S0WE28 - Deersneyland II

"Deersneyland II" is the twenty-eighth episode of the W-Series. Months after the Marshlands weekend of "Touch Grass", Nick spends his birthday at Deersneyland with the pack, on tickets that have waited on the refrigerator since the night he booked them, and a VIP guide meets them at the gate with access Nick never booked. It is the pack's second day at the park, after "Day Pass".

Synopsis

Nick booked four Deersneyland tickets for his birthday the night after the pack's Marshlands trip, and months later he is up before dawn in a Pawaiian shirt covered in Stitch while Luther maps the park in quadrants and Judy mocks the quadrants. They miss the Tiana at the harbor and cross on the older Woolombia, where Pawbert finds the open water no longer overwhelms him. At the gate a scanner flags Nick's ticket, and Faline, a young doe on her first VIP assignment, arrives with gold lanyards, a birthday button and a lunch she is not allowed to name. Nick decides the park has recognized the pack. The day misfires in every comic way it can: a moose owns the Tower of Terror ride photo, Luther admires the villains on Rise of the Resistance, the It's a Small World boat stalls for most of an hour, and two more photographs fail. Pawbert alone notices the guide about to crack afterward and tells her she did well. Club 33 turns out to be the lunch, the Country Bears play Judy's song as a country ballad, a cartoon train ride gets past Luther's guard, and the castle photo catches all four with their eyes shut. At the exit the corporation's CEO, Bob Tiger, thanks Luther for a personal call made months earlier: the whole day was his gift, arranged through a family name he has never used for anything. Nick runs out of words, then finds thanks and a hug. An upgraded suite at the Grand Floridian, a sworn-off prank war, and a photograph claimed for the refrigerator close the night.

Plot

Nick pinned the tickets to the refrigerator under a carrot magnet of Judy's, a Bunnyburrow souvenir, his birthday circled in red, and they have hung there for months between the grocery list and one of Pawbert's intake schedules. He booked them on the couch at one in the morning the night after the Marshlands trip, with Judy dozing against him, and posted the date to the pack chat. On the day itself he is dressed and packed in the kitchen before Pawbert comes down, wearing an electric-blue Pawaiian shirt printed with Stitch's face, and he heads off a remark about the hour that Pawbert was never going to make. Luther arrives from a run and a shower with the park laid out on his phone in colored quadrants, annotated for crowd flow. Judy leans over his shoulder, hands the word asymmetric back to him, and he puts the phone away. Nick raises a coffee he never drank in a toast to nobody in particular.

Luther drives them to Zootopia Harbor, where the Tiana is already leaving her berth as they reach the pier and Nick's wave to her goes unanswered. The next boat is the Woolombia, older and slower, and Nick accepts her as a consolation. Pawbert takes the railing without thinking and lets the departure horn pass through him with the engine noise. The last time he crossed this water it had rearranged him; today the horizon asks nothing of him, and he lets the wind, Nick's ride strategy and Judy's laughter carry him over. Luther joins him at the rail as Deersborough comes out of the haze with the castle above it, and Pawbert says it, and Luther says it back.

At the gate a deer at the scanner runs Nick's ticket twice and picks up a radio. A young doe in a park blazer comes through a staff entrance at speed with four gold lanyards and introduces herself, on behalf of The Walt Deersney Corporation, as their VIP Tour Guide for the day. From her pocket she produces a round button that reads HAPPY BIRTHDAY NICK! Nick bought ordinary tickets and booked none of this, and the guide can confirm only that it has been arranged: priority queues, reserved seating for the evening show, and a lunch she is not permitted to spoil. Nick weighs the mystery, concludes that the pack has saved the city often enough to have earned a loyalty program and that the park has simply recognized them, and pins the button to his shirt like a decoration.

Nick sells Tower of Terror to Pawbert as a gentle, atmospheric dark ride. It is thirteen stories of free fall, with four more drops after the first. Pawbert's claws go through the armrest, Judy laughs through the fall with her paws in the air, Nick produces a noise he will never live down, and Luther grips the armrest on the first drop, loosens by the second and by the last is riding it with his chin up and a twitch at the corner of his mouth that Pawbert catches. The ride photo belongs to the row in front, a moose's antlers across the top, a giraffe's neck up one side and a pair of elephant ears filling the rest, with only Judy's ears and one of Pawbert's paws surviving from the pack. Nick objects that the brochure was misleading and pronounces them extras in a moose's photograph. The guide treats the miss as a scheduling matter and promises a proper picture at the next stop.

