Recap / Gravity Falls S1 E9 "The Time Traveler's Pig"

"Hey, you! Toolbelt! You ruined my life!"

Dipper: Here it is, Mabel. Our ticket to any moment in history.
Mabel: Let's get two dodos and force them to make out!

The ninth episode of Gravity Falls.

At a fair hosted by Stan, Dipper ruins a chance to impress Wendy — in fact, driving her into Robbie's arms — while Mabel wins a pig she names Waddles. Then Dipper gets his hands on a device lost by a time traveler from the future, and decides to use it to go back in time and fix his mistake — but it turns out that doing so will cost Mabel her new pet.

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Tropes in this episode:

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: Used for the Ferris wheel.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Everyone laughs at Robbie's humiliation when hot water makes his pants shrink, even Wendy, his new girlfriend.
• An Aesop: Sometimes seeing someone else happy is much more important than your own needs.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Discussed by Mabel and Dipper, regarding Robbie.
  Mabel: He is such a jerk.
  Dipper: Yeah, but he's a jerk with tight pants and a guitar.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Mabel, when assuring Dipper she'll help him win Wendy.
  Mabel: Don't worry, brother. Whatever happens I'll be right here, supporting you every step of the— OHMYGOSHAPIG!! (runs off in excitement)
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Dipper manages to calculate a baseball throw with such precision that it not only wins Wendy the prize without hitting her, but also goes on a Rube Goldberg-esque path throughout the carnival, destroys Robbie's snowcone, and lands in Dipper's hat. He needed Mabel to adjust a rain gutter at the right moment to pull it off, but it's still awesome.
• Bad Future:
  • So apparently, in the future, a time baby will destroy everything and take over humanity. On the plus side, humanity gets time travel.
  • On a smaller scale, Dipper refusing to help save Waddles because it would blow his shot at Wendy causes a despondent Mabel to lean against the Shack's totem pole and refuse to leave. Dipper waits more than a month — until Mabel is covered with vines and has been incorporated into the tour — to go back in time to help her.
• Bait-and-Switch: When Blendin demonstrates his time machine he vanishes and returns in Renaissance garb, after asking the twins to guess where he was before he says there was a costume store there 15 years ago.
• Big "NO!": Mabel's reaction when she loses Waddles to Pacifica in one of the alternate timelines.
• Bittersweet Ending: Dipper Did Not Get the Girl, but he's learned not to sacrifice his sister's happiness for his own.
• Break the Cutie: Mabel helping Dipper win the ball toss causes her to lose her chance at winning Waddles, and the fact she doesn't get a Loyal Animal Companion causes her to enter an endless Heroic BSoD if Dipper doesn't change the timeline.
• Brick Joke: Mabel feeds Waddles a caramel apple. At the end of the episode when Robbie is holding another caramel apple, she sends Waddles after him and his apple.
• Burn the Witch!: Farmer Sprott rounds up a mob with Torches and Pitchforks try to find Mabel after she tells him she's a witch.
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: Occurs when Dipper and Mabel time-travel into the port-a-john.
• Call-Back:
  • The Time Baby was mentioned in the Freeze-Frame Bonus document in the last episode.
  • In "The Inconveniencing", Mabel exclaims "the future is in the past" thanks to Smile Dip. And of course the future was indeed in the past thanks to time travel.
  • In the end credits, we're reshown the three scenes from past episodes where Blendin made background appearances.
• Captain Obvious: Waddles' original name was "15-Poundy", which gives away his weight, 15 pounds, allowing Mabel to win him.
• Chekhov's Gun: At the start of the episode, you can see the stuffed animals Dipper tries to win being stocked.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Pacifica appears briefly at the fair before she initiates the climax by taking Waddles.
• Continuity Cavalcade: Dipper and Mabel's fight over the time machine ends up sending them tumbling around the background of the show's first three episodes, which ends up explaining Blendin's Early-Bird Cameo appearances in those episodes at the end.
• Continuity Nod:
  • To "Irrational Treasure": Stan's mention of there being no police around (since Blubs and Durland are vacationing in Michigan), and a pioneer's swear of "By Trembley!"
  • Dipper brings up the lesson he learned from "Double Dipper".
• Crappy Carnival: Stan, being the cheapskate he is, spent as little money on the fair as possible, leaving it full of unsafe attractions.
  Stan: There it is, Mabel, the cheapest fair money can rent. I spared every expense.
