield story thus far. "Lex's" transformation into Willabella Muckwab's final form also qualifies, especially the detail that she does so by literally ripping off Lex's face.
• Body Surf: Willabella Muckwab's grand Evil Plan is to invade the body of her descendant, Hannah Foster, and use her Psychic Powers to Take Over the World. Uncle Wiley claims to be inspired by this plan and comes up with a similar one on the fly, to escape his status as a Living Memory of Miss Holloway by jumping into the unconscious body of the nearby Pamela Foster. Luckily, Hannah foils them both.
• Burn the Witch!: The 1824 Flashback sequence plays out very much like this, although in this case the Witch was very much guilty of using dark magic fueled by murdering the town's children, and the Judge's Knight Templar attitude is therefore justified.
• The Bus Came Back: After Lex was Put on a Bus offstage by being taken to prison before the beginning of the story, we suddenly find out Pamela confessed to her crimes and got Lex and Ethan released with time served, and Lex has come back to be Hannah's legal guardian while Pamela serves her sentence. This is, of course, all a very obvious trick by the Witch in the Web, but after Hannah awakens for real, Miss Holloway reveals she was able to leave a post-hypnotic suggestion in Pamela's mind to make this happen for real too.
• Call-Back: We get one to the "magic hat" scene in Black Friday, revealing Ethan Green is one of the children Miss Holloway helped back in the day and the baseball cap is a typical Magic Feather Miss Holloway leaves with kids to "remind them that they're warriors".
  • Willabella Muckwab was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it bit of Foreshadowing in "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man", where she was briefly mentioned as one of the other folk legends associated with the Witchwood alongside Wooly-Foot the Ape-Man.
  • Wiggly and Uncle Wiley's unexpected appearance was a major Moment of Awesome for fans of Black Friday, as was the vaguely hinted-at backstory about how, in this timeline, Miss Holloway essentially intervened in the plot of Black Friday before it began and prevented it.
  • Wiggly's "We just keep running into each other, don't we, Hannah?" is a Call-Back to the Hive Mind (speaking through Alice, Deb and the Hatchetfield Bee)'s "We just keep running into each other, don't we, Paul?" in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals.
  • The Reveal of the five dolls representing the five brothers who make up the Lords in Black: in order (the exact same order in which the mysterious voice listed their names in "Jane's a Car" and in which they are shown during the end credits): an unfamiliar blue one with a stone face, suggestive of the meteor and its "blue shit" from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals; the two we've seen previously in "Watcher World" and "Time Bastard"; a totally new one for a story yet untold; and finally, Wiggly himself.
  • The version of "Lex" Hannah meets inside the Lotus-Eater Machine reveals she's an impostor in a horrible moment where she quotes Hannah's abusive mom from earlier in the episode.
  Hannah: Those are... her brothers. They're bad.
  Lex: Who told you that? The nasty little spider you think is your friend?
  Hannah: ...Uh-huh.
  Lex: Well. We've already established she's a lying little turd.
  • Miss Holloway's "Nightmare Time" memory is one of some kind of final confrontation with Uncle Wiley at the Starlight Theater, the same place Paul Matthews had his confrontation with the Meteor's Hive Mind in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals. For bonus synchronicity, Miss Holloway initially came to the theater to investigate the Three-Girl Creature, the result of a botched Fusion Dance combining three humans into one — played by the same three actresses who played the three teen girls who Speak in Unison as the representatives of the Hive Mind during "Not Your Seed" in that same show.
  • One of the voices that calls out to Hannah from the void beyond the Starlight Theater in Miss Holloway's Nightmare Time is played by Robert Manion, greeting Hannah with the same words Ethan Green (and Ethan's Bad Double) did in Black Friday.
• Cerebus Syndrome: There are very few actual jokes in this episode, and what few there are are heavily tinged with Black Comedy — this Grand Finale is one for the fans who came for the Myth Arc and see the comedy as secondary.
• Character Development: Hannah has become a lot more lucid at 14 than she appeared to be a year ago during Black Friday, though it helps that she's talking to Miss Holloway most of the time, who both understands and believes what she says about the supernatural and is willing to meet her halfway in a way Lex and Ethan weren't.
• The Chosen One: Hannah turns out to be this — the long-prophesied descendant of Willabella Muckwab, born as the "most powerful psychic mind ever to exist", the only human aware of The Multiverse and the only one with the power to eventually save or damn Hatchetfield's different timelines as a whole.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: According to "The Web I Spin for You", this will be the Lords in Black's eventual downfall; they created their greatest enemy, Webby, when Wiggly betrayed his sister in some unspecified way long ago, and the "witches he summons" always betray or are betrayed by him in the long run (because such is the nature of evil).
• Coconut Superpowers: Angela Giarratana "transforms" from Lex into the Witch just by turning on a purple filter on her Zoom window, and "pulling off" her face and leaving it stretched out and distorted for the rest of the scene.
• Collapsing Lair: Hannah seizing control of her mind back from Willabella is represented by her smashing the walls of the setting Willabella built in her dreams — originally the idealized version of the Foster family trailer, transformed into her 1824 witch's hut when she reveals herself. Once the witch's hut completely crumbles, there's nothing left but a Blank White Void, with no walls left to protect the Witch from the gaze of Webby, her cosmic enemy.