Rise of the Resistance recruits them into a rebellion, has their transport captured, and marches them into a hangar of white-armored troopers. Luther, who has seen the posters and summarizes the franchise as a war in which one side has uniforms, admires the enemy's kit standardization aloud. Judy points out that these are the villains; Luther weighs the rebels' salvaged equipment and missing chain of command and stays unconvinced. When a live cast member playing a First Order officer, a tall elk in full uniform, orders the prisoners into columns, Luther squares his shoulders and nods to him, and defends the nod to a spluttering Nick on the grounds that they have been captured and compliance is the correct posture. Through the detention cell, the breakout and the chase he watches both sides with professional interest, and he walks out into daylight not entirely convinced they were on the correct side. Judy reminds him that the faction he prefers blew up a planet. He allows that their methods could use refinement.

Judy buys a round of Doe Whips on her own authority and watches Nick lose a fight with frozen pineapple. From the bench she spots a deer's profile worked into the hedges of a planter, the first Hidden Deer of the day, and Pawbert knows the look on her face from crime scenes. He looks at the park itself and finds it unchanged; what changed is him, because the last time every crowd here was a threat to assess and today a crowd is a crowd, with his husband eating frozen pineapple next to him. It's a Small World follows, front row, no drops, singing dolls, one whole section of reptiles. Ten minutes in, the boat stops in mid-channel and the song does not. Nick lies down in the boat and plans his own death by musical attrition, Judy counts animatronics into the hundreds and sorts them by species, Luther runs a tactical exercise behind half-closed eyes, and Pawbert, to his own surprise, has a wonderful time and hums along. A ride operator declines to let a ZPD detective walk out. After fifty-three minutes cast members hand the guests out along the maintenance walkway, and the song follows them down the corridor.

While Nick itemizes the ways the song has moved into his skull, Pawbert sees their guide turn away from the group with her hooves trembling and take a breath she has to control on purpose. He drops back to her pace, says her name, Faline, for the first time, and tells her she handled all of it well and that someone noticed. She thanks him as Mr. Pawthorne, the tremor lets go, and he rejoins the pack without mentioning it. Judy finds two more Hidden Deer within fifty feet. Nick steers them into the Country Bear Musical Jamboree, where the curtains open on animatronic bears in country-western dress and, partway through, the bears play "Try Everything" as a slow country ballad, the song that carried Judy into the city years ago. Her paw finds Nick's. Luther's tail moves on its own. Outside, the second photograph is linked to the wrong lanyard, and a wildebeest family beams up from Nick's phone in the pack's place.

Faline leads them down a quiet lane to a plain door with a small cream-and-gold medallion numbered 33, and Nick, who has told the pack about Club 33 four separate times since the Marshlands, climbs to the dining room upstairs as if it were a cathedral. Luther and Pawbert sit down in one identical motion, two childhoods of formal dining rooms surfacing at once, and Nick works through four forks in the correct order on the strength of a single dinner at the Pawthorne estate, announcing each one. Lunch is mushroom velouté, turbot, charred asparagus in brown butter that Pawbert files away to reproduce, and a panna cotta wearing one candle. Luther orders a second glass of wine. On a bridge afterward, with the light right and no moose in the way, the third photograph fails because Luther is twenty feet back in a brief exchange with a blue-badged stag, and a school group floods the bridge before he returns.

At dusk Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway throws their train cars off the rails through one cartoon disaster after another, Goofy hollering reassurance from the engine as it pulls away without them, and ends in a room of artificial starlight where two mice sit on a picnic blanket on a hill, the hill knee-high to a lynx and the mice no longer than Luther's thumb. Luther's paw settles over Pawbert's on the lap bar, and the face beneath his composure is the one Pawbert has seen only a handful of times. At the castle, with the walkway cleared, the fourth photograph catches all four of them with their eyes shut at the instant of the shutter, and Nick declares it exactly them. By Fantasmic Judy has found sixty-six Hidden Deer. The show's sorcerer dreams the lake into color, loses the dream to a dragon and real fire, and stands alone against it; Pawbert goes still, then watches the small figure refuse to run and win. Luther's paw finds his and their rings click, and the whole day settles into him at once.

