A long time in the future, when we've all forgotten about it, a dramatic confrontation will take place in the Witchwood and the good guys will be saved by the surprise intervention of the Ape-Man showing up and ripping the bad guy's arms off.
Although Nick Lang Jossed the idea that the actors in "Watcher World" were literally in-universe versions of the real-life Team Starkid, he did allow that "The Watchers With a Thousand Eyes" was a reference to The Trail to Oregon!, and that this meant that The Trail to Oregon was a show that had been put on in-universe at the Starlight Theater.
Since the whole idea of Blinky seems to be that he's the eldritch Meta Guy — his role in "Watcher World" is literally directing a drama and he comes very close to Breaking the Fourth Wall when complaining about how Bill and Alice have ruined his intended ending for their day at Watcher World — it'd be appropriate for meta references to Starkid to follow him around, like the Sniggles' actors being named for their Real Life actors, or for TTtO playing in Hatchetfield as a way for him to quietly taunt the people of Hatchetfield for being his puppets. It wouldn't be surprising if later references to Blinky continue to hint that, as an evil deity based around the idea of generating human suffering for entertainment, he's associated with a self-deprecating version of Team Starkid themselves. It would be an especially appropriate time to bring up old jokes about Starkid being a "cult", "Satan is a REAL MAN", etc.
The fan consensus that the Surreal Music Video is just a recurring nightmare Tinky is sending the Homeless Man every night is probably correct — but that doesn't mean it isn't real. We know that sometimes people who die get their souls laid claim to by one of the Lords in Black — Wiggly was able to send "Bad Double" Ethan to torment Hannah in Black Friday that way — and Tinky explicitly says that Ted is both destined to go into the Bastard's Box and "already there" (because the Box is outside of time) and that Ted "belongs to" Tinky.
Given Tinky's title of the "Weaver of Impossibilities" etc, it seems likely that Tinky's domain is Time Paradoxes, and that anyone who dies as the result of some kind of Predestination Paradox gets their soul sucked inot the Box. This applies to Ted himself — but why shouldn't it also apply to Jenny, whose death is just as paradoxical as his own? (It's only because she died and disappeared that Ted went back in time to try to stop her from leaving, leading to her death.)
What if a version of Jenny is in the box and Tinky sends her out in order to complete the Time Paradox that created her and close the loop, both in dreams like the "Time Bastard" Music Video and the Hope Spot Hallucination that kicked off this saga in the first place? What if the sentiment she expresses in "Time Bastard" is true — she really does hate and resent Ted for what he did to her and she's happy to participate in the scheme to make sure he ends up in the Box with her?
Note that if this theory is accurate, it implies Andrew Kilgore is in the Box as well, after his death in 2104 — maybe it's actually true in-universe that the face Tinky wears beneath his goat mask looks like Jeff Blim? (Note that this whole premise is very similar to what's going on with Frank the Bunny and the "Manipulated Dead" in Donnie Darko — if you like Crossover WMGs see the one on the main Hatchetfield page.)
"Time Bastard" does little to conceal from us that Executive Kilgore, the cyborg Ted encounters in 2104, and Andy, Jenny's boyfriend whom Ted beats up in 2004, are the same person, and that he spent the intervening century with the Time Bastard constantly on his mind, that led him to devote himself to studying Tinky. The unidentified professor whose voice is heard in "Jane's a Car" may very well be Kilgore, having first discovered Tinky's name via the Black Book and latched on to Tinky's title as "The Bastard of Time and Space", realizing there must be a connection there. This would explain why Jeff plays Andy with a strangely posh accent, which fits with the professorial tone with which he plays the unknown professor.
The Workin' Boys were real people who were colleagues of Prof. Hidgens when they all worked together to investigate the supernatural, but some disaster caused most of them to either die horrifically Go Mad from the Revelation and get locked away — Hidgens is the one who escaped mostly unscathed thanks to Repressed Memories, but this is why he started to crack up in the decades since it happened and develop his eccentricities like his obsession with musical theatre. (Hence Workin' Boys itself exists as the result of his incoherent desire to go back to the old days before his mind was shattered expressed in the only way he knows how, coming off as a silly and meaningless plot because all the meaningful details were erased.)