• Color Motifs: The "Black and White" is represented by Hannah's ukulele shifting from white to black depending on whether it's the real one or Willabella's substitute. There's also Willabella herself having a purple filter when she reveals her true form, the Lords in Black being represented by their Color-Coded for Your Convenience doll forms, and Webby showing up in her white dress with white hair.
• Compelling Voice: Miss Holloway has one of these (represented by reverb on the soundtrack), allowing her to perform something like hypnosis on Pamela to put her into Forced Sleep and to use on Hannah and herself to go into a trance for a Journey to the Center of the Mind, only taking effect far, far faster than anything Real Life hypnotists can do.
• The Constant: Miss Holloway's 1980s aesthetic remains constant even as everything around Hannah changes to match the Witch's Past-Life Memories, serving as Hannah's one reality check as Willabella tries to impose Loss of Identity on her.
• Cool Sword: The "Black Blade" Miss Holloway used to kill Uncle Wiley. We learn very little about it, but apparently the blade had to be left stabbed through Uncle Wiley's corpse to keep him from coming back.
• Creepy High-Pitched Voice: Once the Witch reveals her true self, her voice turns into a constant ear-splitting shriek, literally like nails on a chalkboard.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Hannah's Traumatic Superpower Awakening allows her to blast Uncle Wiley's Living Memory into atoms with a single shriek of rage. When she fully gains control of her powers inside her own mind, she's able to smash Willabella Muckwab's Supervillain Lair she built in her mind to pieces with the Witch powerless to stop her — and then Webby reappears and turns the Witch herself to dust with a flick of a finger.
• A Day in the Limelight: A long-awaited one for Black Friday's Waif Prophet Hannah Foster, giving some clarity on the mysterious nature of her powers and her Imaginary Friend, the Giant Spider Webby.
• Déjà Vu: Hannah doesn't consciously recognize the Wiggly doll or Uncle Wiley from the Alternate Timeline of Black Friday (notably, she didn't actually meet Uncle Wiley onstage in Black Friday either) but when the two of them act like they know her, she gets a horrible sinking feeling they're telling the truth.
• Dem Bones: The reanimated Living Memory of Uncle Wiley starts off as just his animated skeleton, before a "flash of green light" regenerates his flesh and clothing.
• Dream Emergency Exit: Miss Holloway is unable to awaken from her Nightmare Time and escape Uncle Wiley strangling her until Hannah destroys Wiley — and the entire dream-version of the Starlight Theater — with one great psychic blast. Similarly, Hannah is only able to escape from her own Nightmare Time after she smashes the setting around her (her family's trailer, transformed into Willabella's witch's hut) with her ukulele, and Webby comes back to kill the Witch.
• Dream Tells You to Wake Up: Hannah finally escapes Nightmare Time when Webby directly tells her that it's time to wake up.
• Dream Walker: The Witch in the Web confronts Hannah in her dreams.
• Dream Within a Dream: The Witch's final tactic to try to ensnare Hannah is to let her "wake up" in her bed in her room, only to find that it's a much cleaner, nicer, brighter version of her room and that her beloved sister Lex is there with her, having been mysteriously and suddenly let out of prison. The audience obviously didn't buy it one bit, but you can't fault Hannah for at least briefly wanting to believe.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: It's a Surprisingly Happy Ending for a Hatchetfield story, but after the long Trauma Conga Line of Hannah's "Nightmare Time" — leaving her paralyzed with terror for most of the story before its climactic Final Battle — you can't say she didn't earn it.
• Evil Old Folks: Willabella Muckwab was already quite old — and quite evil — when she died the first time, but apparently two hundred years as the evil spirit haunting the Witchwood has turned her into a horrifyingly twisted hag with literally rotting, stinking flesh barely clinging to a warped and twisted skeleton. It probably doesn't help that "Nightmare Time" is a Spirit World where your appearance reflects your personality.
  • The Puritan Judge in the Flashback to 1824 may be more Knight Templar than genuinely evil, but he's terrifying nonetheless, and all the more terrifying for being a decrepit, wrinkled old man determined to see Hannah-as-Willabella hanged.
• Familial Body Snatcher: Willabella Muckwab has been waiting for almost 200 years for the Chosen One to be born into her matrilineal bloodline ("the daughter of my daughter's daughter, and her daughter's daughter...") so that she can steal her body and harness her powers to finish her Evil Plan from long ago.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: The Witch being Reduced to Dust isn't too bad, but Webby still makes Hannah close her eyes to avoid seeing it. Uncle Wiley gives a gleeful, gruesome description of the mutilations he enacted on Miss Holloway's body in the Alternate Timeline where he won his duel against her.
• Flashback: Hannah and Miss Holloway's "Nightmare Time" is a Dream Land cobbled together from their own traumatic memories — although unlike a typical flashback, just because these worlds are based on the past doesn't mean their imagination can't twist them into new events that threaten their lives. Also, part of what's going on with Nightmare Time is that the Witch has been invading Hannah's mind and replacing her bad memories with the Witch's own Past-Life Memories.
• Friend to All Children: Both Duke and Miss Holloway have dedicated their lives to helping kids, albeit in very different ways.
• God's Hands Are Tied: The Big Good Webby, for whatever reason, cannot act on the world directly and must act through proxies — the Hatchetmen who initially created the web in the Witchwood implicitly being one of them. Webby teaches Hannah songs that are meant to keep the Witch's ghost at bay, which only work as long as Hannah can remember the lyrics and the tune and doesn't lose her memory of Webby herself; as soon as she does so, the Witch starts gaining in power and taking over her mind. It's only by reclaiming her memories of Webby that she gains control of her powers, and it's implied that only by doing so can she channel Webby's presence and allow Webby to finally kill the Witch directly.
