Inside The Mind of Brennan Lee Mulligan
Dimension 20’s first ever TPK
What must it be like to spend some time in Brennan Lee Mulligan’s brain? I’ll get to the horrifying glimpse we saw in just a moment.
But first, let’s recap episodes 2 and 3 of Dimension 20’s Neverafter. And oh boy, as Stefan said to Puss in episode 2, “Our whole thing is over.”
We now have another data point to try and understand the way Mother Goose’s book works. Ally Beardsley’s character was gifted (cursed?) the book by an evil goose who…probably killed his son Jack? As Mother Goose wrote in the book a memory of his son jumping over a candlestick (“Jack be nimble, Jack be quick…”), Jack’s bones were sucked into the book. It’s all very confusing, figuring out who is and is not permanently dead.
What we do know is when Goose writes a given fairytale character’s story in the book, the character gets sucked in. The latest victim? Old King Cole, later dubbed Nathaniel “Nat” King Cole by a hilariously confused Lou Wilson.
Old/Nat King Cole is a tired and defeated old man: his kingdom fallen, his Fiddlers Three dead trying to defend it. He mournfully shares their story (“Old King Cole was a merry old soul…”) as Mother Goose writes it down, at this point not knowing what would happen. As the rhyme ends, the Fiddlers Three emerge from the book as images of light. Nat King Cole weeps, hugs them, and disappears.
Oddly enough, sucking an old man into a magic book does little to earn the trust of the other travelers in the caravan. In fact, everyone freaks the fuck out and nopes right out of there, leaving behind our adventurers. Sure, they all loved it when the book was just spontaneously producing light and fiddle music, but you trap *one* king in *one* book, and suddenly you’re a social pariah.
The adventurers take time examining the book, each one placing their hand on it and seeing something different.
Pinocchio sees an island of toys. We’re off to a very pleasant start! What could go wrong from here?
Little Red AKA Ylfa touches the book and becomes overwhelmed and transforms into a wolf. An image appears on a page of her as a little girl, picking flowers. But something is moving in the trees in the image as blood spreads over the page. A massive fanged creature lunges off the page at the adventurers, and Mother Goose quickly slams the book shut.
Gerard thinks the book can transform him back into a human. He touches it and does indeed begin to transform, but the book begins to rot, because Gerard is taking power away from it. Goose closes the book again as the rot heals and Gerard re-frogs.
Sleeping Beauty AKA Rosamund touches the book, and flowering vines spread out, and the portrait of a handsome prince appears. The face flickers into the image of another, less handsome prince. An image of a fireplace appears, and a figure in glass armor pulls a Santa Claus, drops into the fireplace, looks at Sleeping Beauty, and says, “Sister, you’re awake.” Goose slams the book. Rosamund didn’t know she had a sister.
A hand with a gauntlet made out of parchment bursts out of the book to try and attack Goose.
Meanwhile, Puss in Boots, AKA PIB, is investigating the carriage one of the freaked out caravan riders left behind. He finds the Magic Mirror from Snow White, which leads him down the road to find the first of “many treasures” that Mother Goose’s book requires. This is apparently guidance for a long quest to return the world to some semblance of normalcy.
The mirror also advises Puss to be aware, because the sisters of his new companion now know what they’re up to.
So Rosamund has more than one sister she didn’t know about.
Puss rejoins the group, and the six all catch up on what happened.
Herr Drosselmeyer (from The Nutcracker) appears, speaking with the group about how he is on his way to Shoeberg to collect magical artifacts of his own. Are these the same items that Goose’s book requires? Will Drosselmeyer and the adventurers become allies or enemies?
Who the fuck can tell with this series?
Drosselmeyer says he is pursuing a “clockwork man” he considers to be his godson. He’s worried that the man’s grief is driving him to seek vengeance. I include this only because it feels like groundwork Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan is laying for a later payoff.
Drosselmeyer also clocks the book, and Goose asks him if he wants to take a look at it. Drosselmeyer touches it and says there are other books like it with other people trying to save what they can save.
He says, in part: “There is a way to use this gift, a gift that you bargained for very deeply I think, Mother Goose. There is a way to take the careful steps to bring the world to a day that might dawn with bright sun and the ending of Time of Shadows. Great and many are the challenges and perils that will face you. This will not be an easy task. Much will be asked and much given. The book hungers, and one here knows for what it hungers…many will offer answers. I would trust your heart and the heart of your companions alone.”
Drosselmeyer turns into an owl and disappears.
Blahblahblah plot happens, and they all venture into the woods on their way into the Kingdom of Elegy, another fallen kingdom. They find themselves in a village and enter an abandoned home. Rosamund opens a cupboard and discovers a small village of makeshift homes with a group of terrified mice.
One steps forward and says, “Please your ladyship, you can eat me. just don’t eat the rest. Please don’t turn us into nothin’ unnatural.”
This brings us to the inner workings of Mulligan’s mind.
The mice have been hiding, terrified, avoiding Cinderella’s fairy godmother, after the horrors she wrought years ago. She turned them into people for a few hours, forcing them to serve Cinderella on her way to the ball.
Mulligan details in excruciating horror how these mice were minding their business when she disfigured their bodies and forced them to become human and work as unpaid servants (I feel like there’s a word for that?).
