Maris Pawthorne

Season 4

Maris is introduced when Pawbert meets Luther's parents for the first time in "Open Enrollment". She and Harlan have let themselves into the mansion with a casserole, and the pack hears her before they see her — mid-anecdote about a four-year-old Luther labeling his shirts, then calling "LUTE! LUTE, IS THAT YOU?" down the hall. Her greeting when they round the corner is a mild "There you are." She crosses the room to hug Pawbert before he can brace for it, tells everyone that Luther has not smiled like this in years, and declines to be called Mrs. Pawthorne. Later, slicing bread beside him while he heats soup, she gives him the reason they came: "We wanted to meet the mammal who makes our son look like he's remembered what joy is."

During the press siege in "Front Lawn", Maris walks down to the gate and takes the press pool apart outlet by outlet — naming for Bree the three company boards she sits on whose advertising funds the Zootopia Enquirer's publisher, and reminding the Hoofbeat News anchor which foundation paid for her network's journalism ethics grant. Her closing statement to the stragglers: "The public has a right to truth. Not to your cruelty." Inside, she takes Pawbert's phone and clears the harassment off it message by message. When he asks why she would do any of it, she tells him "The paperwork is optional" and "You're ours now. Whether you like it or not." — a moment he records in a class essay that evening as one line: "You make our son happy. That makes you ours. The paperwork is optional."

In "Operational Surprise", the surprise party is Nick's idea; Pawbert is assigned family coordination and calls her. She agrees within seconds, tells him the thing he needs to know about her son — "He doesn't ask for things." — and volunteers the cake — three lopsided chocolate layers from her mother-in-law's recipe, the same cake Luther has had every birthday since he was three. She arrives with it on the day, laughs at her son's tactical entrance, and spends the evening showing Judy photographs of Luther as a pup.

Maris stays off-page in "Map Day", but Luther takes Pawbert to the Sahara Square spice market his parents brought him to as a pup — a place he knows because his mother cooks complicated things that need ingredients regular stores do not carry. The vendor, Kamila, sends a jar home for her with the message that Kamila remembers. At the Tundratown viewpoint, Luther gives Pawbert her answer to his coming out at fifteen: "My father said my heart wasn't a problem to solve. My mother asked if I wanted stew."

In "Loud and Determined", she and Harlan arrive for Pawbert's birthday with "There he is." and a covered dish. Inside it are cinnamon rolls — her attempt at Lillian's recipe, found by hunting for one that sounded similar after Luther told her about it, offered with the promise that she will not be offended if it is wrong. Holding Pawbert by the shoulders in the doorway, she tells him: "We missed the first twenty-seven. We're not missing any more."

Season 5

Before the double wedding in "Always", Maris sends Pawbert down the aisle with: "Now. Go marry my son."

W-Series

In "Under the Weather", Luther calls Maris while sick with canine infectious tracheobronchitis. She diagnoses him from half a sentence and instructs him to put Pawbert on the phone. She gives Pawbert the Pawthorne family broth recipe — dried mushrooms, roasted garlic, fresh ginger, black pepper, root vegetables — a recipe she has been making since Luther was a pup who thought he could outrun a fever. She advises Pawbert that Luther will try to outlast him but cannot, because lynxes are more patient than wolves. She also shares a story about Harlan once sitting through a board meeting with a hundred-and-two fever and calling the same associate by three different names. When Pawbert makes the broth and brings it to Luther, the wolf recognizes it immediately as his mother's — and warns Pawbert not to tell Maris he liked it because she will be impossible.

In "Nighthowler" the ZSI call goes to Harlan, and Maris is on Pawbert's phone a short while later, asking what is known and nothing beyond it. Told that Luther is still moving north under the compound and has not come off his line, her reading is that of course he hasn't; he is her son. She tells Pawbert that she and Harlan are going to whichever hospital the city has ready, asks whether he has eaten, and instructs him to eat something — an instruction he follows when nothing else that night can move him. She arrives at the ICU corridor at Zootopia General with Harlan half a step behind her, the order the two of them keep when she is leading, and neither of them has slept. Her eyes go over the bloodstained green sweater and the bruising at Pawbert's shoulders. Then she lifts her arms to ask rather than assume, and does not end the embrace until he does. When the ZSI biochemist warns that the neural damage may have run past anything the antidote can reverse, Maris's claws go into the fabric of her chair and her face gives nothing away. At the bedside afterward she lays a paw against her son's cheek, tells him that coming back was the whole of what they asked for, and forbids him to apologize in that room for something that was done to him.

In "Pawthorne", two intruders break into the family estate at 2901 Kilimanjaro Parkway. Maris drops the puma with a reproduction vase and an iron plant stand, then drops the lion with a fireplace poker she collected on the way to Harlan's study. She asks Nick and Judy not to tell Luther, wanting to handle it in her own time. When Pawbert tells Luther instead, Maris admits she was protecting both Luther and herself from his reaction. At the Saturday dinner, she apologizes to Nick and Judy for the impossible position she put them in, and tells Pawbert that Lillian would be proud of the cook he has become.

In "The Guest List", Maris calls Pawbert's phone rather than Luther's and invites the two of them to a Saturday dinner with a few of Harlan's colleagues, sweetening it with the rosemary galette, the lever she has used on reluctant guests for decades. What they arrive to is a formal reception — government cars in the drive, diplomatic standards on the fenders, twenty-eight place settings, and calligraphed cards in her own script that seat her son and his husband at the center of the table, where every guest can reach them. She refuses Luther a number in the hallway and walks in expecting to be followed. Once the guests have gone she comes upstairs to his childhood bedroom with the hostess left behind her, concedes at once that she knew he would have refused the invitation, and — after Harlan draws the line between protecting a child and managing one — names the pattern before anyone can name it for her, setting the dinner beside the greenhouse and apologizing for both. She explains what she wanted: Commissioner Elizabeth McHerd seated within reach because the table was going to be hard, Ambassador Gaspard Dumont looking Pawbert in the eye, and both of them seen as themselves instead of read about in a briefing. She promises they will ask next time, and holds to the plural when Luther tries to make it hers alone. In the hallway afterward she apologizes to Pawbert privately, for the call as well as the dinner.

In "The Call" her son turns up on her porch past nine at night with his husband and his pack, in the clothes he wore to dinner, at an hour he has never once shown up unannounced. She says his name and holds him while his paws shake, puts all four of them in the kitchen, makes tea because that is what she has to give, and sits across from him and watches it go cold.