"Nightmares are real!"
--
Well, it's that spooky-ass time of year again. Admittedly, spookiness has sort of persisted across the entirety of this year, and perhaps most ironically, October isn't really shaking up to be any more scary than any other month this time around, but escapism! While Halloween in the traditional sense might be cancelled, there's nothing like a good Halloween episode to stir us into that fun, autumn mood, and "The Shut-In!" is pretty much exactly that.
Continuing television's long-held tradition of
fictitious-but-eerily-comparable holidays, this isn't
technically a Halloween episode. It's all about
Amphibia's warped version, the Blue Moon Shut-In, the night where
the moon turns blue and everyone locks themselves inside of their homes and
tells stories until the sun rises again out of fear that staring at the moon
could transform them into horrifying beasts. (There's also jack-o-lanterns and
trick-or-treating for practical supplies, but... it's not a holiday.)
I was initially a little hesitant about how this episode falls into the
narrative of the show, to be honest. It feels a little odd considering how
elegantly last episode wrapped up this leg of the season, with Anne setting off to
Wartwood once more and Marcy being approached with an ominous proposition
from the King, for us to suddenly be back home without any indication of
time passing. I honestly feel like that plays to the show's benefit,
though, in retrospect. A good holiday special should have a relatively
timeless quality to it, and there's something of an appreciable coziness
to being back home, bereft of narrative complications, for some fun, scary
stories.