• Good Old Boy: Duke, Miss Holloway and Pamela Foster all speak with some degree of a Southern drawl and exhibit laid-back, working-class mannerisms. Duke and Miss Holloway do so as completely sympathetic good-guy characters, to counterbalance the Lower-Class Lout stereotype Pamela falls into. Later on, Uncle Wiley from Black Friday reappears, who talks much the same way.
• Grand Finale: This is the grand finale for Season 1, uniting the entire combined cast of the Hatchetfield series.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Willabella Muckwab the Muck-Witch turns out to have been one for the whole Hatchetfield series, possibly the biggest human Big Bad in the setting — she's the first human to discover and worship the Lords in Black, the author of the Black Book and the evil spirit the Witchwood and the town of Hatchetfield were built to contain. All of the horror and misery of the Hatchetfield series is at least indirectly her fault, and this timeline's version of Uncle Wiley — the previous human(-ish) Big Bad from Black Friday — graciously cedes the Big Bad title to her and now claims to only be her dragon.
• Halloween Episode: This episode went up a week before Halloween in Real Life. In-universe, it doesn't take place on Halloween, but sometime shortly before it — Donna on the news mentions that there's "jack-o-lanterns going up" around town.
• Harmful to Minors: Webby reappears at the last minute to spare Hannah from having to kill the Witch herself, and tells Hannah to close her eyes so she won't have to see Webby do it for her.
• Hearing Voices: Hannah is bombarded by voices when she enters Miss Holloway's mind — some of them cajoling and tempting, some cruel and threatening — and one of which is the very familiar voice of Jon Matteson as Wiggly.
• Hero of Another Story: Miss Holloway, and it's a hell of a story — it turns out she killed Uncle Wiley (who came off as The Omnipotent Satan figure in Black Friday) in half of all known timelines and personally prevented the apocalypse and saved the world. Unfortunately, there are still future apocalypses coming down the pike, and Evil Only Has to Win Once...
• Human Sacrifice: It's revealed that the Witchwood was created by this, by a mysterious Ancient Conspiracy known as the Hatchetmen.
• I Will Only Slow You Down: Miss Holloway demands that Hannah run for the exit to the Starlight Theater and let her deal with Uncle Wiley; luckily for her, Hannah turns back at the last minute and gets enough of a grip on her power to save her life and annihilate Uncle Wiley just before she dies.
• Iconic Outfit: Miss Holloway has a very '80s outfit consisting of beat-up sneakers, teased and blow-dried '80s Hair, and an iconic oversized denim jacket. Turns out that jacket is also the centerpiece of a different character's Iconic Outfit — Uncle Wiley took it as a Battle Trophy from her in the set of timelines where he won their duel and killed her, and it forms part of his all-denim outfit in Black Friday (retroactively letting us know Black Friday was one of those timelines).
• Identical Grandson: Played with; Willabella Muckwab and her distant descendant Lex Foster are both played by Angela Giarratana, but of course, this connection exists between 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. The Narrator's description and the way Angela puts her all into contorting her face suggests that Willabella, in fact, does not much resemble Lex.
• Implied Love Interest: Duke and Miss Holloway have a lot of flirtatious banter with each other, but nothing that confirms that they're actually dating (and a few lines that imply that Duke would like their relationship to be romantic but Miss Holloway is resisting).
• Improbable Weapon User: Once Hannah reclaims her white ukulele, the symbol of her power, she gets busy smashing the Witch's hut to pieces with it — and since Nightmare Time is "a world of dreams and symbols", it's just as destructive a weapon as a sledgehammer or a machete would be.
• Infodump: The device of Miss Holloway's Lecture as Exposition when explaining the Black Book's workings to Hannah, the Journey to the Center of the Mind mechanic allowing us a series of Flashbacks, and both Uncle Wiley and Willabella herself's Evil Gloating means we get through a lot of Exposition about the Hatchetfield setting by the end of the story — although there are still quite a few Sequel Hooks and riddles for the ages left at the end, not least of which is Miss Holloway herself.
• Interface Spoiler: Jon Matteson showed up for this episode wearing a Renaissance Faire-style Badass Cape, leading people to speculate over his costume's significance. Subverted, in that, hilariously, Jon has no significant role in this episode at all and the cape was just for flavor during his brief appearance as a random member of the angry mob in 1824, with him wearing it the whole time just an example of Jon being "extra".
• It Was with You All Along: Just when the Witch seems like she's about to win her final victory, Hannah remembers Miss Holloway's reminder that Nightmare Time takes place in her own mind and she has final authority over what happens there — and that the Witch cannot keep the white ukulele that symbolizes her creativity and power from her, and that, sure enough, as soon as she remembers its existence it's right there next to her hand.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: The latter half of this story takes place inside Hannah's personal "Nightmare Time", i.e. the Dream Land composed of her most traumatic memories that connects to the Spirit World (through which Willabella Muckwab is trying to attack and possess her), with a brief detour into that of her newfound mentor Miss Holloway. Culminates in a Battle in the Center of the Mind for both of them.
• Jump Scare: It's hard to do a proper one of these with a low-budget Zoom script reading, but Starkid came close to pulling one off anyway by having Jon Matteson's window suddenly appear with Wiggly's face filling the camera when Wiggly speaks to Hannah for the first time.
