When is Blendin Blandin? [gravity Falls, Weirdmageddon Part 1] The Royal Order of The Holy Mackerel

Last time I talked about the inescapability of “fate” and “destiny” in stories, and how Gravity Falls subverts this trope with the failure of the Zodiac. It sends the positive message that we are never trapped by our circumstances, and through the power of our own free will we can overcome any obstacle. Complicating this message however is Gravity Fall’s incorporation of time travel. You see, time travel is a tricky element to handle because with this plot device in play, the possibility arises that everyone’s fate really is sealed and nothing done in the present can actually affect the future or past. However, Gravity Falls does supply an answer to it’s problem with time travel, if you do your detective work and answer a specific question. When is Blendin Blandin? But before we tackle that question, you first need to know how time travel works in narrative storytelling. While this is not universal, most time travel stories hold fast to one of two rules. The first rule is that the timeline is fixed and cannot be changed no matter how hard you try. Everything that has happened in the present and future has already been set up by events in the past, and no amount of time travel can change this. This is usually played up for it’s more grim aspects. Twelve Monkeys is a great example of this rule, in which, spoilers, a time traveling Bruce Willis goes to the past to save the future from a terrible man-made virus, only to overshoot his mark and land in an asylum where he begins to doubt his memories and his mission. In the end, after a botched attempt to stop the virus leaves Willis shot and dying in an airport, he sees his younger self and realizes that the nightmares that have haunted him his whole life were actually from seeing himself gunned down as a child. His time travel had always happened, his mission had always failed, no matter what they try the destiny of humanity is sealed and they are forever doomed. I told you. Pretty grim stuff. The second rule is one we see more often. It suggests that changes made in the past can affect the future in varying degrees. A great example of this is the Back To The Future series which posits that changes made in the past, no matter how incidental, slowly affect the future. For example, in Back To The Future Part One, Marty accidentally saves his father in the past from an accident that would have cemented his parents relationship. The result alters the timeline and Marty is slowly erased from history. They even expand their rules for time travel in Back To The Future part two, explaining that alterations in the past create alternate timelines which can be undone if you go back to the point of the original alteration and change things back again. Don’t worry if you're confused, the writers expected this and included a scene where Doc Brown explains everything to Marty (and the audience) by drawing timelines on a blackboard. The problem with this rule, even in Back To The Future, the gold standard of time travel films, are the logic problems it opens itself up to. For example, in Back To The Future Part Two, if Biff Tannen traveled back in time to give himself the almanac, he would have returned to an alternate twenty fifteen and not the one he came from. In the storytelling it makes sense, because the writers needed a way to return the Delorean to Marty and Doc to continue the story, but as you can see, the more you time travel you use the more problems you create logically. Which is why I’m glad we don’t get that much in the way of established time travel rules in Gravity Falls. The more you time travel rules you use the more questions they raise, which is why continuity driven TV shows have problems with it. I mean, just look at all the hilarious ways the writers of Doctor Who have bent and broken their own rules over the years to keep things fresh and dodge logical questions. So back to Gravity Falls, as we all well know, Blendin Blandin narrowly dodges Bill Cipher’s blast in Weirdmageddon Part 1. He escapes never to be heard from again in the context of the show, seemingly playing the part of a coward who turned tail and ran in the face of the insurmountable threat of Bill Cipher. However, that doesn’t tell us specifically where and when he went. At face value this is frustrating because Gravity Falls seems to have given a neat and tidy closure for all of the major characters. Sure, Blendin only has a handful of cameos and two full episodes dedicated to him, but it seems like he should have had more closure in the story than the even more tertiary Northwest family received. Well, it turns out Alex Hirsch did give us the clues to when Blendin went, but I interpreted these clues with deeper meaning for the wrong end of the story. Because “time travel”. But much like Gravity Falls, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s first review what we know about Blendin Blandin, the role he plays in the show, and how these elements explain how the rules of Time Travel work in Gravity Falls. We are officially introduced to Blendin Blandin in the Time Traveler's Pig, where he nervously explains what his job is. He is a member of the Time Anomaly Removal Crew. Theoretically a group of workers tasked with traveling backwards through time searching for things that may cause paradoxes that rewrite or erase the future. In the Time Traveler’s Pig, Dipper and Mabel not only run amok through time, but leave a series of anomalies in their wake as they do so. These small changes are ultimately cleaned up by Blendin Blandin without much fuss, but it proves that changes made to the past don’t cause