When traveling through the spirit-realm version of the Witchwood, Hannah and Miss Holloway take particular note of Casey, a girl who was very visibly planted there in The '80s, wearing a t-shirt depicting what the narrator describes as an 80s pop star the world has forgotten. Miss Holloway, herself already noted as a creature of the eighties, seems particularly unnerved by Casey, not the least because Casey seems drawn to her. So... am I the only one who got the vibe that the pop star whose merch Casey is wearing was Miss Holloway herself? Since Miss Holloway is a witch and Casey, like the rest of the tree-people, had "a touch of the Gift", perhaps Miss Holloway coded messages for magically-gifted people into her music and Casey was one of the people who received those messages.
- Additional evidence for this is that Miss Holloway tells Hannah "I used to play music too", and that Miss Holloway seems to do what she does out of charity and not really need to worry about money (hence her fancy classic car).
- More evidence - when Miss Holloway plays her song in Killer Track, the song is referred to as "a piece of her past" by the narration, and which is why it causes people to forget.
Both Jaime Lyn Beatty and Nick Lang have said they wanted to explore Charlotte's Hidden Depths beyond just being The Woobie, and TGWDLM has already demonstrated she has the potential to be a violent killer when she's assimilated by The Virus. It'd be a painful shock for fans who want to see her star in an episode because they're fond of her, but the Lang Brothers have made it clear that Nightmare Time is a horror series above all else and are constantly being guided by the borderline-sadistic mindset of Sam Raimi's "Three Rules of Horror". Playing Charlotte as a stressed-out, ignored-and-disrespected, quietly desperate broken woman who finally hits her Rage Breaking Point after being mistreated one too many times would make a ton of sense for her character and be a truly heartbreaking horror story.
The idea of Nibblenephim as "The Thing That Feeds in the Dark" in the sense of a lurking grue that horribly kills anyone who wanders out of sight for more than a second is an intense Primal Fear that would make for one hell of a contrivance to create a Closed Circle where terrified survivors can form a Dysfunction Junction, classic-zombie-movie-style.
- Jossed as far as Nibbly's debut goes; he is properly introduced in "Honey Queen", and the style of horror that story takes is saving the existence of any horror elements for the Twist Ending. Still a possibility for future stories featuring him, though...
Fans have been tossing around suggestions for who might play Ziggs ever since Nick Lang confirmed that he's only considering casting a non-binary actor to play a non-binary character. Unfortunately, all of the existing Starkid roster who've come out as non-binary are very unlikely choices simply because they're too old — Esther Fallick, Jim Povolo and Meredith Stepien are all in their 30s, and part of the whole point of bringing in new blood like Mariah Rose Faith, Angela Giarratana, Robert Manion and Kendall Nicole for the Hatchetfield series was to try to keep the Dawson Casting for high-school-aged main characters to non-extreme levels. (This is also why, unfortunately for people highly invested in the Deb/Alice ship, it's unlikely there will be a script where Deb takes center stage as a major character, since it'd be awkward for the whole plot to revolve around Jaime Lyn Beatty romancing someone ten years younger than her.)
Of all the people in the Starkid-adjacent orbit, Ryan Simpkins seems like the most obvious choice to cast as Ziggs — their pronouns as they/them, they're in the age range to play a teenager (early 20s), they've already acted in a Tin Can Brothers production (as Jewel Irons in Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye), and as long as the COVID-19 Pandemic is going on and Nightmare Time is being done over Zoom, their being in NorCal rather than SoCal (they're a student at UC Berkeley) poses no obstacle, not even time-zone-wise. And since they're already a film actor with plans to come back to the industry after college, they'll likely be available for any LA-based productions that take place after they graduate within the next couple years.
Of course, it may well be that Ziggs will be someone we've never heard of, but if they're played by someone we have heard of Ryan seems like the most obvious choice. In fact, it may even be that their relatively minor role in Wayward Guide was an informal "audition" to see if they'd gel with the Starkid family before offering them the much higher-profile role of Ziggs.
- Jossed; newcomer Jae Hughes was brought in to fill the role of Ziggs.
