A lot of this falls under the show’s ethos that it’s more fun for some mysteries to be left unsolved, but in the episode that takes on the burden of Explaining the Things, it’s inevitable that it can’t be everything to everyone. Some of the most interesting elements get left on the cutting room floor, whether it’s Ford’s time working with Fiddleford (which gets shoved out to Journal 3), Stan’s more adventurous criminal exploits, or even just digging into the psychological meat of the two Stans in their younger days. There’s a tension in the fact that these are clearly edited narratives, and the fact that no one questions or corrects them (aside of the Bill issue), leaving them as a sort of defacto “truth.” And a few moments rely a little bit on narrative convenience, too–why did they call Stan to the office with Ford, exactly? This then casts aspersions over the rest of the two Stans’ respective stories, but the need for this episode to also Reveal the Truth keeps the script from going full bore in pitting the twins’ narratives against each other. A few scenes play with the idea of an unreliable narrator, from Stan’s obvious glossing over of his hardships to Ford notably editing Bill out of the telling. The episode that came out of that pressure is by no means a failure, but it stumbles a bit under the weight of what it needs to do. And even at 28 minutes in length (almost an extra quarter longer than the average episode), that’s the most a single episode of the show has ever covered in terms of sheer plot details. One episode would be tasked with telling the entire life stories of two characters, one of which it had to sell us on basically from scratch. Putting aside the people who’d pinpointed Ford’s existence for up to a year before the reveal, Disney also put a four month gap between the airing of “Not What He Seems” and “A Tale of Two Stans,” giving the fandom plenty of time to work itself into a frenzy with potential backstory. This episode was never ever ever going to live up to the expectations around it. But while Ford has returned, the brothers’ bond is far from mended. Now that the real Stanford Pines has returned from the other side of the portal, the two Stans explain how he got there in the first place, from their close childhood to their falling out as teens, to the misunderstanding that sent Stanford to the other side in the first place.
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