S0WE06 - The Prodigal Son

"The Prodigal Son" is the sixth episode of the W-Series and the first built around Nick. A letter arrives for him at the Precinct 1 front desk, addressed in writing he has not seen since he was a teenager, and the pack sits with him through the evening while he decides what to do about it. In the morning he drives out to the house he grew up in, with Judy beside him.

Synopsis

A cream envelope is waiting for Nick Wilde at the Precinct 1 front desk, left by a visitor who gave no name, in writing he knows. He takes it home unopened and reads it with the pack around him: his mother, Vivian Wilde, whom he last spoke to at seventeen, wants to meet him and the partner she has only ever seen on the news. Judy follows him onto the back porch, where he admits he ended their last conversation as cruelly as he knew how and fears she will look at him now and find the same fox underneath. Later he gives Pawbert and Luther a different fear: nothing in the house he grew up in will have moved. Luther gives up his car for the morning and Pawbert sends a thermos of soup for Vivian. Nick introduces Judy at the door as his wife, which his mother did not know to expect. Inside, the mantle holds twenty clippings of his public career and no wedding photograph. Vivian tells him she has been proud of him for years, accepts his apology, and gives him a wooden box: the scout patch she pulled from a trash can the morning after he was muzzled, three postcards his father sent from overseas before the mail stopped, and a letter John Wilde started and never finished. She has never known what became of him either. Nick brings the box home unread and falls asleep with the patch in his paw.

Plot

Nick and Judy are closing out a minor call — two ferrets arguing over a recycling bin, with an unwilling wombat caught in the middle — when Clawhauser flags Nick down at the Precinct 1 front desk. A visitor had come by for him earlier, leaving no name, saying only that it was personal and that he would know. The envelope is cream and the paper is cheap, and Nick recognizes the writing on the front of it before he has finished looking at it. His smile holds long enough to get him past Clawhauser; it does not get him past Judy. Neither of them says anything on the way into the bullpen. Luther reads the change in him a few blocks into the drive home, asks about none of it, and lets the car stay quiet.

At Pawthorne Mansion, Pawbert is already cooking when the others come in. He takes one look at Nick, turns the burner down and moves everyone into the living room, and the Four Green Mugs come down off the counter. The pack arranges itself around the envelope on the coffee table, one on each side of it. Nick tries three jokes — a ZNN sweepstakes, a fan letter, an IRS audit over a deducted tail conditioner — and runs out of deflection. Pawbert puts no weight on it either way: tonight, or three in the morning, or a week from now, and the pack will be there for whichever it turns out to be. Nick opens it, with Judy leaning against his side to read it with him. It is from his mother. She would like to meet his partner.

Judy comes out to the back porch and sits with him until he is ready to talk. Vivian uses the word partner, Nick says, because she has followed him through the news for years and the wedding never made it onto television. He has carried two images of her at opposite ends of his head: the morning she walked him to a Junior Ranger Scout meeting in a uniform she had saved six months to buy, and the night he walked out of her kitchen while she stood in the doorway and refused to cry in front of him. Meeting her will put both images in one room. He wants Judy there as his wife rather than as a partner his mother has to work out later, and then he says the thing he has never said out loud: he was deliberately cruel the last time he spoke to her, and he is afraid she will look at him up close and find the same fox still standing there. Judy tells him he will not be walking in as the teenager who said one bad thing, but as her husband, as a detective, as part of a pack, and that he can let his mother see all of it.

A flashback returns to the kitchen at 1955 Cypress Grove Lane, where Nick is seventeen and Vivian comes in off a double shift to find stolen property laid out on the table for her to see: a stack of bills, a watch, a billfold, a spare key. He has been working with a fence in the warehouse district and lifting wallets in Tundratown, running with a marten known for hitting mammals, all of it years before Finnick and the pawpsicle hustle. Vivian is calm in the way that costs more than shouting. She wants every piece of it returned where it came from, and she tells him she knows him and that this is not what he is. Nick answers by reaching for the uniform — the one she saved for and pinned the patch onto herself, and the one he came home in the night the scouts muzzled him. Then he goes past anything he had rehearsed: she is still looking for the kit who went into that meeting, he tells her, that kit never walked back out, the son she cried with afterward was always this one, and he will leave so she can grieve properly. He demands a bag. Vivian does not block the door — there is a green canvas bag in the front closet, and she will not lock the door behind him. He pockets the cash, the watch and the billfold and goes. Her front-room lights stay on long after he is gone.