• Kent Brockman News: Dan and Donna are on the news again in this episode and, as usual, are broadcasting about a pointless Human-Interest Story containing no useful information. Pamela is only watching it because she considers watching Dan talk about anything to be Eating the Eye Candy.
• Knight Templar: The terrifying Judge ordering Willabella Muckwab's execution — which, in this false memory planted by the Witch, is Hannah's execution — is a pitch-perfect embodiment of this archetype.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The Witch's psychic attacks on Hannah's mind during her nightmares are specifically geared to wiping away her memories of her Not-So-Imaginary Friend Webby, especially the songs Webby taught her to sing to keep the Witch's spirit at bay. It turns out this is just the first step toward manipulating Hannah's memories and replacing her own past with Willabella's Past-Life Memories, Gaslighting her until she believes she is the Witch and Willabella is able to possess her completely.
• Last Episode, New Character: Miss Holloway was unveiled on social media shortly before the episode premiered. She and Duke, as social workers who care deeply for Hannah and help her with her problems both mundane and supernatural, would seem to be the most significant Hatchetfield characters to debut in Nightmare Time, and were never seen or mentioned until now, in the final story of the season.
• Leaking Can of Evil: This story functions as a reveal that the Witchwood has always been this — a "web" created to trap the witch's ghost all the way back in 1824, against which she's been struggling all that time and putting what mischief into the world she can through the holes in the barrier.
• Leitmotif: Once more some elaborate work done in this department by the inimitable Matt Dahan:
  • We get a Call-Forward to "The Web I Spin for You" as the opening to the episode, so that the Solemn Ending Theme can serve as Book Ends.
  • The "Nightmare Time" riff shows up during a story for the first time (as opposed to Book Ends opening and closing the story), playing at dramatic moments like whenever Hannah actually falls asleep and enters "Nightmare Time", or when the dolls of the Lords in Black appear, and one last time to announce the return of Ethan's magic hat "imbued with the power of Grayskull".
  • "Peanuts!" gets a reprise under Dan and Donna's morning news report.
  • There's a new, wistful theme associated with the Witchwood and the Tree-People, which translates into the familiar "spooky" Witchwood theme at the moment Hannah gets sucked into the center of the Witchwood and wakes up in 1824.
  • The theme associated with Hannah's visions in Black Friday — which became part of the tune of "Do You Want To Play?" — comes back here when Hannah has particularly insightful moments.
  • Duke's theme is a jazzy, upbeat version of the theme from "Show Me Your Hands?" (the Hatchetfield PD's motif), as a Reasonable Authority Figure in contrast to the cops.
  • The tune from the verses of "CaliforMIA" ("My mom's a bitch!") comes back whenever people are discussing Lex and Hannah's home life with their mother.
  • Matt composes a new theme — vaguely dissonant and meandering — as "Miss Holloway's theme" that follows her around when she uses her powers or questions are raised about her past. When Duke and Miss Holloway are alone together, his theme and hers get mashed up.
  • There's a second new theme, a leitmotif for the Lords in Black, that plays when the Black Book is first revealed, when the false Lex starts pulling out the Lords in Black dolls, and when she transforms into her true form as the Witch in the Web.
  • A particularly shocking moment for the audience is when the Nightmare Time Theme Tune proper shows up itself as a leitmotif when Hannah first sees her ukulele has been replaced with the Witch's fake one in the waking world.
  • The Title Track of Black Friday, which played when Lex thought she was going to die in that show, plays again when the Judge pronounces sentence on Hannah and is about to execute her.
  • The tune of "Let It Out", which accompanied a Final Battle at the Starlight Theater in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, plays again at the introduction of the Starlight Theater nightmare in Miss Holloway's mind.
  • Wiggly's surprise appearance comes with the reprise of his leitmotif from Black Friday (which became part of the chorus of "Wiggle"), which underscores the resurrection of Uncle Wiley.
  • Once Wiley returns to life, his jazzy bass theme from Black Friday comes back with him.
  • The opening verse of "What If Tomorrow Comes?" ("Tomorrow will come/Tomorrow won't come/Will tomorrow come today?") starts playing when Uncle Wiley brings up the concept of The Multiverse. It plays again as a Triumphant Reprise when Hannah wins her Final Battle and destroys the Witch's hut.
  • The bridge of "Black Friday" ("At first I didn't know what she was to me..."), representing Lex and Hannah's relationship, plays when the false Lex first appears in Hannah's dream. It cuts off when Hannah starts to realize who "Lex" really is, and then comes back in earnest when she finds Lex's ukulele.
  • The chorus of "What If Tomorrow Comes?" is a leitmotif for Hannah eventually finding peace — her Traumatic Superpower Awakening is accompanied by a major-key Triumphant Reprise of the first line of this theme, repeated over and over, and the ending scene after Hannah wakes up is a quiet piano reprise of this tune, which notably ends the story without transitioning to the "Nightmare Time riff" at the Fade to Black.
