Recap / Nightmare Time S1E2 "Forever and Always and Time Bastard"

"Forever & Always and Time Bastard" is the second episode of Nightmare Time's first season, livestreamed on October 17, 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 — and, in this case, one Creative Closing Credits sequence that serves as a mini-story:

Forever & Always

Forever & Always

"It was forever and always you."

Paul Matthews and Emma Perkins are getting married, but before they tie the knot, the happy couple must come to terms with a terrible secret from "Emma"'s past...

Musical sequences:
"Forever and Always" performed by Robert Manion and Mariah Rose Faith

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• Accidental Pervert: A classic example, with Paul trying to give a casual hug and kiss to someone he thinks is his wife but is actually a shocked and offended stranger — complete with a chivalrous bystander (naturally played by Dylan Saunders) butting in and offering to beat the crap out of him if he doesn't leave the lady alone.
• Actor Allusion: The Teeny Weenie joke Robot Emma makes about Paul ("He's barely big enough for one of us") is one to Jon Matteson having played a character who was hilariously insecure about his penis size on Royalties.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Emma's robotic double turned on her creators and killed them all, later time-traveling to the past to take over the original's life, murdering whoever she has to in order to keep her secret.
• Alternate Universe: Once again it pretty much has to be, with Paul and Emma surviving long enough after their Meet Cute to make it all the way to their wedding this time.
• Arc Words: The Title Drop of the words "Forever and always" happens almost immediately, being the final words of Paul and Emma's vows at their wedding and a reminder of their commitment to each other in the face of any and all challenges (including the rather large challenge of both of them turning out to be murderous impostors).
• Asshole Victim: As in The Terminator, the bikers at the bar are set up to provide an antagonist for the killer robot that we won't feel too bad about when they're on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle. The Black Comedy of this scene is Emma 2 smoothly segueing from murdering them to murdering everyone else in the bar, including obviously innocent bystanders cowering and begging for mercy, because her Leave No Witnesses ethos is non-negotiable.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Arguably, depending on who the audience empathise with, Android Emma and Paul 23 might be considered the Bad Guys, but they remove anyone who could threaten their scheme to Kill and Replace their originals, and are able to live on, with no one the wiser and their marriage intact.
• Bait-and-Switch: The whole fun of this story is doing this to the audience multiple times — first luring everyone in hoping to see Paul and Emma's wedding, then revealing that Emma isn't who she says she is and is just an Identical Stranger who stole the real Emma's life — then revealing that the real Emma is alive and has come back to Hatchetfield and is actually completely identical to the woman Paul married, and finally confronting us with the sheer absurdity of a Terminator Impersonator plot. And just when you thought you'd been through all the twists and turns the story had in store comes one last Wham Line that Paul was also an imposter created in a lab all along.
• Batman Gambit: When Emma 2 is marching Emma 1 to the alleyway behind the Birdhouse to her death, Emma 1 sees the perverted biker gang coming to hit on the pair of "hot twins" as her possible salvation, at first trying to seduce them, then trying to provoke a fight between Emma 2 and their leader. The fight does break out, and it doesn't go the way Emma expected.
• Becoming the Mask: A major theme of this story, with Emma 2 desperate to leave behind her violent past to truly become Emma Perkins, and with The Reveal that Paul 23 already became the mask of the real Paul and his reticence to accept Emma 2's nature has been not wanting to take that mask off again.
• The Big Guy: Dylan Saunders is mostly in this story to play this role, in his cameo as Tom escorting the Homeless Man out of the wedding and as the leader of the biker gang sexually harassing the two Emmas.
• Broad Strokes: Treats Paul and Emma's relationship from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals as canon but omits the Alien Invasion.
• Call-Back: An immediate one, where Emma's vows bring up that she tried to talk Jane out of marrying Tom by calling him a "tall, hairy Yeti-man" (throwing shade at Lucy Stockworth's taste in men, since we just saw her run off with a literal Bigfoot in "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man").
  • Episode 1's other story, "Watcher World", gets a minor one with Bill's reveal that Alice has since gone off to college and that she's apparently on much better terms with him now than she was before, having already confirmed she'd prefer to stay with him over fall break than her mom.
• Cassandra Truth: The Homeless Man warning Paul that "That's not Emma Perkins!" We find out what's up with that in the very next story, "Time Bastard".
  • To a lesser extent, Bill giving a grim warning to Paul about how "the shit always hits the fan" when people keep secrets from each other in a marriage. Even though this is just Bill expressing his own bitterness over his wife's emotional infidelity and their divorce, it's also a Captain Obvious Reveal when Paul eventually finds out there's more to Emma 2's Dark Secret than she initially confessed. Gets a hilarious Call-Back:
  Paul: Bill was right. I've got a shitty fan!
• Character Development: Real Emma and Emma 2's conflict — aside from the fact that Emma 2 tried to Kill and Replace Real Emma — comes from this fact. Real Emma is appalled that despite her Confirmed Bachelor status, Emma 2 ended up getting married after only six months of dating Paul — and not just that but choosing someone who's such a "geek".
• Church of Saint Genericus: Paul and Emma are pretty clearly having a non-denominational wedding (to hold off Ted's Presbyterian objections to walking into a "stinky-ass Methodist church" from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals), using the Hatchetfield Natural History Museum as their venue, but it still seems to be a religious service — we enter In Medias Res to Prof. Hidgens wearing a clerical collar saying "Thus ends the lesson" after apparently having just read from the Bible. That said, it's Prof. Hidgens, and he appears to be wearing a very fake clerical collar even in universe, so any conclusions about what church he may or may not be accredited by are still up in the air.
• Collateral Damage: Played for Black Comedy — Emma 2's scheme to steal the real Emma's life started off with a body count of seventy-five bystanders who were on the bus with Emma when she arranged the "accident", followed by her casually murdering the entire clientele and staff of the Birdhouse tavern just to Leave No Witnesses. It turns out Paul 23's clone uprising probably had its fair share of collateral damage too, although he only confesses to the murder of Paul himself and dismisses the rest of it as "We raised some hell".
• Confess to a Lesser Crime: The initial Bait-and-Switch of this episode is Emma telling Paul that she's not the real Emma, but just an Identical Stranger who witnessed her death in Guatemala and took the opportunity when she heard about Jane's death to pull a Dead Person Impersonation. The truth is much, much worse.
  • When watching this scene in hindsight, it's pretty clear Emma 2 is pulling off an Exact Words lie — it's true that she was a drifter with no friends or family who was desperately jealous of Emma 1's life, and that she took the opportunity to steal that life after Emma's accident. She just doesn't mention that the reason she has no friends or family is she's a time-traveling robot from the future... and that Emma 1's very literal Bus Crash wasn't an accident.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The fight between Emma 2, the biker gang, and eventually everyone inside the Birdhouse tavern, which is lavishly described by the narrator in bloody, gory detail.
• Dark and Troubled Past: According to the preview, Emma has one, and it catches up with her by the time of the wedding. The story ended up subverting a lot of fans' expectations hard — it's not Emma who had a Dark Secret, the Dark Secret is that the woman Paul is marrying isn't Emma.
• Dark Reprise: A darker instrumental version of "What Do You Want, Paul?" from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals plays when Paul is forced to choose between the android Emma and the real one.
  • There's also a Dark Reprise of the "Hey, Mr. Business..." melody from "Cup of Roasted Coffee" in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals that plays whenever Emma 2 violently attacks someone.
• A Day in the Limelight: Paul and Emma were, of course, already in the limelight as the Official Couple of The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, but this is a long-promised chance for them to get back in the limelight after they were both Demoted to Extra in Black Friday and didn't appear at all in Episode 1 of Nightmare Time, and to focus on their romantic relationship without an apocalypse getting in the way. This turns out to not quite be the case, as the leads of this episode are not in fact the original Paul and Emma.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The Surreal Music Video for "Forever & Always".
• Distant Duet: The Surreal Music Video for "Forever & Always" gives several hints that the Split Screen between Robert and Mariah indicates their duet is actually separated by significant time and space, ending with the implication that Mariah is the Lost Lenore and may have died some time ago.