On the way to the exit a voice asks for Agent Pawthorne. A tiger in a navy blazer comes out of a staff corridor, and Faline straightens into a posture no training covered. Nick places him from an entirely different decade as the weatherman Bob Tiger, and the tiger supplies the rest, weather desk to broadcast operations to the network to CEO of The Walt Deersney Corporation. Nick notes that every employee in the park is a deer and the chief executive is a tiger. Bob Tiger has come out in person to thank Agent Pawthorne for the call, and when Nick asks what call, he explains: Luther phoned the office months ago, himself, and arranged the tour, the Club 33 table, the Fantasmic seats and the Grand Floridian, because his pack brother's birthday was being spent here. Nick, never before short of an answer in the years Pawbert has known him, has none. He works up from the fact of the call to whether it was for the pack, and Luther tells him it was for him. Asked his favorite ride, Luther names the Runaway Railway, the one where everything derails and the mice who matter still end up on the same hill, and the CEO's corporate edges fall away. Nick spends his last composure commending Faline by name for running a stranded boat like a trained negotiator, and Bob Tiger notes it and takes her back through the corridor with him. Then Nick tells Luther he does not know what to say, says thank you anyway, and hugs him first, his face in Luther's shirt; Luther's arms come up a half-second later and stay. Into the shirt, Nick reports the best birthday.

The Grand Floridian moves the Pawthorne party from the two-bedroom villa Luther booked to the Grand Suite, complimentary, over Luther's objection that a villa was the correct ratio of bedrooms to mammals, and the front desk assures Judy that the suite has been provisioned for guests who packed no toothbrush. Nick stands on a queen bed larger than his first apartment and demands to know what Luther did; Luther, from the parlor, says he booked a villa, and when Nick points out that Luther briefed them on foot traffic that morning with the whole day already arranged, Luther answers that cover requires commitment. The knocks begin: a birthday cart with champagne, four bathrobes monogrammed PP, turndown with castle-shaped mints, a concierge menu. Luther would like the knocking to stop. From the balcony, in his robe, Nick tells him he is never pranking him again, and after just long enough to reconsider adds a probably.

Past midnight the suite is quiet. The castle photograph, printed before they left the park, is already claimed for the refrigerator at home, for the spot under the carrot magnet. Judy has logged Hidden Deer sixty-seven in the bathroom tile and gone to sleep. Nick is on the balcony with his mother's reply to the photograph open on his phone, reading it again. At the parlor window Pawbert asks Luther when he called and learns it was the morning after Nick booked, while Nick was still asleep; Nick had noticed what Luther loves, and Luther wanted to return that. Pawbert names the thing Luther has never done in his life, asking the Pawthorne name for anything, and Luther says the name was worth spending on this. Their rings touch with the same small click as at the lake. From the balcony Nick proposes riding Small World again, since they never finished it, and the sound three mammals make at once fills the suite.

Key Moments

• The tickets wait on the refrigerator under Judy's carrot magnet for months, the date circled in red
• Luther arrives with the park mapped in quadrants, and Judy mocks the word asymmetric
• The Tiana leaves without them and the pack crosses on the Woolombia; Pawbert finds the open water no longer overwhelms him
• Faline meets them at the gate with gold lanyards and a birthday button Nick never arranged
• Nick sells Tower of Terror as a gentle dark ride; a moose's antlers take over the ride photo
• Luther admires the First Order's kit standardization and nods to a costumed officer out of reflex
• Judy finds the first Hidden Deer in a planter, and Pawbert sees the park unchanged and himself changed
• The It's a Small World boat stalls for fifty-three minutes; Pawbert alone enjoys it
• Pawbert sees Faline a breath from cracking, says her name, and tells her she handled it well
• The Country Bears play "Try Everything" as a country ballad, and Judy's paw finds Nick's
• The second photograph loads a wildebeest family; the third loses Luther to a blue-badged stag on the bridge
• Nick gets every fork right at Club 33 and announces each one
• The Runaway Railway ends on two thumb-length mice at their picnic, and Luther's paw closes over Pawbert's
• All four shut their eyes for the castle photograph, and Nick calls it exactly them
• Their rings click at the Fantasmic lake as the sorcerer's dream survives
• Bob Tiger thanks Agent Pawthorne for his call, and Nick learns the whole day was Luther's gift
• Nick asks whether it was for the pack, and Luther tells him it was for him
• Nick commends Faline to her CEO by name, and Bob Tiger walks her off with him
• Nick hugs Luther first, and Luther lets him
• The Grand Floridian upgrades the Pawthorne party to the Grand Suite and the knocking will not stop
• Nick swears off pranking Luther, probably
• Judy logs Hidden Deer sixty-seven in the bathroom tile; the castle photo is claimed for the refrigerator
• Pawbert learns Luther called the morning after Nick booked, and that the name was worth using for this