Back at the mansion, Nick brings part of the porch into the kitchen. The apology itself he holds back, because those words belong to his mother and will be said to her tomorrow, but the pack gets the other fear: he has not been inside that house since he was a teenager, he knows his mother, and he knows nothing in it will have moved. Walking through the door means walking into his own childhood with everything still where he left it. Pawbert's eyes go wet and he does not hide it; Luther comes forward onto the front edge of his chair. When Nick says he is going in the morning and taking Judy, Pawbert ladles soup into his green mug, sets his own mug down on the tile beside him, and says the one thing nobody else in the pack has the standing to say: Nick has a living mother who wrote him a letter, and Pawbert would trade anything he owns for a letter like that. He wants Nick going into that house as something he is allowed to do rather than something he is obliged to do.

In the morning Luther puts the sedan keys in Nick's paw and books a Zuber to the precinct, on the theory that Bogo can wait a morning. Pawbert hands over a thermos of lentil soup with an instruction attached: it is not for Nick, it is for his mother. Judy drives, having pushed the seat forward and re-aimed a wolf's mirrors. The route runs through parts of the city Nick has spent years steering around — a bakery whose blueberries he used to steal, a corner he used to work, a street where he once ran a long con, now a row of tidy townhouses with plants on the steps. Judy does not need the address he wrote out for her; she has carried it since they first met, off the top of the tax return she pulled while running down his pawpsicle operation.

Nick knocks so softly on the front step that Judy barely hears it. Vivian answers: a red fox a generation older, smaller than he remembers, gone gray at the jawline and the ear tips. She is older than the photograph he keeps in his head and exactly the mother he has been carrying everywhere else. She skips whatever greeting the moment seems to call for, and Nick gets there first and names Judy as his wife. Vivian did not know about the wedding; her face takes it in small increments and she decides, visibly, to let the surprise wait until later. Inside, the carpet, the side-table lamp and the couch are the ones he grew up with. The mantle is not. It has been given over to his career — a Daily Gnus front page from the Nighthowlers aftermath with Nick in a new officer uniform beside Judy in hers, the arrests outside City Hall at the end of the Lynxley case, a Tusker Times piece on a raccoon he talked down out of a robbery, the Lionheart hearings, and his promotion to detective in two different papers. Twenty clippings, mounted on cardboard she cut herself. No wedding photograph, because the wedding was never on television.

Vivian delivers the speech she has rehearsed. She spent years blaming herself for buying the uniform, until the morning she decided she would buy it again, because wanting to belong was never the mistake. She watched the Bellwether press conference and caught an expression on Nick she had not seen since he was a kit, and she has been grateful to the rabbit standing next to him ever since, without knowing her name. When she tells him she has been proud of him for a long time, the word Mom comes out of him low and broken and stretched, after more silent years than he can count. She is out of her chair before he finishes it. She holds on without saying anything, the way she held him the night he came home from the scouts, and the way she would have held him every night in between if he had let her.

When he can breathe, Nick apologizes for the thing he said in that kitchen, which he has rehearsed apologizing for nearly as long as he rehearsed saying it. Vivian answers with the promise turned around: the door was never locked, and has not been locked since the night he left. Then she brings out a wooden box. Inside is the Junior Ranger Scout patch, which she recovered from a trash can along his walk home the morning after the muzzling and has kept ever since; three postcards Nick's father, John Wilde, mailed from a foreign port city across the first year he was gone, and nothing at all after them; and a folded letter John began at his desk and never finished. John ran a Zootopia tailoring shop called Suit-topia and sold half of it to fund a second location overseas. Vivian tells Nick plainly that she does not know whether John died, left them, tried to come back and could not, or is alive somewhere at this moment with no idea his son became a detective. She reported him missing, paid an investigator out of money she did not have, went down to the docks, wrote letters, and none of it gave her anything to hold. Nick has blamed his father his whole life; Vivian knows, and let him, and is sorry for that too. He takes the box home without opening the letter.