• Does Not Like Guns: When Emma 2 casually asks Paul if he keeps any firearms in the apartment while preparing to go out and finish killing Real Emma, Paul reacts at first with confusion and then with sheer horror.
• Downer Ending: A harsh one for people who cared about the fates of the real, original Paul and Emma, although the fact that Paul 23 and Emdroid inherited all of their memories raises the question of whether Paul and Emma really count as dead (with all the Existential Horror implications of the resulting debate).
• Drives Like Crazy: Emma describes the tour bus driver in Guatemala doing this (unfortunately Truth in Television for many tour bus drivers) going up the mountain to Tikal, leading to the tragic bus accident she barely survived. It turns out this was Vehicular Sabotage by Emma 2, who picked this way to do it to more effectively Make It Look Like an Accident.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: If there's one thing you can say for the android and the clone, it's this. They're quite literally willing to kill to stay together, and accept each other exactly as they are.
• Evil, Inc.: We get The Reveal in this story that the Standard Office Setting from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals is actually one of these — "CCRP" stands for "Coven Communications, Research and Power", and true to their ominous name they're up to some shady stuff, like cloning their own employees to use as slave labor on a hidden moon colony.
• Fairytale Wedding Dress: Emma is described as wearing one, but it's a matter of Take Our Word for It (fans who want to see Lauren Lopez in a wedding gown will have to wait for Joey and Lauren's actual wedding). To make up for this, Mariah Rose Faith's character in the Title Sequence is wearing a very impressive one, albeit with no veil or train. (This is actually her high school prom dress, last seen by Starkid fans when she wore it to play Allison in Starkid's livestream of Hocus Pocus.)
• The Family That Slays Together: At the end Emma and Paul both admit they're duplicates who killed their originals and agree to go and kill the homeless man who knows she isn't the original so he won't blow her cover.
• Fidelity Test: When Real Emma and Paul flee the bloodbath at the Birdhouse to hide out at a motel, it turns out Robot Emma completely anticipated this move and was already there, hiding in the closet, and chose to wait before attacking because she also knew that Real Emma would start to feel attracted to Paul and try to seduce him at this point, and wanted to know how Paul would respond.
• Fiery Cover-Up: After murdering everyone in the Birdhouse, Emma 2 immediately decides she has no choice but to burn down the whole building to destroy the evidence and forestall any future investigation, while hilariously blaming Real Emma for "forcing" her to destroy her favorite bar.
• Flock of Wolves: It turns out, they're both fakes, and neither had any idea until the other told them the truth.
• Foreshadowing: We get a brief encounter with Sylvia saying something about "temporal distortion" and "Spankoffski's" office on Paul's first day back at work from his honeymoon. Both of these references are soon explained in "Time Bastard".
• Genetic Memory: The story revolves around this trope — both Robot Emma (who is actually a Cyborg made by cloning the real Emma) and Paul 23 (who is an exact clone of the real Paul) have this, which both motivates and enables replacing their originals.
• Green Aesop: A surprise one at the end of the segment. The reason Robot Emma insists on becoming vegan is because of the Bad Future that ends up happening due to humans not reducing their carbon footprint.
• Improbably Predictable: Emma 2 knows everything about Emma, and can predict everything she does — including not just predicting which motel she'd check into to hide out but the room number (because Emma has a private joke of always booking room 311 if it's available). This ends up being explained by the fact that Emma 2 is a Cyborg, and has an enhanced computerized brain combined with a cloned brain that has all of the real Emma's Genetic Memory.
• Kill and Replace:
  • Robot Emma's plan to take over Emma's life; quietly murder her and take her place with no one the wiser. It would've gone off perfectly if not for two little problems: real Emma wasn't actually dead, and the Homeless Guy knows something.
  • It turns out, "Paul" is actually a clone who murdered and replaced the real Paul Matthews ages ago. Unlike his wife, he managed to pull it off in such a way that even she had no idea, and never would have had he not confessed.
• Killed Offscreen: The Bait-and-Switch that starts this story tells us the real Emma was Killed Offscreen months ago in an accident, ironically on the same day her sister died. This is subverted when we see her Not Quite Dead after all, and then find out at the end of the episode it was the real Paul who was actually killed months ago.
• Killing Your Alternate Self: Emma 2 attempts this twice, and succeeds the second time. She may not seem so much of an alternate self as she is a synthetic double, but she doesn't just look like Emma. She acts and thinks like her as well, making her that much more terrifying of a threat.
• Leave No Witnesses: Emma 2's philosophy she's adopted to protect her peaceful, ordinary life, which it surprisingly turns out is Paul 23's philosophy too — and leads to them merrily running off at the end of the episode to commit their first murder together, of the Homeless Man who initially tried to expose Emma.
• Leitmotif: Once more, Matt Dahan does amazing improvisation for the underscoring, using multiple recurring leitmotifs throughout the episode that are generally also Call Backs to The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals:
  • "Cup of Roasted Coffee" is the leitmotif generally associated with Emma, including playing under Paul's wedding vows when he's describing what he loves about her, and playing the first time Paul sees Real Emma walking down the street. It gets a Dark Reprise in the Bar Brawl scene, where the "Hey, Mr. Business" snippet plays whenever Emma 2 kills somebody.
  • The Title Theme Tune of this episode, "Forever & Always", is Paul and Emma's Love Theme, which plays under Emma's wedding vows, the narration of Paul and Emma's honeymoon, and Paul and Emma's "heartwarming" reconciliation in Unholy Matrimony at the end.
  • Paul's "theme song", "What Do You Want, Paul?", gets a chirpy electronic remix as the underscoring for Paul's day at work at CCRP Technical when he gets back from his honeymoon. It then gets a hilariously appropriate Dark Reprise in the Final Battle between the two Emmas where he faces his Sadistic Choice ("What do you want, Paul?" indeed).
  • The other theme identified as "Paul's theme" from TGWDLM (the opening bars of "Inevitable"), which appears in other Nightmare Time stories as a generic "spooky" theme or the theme of the Witchwood, appears here as a leitmotif underscoring Paul's intimate moments with Real Emma when she's pouring out her Dark and Troubled Past to him.
  • Robot Emma gets two specific themes associated with her — her "confession theme", a somber, serious theme that plays under her initial confession she's an impostor, that gets a Dark Reprise when her robotic nature is first revealed, then is played straight again when she fully confesses to him in the ending, and her "suspicious theme", a creepy theme that plays whenever Paul gets evidence she's been lying to him (and that, ironically, plays again when Paul suddenly reveals he's an impostor in the ending).
  • As a brief musical joke, we hear the opening bars to "Show Me Your Hands" as the bartender at the Birdcage calls the police, only for it to cut off as soon as he's Killed Mid-Sentence.
  • Finally, there's a blatant Call-Forward that none of the original audience would've gotten — when the Homeless Man bursts into the wedding, he's accompanied by the tune of "Time Bastard", which upon rewatch is a blatant spoiler for the ending of that story.
• Lohengrin and Mendelssohn: Matt Dahan doesn't actually play either of these Standard Snippets at Paul and Emma's wedding but gives us some organ music that sound close enough to pass muster.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: The classic example where one of the members of the main cast surprisingly turns out to be licensed as a wedding officiant, and the Official Couple decides he's the best possible option to officiate their ceremony as opposed to a more traditional choice. Professor Hidgens seems to be ordained in some kind of Christian denomination (wearing a clerical collar) and Paul and Emma apparently want him to conduct their wedding despite the fact that they only really know him as Emma's "kooky, reclusive biology professor" from community college.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Emma 2 considers it very important to do this whenever killing somebody, even when doing so massively increases the Collateral Damage.
• Mix-and-Match Man: When the robot Emma gets her eye damaged in a fight, she has to replace it with one belonging to a biker she killed, resulting in one eye having a different color than the other.
• Ms. Fanservice: Mariah's gown in the Title Sequence is fairly low-cut.
• Neck Lift: Robot Emma shows off her Super-Strength doing this to Real Emma while delivering her Motive Rant (which is, of course, all done by Lauren Lopez in pantomime).
• No Name Given: The script gives no actual name for Paul's wife other than "Emma 2" or, at one point, "Robot Emma".
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Paul's initial conversations with the two Emmas, which he persistently chooses to interpret as Emma teasing him or messing with him even though it pretty clearly becomes obvious — given Emma 2's confession at the beginning of the story — that they're two different people.
