Tag: book of bill

Starting in 2012, Disney started airing a new animated series called Gravity Falls following the adventures of twins Dipper and Mabel Pines as the twins spent the summer at their “Grunkle” Stan’s roadside attraction The Mystery Shack, nestled in a small town in Oregon. And while the show was targeted towards kids, the show also presented an increasingly complex series of mysteries for its audience to solve along, introducing a new generation to the world of alternate reality games through everything from cryptic messages hidden in the show itself to a global scavenger hunt.

The series’ primary antagonist, Bill Cipher, only appeared in a fraction of the series’ episodes…but the sentient triangle was at the epicenter of the show’s mysteries and many of its puzzles, with many of the puzzles of the last decade revolving around the question: “what happened to Bill, after his dramatic confrontation with the Pines family in the series finale?” Almost a decade later, The Book of Bill offers answers to that question with an epistolary look into Bill’s past, present, and future in a book packed to the brim with puzzles and ciphers to decode. The book also brought with it an alternate reality game that helps provide context and closure to the series.

“Solving” Gravity Falls, During the Show’s Initial Run
At the tail end of the opening credits to Gravity Falls an aged page from a journal is shown, prominently featuring a one-eyed triangle that fans took to calling “Triangle Guy”. Before cutting to commercials, a voice whispered the only words in the now iconic theme song: “three letters back”. Applying that shift cipher to the message on the screen, “VWDQ LV QRW ZKDW KH VHHPV”, delivered the first of many messages from the show: “Stan is not what he seems”. The cipher also came in handy during the episode’s end credits. During an extended scene featuring a rainbow-puking gnome, a message in that same cipher greeted viewers with a hearty “Welcome to Gravity Falls”.

This pattern followed for every episode of the series: reversed audio messages in the opening credits might provide a hint at how to solve the episode’s cipher, and a secret message was inserted into the end credits, for those who cared to look. After a few episodes, the messages switched over to the Atbash cipher – but to make sure viewers were prepared, the prior episode’s secret message informed viewers, “Mr. Caesarian will be out next week. Mr Atbash will substitute.” To further reinforce that message, the opening theme song’s reversed audio was swapped out to say, “switch A and Z”. Over the course of the series, these ciphers grew increasingly complex, and viewers were introduced to A1Z26 ciphers, the Vigenère cipher, indexing, and even multiple custom cipher languages with in-universe origins.

Every now and then, the solving went beyond the bounds of the show itself. Part of the way through the first season, Disney released a Flash game called Rumble’s Revenge, putting fans into the role of Dipper and Mabel as they fought through cryptids the characters encountered. Interacting with 12 objects throughout the game pulled up messages from the Triangle Guy that, when decoded, revealed his name before he officially appeared in the show: “MY NAME IS BILL”.

This interplay between puzzle and theory continued as the show progressed, culminating in a puzzle-laden cliffhanger. During Stan Pines’ final confrontation with Bill Cipher, Bill’s final words are spoken through reversed audio: “A-X-O-L-O-T-L, my time has come to burn! I invoke the ancient power that I may return!” So, in a show when almost everything else wrapped up neatly, the question remains: what happened to Bill?