“She made us want to be good servants,” the mice said. “We didn’t even understand things like that.”
The four and a half hours of being people a couple of years ago left them traumatized.
Think about it: these mice were transformed into humans. They were forced into slavery for a night with the brains of people, then transformed back into mice. They’ve since lived as mice with the brains of mice, with the memories of being forced into labor, but without the mental capacity of humans to process and cope with what happened to them. Their mouse brains are trapped in the unending horror.
Oh, and also, these mice had to witness the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, where the stepsister cut off their toes and heels to try and fit into the glass slipper, only to be RAVENOUSLY EATEN BY THEIR OWN MOTHER.
This was some fantastically horrifying storytelling. I don’t love a lot of cisgender, straight, white men, but Brennan Lee Mulligan is on my short list of The Good Ones.
But good god, his mind. He crafted a chilling narrative for these horrified mice. It’s hard to imagine a reality where he didn’t spend years, maybe decades, of his life contemplating the post-ball life of Cinderella’s mice and the trauma they endured without the human brain power or modern-day mental health services to process their experience.
I often feel like I will say things in conversation that to others may seem apropos, but in my head, I had made a half dozen logical evolutions in the conversation and said the seventh narrative point. The end result of what I said made sense to me in my brain, but everyone else failed to see the work that led up to that. That’s what I think Mulligan’s story is like. It’s the most extreme, long-term, but perfectly rational extrapolation of what the lives of the mice must have become after being transfigured and charmed into serving this teenage girl for the night on her journey to a ball.
My point is, I already think my brain is scary and fast-moving, but holy shit…Mulligan’s brain lives on another planet where time is on hyper speed, spinning around the original plot point hundreds of times per second, like strands of cotton candy whipping around a paper cone.
Brennan Lee Mulligan is a great storyteller of our day, and good god I hope he has an excellent therapist.
Oh also, apparently Cinderella’s stepmother is also Pinocchio’s stepmother/warlock patron. That becomes important later.
What a fucking weird, delightful season.
We learn from the mice that Cinderella eventually stabbed her Fairy Godmother with the broken heel of a glass slipper. Red picks up the scent of the fairy godmother’s blood, still lingering, and follows it with the group.
They find the Fairy Godmother with her army of transfigured constructs: tables, barrels, and other furniture, poorly transfigured into humans to fight for her. The glass shard drained her of much of her power to properly transmute them. She tells her army that she wants Cinderella to come back to her and pull the shard out of her chest.
Eventually our heroes are spotted, and the fight begins.
Episode 3 does…not go well.
The team splits into two groups: distraction and extraction. Distraction draws the fairy and her army’s attention while extraction works on taking the shard out of her chest.
Puss, on extraction, sneaks up and hides in the body of a dead cow, and spends a few rounds jumping from carcass to carcass to make his way to the Fairy Godmother.
Rosamund, on distraction, loudly proclaims “I heard you’re looking for a princess!”
Ylfa joins her by saying, “It is also I, a beautiful princess” and goes into a rage and wolfs out.
They have the army’s focus now. The constructs are following the paths of least resistance on this battlefield, not going up the hills to attack the adventurers. This leaves them barreling (get it?) towards our heroes in a single narrow path. Ylfa uses this to her advantage to face off against them only one or two at a time.
“Welcome to Ylfa’s Bottleneck!” she yells.
Honestly this part goes pretty well for a while, until it doesn’t. She’s nearly single-handedly taking out the enemies one by one while the others mostly hold back.
They are, as Mulligan calls them, “A bunch of cowards and the bravest little girl in the world.”
Spoiler alert: everyone rolls terribly throughout the entire combat (so many 3s!) and they all die one by one.
I don’t mean they fall unconscious. I mean each one of them died. Pinocchio. Rosamund. Goose. Puss. Ylfa.
Gerard manages to pull the shard from the Fairy Godmother, but the action of pulling it out of her causes the shard to enter him, killing him, too.
Total. Party. Kill.
As the group was fighting for their lives, we learned some interesting things:
Pinocchio’s stepmother/warlock patron is also Cinderella’s stepmother, and she apparently sent Pinocchio on this quest in order to have him kill the Fairy Godmother, as revenge for taking her servant Cinderella away from her
The Fairy Godmother is the one who cursed Gerard as a child to turn into a frog.
Gerard says “Are you happy!?” to which the Fairy Godmother replies no, she’s not happy. He should be a handsome man, and she’s trying to set the Neverafter to right
Puss reunites with Alphonse the Mule, who had been playing dead for several days to avoid the Fairy Godmother
The episode ends with a dying Little Red Riding Hood having a realization:
“Oh my god, we’ve been going about this all wrong, because we were trying to use this book to hang on to memories and for nostalgia, but actually, the purpose of this whole book is to start new stories. So really we just have to say, ‘Once upon a time.’”
I have no idea what will happen in episode 4. Will some/all of the characters come back, perhaps with some kind of disadvantage as a result of having died? Will we get a whole new set of characters from these six? How will Mulligan make capitalism the BBEG of this season?
One way to find out.
Quote of the episode:
Ally Beardley, not in character, looks in awe at Emily Axford’s Ylfa slaughtering the constructs she trapped in the narrow passageway, saying “It’s Ladies Night at Ylfa’s Bottleneck!”