• Police Are Useless: The HFPD continues their generally poor showing in this story; yes, the bartender at the Birdhouse was Killed Mid-Sentence during his 911 call, but the fact that the call went through and then mysteriously went dead is the kind of thing you'd think would merit some kind of police response.
• Post-Processing Video Effects: Mariah's character gets a bunch laid on her in the Surreal Music Video Title Sequence — first Bishie Sparkle, then Petal Power, followed by a final layer of Pixellation and Ominous Visual Glitching in the last verse, as though to indicate she's not really there and being viewed on a screen. The vague implication — along with her wiping away a Single Tear before Robert sings the last word, "us", alone — is that their relationship ended tragically and she's only a Living Memory of his Lost Lenore.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Whatever you think of the morality of pulling a Kill and Replace on your own counterpart so you can steal their life, you're pretty clearly Jumping Off the Slippery Slope when you murder a whole bar full of innocent bystanders just to keep your secret. The ending is pretty clearly the Lang Brothers wanting the audience to squirm with discomfort over how much to cheer on Paul 23 and Robot Emma's newfound devotion and loyalty to each other.
• Remember the New Guy?: It's not clear if Sylvia was hired/transferred to the Hatchetfield branch of CCRP in the year and a half between The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and this story or we just never saw her before, but when she shows up in this story all of the CCRP staff are already familiar with her.
• Reunion Show: Alongside Time Bastard, Forever and Always acts as a proper follow-up to The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, bringing back Paul (well, close enough), Emma, Ted, Charlotte, Bill, Professor Hidgens, Mr. Davidson, and the Homeless Man.
• Robot Girl: Robot Emma is this, naturally. A synthetic organism made from the original's genetic material in her likeness.
• Running Gag: Paul keeps on asking if the runaround Emma is giving him in this story is a prelude to a "sexy surprise", while protesting that he hates sexual roleplaying (because he hates all forms of playing roles or performing, by extension of hating musicals).
  • The good people of Hatchetfield indulge in their usual "Fuck Clivesdale!" call-and-response during Paul and Emma's wedding vows.
• Sadistic Choice: The climax of the episode has the two Emmas fight to a standstill, with Paul stuck holding a knife and forced to choose which side to intervene on — the woman he actually married and made a promise to love "forever and always", even after she's been revealed as a robot impostor and a murderer, or the woman his wife was pretending to be, who's an innocent bystander and who has all the qualities he admired in his wife but is technically someone he's never met. The choice turns out to be, in hindsight, a Foregone Conclusion once we learn that Paul is a clone who killed his original himself, and that his hesitation in this moment is him resisting going back to his old ways.
• Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace: Prof. Hidgens, to his credit, averts this trope — as most modern, secular weddings not using a traditional liturgy do — but the Homeless Man interrupts the ceremony at around the time the officiant would be raising this question anyway. (And, to be fair to the Homeless Man, the accusation he's making — that the bride is an impostor getting married under false pretenses — absolutely is one of the traditionally valid objections one could make at this point.)
• Split Screen: The "Forever & Always" Surreal Music Video had to be filmed this way because of COVID-19, but the video makes an intentional artistic choice to highlight this rather than hiding it — eventually making it clear the two lovers aren't physically together, and Mariah's character may only be a memory in Robert's character's mind.
• Spot the Impostor: Averted in-universe — the two Emmas are, for obvious reasons, wearing different clothes, and one of them even has a wedding ring as an identifier — but out-of-universe we have to guess which Emma is speaking just from Lauren Lopez's facial expression and tone of voice. She does a very good job of making it clear.
• Surreal Music Video: The Title Theme Tune has one, which is very clearly non-diegetic to the main story and involves two Star-Crossed Lovers played by Robert Manion and Mariah Rose Faith singing to each other in a Big Fancy Castle of some kind. Its connection to Paul and Emma is unclear, although to some degree it's just giving us characters directly and explicitly singing out their feelings in a way neither Paul nor Emma would (if they weren't infected by a musical zombie virus). The implied story of the music video where Mariah's character becomes a Lost Lenore for Robert's character might reflect Paul 23's regret over the death of Real Emma.
• Survival Mantra: We get yet another Call-Back to Paul's "Okay... okay... okay..." from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals; this time Paul uses it while trying to process Emma's initial confession that she's an impostor.
• Take Our Word for It: All of Nightmare Time tends to run on this, but this story especially asks us to imagine the two Emmas not just conversing but physically grappling and fighting with each other (something that would require some expensive tricks with body doubles in a real live-action film), as well as a truly epic blood-soaked Bar Brawl when Emma 2 turns on the other denizens of the Birdhouse.
  • This also applies to some of the more minor physical features of the characters, like Robert Manion conspicuously stroking his imaginary beard as one of the bikers, or Paul 23 revealing his Slave Brand tattoo (that Jon Matteson doesn't actually have) on his right wrist.
  • Also applies to Lauren Lopez's Played for Laughs Cheap Costume for the wedding scene — Jon Matteson does wear a real suit with a bowtie to approximate a tuxedo, but Lauren just wears her normal clothes with a tissue-paper veil in lieu of Emma's "gorgeous wedding dress".
  • Many fans therefore took notice of this trope being averted with Emma's knife — an actual high-quality kitchen knife Lauren brandishes with surprising carefreeness during the fight scenes.
  • A few people have commented on how Lauren Lopez's discomfort with stage kissing led to the Big Damn Kiss moment being subverted in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals — one silver lining of Nightmare Time being done over Zoom is the audience being willing to suspend disbelief and accept the Big Damn Kiss moment at Paul and Emma's wedding being described in narration without Paul and Emma actually making contact (being in separate windows).
• Time Travel: Makes a surprise early appearance in this episode, when Emma reveals that she's from the year 2104, to be followed up on immediately in "Time Bastard".
• Turned Against Their Masters: Hilariously, both this Emma and this Paul turn out to have this as their backstory, both being creations of CCRP — although Emma is a far more advanced one from the future.
• Twin Threesome Fantasy: The two Emmas attract the attention of a Badass Biker who has one of these, which Real Emma tries to exploit as a Batman Gambit to get herself away.
• Unholy Matrimony: It's revealed at the end of "Forever And Always" that not only is there a robot Emma that's convinced Paul to kill the original, he's actually a clone that killed the original Paul as well. And they both live happily ever after.
• Vehicular Sabotage: We finally get confirmation that Emma 2 is a morally irredeemable murderer when we find out that Emma 1's Bus Crash wasn't an accident — Emma 2 cut the brakes on the bus, which wasn't just attempted murder on Emma but successful murder on the driver and seventy-five other passengers.
• Warts and All: A very twisted version of this. When "Emma" initially confesses that she's not the real Emma Perkins, Paul is taken aback, but then concludes that she is still the same woman he fell in love with, and he can live without knowing her true background. He then proves willing to accept her even as it becomes clear she's a murderous monster... because he himself is a clone who killed the real Paul Matthews to take over his life. And Emma still loves him knowing this.
• Wedding Episode: The fandom came in hyped for this one once it was revealed it was the long-awaited wedding of The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals' Official Couple, Paul Matthews and Emma Perkins.
• Wedding Ring Defense: Emma 2 tries this on the leader of the Badass Biker gang when Emma 1 tries to seduce him, only for the biker to hold up his hand and reveal he is also married and thinks that cheating on his wife only makes his Twin Threesome Fantasy hotter (setting him up as an Asshole Victim).
• What Does She See in Him?: The burning question that Real Emma has for Emma 2 about her marriage to Paul. Complicated because, for all intents and purposes, Emma 2 has an exact copy of Emma's personality and she's really asking this about herself.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The sequence at the Birdhouse is one to The Terminator, with Emma 2 revealed as a Terminator Impersonator and taking out a whole gang of Badass Bikers in an homage to the first scene of the movie.
  • Paul 23's backstory is a reference to the movie Moon.
• Why Did You Make Me Hit You?: Emma 2's reasoning is that all the death and destruction caused in her wake wouldn't have happened if Emma had just died on the bus she sabotaged. She outright tells a horrified Emma so after her attempted murder turns into a bloodbath.

