Greg: "Thank you, old lady Daniels!"
Old Lady Daniels: "Goodbye, Gregory. And please, don't call me old lady."
Greg: "Yes, sir, young man!"
Cop: "Hey, you two robbers, you're under arrest.
[Robbers stop and turn.]
Cop: "Nah, I'm just kidding. Happy Halloween."
Wirt: "There she goes. Let's get her."
Greg: "Yeah, let's get her."
[Catches fist]Greg: "Let's go in after her."
Wirt: "I can't. I wasn't invited to this party."
Greg: "I'll go in."
Wirt: "You weren't invited either."
Greg: "Wirt, you tricked me! I didn't know this was a frog hunt all along."
Cop: "What's going on here? Huh? Is this some kind of witchs' gathering? You're all under arrest."
Kids: "Run!"
Cop: "Hey, hey! I was just kidding."Bluebird: "You'll be no good to your brother dead."
Wirt: "I was never any good to him alive, either."
That Funderberger made me laugh really hard ahah
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-10-19T21:03:34Z
[8.2/10] This may be my favorite “prequel” episode in a long time. I’ll admit to being a little bowled over by this one. I assumed, given the old timeyness of the wooded surroundings, that our tale was set sometimes in the 1800s or maybe early 1900s. Learning that Wirt and Greg are, in fact, refugees from fairly modern times, with cassette tapes and police cars with bullhorns and the like is a shock, but in a good way.
“Into the Unknown” fills in the pieces of how our heroes got to here, something that turns out to be fascinating. I don’t know if I would ever have complained if all we knew about Writ and Greg is that they were lost from their home. The in medias res of the show’s start is a feature, not a bug. And yet, learning the series of events that led them over the titular wall and into the fantasy land that we’ve seen them traversing since the series began is surprisingly cool and illuminating, to where I’m not only glad we got it, but I'm glad we got it now.
It also just puts the show in a fun and different mode. I like seeing Wirt and Greg n a more suburban setting doing regular kid things beyond running into ghouls and magical creatures. Seeing Wirt get nervous over expressing his feelings to his crush, while Greg, the kid with an adorable lack of limits or tact barrels directly into his big brother’s high school season is endearing as hell. It’s relatable to see Wirt fretting over Sara, despite the fact that she clearly likes him back and couldn’t care less about Jason Funderbirk (who is, contrary to expectation, an even bigger dork).
The setups and escalation here center on Wirt’s mixtape, his desire to share it with Sara, and his fear that if he expresses his feelings or even let’s anyone know that he has them, the world will laugh at him. His efforts to play it cool, Greg’s blithe obliviousness to not just going after the thing you want, and Greg’s supreme embarrassment when it seems like his worst fears are coming true put everything into context.
I even like the prequel-y elements to this one that explicate little weird or unexplained bits from the show so far! Wirt doesn’t normally dress like a gnome -- he was just repurposing old junk from his house as a late-breaking Halloween costume! Greg has a teapot on his head because he was trying to go as an elephant! His pants were full of candy after he was rewarded with sweets for helping an elderly neighbor. Greg found his amphibian companion after Wirt promised to take him on a frog hunt! Learning these details should be corny, but instead there’s a revelatory sense to them, layers of cuteness and sweetness upon what we already know, that makes it work.
I also like how this clicks into Wirt’s emotional state, resenting Greg as a projection of his resentment for his stepdad, and the sense that they’re both always pushing him to get out of his shell and go do things. There’s something simple but deep there, and I like how it manifests here as high school and familial anxieties come to life.
Overall, this gives us more information about how Wirt and Greg found their way into the predicament that makes up the bulk of Over the Garden Wall at just the right time. Seeing this glimpse of their life before the wall helps us to understand both Greg and Wirt better, and sets up the show’s finale and the complicated brotherly situation between our heroes even better.