• Living Memory: In this timeline, Miss Holloway killed the real Uncle Wiley years ago, and all we're seeing is her repressed traumatic memory of the event. Unfortunately, Hannah's Psychic Powers are vast enough that a single errant spark of them is enough to reawaken this memory into a fully-aware psychic construct that's clever and powerful enough to outwit Miss Holloway — the mind he's parasitically dependent on for existence — and almost leap into Pamela's body and resurrect himself.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Willabella Muckwab's final gambit after Hannah saves Miss Holloway by destroying her Nightmare Time and returning to her own mind is to present her with an idealized, utopian version of her room at home and disguise herself as her sister Lex, telling her that if she "stays in Drowsy-Town" with her (and lets Willabella pilot her body and mind up in the real world) then she never need be unhappy again. Hannah is perilously close to accepting, but she won't stop asking about the ukulele the real Lex gave her that serves as her connection to Webby, which starts pissing "Lex" off.
• Lower-Class Lout: Pamela Foster is the classic "trailer trash" stereotype, which Lex has been desperately trying to rise above and to take Hannah away from.
• Magic Feather: Hannah needs her white ukulele — a gift she got from Lex and the only object of value she owns — to keep playing the songs Webby taught her to keep Willabella's spirit away, and when Willabella uses her own powers to swap out the white ukulele for a black one it renders her helpless against Willabella's attacks on her mind in her dreams. The climax reveals, however, that the ukulele's power was only symbolic and that the power was inside herself all along — and once she realizes this inside her dreamscape it turns out the ukulele was with her all along.
  • This story also gives us a Call-Back to Ethan's "magic" baseball cap in Black Friday and reveals that it's probably also this — the baseball cap is one of the tokens Miss Holloway gives to kids she helps "to remind them that they're warriors", but the actual power always comes from the person themselves.
• Magic Music: Lex bought Hannah a ukulele as a gift a long time ago, and Webby has been singing songs in her mind, which help her retain her psychic connection to her and keep the Witch's soul at bay. Pamela confiscating the ukulele from her so she can get some sleep at night — giving her no remaining tools to keep the Witch from taking over her dreams — is the inciting incident that begins the story.
• Make Them Rot: This time, when Uncle Wiley tosses his half-eaten apple to Hannah, it instantly dissolves into maggots and mush in her hand — possibly a side effect of the general atmosphere of decay permeating Miss Holloway's nightmare version of the Starlight Theater.
• Meaningful Name: We find out Willabella Muckwab being called "the Muck-witch" wasn't just a riff on her last name when Lex's trailer transforms into her witch's hut and "dark muck drips down the walls".
• Meat Puppet: Uncle Wiley demonstrates a previously-unseen ability to do this, manipulating the unconscious Pamela's body to strangle Miss Holloway's body while she's helplessly trancing in Nightmare Time.
• Mentor Archetype: Miss Holloway becomes a classic one for Hannah, becoming the Virgil figure leading Hannah-as-Dante through the metaphysical Hell of Nightmare Time.
• Mr. Exposition: A lot of what we learn about the Hatchetfield multiverse in this story is the result of Uncle Wiley giving a lengthy Evil Gloating Motive Rant about how close Willabella Muckwab's Evil Plan is to fruition.
• Ms. Fanservice: Mariah Rose Faith wears a revealing white dress to play Webby in "The Web I Spin for You".
• The Multiverse: This story confirms that Alternate Timelines exist, that beings like Uncle Wiley and his masters are aware of them, and that the Chosen One Hannah is the only human to be vaguely aware of them and somehow her own nature is intimately tied to them. (Wiley tells us that "Everything shattered when she came!", and Word of God has dropped hints that her birth in 2005 is what allowed observably branching timelines to occur afterwards.)
• Musical World Hypotheses: We're told one of the ways Webby communicates to Hannah is "singing songs to her", and after seeing this show it's really obvious the Music Video of "The Witch in the Web" is Hannah literally singing a song Webby taught her to try to keep the nightmares away — as, despite being performed by Hannah, a second listen makes it clear that the lyrics depict a message from Webby to Hannah. "The Web I Spin for You" is also obviously one of Webby's songs, although it's unclear whether she's ever taught it to Hannah (since it seems to be about personal secrets about her relationship with her brothers Hannah may not be ready for).
  • That said, the actual version of "The Witch in the Web" we hear can't be diegetic — in the waking world, anyway — because it's played on a full-sized guitar, not a ukulele, and adds extra instrumentation from a strings section in the final verse. (Perhaps this is how the song originally sounded to Hannah when Webby taught it to her in her dreams.)
• Myth Arc: This story finally reveals the basic outline of the Hatchetfield series' Myth Arc — the timelines that make up Hatchetfield's "multiverse" were split as a result of the supernatural event that also led to Hannah Foster being born as the Chosen One, and Hannah's power is the only thing that can finally end the terror of the Lords in Black and bring about a true happy ending for all the timelines as a whole.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Miss Holloway's desperation move of dragging Hannah out of the "Nightmare Time" Willabella arranged in Hannah's mind into her own "Nightmare Time" nearly proves disastrous — Miss Holloway has the residual memories of some very powerful, malignant entities lurking in her own consciousness, and letting Hannah into those memories — whose powers are to make nightmares real — almost brings Uncle Wiley back into the world.
• Noodle Incident: The story of what happened when Miss Holloway tried to help the teenage girls who became the Three-Girl Creature and how it ended in a duel to the death with Uncle Wiley.
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Hannah's original Imaginary Friend, Webby — who turns out to be a very real Spirit Advisor — has vanished from her mind since "Nightmare Time" began, forcing her to resort to talking to the Tree-People of the Witchwood (which from Duke's perspective just looks like "talking to a tree").