Time Bastard

Time Bastard

"Keep runnin' away, you bastard!"

Ted, the horny bastard from CCRP's technical department, discovers that his office is a time-machine. Will he use this awesome ability to save his life... or doom us all?

Musical sequences:
"Time Bastard" performed by Kim Whalen; directed by Kim Whalen and Curt Mega

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• Actor Allusion: Ted being the "Time Bastard" may be an allusion to Joey Richter playing a supervillain named the "Time Jerker" on Henry Danger. (Note that the Time-Jerker's Color Motif, like Tinky's, is yellow.)
• Affectionate Nickname: Jenny in the past used to call Ted "Teddy" or, apparently, "Teddy Bear", hence Young Ted exhorting himself that he's not a teddy bear and needs to become a "tiger". The "Teddy Bear" nickname, unfortunately, comes off a lot less affectionate when appropriated by Tinky.
• Alternate Timeline: Name-dropped in this story, as Ted's explanation for the Dream Sequence of his and Jenny's wedding, leading to his determination to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and make that timeline real. In a bit of Dramatic Irony, even though we know Alternate Timelines are a thing in this setting — because we've already seen several of them where Ted is dead — this trope is harshly averted by this story, which always took place in only one timeline in a Stable Time Loop (and where the "Ted/Jenny wedding timeline" was probably always just a Lotus-Eater Machine).
• Ambiguously Gay: The female scientist in charge of the project to build Robot Emma has a very earnestly appreciative tone in her voice when describing how "aesthetically pleasing" the synthetic life form will be.
• Anti-Climax: A deliberate one for the Title Sequence, where after a lengthy homage to James Bond describing the titular "Time Bastard" as something in between a Magnificent Bastard and a Complete Monster, the final musical sting shows us this James-Bond-esque figure is... Paul's sleazy coworker Ted, of all people (complete with an unflatteringly goofy photo).
• Arc Words: Combined with Title Drop — Ted being called a "bastard", "the Time Bastard" or a "horny bastard" (which is a Call-Back to Charlotte calling him that in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals). This story also ends up borrowing the Arc Words and Title Drop from the previous story, with Jenny signing off her "Dear John" Letter to Ted, "I love you... forever and always".
• Bad Future: The world of 2104 is very much a Crapsack World dystopia.
• Bad Vibrations: Kilgore's immense bulk in his Cyborg form makes the ground shake — represented by loud musical stings in the soundtrack — whenever he moves.
• Best Served Cold: Executive Kilgore has been patiently waiting one hundred years for his revenge against the man he knows only as "the Time Bastard".
  • The lyrics of the song "Time Bastard" imply that Jenny wants this against Ted for what he did to her. Given that there's no indication in the story itself that Jenny underwent anything other than Cessation of Existence when she was disintegrated, the meaning of this has led to a lot of Epileptic Trees debates. (Most likely this is an imaginary version of Jenny that Tinky is using to torment Ted with guilt during his time as the Homeless Man.)
• Bishōnen Line: The Surreal Music Video Title Sequence has an ambiguous example, with an androgynous, gracile nude humanoid figure covered in shining gold holding the Bastard's Box levitating above its hand. It's not clear if this is one of Tinky's servitors, an illusion (like the illusion of Jenny that gives Ted the Box in the story proper) or Tinky's One-Winged Angel form beneath his fursuit and mask.
• Call-Back: We learn what Sylvia was talking about with Lab C-8 and "Spankoffski's office" in "Forever & Always" shortly after this story starts.
  • Just when we've barely had enough time to process the fact that the Homeless Man and Ted are one and the same, we're reminded that Paul 23 and Robot Emma ended "Forever & Always" intending to hunt down and kill the Homeless Man to protect their secret. Sure enough, this story ends with the happy couple showing up in Ted's alley stabbing away.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Young Ted and Jenny both had romantic feelings for each other in college that neither of them could ever admit to, ultimately leading to the ironic death of their friendship.
• Character Title: It was revealed just before the episode was broadcast that the titular "Time Bastard" is none other than Paul's work Frenemy Ted. The epithet "Time Bastard" may be a reference to Charlotte calling him a "horny bastard" in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals.
• Cheap Costume: Played for Laughs with Prof. Hidgens' minister outfit he wore to officiate the wedding — the theatrical way Robert Manion takes it off seems to indicate that in-universe it's just a strip of white paper tucked into his usual "theatre nerd turtleneck" to look like a clerical collar with as little effort and expense as possible. As soon as he takes it off, Hidgens seems to drop all pretense of being a man of the cloth and joins Ted in getting embarrassingly soused in public.
• Chekhov's Gun: A very literal example with the disintegrator device that Ted puts into his pocket to take with him back to the past after killing Executive Kilgore with it.
• Coconut Superpowers: A hilarious example with the Bastard's Box, whose "canon" appearance is represented in the Surreal Music Video with Stock Footage of a golden cube made of an impossibly complex ever-shifting pattern of smaller cubical blocks and voids, floating and rotating in place. The Bastard's Box we see in the livestream is... a commemorative Rubik's Cube with the (golden-colored) UMich logo on it, which presumably Joey Richter already owned from his college days.
• Color Motifs: Just as Wiggly's associated color in Black Friday was green and Blinky's in "Watcher World" was purple, Tinky's appears to be yellow. The Surreal Music Video for "Time Bastard" uses gold for its motif, with heavy use of gold clockworks, gold dust and a gold-painted silhouette.
• Conducting the Carnage: When the stage directions end Tinky's final encounter with Ted by saying "Tinky laughs, and laughs, and then... silence", Nick Lang actually makes an orchestra conductor's pinching gesture to indicate "silence", before going on to narrate, with relish in his voice, Robot Emma and Paul 23's appearance with knives in their hands.
• Contrived Coincidence: One reason Ted can't let go of The One That Got Away is that the very next day after he tried and failed to pluck up the courage to confess to her he found a "Dear John" Letter saying she'd left town never to return because — crushing irony of ironies — she couldn't stand being around him knowing her love for him was unrequited.
• Cosmic Plaything: Ted thinks at first that being "The Time Bastard" means being the Chosen One who's been Cursed with Awesome; turns out it's more like being one of these Blessed with Suck.
• Create Your Own Villain: It turns out Executive Kilgore became what he did entirely because of Ted's brutal attack on him in the year 2004, one hundred years in his past.
• Cyberpunk: The Bad Future of 2104 is very much in this vein, with corporations ruling the world directly, civil rights having been abolished as a concept, and technology readily blurring the line between human and machine.
• A Day in the Limelight: For Ted. The second one of these after "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man"; Ted is turning out to be a surprisingly important character.
• "Dear John" Letter: The tragedy of Ted's past revolves around finding a letter from his best friend Jenny confessing her love to him and saying she was leaving with Andy to Clivesdale because she couldn't bear the knowledge that her love was unrequited. We get to see her writing it in the past later in the episode.
• Despair Event Horizon: Ted is about to cross it when Jenny dies by disintegration, and is fully lost to it when his attempt to Set Right What Once Went Wrong fails utterly and he realizes he's lost his Time Travel powers (thanks to having gone back too far) and is Trapped in the Past. It's vaguely implied that coming into full awareness of one's nature as a Time Paradox entails crossing the Despair Event Horizon completely and entering the Bastard's Box.
• Dirty Coward: The Title Theme Tune seems to call the "Time Bastard" one, possibly alluding to Ted's attempt to forget his past once he becomes the Homeless Man:
  Jenny: Keep, keep running away, you bastard, you bastard...
• Disintegrator Ray: One of the nastier weapons available in the Bad Future (and one that Executive Kilgore scolds an employee for almost using on Ted, since he needs Ted's DNA intact). Ends up being a Chekhov's Gun that plays a major role in the plot.
• Double Entendre: Ted uses a fairly unsubtle wedding-themed one as his unsuccessful pickup line — asking to try to fit "my finger" in "your ring".
• Double-Meaning Title: Ted is the titular "Time Bastard" both because he's been disconnected from the normal flow of time, making him a "bastard" child of the laws of space-time, and also because... well, he's a time-traveling asshole.
• Downer Ending: An extreme one, where we learn that not only was Ted's awful life a Stable Time Loop that ends in him Driven to Madness and undergoing a Trauma Conga Line on the mean streets as the Homeless Man, but that when he finally dies it all culminates in an And I Must Scream Ironic Hell inside the Bastard's Box.
