Year produced: 2022
Original air date: 4/22/23 (TV), 4/12/23 (Disney+)
Production code: 114
Lunella’s phobias come to the surface when Mimi takes her and Casey to Coney Island, where she once experienced a childhood trauma. Things are only exacerbated when the Beyonder decides to take the opportunity to study Lunella’s fear.
Tropes:
- Absurd Phobia: Lunella/Moon Girl faces down terrifying villains on a daily basis, befriended a dinosaur, and is generally considered fearless by those who know her. Her biggest fear? Coney Island.
- An Aesop: Whether it's serious or mundane, fear is an everyday feeling to deal with. As Lunella learns from her Coney Island experience thanks to the Beyonder.Lunella: Fear isn't something I need to get over, it's something I need to get through.
- Borrowed Catchphrase: When Lunella assures the Beyonder that she's not afraid he decides to test this by ramping up all the rides she goes on, first quipping, "I'm about to juice this up!"
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: The Beyonder does this to find out Lunella's greatest fear, by rewinding the episode through the editing software used to make the show.
- Brick Joke: Casey mentions early on that she likes to eat colorful food before getting on rides, so that when she pukes it comes out as Rainbow Puke. At the end, both Lunella and Casey throw up after a ride and go "oooh" at the colorful puke.
- Casting a Shadow: The villain Moon Girl and Devil are fighting in to opening is Nox, who attacks with tentacles of darkness.
- Color-Coded Time Stop : Before Beyonder starts his final trial of fear he pauses the world, rendering everything on Coney Island frozen and, excepting Mimi and Casey, photo-negative in color.
- Continuity Nod:
- The Beyonder is back, still studying humanity, specifically eating food after being introduced to the concept by trying the food on Coney Island.
- After finding Casey again in the third act, she reminds Moon Girl of Mimi's advice that Lunella quoted in the first episode, that bravery is what you do when you're flat-out scared. They both then repeat that they love old people.
- Eating Contest: There's one right at the end of the episode, with Devil winning immediately by eating his hot dogs, his opponents', and the table they're all resting on.
- Eyeless Face: The Beyonder turns everyone at Coney Island except Lunella, Casey, and Mimi into creepy smiling zombies with no eyes as part of his final test.
- Face Your Fears: The Chuckle Hole Funhouse was something that traumatized Lunella when she was younger. While that fear still exists, the Beyonder forces her to face it with something far more dire — the fear of losing Mimi.
- Fun with Subtitles: During the silent film sequence at the roller coaster, Casey's screaming is followed by a title card reading "Fun Screaming". When she realizes the track is missing and screams, the next title card reads "Real Screaming".
- Medium-Shift Gag: During the roller coaster rescue segment, the show becomes a black-and-white silent cartoon.
- Monster Clown: Lunella was scared by one in a funhouse when she was a child. The Beyonder brings it to life for the climax.
- Nightmare Face: The park patrons in Beyonder’s final test are shown with no eyes and unnaturally wide smiles.
- Race Against the Clock: Beyonder gives Lunella ten minutes to find Mimi, or else he'll send her to another dimension forever.
- Shapes of Disappearance: Devil wins the eating contest by eating the entire table, leaving only a dotted outline in its place.
- Shout-Out:
- Lunella's flashback to her greatest fear shows her following a balloon alone to someplace that she finds a scary clown. The plot itself is about a supernatural being taunting her with her fears that she ultimately defeats by learning to face it directly. If the balloon was red, it couldn't be any more of a reference to It. During the end credit sequence, the clown even dances like Pennywise does in the 2017 film adaptation.
- When the Beyonder realizes what Lunella's greatest fear is, his face takes on that of the Grinch when coming up with a “wonderfully awful idea”.
- The merry-go-round is called the Going Merrily. The bow of its namesake is even on full display.
- Stink Snub: The Beyonder repeatedly snarks that Lunella's flop sweating is making her funky in a bad way.
- Thrill Seeker: While Lunella is terrified by the rides on Coney Island, Mimi and Casey are completely thrilled, moreso when the Beyonder’s tampering greatly ramps them up.
- Track Trouble: As part of his experiments on human fear, the Beyonder deletes a section of the track on a roller coaster Casey and Mimi are riding. Moon Girl desperately keeps multiple cars from falling. The silent film roots of the trope are referenced when everything suddenly becomes black and white with audio silenced and replaced with descriptive cards as she does so.
- Trickster Mentor: The Beyonder puts Lunella through a harrowing experience of confronting her fears, purely to help her learn how to overcome them. Credit to where it's due, he actually manages to succeed.
- Tron Lines: When Nox blacks out all the street lights, Moon Girl debuts a glow-stick horse to her suit that gives it glowing lines. She employs it later in the dark funhouse at the climax.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Beyonder is introduced buying food at a stall in Coney Island with no one paying him much mind. Given that this is the Marvel Universe, one would assume that a six-foot something man with blue hair and orange skin wouldn’t get much more mind than a two-ton red dinosaur.
- Wham Line: As the episode ends, Beyonder shows up to inform Mimi, directly, that “they” are coming for her.
- "What Do They Fear?" Episode:
- The Beyonder is present at Coney Island to study eating, but he is intrigued by human fear after seeing Lunella and decides to force her to confront it. Though Lunella specifically acts afraid of a clown prop from a haunted house, the Beyonder deduces that her underlying fear is losing people she loves, so he puts her through that by abducting Mimi and hiding her in that same haunted house.
- Devil Dinosaur is shown to be afraid of getting stung by jellyfish, which is why he has trouble getting to Coney Island to save Lunella. He finally just jumps into the water and braves the jellyfish, which gives Lunella the courage to get through the haunted house and save Mimi.
- Wrong Turn at Albuquerque: Devil gets on a ferry to get to Lunella, but discovers too late that he took the Staten Island ferry rather than the Coney Island ferry.