• One-Winged Angel: The Witch's final transformation from her disguise as Lex into a gigantic, shrieking, rotting hag with razor-sharp claws. (Presumably she never looked like this in life, given that a lynch mob of mundane villagers was able to overpower and execute her.)
• Only One Name: Miss Holloway never gets a first name — and even her enemies always call her "Miss".
• Opening Shout-Out: The Title Sequence for this story intersperses a simple shot of Hannah playing the ukulele with the same Stock Footage of creepy-looking woods from the Nightmare Time main theme; it turns out this is supposed to be footage of the Witchwood Forest, whose origin story takes center stage in this story.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Somehow the angry mob that killed Willabella Muckwab in 1824 knew that as a powerful witch her ghost would inevitably come back and find a way to resurrect or reincarnate herself if they didn't use magic to prevent it. It's implied something similar is true of the not-quite-human-anymore Wilbur Cross/Uncle Wiley, which is why Miss Holloway left the Black Blade pinning his corpse to a magic circle in the real world after killing him, and why his Living Memory inside her mind becomes fully sapient once activated by Hannah's power and capable of telling her things she didn't know.
• Out of Focus: No The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals characters appear in this story except for a brief appearance from Dan and Donna on the Hatchetfield news. The rest of the cast of Black Friday is also mostly offstage, with Lex and Ethan having been Put on a Bus (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 backstory is intimately related to PEIP and MacNamara was presented as his Arch-Nemesis originally — and yet neither is so much as mentioned here (possibly because this Uncle Wiley is only a Living Memory of Miss Holloway's).
• Past-Life Memories: At the heart of Hannah's Nightmare Time is a memory planted in her mind by the Witch — Willabella Muckwab's memory of her own execution — in hopes that the trauma of reliving it will accelerate Hannah's Loss of Identity so the Witch can take over.
• Point of Divergence: 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 The End of the World as We Know It (as seen in the endings of both Hatchetfield stage shows that existed at the time), while "her half" is the half where the apocalypse was prevented (leading to the assorted timelines seen across Nightmare Time).
• Power Echoes: Miss Holloway's voice gets some reverb on it when she uses her Compelling Voice to hypnotize Pamela — once she and Hannah embark on their Journey to the Center of the Mind, everyone gets some psychic reverb to indicate they're not in the real world.
• Power Incontinence: It turns out one reason Hannah is such a Weirdness Magnet is that she's an incredibly potent psychic power source and she can't control it, meaning that malign spiritual entities that get close to her can easily feed on her to empower themselves. Her accidental resurrection of Uncle Wiley inside Miss Holloway's mind as a Living Memory is a major Oh, Crap! moment.
• Precious Puppy: "Lex" throws in one of these just to try to sweeten the deal for her Lotus-Eater Machine trap to keep Hannah asleep in "Drowsy-Town".
• Pretending to Be One's Own Relative: The ghost of Willabella Muckwab poses as her own distant descendant Lex Foster in the Dream Land known as Nightmare Time, as part of her gambit to take over her sister Hannah Foster's body and pose as her in the waking world.
• Psychic Powers: We get direct confirmation that these exist in this setting, and that having them is linked to the ability to perform more blatant forms of magic. Hannah, as the "most powerful psychic mind to ever exist", has been groomed from birth to be the Witch's reincarnation for this reason; we're told that all of the souls who were killed by Human Sacrifice to form the web in the Witchwood were chosen because they had a "touch of the Gift".
• Put on a Bus: The story begins with the surprising In Medias Res Reveal that Lex is nowhere to be seen and Hannah is living alone with Pamela — exactly the scenario that Lex spent all of Black Friday desperately trying to prevent. We're given a bit of a sickening Bait-and-Switch that this timeline's version of Lex and Ethan may have selfishly abandoned Hannah to go to California themselves — only to get the painful reveal from Duke that Lex and Ethan aren't gone by choice but were arrested and sentenced to prison.
• Reality Bleed: Miss Holloway has repeatedly been lecturing Hannah that Nightmare Time takes place in your own mind, which means Your Mind Makes It Real and as long as you remain aware of this and don't get tricked into surrendering your power to someone else nothing in the dream can hurt you. Uncle Wiley, unfortunately, finds a loophole — when he starts strangling Miss Holloway she finds that she can't do anything to stop her throat closing up no matter how hard she concentrates to warp reality — because he's using Pamela's body to actually physically strangle her in real life, where she has no power while her body is asleep.
• Reality Warper: Uncle Wiley and Miss Holloway both show off their ability to do this inside Miss Holloway's Nightmare Time, including having fun with cheap tricks like Offscreen Teleportation to Jump Scare Hannah and summoning objects back and forth between camera cuts (if this story had actually been filmed). Wiley, of course, ends up conceding his ability to do this is always going to lose to Miss Holloway's given that they're in her mind and not his, which is why he "cheats" and starts using Pamela's body to strangle her in the real world.
• The Reveal: There's a number of Wham Lines and Wham Shots in this story, but the big ones are The Reveal of Wiggly and Uncle Wiley inside Miss Holloway's memories, the five dolls representing the Lords in Black in "Lex's" backpack, "Lex" revealing her true identity as Willabella Muckwab, and the final surprise of Webby actually appearing onscreen as Mariah Rose Faith in the ending.
• Reduced to Dust: Both Uncle Wiley and the Witch go out this way — Wiley is atomized by a telekinetic blast, while the Witch horribly crumbles Thanos-Snap-style after Webby touches her on the forehead and wishes her gone.