• Dream Sue: The ambiguous Dream Sequence of Ted and Jenny's wedding doesn't just give Ted his The One That Got Away back, it makes everything in his life better — Paul actually is his best friend and best man instead of barely tolerating him, his Frenemy Bill is now his direct subordinate at work who seeks his approval — in fact, just the fact that he has a huge crowd of approving friends and family on his side of the aisle means his life is much better than his real life as The Friend Nobody Likes. Sadly, what we learn about Ted's life is that this trope is justified — it was losing Jenny in the first place that triggered Ted's downward spiral into an unrepentant Jerkass to everyone around him in an effort to Never Be Hurt Again.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Ted and Prof. Hidgens briefly bond at the bar over their lack of romantic prospects.
• Dying as Yourself: An extremely dark example — the Homeless Man seems to "turn back into Ted" (Joey Richter changing back into his original costume) as he dies, implying that Ted is now once more aware of all the horrible truths he tried to repress after being Driven to Madness as the Homeless Man, and that he will have to live with them forever in the Ironic Hell of the Bastard's Box.
• The Ending Changes Everything: Not just of this story, but of the past Hatchetfield shows The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and Black Friday, with our knowledge of the true nature of the Homeless Man retroactively adding a huge layer of pathos to every scene he's in.
• Ethereal White Dress: "Time Bastard" opens with Kim Whalen embodying this trope — wearing a simple white dress, carrying a bouquet and with flowers in her hair, singing about her undying vendetta against a man who wronged her. We later find out this is Ted's Old Flame Jenny and this outfit is her wedding dress from the (supposed) Alternate Timeline where they stayed together like they were supposed to, rather than Ted losing her to another man in college and ending up in a downward spiral of despair.
  • Note that Jenny's dress averts Fairytale Wedding Dress (in contrast with Mariah Rose Faith's dress in the "Forever & Always" video), being a much simpler design than Kim Whalen's actual wedding dress (visible on her Instagram).
• Expy: Ted's backstory — where he became a shallow, abusive pickup artist after losing his One True Love to a guy like that in college (or so he thinks) — is very similar to that of Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother.
  • The Bastard's Box is clearly one for the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser, which makes Tinky a less Affably Evil version of Pinhead. Tinky's appearance (obviously looking like a human being wearing a costume with an immobile mask, rather than an actual beast-man) and nature as Ted's Not-So-Imaginary Friend is also very reminiscent of Frank from Donnie Darko.
• Exactly Exty Years Ago: Ted's travels take him first 85 years in his future, then 15 years in his past, meaning Andrew Kilgore spent exactly 100 years waiting for him.
• Everyone Has Standards: Even Ted starts getting uncomfortable when Prof. Hidgens starts waxing lyrical about his sexual encounters with his "girlfriends" Siri and Alexa.
• Everyone Is Armed: Par for the course in a Bad Future; Ted unfortunately learns that not just the security guards but everyone at CCRP in the future goes around armed with deadly weapons at all times.
• Extreme Libido: A big theme of this story is making it clear just how much of a "horny bastard" Ted really is — he can barely stop talking or thinking about sex for five minutes, including compulsively masturbating whenever he's briefly in private, no matter how inappropriate the venue.
• Failure Montage: Ted being rejected by all three of the girls at the wedding he tries to hit on. To be fair, this is only partly because of Ted's personal repulsiveness — all three women turn out to already be attached when he hits on them. (Charlotte, who's a regular hookup for him, still draws the line at cheating on her husband when her husband is right there in the room with her.) Of course, this is made extra egregious when one of the attached women he hits on is the bride.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: The disintegrator's effect on a human body, although it's Bloodless Carnage with No Body Left Behind, is described as agonizingly painful to experience and truly horrific to watch. (Especially if it's the love of your life you're watching disintegrate and it's your fault.)
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Ted in 2104, made worse by the fact that he's too slow on the uptake to realize he should even be trying to blend in (possibly because he's still hung over).
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Tinky's last appearance to the Homeless Man warning him that his "time's almost up" and he's about to die and go in the Bastard's Box gives the audience just enough time to think back to the ending of the previous story, "Forever & Always", before The Reveal where Tinky vanishes to be replaced by the figures of Paul 23 and Robot Emma, knives in hand.
• Forbidden Zone: Played for Laughs. No one's gone into Ted's office in the 85 years since he disappeared, because of the stench from the state he left it in.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Ted arrives in the year 2104, Executive Kilgore wryly remarks that without the implants required to function in this futuristic society, Ted is a homeless man.
  • When Tinky tells Ted he's trapped in the past, Ted goes mad from the revelation, and suddenly develops some rather familiar loopy mannerisms. It's not until a few minutes later that he finds himself cold and alone in the streets, discovers a rather familiar heavy coat and wooly black hat, and starts muttering about needing to find a home.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: This fact about Ted is emphasized and Played for Drama more than usual, with The Reveal that Ted wasn't even actually invited to Paul and Emma's wedding — since he makes all the women he knows uncomfortable, especially Emma — but obliviously chose to crash anyway.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Even though he doesn't seem to directly do anything antagonistic compared to the nominal Big Bad of the story, Executive Kilgore, T'Noy Karaxis a.k.a. Tinky makes it pretty clear he arranged all the Timey-Wimey Ball shenanigans in "Time Bastard" for his own amusement, and is the only one who could craft such an elegant Time Paradox that has no purpose other than putting Ted through eternal psychological torture.
• Hope Spot: A trope deliberately invoked in-universe, crossed with Imagine Spot — Ted gets a very vivid Hallucination and/or glimpse of an Alternate Timeline where it's him and Jenny getting married, not Paul and Emma, and he suddenly remembers all the genuine intimacy and love he'd hoped for with her before he gave up and became just another "horny bastard". Unfortunately, by the end of the episode we learn this probably wasn't a glimpse of a timeline that actually exists, but an illusion wrought by Tinky to trap Ted in the Bastard's Box.
• Hotter and Sexier: The "Time Bastard" music video deliberately plays with this, with Sexy Silhouettes everywhere serving as ornamentation for the ominous shots of timepieces being broken and destroyed — appropriate imagery for the downfall of a "horny bastard" like Ted.
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: I just shot my One True Love with a Disintegrator Ray... while I was incompetently trying to seduce her and she, revolted by my new self, was trying to fend me off.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Ted is so depressed at his lack of success hitting on bridesmaids he marches over to the open bar and demands the bartender hand over the whole bottle of vodka.
• In Vino Veritas: The plot of the episode kicks off with Ted and Prof. Hidgens getting drunk at the bar together at the wedding reception, after Ted strikes out with all the wedding guests he hit on; the liquor makes Ted maudlin enough that he's willing to openly admit his loneliness and talk about his regrets over The One That Got Away.
• Instant Sedation: Future Ted subdues his past self using the classic rag soaked in ether.
• Legacy of the Chosen: We eventually find out that Ted's moniker of "The Time Bastard" is derived from the epithet properly possessed by the Eldritch Abomination T'Noy Karaxis ("the Bastard of Time and Space"), and that he probably isn't the first person Tinky has given the "gift" of being his Chosen One to.
• Leitmotif: This story leans a little less heavily on identifiable leitmotifs than the previous one, but still includes plenty of Call Backs to earlier Hatchetfield music:
  • The initial Failure Montage of Ted hitting on women at the wedding is a jazzy, uptempo version of "Inevitable" from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals.
  • Ted Drowning His Sorrows with Prof. Hidgens is underscored with the tune from "Showstopping Number", switching to the tune of "Workin' Boys" when Hidgens starts reminiscing about his college days with Chad.
  • The Title Theme Tune "Time Bastard" is associated with Time Travel, and is the leitmotif that gets the most of a workout during the show:
    • A soft, major-key version of it plays as the "old love song" during Ted and Jenny's imaginary first dance at their wedding.
    • This then turns into the dark, depressing version of it during Ted's depressed stupor at Paul's office.
    • A characteristic high-pitched tinny version of it plays every time he actually passes through the Time Portal.
    • A hesitant, thoughtful version of it plays when Ted contrives his plan to go back to 2004 and change history so he ends up with Jenny.