• Cuteness Proximity: The pig has this effect on Mabel.
• Double Meaning: When Dipper is about to willingly lose Wendy to Robbie so Mabel can win Waddles again, he tries to make her understand that people make mistakes and tight jeans are overrated.
  Wendy: Dude, you lost me.
  Dipper: I know.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Ford Pines appears in one the times that Dipper and Mabel time travel to, and he peaks out of door of what would soon be the Mystery Shack.
• E = MC Hammer: How Dipper tries to figure out how to avoid hitting Wendy with the baseball.
• Eleventy Zillion: Blendin Blandin is from the year 207̃012. (Pronounced "Twenty-Schneventy-Twelve")
• Epic Fail: Dipper's worst throw missed the bottles entirely and sent a whole bag full of baseballs into Wendy's face.
• Eye Scream: Wendy gets hit in the eye with a baseball in increasingly improbable ways.
• Ferris Wheel Date Moment: Wendy and Robbie have one after he asks her out.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • Once Blendin runs off after bumping into Dipper, Robbie can be seen standing in front of the snow cone truck, which happens to be right next to the ball tossing booth where Wendy is still standing.
  • Pacifica can be seen next to the pen in the background right before it is revealed she took Waddles.
• Foreshadowing: Soos speculating on what it would take to trigger the rigged dunk tank target early in the episode.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Three retroactive ones: go back and watch the first three episodes carefully. Blendin's there, fixing◊ the◊ paradoxes!◊
• Friend-or-Idol Decision: Dipper does find a way to win the stuffed animal for Wendy and prevent Robbie from asking her out, but it requires Mabel to lose the chance to win Waddles, making her miserable. Dipper decides that Mabel being happy is more important.
• Funny Background Event: Two of them; First, Dipper sees Wendy agree to date Robbie for the first time and a heart-shaped balloon pops behind him. Later, when Dipper finally succeeds in winning Wendy a prize, a guy behind him wins the strongman game and someone shouts "We have a winner!"
• Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Wendy and the Duck/Panda. She declares she wants one upon seeing them as prizes, and when Dipper finally wins one for her, she has an enormous grin on her face.
  Wendy: This is the best present ever.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: Mabel hands her calculator to a pioneer boy. Dipper takes it back. Less seriously, she also teaches the pioneers how to high-five.
• Head Desk: Mabel repeatedly thumps her head on a totem pole when she loses Waddles to Pacifica for helping Dipper. It lasts over a month if this isn't fixed.
• Heroic BSoD: After losing Waddles, Mabel goes through one that lasts at least a day, a week, and a month. Thankfully, Dipper decides to fix it by undoing his happy ending by going back to the time he accidentally hit Wendy with the baseball just so Mabel can be happy again with Waddles.
• Housepet Pig: What Mabel intends for Waddles to become, rather than dinner like the carny expects.
• In the Hood: After Dipper shows him up, Robbie hides his face in his hood, his nose still sticking out.
• Ironic Echo: "Everything's different now." The first time it was said cheerfully by Mabel after she won the pig. The second time it was said by Dipper, with pure despair in his voice, after losing Wendy to Robbie.
• Losing a Shoe in the Struggle: Dipper loses one of his shoes when he chases Mabel through the events of past episodes, and leaves it behind in a past timeline. When Lolph and Dundgren make Blendin Blandin go back and correct all the time paradoxes, he's seen collecting Dipper's shoe as evidence. It is likely that either he or Lolph and Dundgren returned it to him afterwards.
• Meaningful Echo: The man working the baseball-throwing game tells Dipper "You only get one chance, kid." He's right.
• Noodle Incident: According to Dipper, Mabel has apparently called a ball of yarn her soulmate. The circumstances around this incident are never revealed.
• Not Helping Your Case: When Blendin tries to point out that it was Dipper and Mabel causing all the chaos he's been blamed for he calls Waddles the pig their leader. Lolph and Dundgren are less than impressed.
• Necessary Fail: Turns out in order for Dipper to not hit Wendy with the baseball, Mabel has to lose Waddles.
• Only One Me Allowed Right Now: A strange, unexplained variant is shown in this episode: No matter how many times Dipper and Mabel use Blendin's time machine to travel back to the start of Stan's fair, there is no instance of either of their time travel duplicates at all.
• Our Time Machine Is Different: Blendin Blandin uses a Time Machine Tape Measure. The farther the tape is pulled, the further back in time the traveler goes.