sudden or immediate changes in the future. But we know it must be possible to change the future in Gravity Falls, because if there wasn’t a constant threat of change, Blendin wouldn’t have a job. In fact, the threat of changing the timestream is so serious, that the Time Baby imprisons Blendin in Time Jail for allowing Dipper and Mabel to steal a time machine and cause so much time mischief. So in Gravity Falls, there are no alternate timelines, there is a single timeline enforced by the Time Baby, which is constantly maintained and cleaned by Time Handymen like Blendin Blandin. What else do we know about Blendin Blandin? Well, thanks to Blendin’s Game we know that Blendin is not only highly trained and knowledgeable, he’s a guy who holds a grudge. Blendin never forgave Dipper and Mabel, and spent a seemingly long amount of time plotting revenge while in Time Jail. So much in fact, that he has the perfect plan to see them undone. A time wish from the Time Baby. A Time Wish has the ability to change one thing in the time stream without the worry of causing history destroying paradoxes. Thanks to The Time Traveler’s Pig, we know that Blendin Blandin planned to make sure Dipper and Mabel didn’t exist by preventing their parents from meeting, which didn’t happen because Dipper and Mabel keep existing. Blendin must have learned that by doing something that causes the erasure of Dipper and Mabel it would in turn create too many history destroying paradoxes. This was something that could only be done with a Time Wish. Keep that in mind for later. So we know that Blendin is a guy who has problems letting go of things that make him angry. We can also extrapolate that he has no moral quandaries about altering the timestream to seek out revenge. In Weirdmageddon Part One, we discover just how upset Blendin is with the fact that Bill Cipher possessed him and used his body and time travel abilities against his will to nefarious ends. Yes, Blendin’s reinforcements are easily vaporized by Bill Cipher, and yes, Blendin gets out of “Time Dodge”, but you better believe Blendin doesn’t drop his grudge that easily. Likely, because Blendin knows about the paradoxical problems of erasing Dipper and Mabel, I’d also believe that Blendin would try to figure out what becomes of Bill Cipher’s Weirdmageddon. Just a small jump ahead would prove that Bill fails and Weridmageddon is undone all thanks to the Pines family. So Blendin hatches a plan. Blendin goes back in time to a series of lynchpin moments to ensure certain things happen. His first stop is the failure of the giant gideon robot. When the robot falls, we don’t see a fiery explosion, we specifically see a giant blue energy blast that doesn’t harm anyone or even the surrounding area of the crash, it just busts up the robot and alerts everyone in town to come see what happened. If McGucket’s robot really exploded, it would have at least taken out Gideon, Dipper, and Mabel and a huge chunk of forest. If Blendin future technology was the true cause of destruction of the Gideon bot, then he’s the one who set in motion the social revolt against Gideon Gleeful that sees him imprisoned for his crimes. From there Blendin can bounce further back and be the cause of the big coincidences in Gravity Falls. He would have made sure Soos found the mystery shack screwdriver Dipper and Mabel left behind. He would have helped Gideon discover Journal Number two and his bolo tie. He would have made sure Dipper and Mabel’s parents got together. He would have caused the failure of Ford’s perpetual motion machine that split the brothers up. And most importantly, he would have set the shipwreck inside the boarded up cave Stan and Ford find on Glass Shard Beach, New Jersey. The adventure that cemented their bond as brothers and remained a touchstone for both of them through their entire lives. Blendin Blandin may not have had the powers or the ability to take down someone like Bill Cipher, but he did have the skill to travel backwards through time and ensure Bill Cipher was defeated by protecting the Pines and the members of the Zodiac. Theoretically, Blendin was able to use what he learned about Bill Cipher’s weakness to help the Native American Shaman defeat Bill Cipher in the past! For all we know, Blendin Blandin may have been the one who painted the murals Ford finds in the caves beneath Gravity Falls! And for me, that’s the closure I need for Blendin Blandin. A paranoid man who held a murderous grudge against a pair of 12 year olds so strong that he dragged them across time to compete in deathmatch, but one who ultimately finds redemption and repays the mercy of his rivals. Blendin’s job is time anomaly removal, but ultimately he was tasked with ensuring the past to protect the future. So what better way to see the character off, then as the secret hand behind Bill Cipher’s defeat. Setting all of the pieces in motion that would lead to some of the Pines darkest moments and greatest triumphs, then fading into the background of time and making a history for himself. If this is true, then once again Alex has made the specific choice to put the power of fate and destiny into the hands of mortal man. If Blendin Blandin is the architect of the events that lead to Bill Cipher’s defeat, then that removes the chance of intelligent design or preordained destiny. Pretty heady themes for a Disney cartoon. Well brothers and sisters, now that we know Blendin Blandin is the secret hero of Gravity Falls, it’s time to talk about the overt and covert Bad Guys of Gravity Falls. So please join me next week when our topic will be the death of Bill Cipher and the Time Baby! Until then, share, subscribe, and keep cracking those codes!