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• Pawthorne Mansion — The kitchen before dawn; the refrigerator where the tickets waited and the photograph will go
• Zootopia Harbor — The ferry pier; the Tiana leaving, the Woolombia crossing
• Deersborough — The shuttle from the terminal to the park approach
• Deersneyland — The gates; Tower of Terror; Rise of the Resistance; a bench by a frozen-lemonade cart; It's a Small World; the topiary garden; the Country Bear Musical Jamboree; Club 33; the bridge; Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway; the castle walkway; the Fantasmic lakefront; the park exit
• The Grand Floridian Resort and Spa — The lobby with its grand piano; the front desk; the Grand Suite on the top floor

Items

• Deersneyland tickets — Booked the night after the Marshlands, pinned under the carrot magnet for months, used at the gate
• The carrot magnet — Judy's, brought back from Bunnyburrow; holds the tickets, then the photograph (first appearance)
• Nick's Pawaiian shirt — Electric blue, Stitch's face printed in every size the fabric could hold (first appearance)
• HAPPY BIRTHDAY NICK! button — Gold lettering on Deersneyland blue, from Faline's blazer pocket; pinned to the shirt (first appearance)
• Gold VIP lanyards — Four, worn all day; Nick's is tapped at the PhotoPass kiosk (first appearance)
• Luther's quadrant map — The park in colored quadrants with crowd-flow annotations; cover for a day already arranged
• The castle photo — Printed before the pack leaves the park, all four with their eyes shut; claimed for the refrigerator under the carrot magnet, and sent to Vivian (first appearance)
• PP-monogrammed bathrobes — Four, delivered on the second knock by a second deer or possibly the same one; Nick wears his on the balcony (first appearance)
• The wedding rings — Luther's and Pawbert's click at the Fantasmic lake and again at the parlor window
• Scooby-Doo plush — Named by Pawbert as the gift Luther is answering; not on the page

End Credit Song

"Try Everything" (From 'Country Bear Musical Jamboree'), Emily Ann Roberts

The song is Gazelle's anthem from the pack's own world, the one that carried Judy into the city, here in the country arrangement Emily Ann Roberts recorded for the Country Bear Musical Jamboree, and the episode plays it on stage before the credits do, with animatronic bears on steel guitar and Judy's paw in Nick's in the dark. It is keyed to the whole day rather than any one scene. The song is about getting up after every fall and trying again, and Nick's birthday is a run of falls, a stalled boat, four failed photographs, a wolf unsure he was on the right side, and a fox who keeps going anyway. The country tempo adds patience: slower and warmer than the original, it matches the register the day comes to rest in.

Notes

• Nick's "Pawaiian shirt" is a Zootopified Hawaiian shirt, printed with Stitch from Lilo & Stitch (2002).
• Faline, the VIP Tour Guide, takes her name from Faline in Bambi (1942).
• The Woolombia, the older ferry the pack boards after the Tiana leaves without them, is Disneyland's Sailing Ship Columbia.
• Judy's Hidden Deer count ending on sixty-seven is part of an in-universe "67" running gag.
• The attractions carry their Disney names: The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, "it's a small world," the Country Bear Musical Jamboree, Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway with its Perfect Picnic cartoon short, and Fantasmic!; Club 33 is Disneyland's members-only club, and the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa is at Walt Disney World.
• Hidden Deer are the parks' Hidden Mickeys; Doe Whips are Dole Whip; the vested photographers and the lanyard-tap kiosk are Disney PhotoPass.
• The Country Bears' country arrangement of "Try Everything" is real: Emily Ann Roberts recorded it for the show's 2024 revival at Magic Kingdom.
• Bob Tiger and the line Nick recites, "Tomorrow's weather is— again— everything," come from the weather broadcast in Zootopia 2 (2025).