The wedding conversation comes back around. Vivian learns it was held outdoors at World Celebration Gardens, with white chairs, an arch of irises and roses, and fairy lights in the trees after sundown, and she says she would have come if she had been asked. Then she calls a halt to apologies for the rest of the day and turns to Judy properly. She thanks her for being the reason that look came back to Nick's face. Judy tells her that Nick sees her too, that nothing better has ever happened to her, and that she is glad it was Vivian who raised him. They drink tea through the afternoon while Nick talks about the mansion, about his pack-brother, about Luther — whose way of offering without pressing earns Vivian's approval. Nick hands over the thermos with Pawbert's instruction attached, and Vivian holds it in both paws. When the afternoon runs out she folds to one knee to hug Judy at Judy's height, and at the door she tells Nick she will be here when he is ready to come back. Nick tells her the mansion door is open too.

Pawbert and Luther have the kettle going and the mugs down before the car is parked. Nick sits at the kitchen table in his coat and tells them Vivian wants to meet the pack whenever he is ready. He opens the box and puts the patch out under the kitchen lamp, and nobody asks what it is. Pawbert's eyes are wet again; Luther's are not, but his face goes still in the way it does when he has decided to defend somebody without being asked. Nick thanks each of them by name — Pawbert for the soup, Luther for the car and for asking nothing, Judy for staying beside him on the couch. He is asleep on the couch before midnight with Judy tucked under his arm, the wooden box left on the coffee table, the patch loose in his paw. Pawbert brings a blanket; Luther kills the kitchen light. The corner lamp stays burning, the one Pawbert leaves on for nightmares, for bad days, and for good ones. Across the city another lamp is on in another front room, and for once the fox sitting under it is not waiting for anyone.

Key Moments

• Clawhauser hands Nick a cream envelope at the Precinct 1 front desk, delivered in person by a visitor who left no name
• Nick's cover-smile gets him past Clawhauser and not past Judy
• Luther registers the change in Nick on the drive home and asks nothing, holding the Pack Charter from the inside
• Pawbert reads the room the moment Nick walks in with the envelope, moves the pack to the living room and brings down the green mugs
• Nick tries three jokes at the coffee table before the deflection runs out
• On the back porch, Nick names the two images of his mother he has carried at opposite ends of his head
• Nick admits to Judy that he was cruel at seventeen and is afraid his mother will see it is still him underneath
• The flashback places Nick at seventeen in his mother's kitchen, years before Finnick, running with a warehouse-district fence
• Nick's cruelest line is not the one about the uniform — it is telling Vivian that the kit she sent to the scouts never came home and that she has been grieving the wrong fox ever since
• Vivian meets his announcement that he is leaving with the bag and the unlocked door rather than a refusal
• In the late-night mansion kitchen, Nick tells the full pack about the terror of walking back into a house where nothing has moved
• Pawbert, the one mammal in the room with a dead mother, tells Nick what a letter from a living one is worth
• Luther hands over the sedan keys and calls a Zuber to the precinct; Bogo waits
• Pawbert sends Nick to Cypress Grove Lane with a thermos of lentil soup meant for Vivian rather than for him
• Judy has known where Nick grew up since the day they met, off the tax return she pulled during the pawpsicle investigation
• On the front step, Nick names Judy as his wife before anyone can ask; Vivian had not known about the wedding
• The mantle at 1955 Cypress Grove Lane holds twenty clippings of Nick's public career and no wedding photograph
• Vivian tells Nick she would buy the scout uniform again, because belonging was the only thing she ever wanted for him
• Nick breaks down and calls Vivian by the name he has not used to her face since the night he left, and she is out of her chair before he finishes
• Vivian answers Nick's apology by turning the old promise around: the door was never locked
• Vivian gives Nick a wooden box: the rescued Junior Ranger Scout patch, an unfinished letter John never sent, and three postcards from John Wilde
• John Wilde is named on the page for the first time, along with his tailoring shop Suit-topia
• Vivian tells Nick she has never learned what happened to his father, and that she let his anger settle on the parent in front of him because she believed it spared him
• Nick takes the unfinished letter home without reading it
• Nick describes the wedding at World Celebration Gardens, and Vivian says she would have come if he had asked
• Vivian kneels to hug Judy goodbye at the door
• Nick and Vivian trade the same open-door promise across the threshold, hers at Cypress Grove and his at the mansion
• At home, Nick sets the patch out under the kitchen lamp and the pack does not need it explained
• Nick thanks each pack member by name and falls asleep with the patch curled in his free paw

