Not What He Seems

"Not What He Seems" is the eleventh episode of the second season of the American animated television series Gravity Falls, which was created by Alex Hirsch, and the 31st episode overall. The episode was written by Shion Takeuchi, Josh Weinstein, Jeff Rowe, Matt Chapman, and Hirsch, and directed by Stephen Sandoval. In this episode, Dipper and Mabel begin to question who Stan really is after officers arrest him for stealing chemical waste. The episode, which breaks the show's status quo by introducing Stan's long-lost twin brother, ends with a cliffhanger to the second half of the season.
"Not What He Seems" was first broadcast on March 9, 2015 on Disney XD, and was watched by 1.58 million households in the United States. It was the biggest broadcast ever for Gravity Falls during its run on Disney XD until the following episode, "A Tale of Two Stans", beat that record four months later. The episode received positive reviews from critics, with praise to the story, character work, and animation. The episode was nominated for multiple Annie Awards, while Storyboard artist Alonso Ramirez Ramos was nominated for an Emmy Award.
While Dipper and Mabel Pines are spending their summer in the town of Gravity Falls, their great uncle Stan has been working on an unknown machine in his basement underneath the Mystery Shack, trying to make it work without them knowing about his doings.
In the secret laboratory under the Mystery Shack, Grunkle Stan rigs drums of chemical waste to power the portal machine. He sets a timer for when the portal will fully open; gravity anomalies occur throughout Gravity Falls as a side effect.
The next day, as Stan plays with Dipper and Mabel outside the shack, law enforcement officers Agent Powers and Agent Trigger arrest Stan for stealing chemical waste the night before. Dipper and Mabel are taken by Agent Trigger to be remanded to Child Protective Services; planning to clear Stan's name using footage from the shack's security camera, the twins escape after causing Trigger to crash his car. They return to the Mystery Shack and retrieve the footage; the tapes, however, show Stan committing the crime. Dipper finds a box containing numerous fake IDs bearing Stan's face, as well as newspaper clippings detailing Stan's death in a car crash decades prior; the twins begin to worry that Stan is an imposter. In the box, Mabel finds a password on a slip of paper and identifies this as a button combination for the shack's vending machine.
In an interrogation room with Agent Powers, Stan asks for a phone call. He warns Soos, an employee of the Mystery Shack, of danger and orders him to guard the vending machine. Stan takes advantage of a gravitational anomaly to escape the two agents. Meanwhile, Dipper and Mabel go to the vending machine, which Soos guards. They fight, but Dipper inputs the password, revealing the entrance to Stan's lab. The twins are shocked to discover that Stan possesses two missing journals, important objects in the series. Dipper puts the journals together with his own to create a diagrams, forming the blueprints to Stan's machine. Under a black light, a secret message warns that once the machine activates, the entire universe could be torn apart.
Dipper decides to override the machine, but Stan arrives to stop him. Another anomaly begins, causing everyone to levitate and throwing Dipper, Soos and Stan to the laboratory's wall. Mabel makes it to a lever, which will abort the process, as Stan begs her to not deactivate the portal. Forced to choose, Mabel sides with Stan. The portal activates, engulfing the entire town in a flash of light. As the anomalies finally stop, everyone is unharmed. An unknown man comes from the portal, which Stan reveals to be his brother and the author of the journals, Ford Pines.
During the closing credits, a flashback shows Stan and his brother as children, swinging silently on a swing set as they look out to the ocean.
"Not What He Seems" is the eleventh episode of the second season of Gravity Falls, created by Alex Hirsch. He wrote it with Matthew Chapman, Jeff Rowe, Shion Takeuchi, and Josh Weinstein. It is the second episode to be directed by Stephen Sandoval. The final sequence revealing Ford was animated in-house by storyboard artist Dana Terrace, with Matt Braly providing key animation.
The episode, which halves the second season, ends with a cliffhanger to the second half of the season. The writers did this so a hiatus would fit and they could write the episode sooner. According to Hirsch, half the fandom of Gravity Falls had guessed Stan had a brother—revealed in the episode as the author of the three journals Dipper, Stan, and Gideon own—before the episode aired. In particular, fans wrote "Zapruder film"-level exposés in the form of "PowerPoint presentations, flow charts, timelines", rare for a Disney Channel show. Hirsch had the character in his pitch of the show to the network, with the writers placing clues of his existence from the first episode. Still, he and the writers took this element as a risk, and Hirsch said that the ending would be shocking to some. They found it necessary in the end to keep the characters interesting and break the status quo. Calling Gravity Falls about characters "first and foremost", Hirsch said that would be Mabel forgiving of Stan, while Dipper would be unforgiving of both Stan and himself, for the rest of the season. With Dipper, Hirsch described Stan being a con as "a huge blow to his ego, a huge betrayal, and I think it will leave him feeling isolated from his family in a way he hasn't been before".
The episode guest stars Nick Offerman as Agent Powers; he had previously appeared in the season opener "Scary-oke" and the episode "Northwest Mansion Mystery". Hirsch described this character, in addition to Agent Trigger, as plot devices to divide the protagonists and have them face their allegiances to one another.
On its original airdate, 2.06 million people (and 1.02 million on the Internet) viewed "Not What He Seems", the most received by any series broadcast on Disney XD.
Alasdair Wilkins of The A.V. Club praised the episode, highlighting how the episode utilized the relationships between Dipper, Mabel, and Stan to craft its narrative. He also praised the episode's character work, comedy, and art-style, describing the episode as an "instant classic". Vrai Kaiser of The Mary Sue described the episode as the best of the series. Kaiser highlighted the episode's utilization of color contrasts to emphasize its tone, as well as describing how it turned the viewer's "assumptions of safety" about the series "on its head".
Storyboard artist Alonso Ramirez Ramos was nominated for an Emmy Award for his work on the episode. The episode was additionally nominated for two Annie Awards in the "Best Animated Television/Broadcast Production for Children" and "Writing in an Animated Television/Broadcast Production" categories.