- Whether this is true depends heavily on whether "Jane's a Car" takes place chronologically before or after Paul and Emma's wedding in "Forever and Always"/"Time Bastard". It could take place after — given that Tim calls Paul "Uncle Paul", implying he's already married to his aunt — but there's also references that imply the opposite, namely that "Jane's a Car" is explicitly summer of 2019 (a "year and a half" after Jane's death rather than "almost two years") and "Forever and Always" is implied to take place in fall 2019 (because Bill mentions Alice "coming home for her break", which means she's already left for college and this is after "Watcher World").
- It would really make absolutely no structural sense for every story in a series except the first to represent a singular universe. That leaves us with three bad endings and two good ones — if "Watcher World" and "The Witch in the Web" are leading us to a happy ending for Hatchetfield, that's an ending in which Paul, Emma, and Becky are all replaced by impostors, Tom has gone mad, and Ted has disappeared into the past, never to be seen again. They wouldn't bring us a unified timeline in which so many of the main characters were out of the picture.
- The problem with this is that the reason people noticed each story in Nightmare Time came off as a separate timeline in the first place is that Ted is mentioned in "Watcher World", the story that comes after "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man" in Episode 1, as though he were alive and well. (Yes, "Watcher World" could simply take place before "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man", or Bill could simply not be aware of Ted's death, but that doesn't really come off as the intention.)
- The reference to Becky being up a tree need not be seen as a connection between "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man" and "Jane's a Car" — Hatchetfield is mostly the same from one timeline to another. As Hidgens himself says, it's a bit of general Hatchetfield lore, and it's currently safe to assume, based on hints in "The Witch in the Web", that anything that happened before Hannah was born happened in every timeline.
- As for reasons episodes 1 and 3 pair their stories together... it's pretty simple. Both stories in episode 1 feature a very small cast, both in episode 3 center on Black Friday characters, just as episode 2 focused on the TGWDLM cast. The notion of any two Hatchetfield stories sharing a timeline is probably safe to call a one-off gimmick just for Episode 2.
- The climax of "Killer Track" features a pair of little vignettes which confirm Simultaneous Arcs with "Honey Queen" and "Daddy"; "Yellow Jacket" also has a throwaway but unmistakeable Continuity Nod to "Daddy". This leaves only the two stories in the second episode as not explicitly sharing this timeline, but nothing which would seem to preclude them. And "Yellow Jacket" ends on a solemn note which heavily implies we're saying goodbye to this particular Hatchetfield timeline, hitting the Reset Button for all of the deaths and other bad endings which happened throughout all six stories.
- Addendum: "Honey Queen" features a mention of the titular pharmaceutical of "Perky's Buds" (whose existence indicates very different life circumstance for Emma than seen in most timelines), leaving only "Abstinence Camp" lacking in any confirmed connections unless someone can recall one?
- While not explicit, there's a couple of ones that strongly imply it-for instance Steph debuts in "Abstinence Camp" and shows up again in "Yellow Jacket" and Ted's excitement about the Honey Festival in "Abstinence Camp" could foreshadow his later appearances in "Daddy" and "Killer Track."
- Also "Daddy" precludes most of Nightmare Time 2 from sharing a continuity with any of the first one as Ted is killed by Sheila Young, which contradicts the events of "Time Bastard" (which is implied to weave into most of the rest of the first season's timeline, at minimum overlapping with "Forever and Always") and "The Hatchetfield Ape Man."
- That really goes without saying - baseline assumption should really be that every Hatchetfield story has its own unique timeline unless explicitly stated otherwise; e.g. "Time Bastard" and "Forever and Always" clearly sharing one, while the entirety of NMT2 strongly hints at as much.
- Word of God has confirmed this about Nightmare Time 2, not only by stating it outright but also observing certain effects it had on continuity: for example, the writers elected not to mention the phases of the moon at any point in NMT2 so as to avoid fans overanalyzing this particular timeline. Also, the fact that Peter laments that attending Abstinence Camp will make him miss the Honey Festival, while the Obnoxious Teen is seen at the Honey Queen pageant, meant that Nick Lang's brief whim to Retcon them into having always been the same person wouldn't work.