• Remember the New Guy?: Miss Holloway genuinely is a new character who's never interacted with Hannah before, but Duke has apparently been the Fosters' social worker for many years without having gotten a single mention in Black Friday. (As much of a Nice Guy as he is, it's pretty understandable Lex wouldn't put much stock in the system or care much about how he'd react to her technically-illegal plan to kidnap Hannah to California.)
• Remote, Yet Vulnerable: Uncle Wiley shows off his Combat Pragmatist traits while squaring off against Miss Holloway in their Battle in the Center of the Mind. Smirking that he knows he's only a Living Memory of Miss Holloway's and can't hope to defeat her in psychic combat when it's her own mind and she controls the playing field, he declares "I'm gonna cheat!" and then People Puppets Pamela's body in the real world to strangle Miss Holloway's body while she's caught in a helpless trance in Nightmare Time, a tactic she has no defense against.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Hannah is the only living human who's able to see and hear into different Alternate Timelines, although her awareness of them is vague and fleeting and as of yet only shows up as Déjà Vu. (This was hinted at with the song "What If Tomorrow Comes?" at the end of Black Friday, and a Call-Back to that tune plays in the underscoring when she has a flash of Déjà Vu in this story.) Uncle Wiley, being an only Ambiguously Human servitor of the Lords in Black — and who, in this timeline, has already died and come back as a ghost — is fully aware of The Multiverse, and gives a taunting, gnomic speech about it to Hannah and Miss Holloway just before attacking them.
• Scare Chord: One plays when Miss Holloway first reveals the Black Book.
• Screaming Woman: Kendall Nicole takes on more of the classic "scream queen" role than any past Hatchetfield character, spending pretty much the whole story terrified out of her mind and constantly screaming or recoiling from various horrors that assault her. (And for a 14-year-old child actor she does a really good job.)
• Shout-Out: The Judge at Willabella's trial gives a series of three aphorisms before executing her, which are Nick Lang quoting Sam Raimi's "Three Rules of Horror" he named in a famous interview with Stephen King. These rules have, according to Word of God, served as the Lang Brothers' guiding principle when writing the Hatchetfield series, and in-universe form a decent summary of the Judge's harsh Black-and-Gray Morality worldview:
  Judge: The innocent must suffer... The guilty must be punished... YOU MUST TASTE BLOOD TO BE A MAN!
  • The hanging scene is also pretty obviously a Shout-Out to the similar scene at the beginning of Hocus Pocus; Starkid's livestream reading of this movie is part of the series that inspired the creation of Nightmare Time as a Zoom-based Audio Drama show.
  • Angela Giarratana's performance of the Witch being Reduced to Dust is a clear reference to the Wicked Witch's "I'm MEEELTING" death scene in The Wizard of Oz.
  • Once more, we hear about the magic baseball cap that's "imbued with the power of Grayskull"; since it turns out Miss Holloway is the origin of this reference and she's obsessed with '80s culture, this seems like it's a pop-culture reference in-universe and not an actual reference to the supernatural.
• Shrouded in Myth: 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 origin story and how he came to tangle with Miss Holloway, etc.
• Sickly Green Glow: As a Call-Back to Wiggly's powers being associated with green light in Black Friday, Uncle Wiley's resurrection is announced with a "flash of green light".
• Significant Double Casting: In both this story and "Jane's a Car" Jaime Lyn Beatty plays an Evil Matriarch, although Pamela Foster is almost the exact opposite archetype of a "bad mom" as the ghost of Jane Perkins.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: As with most Hatchetfield villains, the Witch gets pretty crude when she finally reveals herself, memorably gloating to Hannah that once she possesses her...
  Witch: Your bones will be mine! Your blood will be mine! Your pretty hair and your little mouth! And I’ll SHIT OUT YOUR ASS!!!
• Solemn Ending Theme: "The Web I Spin for You", a very surreal song from Webby's perspective dropping very vague hints about the true nature of the Hatchetfield Myth Arc.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: This story in particular has Matt Dahan suddenly stop playing the keyboard at particularly tense moments during conversations, most notably having Lex's leitmotif suddenly stop when Hannah starts to catch on and ask where the ukulele Lex gave her is.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: The story ends unambiguously happily, with both Uncle Wiley and the Witch destroyed for good, Webby returned, and Pamela set up to go to prison in Lex and Ethan's place. Hannah now has three mentors in her life to watch over her and protect her — Webby, Miss Holloway and her sister — and is well poised to take up the mantle of The Chosen One and finish the fight with the Lords in Black once and for all.
• Surreal Music Video: The Title Theme Tune "The Witch in the Web" is a fairly mundane sequence interspersing shots of Hannah singing with Stock Footage of the Witchwood, but the Solemn Ending Theme "The Web I Spin for You" is far more surreal, with Deliberately Monochrome shots of spiderwebs and shattering glass juxtaposed with shots of Mariah Rose Faith as Webby Spiking the Camera and making ambiguous, dramatic gestures.
