there's one thing from tgwdlm: reprised that i need to talk about, one technically tiny change to my favorite song that does so much. spoilers below the cut
the song is let it out. where in the og, right before paul blows up the meteor, the hive says, "we will not be resisted~!", in this version... they sing it.
to the nightmare motif.
let's unpack that, shall we?
first of all, changing that line from being spoken to being sung is a really smart choice. with this being the peak of paul's resistance to the Hive and its final desperate cry to stop him, the moment of our protagonist's "victory" over the antagonist, having the Hive sing and paul respond in regular speech perfectly encapsulates the moment and the show as a whole.
but then on top of that, they put it to the nightmare time motif. arguably the motif of the hatchetfield series as a whole.
that motif is the Hive's now. and it has words.
in the context of just this show, it's an incredible choice because of how it recontextualizes its earlier appearances at the top of both acts. like the use of the inevitable and let it go motifs peppered throughout the score, it becomes a sickening reminder of how, well, inevitable the end of this story (the Hive's victory) is; a reminder that echoes in the Hive's voice. it will not be resisted.
(if you wanted to try and fit the original appearance of the motif in not your seed into this line of analysis, i would tie it into the core of the conflict between bill and alice being bill's inability to accept that alice is growing up. infected!alice is taunting him by saying that he didn't hold her on a tight enough leash to keep her from changing into this person he doesn't recognize. "you left me out of your sight for one second and look what happens, nightmare time".
he was never going to be able to keep her safe, keep her forever preserved as his fragile little girl. she was going to get corrupted sooner or later, by the Hive or the world. you can't stop that change. it can't be resisted.)
and then when you zoom out to consider the motif's use at the overture for each nightmare time story... well, even if most of those stories aren't musicals in the same way as tgwdlm, they are still plays, performances. so the motif now being more directly associated with the musical hivemind, and by extension the lord in black who's a theater kid, makes it work twice as well as the "time for the show to start" jingle.
but then — and this is where i admit i'm probably the only person on earth who's thought this deeply about the implications of this —there are the words.
while most of the hatchetfield stories are primarily comedies, they are also basically all about supernatural or straight-up cosmic forces beyond the characters' understandings causing, to varying degrees of direct-ness, mayhem and tragedy. there are very few cases of characters standing up to those forces and coming out unscathed and/or actually fully free from the web they were entangled in. that's one of the core conceits of cosmic horror stories, no? having your characters encounter something they cannot truly comprehend (not without breaking their understanding of the rest of reality) and cannot fight, cannot stop, cannot resist.
(even paul, who successfully resists to his last breath, cannot keep up his resistance once he's no longer there to have a say.)
when that motif plays, now with those lyrics tied to it, it's a warning that that is the kind of story this will be. whether it's played more for comedy or pathos or pure horror (or something in between),
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