    • This turns into a very dramatic, heroic version of the theme when he comes up with his (doomed) plan to go back in time again to prevent Jenny's death.
    • Finally, it gets its final Dark Reprise as the "real" version of the tune when Ted finally becomes the Homeless Man, playing as the theme of the next 15 years of his awful life, culminating in a darkly triumphal fanfare announcing his soul entering the Bastard's Box.
  • Tinky's "theme" is less an identifiable tune than a chaotic rush of discordant notes. There is a specific four-note motif associated with the Bastard's Box, which is also the opening notes of "Time Bastard".
  • Jenny gets her own theme, a sweet and melancholy tune that we haven't heard before, which we hear the first time when Ted is describing her to Prof. Hidgens and again when we see her for real, which turns into a tormented Dark Reprise when Future Ted and Jenny have their fight.
  • The "surreal" theme from previous episodes comes back whenever Ted encounters something that seems illogical or impossible that makes him question his sanity.
  • A very dramatic theme (based on the chord progression of "Time Bastard") plays to underscore Kilgore's death by Disintegrator Ray, that comes back as an even worse Dark Reprise when Jenny dies the same way.
  • There's a jaunty '80s-style "computer tune" that plays to characterize the Future CCRP office, which then ironically recurs as the tune for the Hatchetfield Gazette office in the past. A particularly upbeat version of it also plays the first time we see young Andy, as a hint to his future identity.
  • Andrew Kilgore has just a bit of a Leitmotif in the form of the rhythmic piano chords that play to represent his footsteps that make the ground shake.
• Lemony Narrator: Normally the voice of the narrator (as played by Nick Lang) in the stage directions is fairly neutral, but in "Time Bastard" the narration almost takes glee in constantly putting Ted down, insulting him and finally gloating about his endless eternity of suffering in the Bastard's Box once the story ends — almost as though it's Tinky himself doing the narrating.
• Liquid Courage: Young Ted spent the whole day pouring himself another drink until his inhibitions were finally lowered enough to go confess his love to Jenny... and never reached that point before he passed out and fell unconscious. At least, that's what he thought happened — in reality he just gave Future Ted the opportunity to ambush him in his drunken state with an ether-soaked rag.
• Literal Genie: The time portal in Ted's office activates in response to him thinking about any other time period, even when he had no actual intention of going there — it initially activates in response to him fuming that his printer's going to take "eighty-five years" to finish printing Paul's weekly reports.
• Loser Protagonist: Ted, moreso than any other Hatchetfield protagonist.
• Lost Common Knowledge: Whatever the warm brown-colored beverage people in the Bad Future drink is, it's not coffee — they don't even know what the word "coffee" means.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The Hope Spot with the "Alternate Timeline" of Ted and Jenny's wedding seems like a Dream Sequence, but the narrator outright tells us it isn't — it's far too vivid to be a dream, with Ted being able to smell Jenny's skin and feel her breath on his neck, taste the wedding cake, etc. In hindsight, it's probably this trope, with Tinky using his Reality Warper powers on Ted directly.
• Metaphorgotten: When Ted expresses skepticism at the idea of having sex with a robot, Prof. Hidgens gives Ted an optimistic speech about how "anything is possible with imagination and a little elbow grease"... then muses that "any kind of lube will do".
• Mind Screw: This whole episode is one, but it's also implied that T'Noy Karaxis' whole MO is to create these in-universe for "toys" he wants to "play with", and said toys' afterlife in the Bastard's Box is one that never ends.
• Motive Rant: Executive Kilgore gives a long and deeply embittered one to Ted before trying to kill him in the future, leading to Ted giving just as over-the-top a gloating speech to Young Andy in the past — both of which play a big role in enabling the Stable Time Loop that dooms them both.
• My Name Is Inigo Montoya: After his No-Holds-Barred Beatdown of Young Andy, Ted not only leaves him alive, but outright tells him to remember the face of the man who beat him and his badass title of "The Time Bastard" — not just Tempting Fate but ensuring that the Stable Time Loop that turns Andy into Executive Andrew Kilgore is completed. (Sadly, Ted doesn't yet know exactly how this Stable Time Loop ends...)
• Nightmare Face: The description of Tinky's motionless face mask is deeply disturbing, and while we don't literally see it, Jeff Blim's Slasher Smile makes for a good approximation — as does our finally seeing Tinky in doll form in his final appearance.
• No Dress Code: Unclear if this was meant to be diegetic or not, but by the time the Future CCRP scene takes place, Robert Manion has already fully changed back out of his Prof. Hidgens outfit into a T-shirt, shorts and a backwards baseball cap — which makes it a funny moment when he speaks up and says he's the current head of the Technical Department and has never seen Ted before in his life. (Matching up with stereotypes of tech workers becoming more and more casual, and an ironic contrast with the very buttoned-up Mr. Davidson in the present day.)
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The Homeless Man's last Pet the Dog moment — trying to warn Paul that his wife is an impostor — not only gets him unceremoniously booted out of the wedding (leading to him angrily muttering "Fuck Paul" a week later) but then leads to him being murdered by Robot Emma and Paul 23 to protect Emma's secret, which finally sends his soul into the unending hell of the Bastard's Box.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Ted gives a vicious one to Andy in the past with a crowbar, as long-delayed revenge (from his perspective) for "stealing" Jenny from him.
• Noodle Incident: Whatever happened between Prof. Hidgens and "Chad".
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Only Ted can see or interact with Tinky throughout the story, and everyone else sees Tinky's manifestations as a sign of Ted's Sanity Slippage.
• Obscured Special Effects: Notably averted for once in one of these episodes — because Lauren Lopez and Joey Richter are a couple living together, Lauren actually is in the same physical place as Joey when Robot Emma stabs the Homeless Man to death with a knife (which Lauren just does by stabbing the knife behind Joey's back, but was still a very shocking moment for many people who saw it).
• Once More, with Clarity: At the end of the story we go back through the scene of the Homeless Man barging into the wedding to deliver his Cassandra Truth, this time from the Homeless Man's POV (with Joey Richter centered in the window).
• One Nation Under Copyright: Executive Kilgore scoffs when Ted brings up his "constitutional rights", revealing that after the "Great Crash and subsequent Buyout" the governments of the world no longer exist, and corporations like CCRP own their employees as chattel. The scientist in charge of the Robot Emma project cheerfully talks about how their "synthetic life form" will be superhumanly capable, perfectly obedient, and will eventually replace all human labor, with no concern about what happens to most of the now-useless human race if this project works out.
• The One That Got Away: We learn that Ted's downward slide into becoming the sleazeball he is today started with losing his One True Love Jenny to another man in college. We get a tantalizing hint of Prof. Hidgens having a similar backstory, only for Ted to cut him off because he's too self-involved to be interested.
• Out of Focus: Some fans were surprised — and a bit disappointed — that despite the heartfelt heart-to-heart Hidgens and Ted have at the beginning of this story, nothing comes of it and Hidgens plays no significant further role in the plot (including not being killed).
• The Pig-Pen: Part of the horror of Tinky's appearance is describing him as seeming to be a man wearing a fursuit that's matted and filthy. Ted has a fair share of this trait too, with his office stinking of his bodily fluids and him having to make a special note to "wash the butt and the balls" when showering before a big date.
• Pun: Ted defends his right to jerk off in his office by saying that all US citizens have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of ha-PENIS".
• Red Baron: Ted ends up treating "The Time Bastard" like this kind of title.
• Red Herring: Andrew Kilgore both gives true Foreshadowing that two of Joey Richter's characters are Two Aliases, One Character ("Here, you are a homeless man, Mr. Spankoffski") and false foreshadowing just to throw us off the scent ("He's a wily one!"). (At least, there's no indication thus far that Ted and Uncle Wiley are the same person, and if they were it would require one hell of a convoluted explanation.)
• The Reveal: The story begins with a small one and ends with a massive one:
  • The first is of Ted's surname, long touted by Word of God as being a spoiler: Spankoffski. Word of God later clarified that previous claims of the surname being inherently a spoiler were true back when Nerdy Prudes Must Die was expected to be the third installment of the Hatchetfield saga, a plan which was disrupted by the pandemic, so they decided to just reveal his name here. Presumably, Ted's younger brother Peter Spankoffski was to be properly introduced in NPMD and Ted would have been revealed to share his name at some point after that. As it stands, it still works as a Reveal that Ted has a silly and meaningful surname (it helps that all the cast members have giggle fits as Nick reads it out), with Peter being unveiled in "Abstinence Camp". True to the original plan, no mention is made of Ted in NPMD.