• Surreal Theme Tune: "The Witch in the Web" initially seems really hard to discern the meaning of, but in hindsight, after having seen the story and knowing it's a song from Webby's POV describing her view of Willabella Muckwab, it's pretty decipherable. The biggest revelation about the lyrics in hindsight is the final verse, revealing that Webby made the Witch's trap escapable on purpose, so that Hannah could have a final confrontation with her leading to her defeat:
  I could throw away the keys now
  But that’s not me, oh no
  You see, a witch is a witch for a reason
  Until you let her go
  • The Solemn Ending Theme "The Web I Spin for You" is just as surreal, and its meaning still isn't completely clear — it paints an Ambiguous Situation that raises troubling questions about Webby's relationship to the Lords in Black and her true motivations. Notably, this song isn't at all what you'd expect from a Big Good talking about a Big Bad — it's a Broken Pedestal song as though from a jilted lover about how she feels personally betrayed by whoever the song is about and wants long-delayed revenge.
• Take Our Word for It: As always, the story is chock full of surreal settings and situations it would be absurdly expensive to actually stage or film. Special mention goes to the Three-Girl Creature (who'd have to be a quite elaborate CGI animation to be portrayed at all convincingly), the endless hordes of Tree-People, and the surreal Final Battle between Hannah and the Witch with the Witch's horrifying grotesque transformation from her Lex form to a monstrous hag.
• Tap on the Head: A possessed Pamela knocks out a distracted Duke with a frying pan while Miss Holloway and Hannah are lost in their trance in Nightmare Time.
• There Are No Therapists: 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 ambiguous disorder, meaning Hannah has made it to the age of 14 without any diagnosis or treatment. Pamela is just as stubborn about Miss Holloway — a very different kind of "specialist" — but unlike the others, Miss Holloway doesn't take no for an answer.
• Title Drop: It turns out that "Nightmare Time" is a real term in Hannah's Personal Dictionary for the in-universe phenomenon of the Spirit World invading your mind in your dreams and assaulting you with your own worst fears and traumas to make you vulnerable to spiritual attack. The biggest "Nightmare Time" going on right now is the Witch in the Web trying to take over Hannah's dreams, but it turns out everyone has a "Nightmare Time" of their own, or at least the potential for one. (Cue Wild Mass Guessing over whether the Nightmare Time series itself is 100% things that "really" happened or if some of the stories are just characters' personal nightmares.)
• The Trees Have Faces: In the Dark World version of the Witchwood as seen in Hannah's Nightmare Time, the trees are replaced with people who were "planted" by the Hatchetmen so their souls could serve as a web to trap the Witch's soul.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Hannah ends up vividly demonstrating the Judge's (and Sam Raimi's) maxim that "You must taste blood to be a man" (or woman). Her Power Incontinence has been a curse for her whole life, but it isn't until she almost sees Miss Holloway killed by Uncle Wiley — the nightmare she accidentally reanimated — that in a burst of guilt and desperation she finally uses her powers on purpose, enabling her to blast Uncle Wiley back into oblivion with a single burst of energy. Following that, her direct confrontation with Willabella Muckwab's spirit is what enables her to discover and control the source of her own power inside her — as symbolized by the white ukulele — and not just destroy the Witch in the Web once and for all, but set her up as the Chosen One to finally defeat the Lords in Black and resolve Hatchetfield's shattered timelines personally.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: As selfish and shortsighted a bitch as Pamela Foster is, even she'd probably be taken aback to find out that stealing Hannah's ukulele so she could get her "beauty sleep" almost allowed the ghost of her ancestor Willabella Muckwab to gain a foothold in Hannah's mind, allowing her reincarnation into the waking world with Hannah's full Chosen One powers enabling her to finally Take Over the World. It's some cold comfort, perhaps, to know that in the scenario where she won, Pamela would've been one of her first victims and likely suffered a truly horrible death.
• Villainous Legacy: We get a payoff for the long-ago Chekhov's Gun from Black Friday that there's something special about the Foster bloodline that led to Lex and Hannah having Psychic Powers... and it turns out to be a pretty negative revelation, that they're descended from one of the most powerful and evil monsters to have ever lived.
• Wham Shot: When Hannah and Miss Holloway reach the Starlight Theatre, we get Joey Richter sauntering into the frame with his Ted mustache shaved off, his hair slicked back, and in-character as Uncle Wiley. Cue the audience losing their collective shit. He's also noticeably without his denim jacket from Black Friday, indicating that it's the one Miss Holloway is currently wearing.
• Witch Classic: The Witch in the Web is a very Played Straight version of a Wicked Witch, while Miss Holloway tries to buck the stereotype as a Hot Witch who's "mostly" a good witch. But Uncle Wiley dismissively sneers at her trying to claim this title, saying that Willabella was the only magic-user in Hatchetfield powerful enough to count as a real witch, and Miss Holloway doesn't try to argue.
• Workout Fanservice: Miss Holloway's Establishing Character Moment clearly would be this if this were a fully produced short film, with her working out to a classic '80s aerobics video, but since it's only a staged reading this is mostly Take Our Word for It.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Miss Holloway gives some advice to Hannah that seems useless — "I got scared!" "Well... don't next time" — but is more significant than it initially seems. The Spirit World of "Nightmare Time" is one empowered by the minds of those who perceive it, and Hannah's mind is much more powerful than that of any other human — which means that nightmares that would normally be powerless gain the power to kill just from her being around them. Uncle Wiley himself respawns from being just one of Miss Holloway's bad dreams into a fully sentient and malevolent spirit just from Hannah being nearby, and comes very close to stealing Pamela's body and becoming an active force in the world again. Unless Hannah can somehow get conscious control over her fears, they will, inevitably, be the doorway through Willabella Muckwab and countless other horrors manifest and destroy the world.

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