And there’s plenty of stuff mankind has never thought of, and will never think of. Words that have been spoken and forgotten. There are stories that were once told, and are gone forever. Patrick McHale described the Unknown like this: Like the Witch’s house in Coraline or the Pale Man’s lair in Pan’s Labyrinth, the Unknown is a space that both threatens the characters with danger and offers transformation if they’re willing to journey through it. Both capitalized and set apart with an article, these woods are an manifestation of a timeless and liminal place. Taken as a whole Over The Garden Wall is a kind of modern day fairy tale, and understanding its deeper meaning starts with an essential interpretive lens: the setting of the Unknown. It is in this setting that Wirt and Greg finally confront the Beast and see if they have the courage to finally pass through the Unknown. Leaves fall, snow drifts arrive, and the Unknown, once a vibrant forest, becomes quiet and threatened with death. Through the last few episodes, a change in setting gives a growing sense of dread and help show how truly life-threatening the stakes have become. Their hushed dialogue reveals deeper threats in the Unknown than simply losing your way–a moment that propels the show toward an inevitable meeting between the Beast and the children. As the Woodsman chops wood, a silhouette of a cloaked figure with antlers and glowing eyes appears. Second, outside the tavern, we meet the Beast for the first time. First, in a bizarre tavern, Wirt receives a name fit for “a traveler on a sacred journey,” and Wirt and his two companions realize their lostness has a deeper purpose than they expected. The threat of this unknown creature hovers over the first few episodes until “Songs of the Dark Lantern,” an episode with two important turning points. He warns them of The Beast, a creature who stalks through the woods bringing fear and “the death of hope.” At the very beginning, Wirt, Greg, and Beatrice meet the Woodsman, a character bound by grief and literally burdened by a woodpile slung on his back. The strongest aspect of the show-and what will keep adults returning for multiple viewings-is the larger narrative told through the episodes. Taken together, these ten episodes add up to a whole story, and Patrick McHale, the show’s creator, compares the structure of the miniseries to a quilt: “Every episode had its own unique color and pattern, but overall it was supposed to become one quilt that all works together.” While some episodes feel hasty and too simply resolved (this is in part because some episodes had to be combined for the production budget), overall the woods of the Unknown become a believable world that seems to extend past the show itself. These stories happen in an autumnal and delicate setting, and while the character design is stripped down, small features like Greg’s massive pupils or Auntie Whisper’s oversized body add a sense of surrealism to the characters and pastoral scenes (never mind the talking animals). They negotiate with blank-faced (and terrifying) pumpkin people of Pottersfield, they rally Beatrix Potter-inspired students to save a school house, they sneak through a ferry of well-to-do frogs, and even seek a blessing in a celestial city inspired by 1930s Silly Symphonies. As the trio wanders closer and closer to Adelaide, each location presents new characters and unique challenges. With a destination charted, the show unfolds episodically. Wirt and Greg quickly meet Beatrice, a guileful bluebird that convinces them to seek Adelaide of the Pasture, the lady of the woods and a potential key to find their way home. As the show begins, the narrator tells us what kind of forest they’ve stumbled upon: the woods of the Unknown, a mysterious place “lost in the clouded annals of history…where long-forgotten stories are revealed to those who travel through the wood.” If you set the Americana fairy tale of Big Fish and the absurd humor of Adventure Time inside the Hundred Acre Woods, you might get Over The Garden Wall, an animated miniseries from Cartoon Network about Wirt and Greg, two lost brothers lost in a forest looking for their home.