• Place Beyond Time: Subverted. Dipper and Mabel believe that they traveled all the way to the end of time. They didn't. They were inside a Port-A-John.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Dipper and Mabel steal Blendin's time machine and end up ruining his life and causing all sorts of Time Paradoxes. They don't express any regret or guilt for it, and Blendin's arrest and trial are both played for laughs.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: Blendin admonishes the twins for stealing his time machine, telling them "Do you have any idea how many rules you just broke?" Then he adds that he's actually asking that, because he wasn't there to document their rule-breaking.
• Rubber-Band History: No matter what Dipper changes, Wendy still gets asked out by Robbie and accepts.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Blendin is sent back to prevent a series of time anomalies that occurred only because Dipper and Mabel got their hands on his time machine.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
  • The premise of the episode from the viewpoint of Dipper. He can't fix it because hitting Wendy in the eye was meant to happen.
  • The only future where Wendy isn't asked out by Robbie results in Pacifica winning Waddles. Mabel convinces Dipper to go back and right this wrong.
  • Subverted from the viewpoint of Blendin. He went back in time to fix a number of anomalies, only to find that there were no such anomalies... yet.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: At the end, Dipper undoes the effect of the time travel: Wendy and Robbie start dating and Mabel wins Waddles.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • Mabel names her pig Waddles, because he waddles.
  • And his previous name was Fifteen Poundy.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Dipper and Mabel end up in pioneer times, this exchange occurs.
    Pioneer 1: Be on the lookout for mountain lions, travelers.
    Pioneer 2: (waving a canteen around) Dysentery, who wants dysentery?
    Pioneer 3: Forge ahead, mighty oxen, for a new life awaits us on this (with emphasis) Oregon Trail.
  • Considering the episode's plot, the twins' brief excursion to the Mesozoic is almost certainly a deliberate nod to "A Sound of Thunder." Fortunately, on this show it's easier to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
  • The two Time Police who show up at the end are named Lolph and Dundgren.
  • "That'll do, pig. That'll do."
• Slapstick: Wendy gets hit by a lot of baseballs in this episode.
• Squee: Mabel does this when she thinks the pig said her name.
• Talking Animal: Mabel thinks Waddles is one of these.
• Tempting Fate: Soos comments that the only thing that could possibly cause the rigged dunk tank to dunk Stan is a "futuristic laser arm-cannon." Guess what happens at the end of the episode.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Dipper has to let Wendy get hit by the baseball so Robbie can ask her to go steady, but Mabel has Waddles make a fool of Robbie.
• Time Travel Episode: The main plot focuses on Dipper and Mabel traveling back in time to change the day's outcome.
• Time Police: Near the end of the episode, two of them show up to arrest Blendin because of Dipper and Mabel abusing the time travel device.
• Torches and Pitchforks: These are broken out when Mabel declares herself a witch to the guy running the pig stand.
  Farmer Sprott: (while lighting a torch) Well, time to round up the mob!
• Tragic Time Traveler: Dipper's attempts to win Wendy over at the fair leads to the same outcome each time: Wendy gets hit in the eye with his baseball, and Robbie comforts her and asks her out. The one time Dipper succeeds in getting the ending he wants, his sister Mabel suffers instead, which makes Dipper feel guilty enough to set things back the way they were.
• Tunnel of Love: Robbie and Wendy go on "The Tunnel of Love and Corndogs" after becoming a couple. Dipper and Wendy go on it when the former manages to win her a prize.
• You Already Changed the Past: Blendin only travelled back to the present in the first place in order to fix a number of time anomalies that occurred then, and is quite confused to discover that there are no such anomalies. Dipper and Mabel then steal his time machine and proceed to cause the very anomalies Blendin was sent back to fix in the first place, at which point he is arrested by the Time Police and made to fix the anomalies properly this time. Lampshaded at the end of the episode when Mabel notes that they never discovered who caused the anomalies Blendin was investigating, at which point Dipper realizes it was them all along.
• You Can't Fight Fate: No matter what Dipper does, Wendy keeps getting hit with the baseball.

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MLG S.T. DVOOH ZKKILEVW. ^note Not H. G. Wells Approved

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