  • More significantly, we learn that Hatchetfield's resident crazy homeless man is in fact Ted himself, having travelled back in time 15 years and been forced to take The Slow Path back home. Word of God confirms that this is true of all incarnations of the Homeless Man, despite Ted dying young in every other story in which he appears, this timey-wimey oddity working on the same still-unknown mechanism by which there are multiple Hatchetfield timelines to begin with.^note That mechanism soon turns out to be that the timelines diverged when Hannah was born in 2005, while this episode takes Ted back to 2004 when there was only one timeline to go back to.
  • For a non-Ted reveal, Executive Kilgore mentions the name "T'Noy Karaxis" before calling the entity "Tinky" from then on, as well as referring to him as a "Lord in Black", revealing details that would become clearer in the next episode: that Wiggly's kin are called the Lords in Black, and that their incongruously cute names are shortened forms of their eldritch true names.
  • Tinky's appearance is also treated as a reveal, with the Tinky stuffed toy not appearing onscreen until the very last of Tinky's onstage appearances in this episode.
• Reunion Show: One for both the actors and characters from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, minus only Mariah Rose Faith — all of the core cast of TGWDLM reappear as their primary characters from that show in either this story or its immediate prequel, "Forever & Always", since it's about all of Paul's friends from CCRP Technical showing up at his wedding. This story notably brings in the two characters from CCRP Technical who didn't show up in the previous story for a cameo, Charlotte and Mr. Davidson.
• Rip Van Winkle: The time portal initially gives the illusion of functioning this way, since in order to pass through it Ted needs to allow it to put him in Forced Sleep, and his first time trip has him waking up 85 years in the future. That said, he soon finds out it didn't literally do this, since he wasn't physically present during any of the intervening years or presumably someone would've noticed him in there when they boarded up the door to his office.
• Running Gag: Jenny, a born-and-bred Hatchetfielder, throws in a hearty "Fuck Clivesdale!" in her "Dear John" Letter, even while in the process of explaining why she's going to move there.
• Sci-Fi Horror: This story in particular branches out from what people traditionally think of as a horror setting to include explicitly sci-fi elements once we get a good look at the Cyberpunk future of 2104. It's still very much an H. P. Lovecraft inspired Cosmic Horror story, though, once we get confirmation that CCRP's Time Travel technology was always based on the powers of the Eldritch Abomination T'Noy Karaxis.
• Shout-Out: The song "Time Bastard" is a direct reference to the opening numbers of the James Bond films, complete with dancing silhouetted women and all.
  • Hidgens describing his ability to have sex with inanimate objects like an Amazon Echo as "Life... life finds a way", quoting Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park.
• Significant Double Casting: The Hatchetfield Gazette employee whose office Ted will someday inherit is played by Corey Dorris, and we're meant to think for a second that it might actually be Bill, before it's clarified that it's a stranger and Ted really has gone all the way back to 2004.
  • Both of Ted's antagonists in this story, Tinky and Executive Kilgore, are played by Jeff Blim. And although they have pretty much opposite personalities, they are both different flavors of Large Ham (a Cold Ham in Kilgore's case) hammed up as only Jeff can ham a character up.
  • The Reveal at the end of the episode is that the double-casting of Ted and the Homeless Man going back to The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals wasn't actually double-casting at all.
• Significant Green-Eyed Redhead: Jenny, played by Kim Whalen, serves as the Lost Lenore for Ted around whose fate the whole story revolves.
• Simultaneous Arcs: Unlike most Hatchetfield stories, which clearly take place in an Alternate Universe from every other, this story very explicitly takes place in the same universe as "Forever & Always" and at about the same time. (Not counting the jumps to the future and the past via Time Travel.)
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Compared to previous Eldritch Abominations, Tinky is notable for not being very childlike at all, including being very free and easy with the F-bombs.
  Tinky: Tick-tock, Teddy Bear! Tick-fuckin'-TOCK!
• Stable Time Loop: The Reveal of this episode is that Ted's life always was one — his time travel into the past caused all the tragedy and trauma that led him to become a "sleazeball" in the first place, and there was never any chance that his meddling in the past would get him the good future where he and Jenny get married.
  • It's particularly notable that the Title Drop "Time Bastard" is a "bootstrap paradox" — the reason Ted calls himself that is Executive Kilgore tells him that's what he is when they meet, but the only reason Kilgore knows that is that future Ted announced it to him during his No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. Since the title seems to be derived from Tinky's title "The Bastard of Time and Space", we can surmise Tinky is the ultimate source of this name and is responsible for inserting it into the timestream.
• Surreal Music Video: The Title Sequence for "Time Bastard" is a doozy of one, featuring Kim Whalen as Jenny in an Ethereal White Dress singing an Adele-esque song about revenge against the "bastard" who wronged her, against a backdrop of timepieces being destroyed (a clock drowned in a pool of water, golden watches dissolving slowly into gold dust) and an ambiguous shot of a golden figure holding the Bastard's Box, with gratuitous dancing Sexy Silhouettes to boot. An homage to similarly surreal James Bond opening sequences from the past, and one designed to kick off tons of Epileptic Trees debate over what it all means.
• Take Our Word for It: For the filthy, disgusting appearance of the "real" Tinky, for the elaborate futuristic office building of CCRP in 2104 and the horrifying inhuman appearance of Executive Kilgore (represented in this reading with bits of foil on Jeff Blim's face), and most of all for the quite expensive special effect of the Disintegrator Ray.
• Take That!: This story is a very harsh one both to "pickup artist (PUA)" culture (a la The Game (2005)) and its associated mindset of the entitled "Nice Guy".
• Time Paradox: This seems to be the true meaning of being a "Time Bastard" — Executive Kilgore gives a long rant about how Ted's title means he's been "aborted from the flow of time and space" and the logic of normal causality no longer applies to him, allowing him to abuse Time Travel freely. (Although, unfortunately, not as freely as he assumes.)
• Time Travel Episode: Exactly What It Says on the Tin — it's one of these plus A Day in the Limelight for Ted.
• Too Much Information: Prof. Hidgens gives Ted and the audience this when it comes to his "relationships" with his AI assistants. Ted, in turn, gives everyone this when it comes to his habits at his desk at work.
• Tragic Keepsake: The silver locket that Andy intended to give Jenny before he was attacked by Ted, and that he holds onto for the next century while plotting revenge against the Time Bastard.
• Trapped in the Past: Ted discovers that because of some strange experiment and an encounter with Tinky, he can travel to the future and the past. Naturally, after realizing this, he uses this power to attempt to travel back to the past to stop his younger self from screwing up with his crush. However, after a fatal accident, his girlfriend is disintegrated and he realizes his damning error: he traveled back in time before the experiment was ever conducted, and he finds that he's trapped in 2004.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Tragically turns out to be true both of Ted's younger self and that of his rival, Executive Andrew Kilgore, who in the past was just a romantic young man named Andy.
• "The Villain Sucks" Song: "Time Bastard" is one of these, combined with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, from the POV of Jenny, a woman the Time Bastard has wronged.
• Walking Spoiler: Any discussion of the ending of this story is a major one for the Hatchetfield universe as a whole.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Ted is familiar enough with science-fiction tropes — as are most people these days — that when he finally realizes he's actually capable of Time Travel he immediately seizes on the idea of an Alternate Timeline and decides his story is a Set Right What Once Went Wrong plot to get back to the reality where he married Jenny. Unfortunately, the presence of the taunting Eldritch Abomination Tinky should've clued him in that he's actually in a Sci-Fi Horror story where the only outcome of attempting to abuse Time Travel is an ironic downfall.
• You Already Changed the Past: A very harsh example. Ted finds out that Jenny leaving him to go to Clivesdale can't be prevented because his time travel to prevent this event caused it — and, moreover, that what actually happened wasn't that she left him but that he accidentally disintegrated her.

