Over the Garden Wall originally premiered on Cartoon Network in 2014. It follows brothers Greg and Wirt after they get lost in a bizarre forest called "the Unknown." Over the course of the series, the two boys meet an eccentric cast of characters who live in the Unknown, including a woman cursed to be a bluebird, a group of sentient skeletons dressed as pumpkins and a man so rich he did not even know the size of his mansion. The woods are also haunted by a monster known as "the Beast," who leads weary travelers to their doom to keep himself alive. It's definitely an interesting, fantasy-like setting, and appears to be entirely separate from Greg and Wirt’s world, connecting these characters through some form of magic.
Though the Unknown could be written off as simply the fantastical setting of the series, fans have long theorized that it may symbolize something more. Sometime in the six years since Over the Garden Wall's release, a fan theory popped up and became quite popular among the show's enthusiasts. The theory states that the Unknown is actually a sort of purgatory that Greg and Wirt are sent to as they're caught between life and death. Many came to accept the theory as truth; however, it may not exactly be correct.
Early in production, the Unknown was actually called "the In-Between." This would indicate that it is not a place for the living or the dead. Further evidence can be found in the book The Art of Over the Garden Wall, which describes the Unknown as "the place between life and death, between dreams and reality." It wouldn't be far-fetched to believe that Greg and Wirt are "between life and death," because the penultimate episode reveals that the brothers got lost in the Unknown after falling into a large body of water and nearly drowning. At the end of the series, the pair find their way back home by going through that same lake again before being taken to the hospital.
When Patrick McHale, the show’s creator, was asked about this theory, he did not reject the notion. “Any interpretation that feels right to people is a perfectly valid interpretation to me,” McHale told Inverse. Many fans have taken his response to mean that this theory is effectively canon, with some going to the internet to voice their support of it. One Reddit user, u/Tesseract618, notes that the Woodsman returns home to find his daughter waiting for him, suggesting that he had been missing for a long period of time. It is possible that the Beast was keeping him between life and death in the Unknown, and only after the Beast was defeated was he able to return to the land of the living.
Another user, u/Wendys_frys, speculates that the majority of the Unknown’s population are already Edelwood trees and cannot ever return to the real world. Perhaps, the user claims, their only goal was to find peace in the afterlife. After the Woodsman meets the brothers for the first time, he states that "everyone has a torch to burn." This would indicate that everyone trapped in the Unknown must face some task in order to find peace, move on, or return to life.
The evidence for the Unknown being a sort of purgatory is damning and seems canon. However, the final episode, Episode 10, "The Unknown," may actually bring the theory back into question. Greg and Wirt are the only characters who actually leave and return to the real world. At the end of this final episode, the narrator says, “And so, the story is complete, and everyone is satisfied with the ending. And so on and so forth, and yet, over the garden wall…” before showing the citizens of the Unknown still there, though clearly much happier. This would indicate that they never actually moved on and could only mean that they either chose to stay or were forced to do so. This would not make sense if the Unknown were purgatory, which suggests a temporary state of being.
The setting of Over the Garden Wall is made to be entirely ambiguous. With no set guidelines as to how the Unknown operates, every theory is valid in its own right.
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November 07, 2020 at 09:18PM
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Your Over the Garden Wall Theory About the Unknown Is Valid (But Maybe Not Correct) - CBR - Comic Book Resources
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