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• 1955 Cypress Grove Lane — Nick's childhood home and Vivian's current residence. A small house, repainted but otherwise unchanged, with the same mailbox and the same three-stone front step, its top stone chipped since Nick dropped a jar of nails on it at six. The front door has not been locked since the night he walked out.
• Precinct 1 — Front desk, where the envelope is handed over, and the bullpen
• Pawthorne Mansion — Living room (the pack circle around the letter), kitchen (the late-night confession and the debrief afterward), back porch (Judy anchoring Nick), foyer (the morning key handover)
• World Celebration Gardens — Referenced only; the wedding venue, as Nick describes the day to his mother
• The warehouse district and Tundratown — Referenced in the flashback as the territory of Nick's teenage criminal work

Items

• Vivian's letter — Cheap paper in a cream envelope, addressed to Nick in a penmanship he recognizes before he has finished looking at it; she delivered it to the Precinct 1 front desk herself and left no name
• Vivian's wooden box — Paperback-sized, kept in the bottom drawer of her side cabinet; given to Nick at the reunion; holds the patch, the postcards and the unfinished letter
• Junior Ranger Scout patch — The patch off Nick's childhood uniform. Vivian retraced his walk home the morning after the muzzling and worked through the bins along it, turning the patch up in the second one; she has kept it sleeved ever since, its pin bent from years of being taken out and put back
• John Wilde's postcards — Three, mailed from a foreign port city at three weeks, a few months and almost a year; the first shows a harbor at sunset
• John Wilde's unfinished letter — One folded sheet of cream paper, turned up in his desk once the second postcard had come and gone; Vivian never opened it, and Nick takes it home unread
• Vivian's mantle clippings — Twenty newspaper cuttings in chronological order, backed with cardboard she cut by paw because real frames were beyond her budget: a Daily Gnus front page titled Hopps and Wilde Crack Missing Mammal Case, the City Hall arrests that closed the Lynxley case, a Tusker Times piece on the raccoon Nick talked down, the Lionheart hearings, and his promotion to detective in two papers
• Pawbert's lentil-soup thermos — A new soup in his repertoire, cooked while Nick sat out on the back porch and sent to Vivian the next morning; the thermos stays with her, to be returned washed
• Four Green Mugs — Down on the counter for the circle around the letter and again for the circle around the box
• Green sweater — On Pawbert's shoulders when he sees Nick off from the foyer that morning
• Luther's black sedan — Lent to Nick for the morning; Judy drives it with the seat pushed forward and a wolf's mirrors re-aimed

End Credit Song

"So Big / So Small" (From 'Dear Evan Hansen'), Rachel Bay Jones

In Dear Evan Hansen, Heidi Hansen sings this to her grown son. She goes back to the afternoon his father drove away and left a house that had gotten too big for the two of them, and she tells him she was there then and has not gone anywhere since. Vivian makes the same case with a front door she has not locked since the night Nick walked out of it, twenty clippings backed with cardboard she cut by paw, and a scout patch she went back for the morning after he was muzzled. The episode belongs to Nick and runs on his fear of what she will find in him. The song is her side of it, and the first Dear Evan Hansen cue in the series sung by a mother rather than a son.

Notes

• The episode title comes from the parable of the prodigal son in the Gospel of Luke, in which a son who leaves home and squanders his share of the family money is taken back without conditions.
• Marian, the friend Vivian mentions in the flashback, is named for Maid Marian in Disney's Robin Hood (1973).
• 1955 Cypress Grove Lane is the address Judy reads off Nick's tax return in Zootopia (2016); the episode makes it the house he grew up in.
• John Wilde and Suit-topia come from cut Zootopia (2016) development material, in which Nick's father ran a tailoring shop of that name.