Peanuts!

Peanuts!

"He's had a meteoric rise!"

As the credits roll, we watch a newscast from a mysterious alternate future, where Dan Reynolds and Donna Daggitt sing the praises of everyone's favorite celebrity animal, Peanuts the Hatchetfield Pocket Squirrel, and describe how thoroughly he's captured the tiny town of Hatchetfield's hearts...

Musical sequences:
"Peanuts!" performed and directed by Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez

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• Adorable Abomination: This sequence serves as a hilarious ambiguous reveal that poor adorable little Peanuts was also one of these all along.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's not clear how much of what we see in "Peanuts!" is actually happening, how much of it may be delusion or propaganda on the part of Dan and Donna, and if it all did literally happen, how exactly it happened.
  • This story has launched quite the debate among fans over whether Peanuts somehow actually is an Eldritch Abomination of some kind or if this is a Trend Aesop about how Dan and Donna's media-driven groupthink ended up taking on a life of its own. (Note that in Black Friday, which had a very similar Aesop, the real truth was still both.)
• Apocalypse Cult: Peanuts ambiguously becomes the center of one when his Flash In The Pan Fad hits critical mass, with Dan and Donna ambiguously at the center of it.
• Apocalypse How: The ending of "Peanuts!" shows Hatchetfield — and possibly the whole world — in ruins, although we don't know exactly how this happened or how far the damage went, just that it was the result of some kind of societal breakdown in response to Peanuts attaining sapience.
• Bragging Theme Tune: The song is one for Hatchetfield's most beloved animal celebrity.
• Cheap Costume: Joey and Lauren's costumes as Dan and Donna are fairly convincing, but the "handheld mics" they use for their Vox Pops are clearly actually TV remote controls.
• Creative Closing Credits: More creative than the Closing Credits of either of the other Season One episodes — the Episode Two Closing Credits are a Music Video that tells a self-contained story with no relationship whatsoever to the events of the preceding episode. (For this reason, the video is shown as a Split Screen with the actual credits scroll, as opposed to the credits being superimposed as with "A Thousand Eyes" in Episode One or interspersed as with "The Web I Spin for You" in Episode Three.) It therefore makes more sense to treat "Peanuts!" as a separate mini-story rather than an actual part of "Time Bastard".
• A Day in the Limelight: For Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez as newscasters Dan and Donna, this being the first time we've actually seen them fully embodied onscreen rather than in the form of voiceovers.
• Deadline News: "Peanuts!" implies it's some combination of this and Apocalyptic Log — it's a recording of a newscast (or compilation of newscasts) being played for us to show us how the world ambiguously ended in this timeline.
• Existential Horror: The fact that Peanuts is a sapient person capable of speech sends Dan and Donna tumbling down a hilarious rabbit hole of existential questions about the nature of the universe they live in.
• Flash In The Pan Fad: The plot of "Peanuts!" is about the existing Human-Interest Story we all remember from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, an inspiring Yet Another Baby Panda story about a baby squirrel named "Peanuts the Hatchetfield Pocket Squirrel", steadily growing and growing in importance to the people of Hatchetfield (or at least to Dan and Donna) until he dominates all their news coverage. And then things start getting weird.
• Giant Animal Worship: We're given a flash of a scene of people worshiping Peanuts this way, although it's probably just an artistic rendition and Peanuts didn't actually grow in size when people started worshiping him.
• Idiosyncratic Wipes: Dan and Donna's newscast indulges in several of these.
• Green Screen: This video is a classic use of this device, with the background behind Dan and Donna's newsdesk changing rapidly and unpredictably while they continue to sit and talk.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: It's hard to say what Peanuts' motivations, if any, are during this sequence, but it doesn't seem like he would've wanted to destroy the world on purpose.
• Mood Whiplash: An intentionally massive one from the horrifying Downer Ending of "Time Bastard" to a jaunty cartoonish song about Peanuts the Pocket Squirrel, which then suddenly whiplashes us again into confronting the idea this adorable squirrel may somehow be responsible for Hatchetfield's fiery destruction.
• Only Sane Man: The Man in a Hurry gets to play this next to Dan and Donna in this video, with his bemused, impatient responses ("I don't know..." and "I don't know!") to their increasingly frantic questions about his opinion of Peanuts.
• Or Was It a Dream?: The final Mind Screw of this video is how the ruined, apocalyptic studio is suddenly restored to its original state at the end as though none of the previous events happened (except for Peanuts creepily lurking in the background).
• Real Life Writes the Plot: The reason for a Music Video focusing on Dan and Donna, of all the Bit Characters, is that Lauren Lopez and Joey Richter were one of the only sets of two actors who were living together and could film together during the pandemic, and Dan and Donna were the only Hatchetfield characters they played who had a pre-established relationship.
  • Similarly, the reason the Man in a Hurry of all people shows up in the Vox Pops is that songwriter Jeff Blim was the one working on the video with them, and he's the only person who could shoot pickups of his own face to splice into the video without having to loop another cast member in (and of all the characters he plays the Man in a Hurry is the funniest one to have show up).
• Sanity Slippage: Dan and Donna are clearly undergoing this throughout the course of the story, until they finally hit full Heroic BSoD status when Peanuts starts talking.
• Screen Shake: This starts happening to the camera as reality starts breaking down toward the end of the video.
• Show Within a Show: All of "Peanuts!" purports to be an episode of the Hatchetfield Morning Cup O' News (or several such episodes spliced together) with Dan and Donna.
• Sole Survivor: Dan's line "If there's an apocalypse, he'll survive it!" lampshades how Peanuts miraculously survived to the end of both The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and Black Friday.
• Stock Footage: All the footage of Peanuts is obviously just stock footage of squirrels taken from the Internet.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Dan and Donna's hilarious Freak Out is a nice reality check that if a genuinely sapient Talking Animal actually existed in Real Life they would in fact be treated as an Eldritch Abomination whose existence would overturn most of the assumptions our society is based on.
• Surreal Music Video: It doesn't start out obviously surreal like other videos in Nightmare Time but soon becomes so.
• Talking Animal: Dan and Donna spend the first half of the video wishing Peanuts were one of these, only to have a massive Freak Out when it turns out he is.
• Team Pet: The song starts out singing Peanuts' praises as one for the entire town of Hatchetfield, and then goes meta, telling you that if you're in some kind of stereotypical Kids' Wilderness Epic adventure you should consider making Peanuts the Team Pet of your story.
• Vox Pops: Dan and Donna do one with none other than the Man in a Hurry, who surprisingly seems to be the Only Sane Man in this scenario (totally nonplussed by both their questions about Peanuts and the intensity with which they ask them).
• Watching Troy Burn: We get a Time Skip after The Reveal of Peanuts' sapience to Dan and Donna broadcasting with Hatchetfield in the process of burning down in the background, followed by a second one to a broadcast in Hatchetfield's ruined, burnt-out husk.