“Somewhere lost in the clouded annals of history lies a place that few have seen—a mysterious place called the Unknown, where long-forgotten stories are revealed to those who travel through the wood.”
What is the Unknown? The mysterious woodland world lost in time, blanketed in swathes of crackling, golden leaves, grey skies and a permeating, crisp chill, Over the Garden Wall’s foremost setting drapes itself in the comforts of the most sought-after autumn staples. The Unknown is where, five years ago this November, the two young leads of Cartoon Network’s 2014 Emmy-winning miniseries, half-brothers Wirt (voiced by Elijah Wood) and Greg (Collin Dean), found themselves far away from home. Misplaced in this endless, labyrinthine wilderness that seeks to hold them hostage there for good, the two brothers must journey out of the woods before an operatic creature known only as “the Beast” takes them prisoner and forces them to become one with the trees.
But along the way, we learn of our heroes’ far more grounded fears of the Unknown as they attempt to free themselves from this never-ending autumnal prison. The “Unknown” becomes a tangible place as well as an abstract concept, a reflection of Wirt and Greg’s own real-life anxieties with each absurd circumstance they find themselves in, as they become what they believe is closer to their escape. But delving deeper into the woods only heightens the tensions between them and pushes them farther off the beaten path, allowing them to become more susceptible to the Beast’s persuasions. The brothers’ earthly troubles bind them to an endless maze of cornfields and pumpkins of their own making.
Lauded by critics as a children’s show that all should watch, not just the demographic it’s aimed at, perhaps what ends up resonating even more than the series’ exquisite embrace of possibly the most adored time of the year is its lighthearted dabbling in the existential nightmare that is being alive. One could consider the Unknown symbolic of the specific, fraught relationship between Wirrt and Greg, but also partly representative of the overarching nature of life itself. Each episode sets itself up as another interpersonal struggle cloaked underneath both absurdity and humor and utter darkness; death and life, innocence intermingling with the uncanny. It allows the show to be both a sweet pill for its core audience to swallow as well as a genuinely fascinating piece of art, one that interrogates human existence underneath… jokes about frogs and a kid named Jason Funderburker?
Revealed in the second to last episode, titled “Into the Unknown,” Wirt and Greg (and Greg’s ever-name-changing frog) became lost in the Unknown after (needlessly) fleeing from police on Halloween night, tumbling down a hill, narrowly escaping being hit by a train. Sometime after that, they woke up and found themselves in a world similar to the one they knew, but turned inside out and pushed back about a hundred years or so. In this world, a disgruntled woodsman chops Edelwood trees for oil to keep the lantern lit where the soul of his daughter’s spirit resides. There is a town full of skeletons donning pumpkin costumes, and a tavern where patrons sing about their designated character tropes. There are good witches and bad witches, a school for animals to learn to read and write, and a ferry for frogs that wear clothes.
Each episode touches on Wirt and Greg’s brotherhood and real-world troubles amidst the absurdity of the episodes’ bizarre premises – Wirt’s identity issues and problems with love and self-loathing; his bitterness harbored towards his little brother Greg, the result of his mom’s marriage to a step-dad he partly resents; Greg’s relentless naivete, a source of clear frustration as he combats Wirt’s perceptions of him with goofy jokes, and is ultimately pushed to make a life-threatening decision for the both of them. It’s as if each segment of the series offers a glimpse into a host of worries both shared by and respective between the two brothers, not all of which are even fully articulated throughout the show’s ten-minute, ten-episode run (watched in one go, about the length of a normal feature film).
In “Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee,” Wirt, Greg, and their new talking bluebird friend, Beatrice (Melanie Lynskey), find themselves in a seemingly normal town inhabited by irritable citizens who dress up in harmless pumpkin garb. But the trio of youngsters ends up confronting death itself, as it’s revealed at the end of the episode that each pumpkin-clad person is really a skeleton in disguise, fancied up in celebration of the fall harvest. “Say aren’t you a little too… early?” a pumpkin maiden inquiries curiously to Wirt, upon their arrival, as he searches fruitlessly for a telephone to call home.
“What do you mean?” Wirt replies.
“I mean,” she continues, “it doesn’t seem like you’re ready to join us just yet.”
Then, “Schooltown Follies,” sees Wirt and Greg happen upon a school for little animals run by a woefully heartbroken schoolteacher on account of that no-good, two-timing, low down handsome man of hers, Jimmy Brown. Greg respectfully denies the concept of having to go to school at all, becoming the leader of a pack of homeless animals wearing street urchin clothes in place of academia. The very first episode, “The Old Grist Mill,” finds the two brothers meeting the Woodsman (Christopher Lloyd), and seems to uncover the pairs’ difficulties dealing with authority figures (furthered by Greg’s charming and bizarre encounters with Old Lady Daniels, which he describes to Wirt later on). Then there’s “Songs of the Dark Lantern,” which seems to more bluntly depict Wirt’s difficulties reckoning with his teenaged identity.
All episodes are run through with the main storyline of the Beast – a dark, perpetually silhouetted, opera-singing creature that hunts wayward souls in the Unknown to turn to Edelwood trees and fuel a cursed lantern. The Beast already has the Woodsman caught in his persuasive snare, tricking him into believing that his lost daughter is trapped in that lantern and must be kept alive – but really, the Woodsman is only keeping the Beast alive. The Beast trails Wirt and Greg ever from afar throughout Over the Garden Wall, and when it seems all hope is truly lost for the pair of them, the Beast finally sinks his teeth into vulnerable Greg so that Wirt may be allowed to escape in Greg’s stead.
Thus, if Wirt and Greg’s journey through the Unknown represents working through their unspoken, every-day adolescent woes, the Beast represents Wirt and Greg’s relationship as a whole –corrupted, all-encompassing but, ultimately, easily defeated and only existing because the two of them allow it to fester. Greg reveals his love for Wirt and Wirt, in turn, reveals his devotion to Greg, and the ease with which their tensions can be defeated, killing the Beast and setting another innocent soul free of his imprisonment in the process.
Absurdity is juxtaposed against reality, two opposing ideas running parallel to one another up until the very end, when it seems like they utterly fuse together. The Unknown suddenly blends into the real world, as it’s revealed that Wirt and Greg were left unconscious in the hospital, after their escapade out of the graveyard landed them into a cold lake as opposed to another world. There are loose ends that trickle in, like the name of an opulent tea magnate the brothers met in the Unknown carved upon the headstone of a real grave; or Greg’s frog still carrying in its belly a magical, glowing bell the brothers retrieved from a cursed young woman. You realize that the lives of Wirt and Greg and their relationships to others were only touched upon, and the show leaves you with more questions about them than answers. The narrator who carried us into the show in the first episode now closes us out with much less nuance: “And so the story is complete, and everyone is satisfied with the ending and so on and so forth,” as if he, the narrator, suddenly found better things to do than narrate the rest of his own story.
In the end, the real world is as absurd as a fantasy. The consequences of the Unknown, beyond a strengthening of Wirt and Greg’s brotherhood, are that whether or not the Unknown exists doesn’t matter. The hinted coexistence of our two worlds implies an acceptance of the unknowable; of the questions that will remain unanswered, of the imperceptible future that has yet to unfold, of the people whose inner lives we will never come even close to fully comprehending. Over the Garden Wall wants us to embrace these existential gaps and make peace with them – come to terms with our meaningless slice of existence as to better appreciate human connection and natural beauty. The world is a weird and terrifying place, but it can also be quite wonderful because of that. “Ain’t that just the way,” Greg ruminates lightheartedly. And sometimes, that’s all it really is.
