With A Callback to Addams Family Values, Wednesday Prompts Thanksgiving Revelers to Remember That It’s Still “Pilgrim World”

Being that Wednesday has arrived to Netflix just in time to capture the “Thanksgiving spirit,” it’s clearly no coincidence that, in episode three of the mostly Tim Burton-directed series, screenwriter Kayla Alpert should offer a callback to one of the most memorable plotlines of 1993’s Addams Family Values. In it, Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) are forced to go to a horrendous normie summer camp called Camp Chippewa. Worse than that, Wednesday is enlisted to play the part of Pocahontas in a Thanksgiving-themed play (yes, in the summer) put on by their ghoulishly white-bread camp managers/counselors, Gary (Peter MacNicol) and Becky Granger (Christine Baranski).

After the Grangers attempt to brainwash Wednesday, Pugsley and a fellow outcast named Joel Glicker (David Krumholtz) with a marathon of Disney movies, Wednesday emerges from the isolated cabin pretending that the “immersion therapy” has worked. Even going so far as to smile at the awaiting crowd of normies, including the odious Amanda Buckman (Mercedes McNab)—the Aryan ideal in every way. But the Grangers should have known better than to believe Wednesday could be so easily cajoled into “normalcy” by visions of The Brady Bunch and Annie. Instead her performance was all designed to lure them into a false sense of security before she changes tack on the script’s dialogue at the last minute.

So it is that, rather than “sweetly” agreeing to break bread with the pilgrims, Wednesday as “Pocahontas” (who wasn’t even alive anymore during the “first Thanksgiving”) suddenly declines the invitation and declares, “You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations, your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the roadsides, you will play golf and enjoy hot hors d’oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation, your people will have stick shifts.”

Barring the part about the stick shifts, the monologue has remained fairly timeless. Nonetheless, with the world of Wednesday being set in a Salem-esque town called Jericho featuring a theme park billed as Pilgrim World, it was ripe for throwing more shade at the white forebears who came to the “colonies” to claim the land as their own. What’s more, both Wednesday and Jericho’s “founding father,” Joseph Crackstone (William Houston), appear to be at the center of some ominous prophecy unveiled by Rowan (Calum Ross), a fellow student at Nevermore Academy (the school for outcasts where Wednesday is exiled after unleashing some piranhas on the water polo players at Nancy Reagan High). Wanting to understand more about why a pilgrim would be in the mix, Wednesday asks at the beginning of “Friend or Woe,” “If I’m going to be responsible for Nevermore’s demise, the question is: why am I sharing this apocalypse with a pilgrim?”

The answer starts to slowly unravel as Wednesday continues her search for Rowan’s murderer while Nevermore gears up for its “Outreach Day”—meaning the students from the school are “allowed” to enter Jericho freely under the pretense of volunteer work that enables them to “commingle” with the town’s normies. Wednesday does her best to get through the torture, complete with being subjected to seeing more signage that urges people to “Visit Pilgrim World: Where History Comes to Life.”

Initial mention of the theme park is made in episode one, “Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe,” when Wednesday encounters a trio of meatheads, including Lucas Walker (Iman Marson), the son of Pilgrim World’s owner. Approaching Wednesday sitting at a table at local coffee shop the Weathervane, Lucas and his henchmen are all dressed in pilgrim garb while on their break from working at one of the only sources of “industry” in town. Mocking them and the park itself, Wednesday ribs, “Why are you three dressed like religious fanatics?” “We’re pilgrims.” She returns, “Po-tay-toh, po-tah-to.” They shove an advertisement her way and announce, “We work at Pilgrim World.” Briefly studying it, Wednesday bites back, “It takes a special kind of stupid to devote an entire theme park to zealots responsible for mass genocide.”

For yes, like her Christina Ricci foremother playing Wednesday, this is one character who will not suffer the bullshit of such Republican holidays as Thanksgiving. And, fittingly, in Addams Family Values, the “outcasts” were viewed by the Grangers as those that white society has long “othered.” Which is why Becky (truly the perfect name) casts only “the ethnic ones” as Native Americans (further insulting the “misfits” of the camp by appointing a white girl their leader). During her “Native American” casting announcements, Becky uncertainly lists out all of the “ethnic” names, grudgingly stating, “Mordecai, Yang, Esther, um, Consuela, Irwin and, um, I’m still not sure just how to pronounce this…Jam-ahl, Jay-mul? Whatever.”

The self-superior sentiments of white people like her are crystallized all the more in the dialogue of the so-called play, with Amanda in the part of lead pilgrim Sarah Miller. Trying to make the slaughter of innocent people come across as “palatable,” “Sarah” says things like, “You are civilized as we—except we wear shoes and have last names.”

Meanwhile in “Friend or Woe,” Wednesday swaps her volunteer assignment at Uriah’s Heap with her roommate, Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers), so that she can infiltrate Pilgrim World and try to find out more about this dastardly “founding father.” Upon entering, it’s plain to see that the “enterprise” is like a monetized version of The Crucible as one man shouts, “Welcome to Pilgrim World! Witch trials every day! Two o’clock, four o’clock!”

Soon, the outcasts are given an introduction by Arlene (Lisa O’Hare), who greets, “I am Mistress Arlene. A real OC.” The Nevermore kids stare at her, dreading what they seem to know she’s going to tell them regarding what that play on “OG” stands for: original colonist. Wednesday’s nightmares continue when she’s instructed that her assignment will be to pass out samples of fudge in the fudge “shoppe” that inexplicably exists at Pilgrim World. Wednesday not only informs German tourists that fudge didn’t exist in this time period, but also that, “All proceeds go to upholding this pathetic whitewashing of American history.”

Christina Ricci’s Wednesday would be proud. And yes, Ricci herself has given her blessing to the project by appearing as a teacher at Nevermore named Marilyn Thornhill, who gets introduced to Mayor Noble (Tommie Earl Jenkins) by Principal Weems (Gwendoline Christie) as follows: “In the spirit of outreach, she’s Nevermore’s first normie teacher.” What that will mean for “normie-outcast” relations (this being a foil for white-“other” relations) remains unclear.

The fact that Wednesday is this time around portrayed by a Mexican-descended actress like Jenna Ortega lends further meaning to her railing against the normies that would support an operation like Pilgrim World (especially its Black owner, Mayor Noble). To boot, her psychic vision of the past unearths the torment of her ancestor, Goody Addams (also played by Ortega), a fellow “outcast” who gets to have an Arthur Miller-esque moment of dialogue when she derides Crackstone (before being sentenced to burning for witchery), “It is you, Joseph Crackstone, that should be tried. We were here before you. Living in harmony with the nature and the native folk. But you have stolen the land. You have slaughtered the innocent. You have robbed us of our peaceful spirit. You are the true monster! All of you!” This extends to those who still presently celebrate Thanksgiving like it’s not one of the most obscene holidays ever foisted upon the American public.

Wednesday’s reminder of this dark period in Jericho’s (and the U.S.’) history leads her to seethe over the fact that the entire purpose of Outreach Day is centered around the celebration of a new bronze statue in the town square. One that immortalizes Crackstone. So obviously, she enlists Thing to blow it up with the simple tools of some gasoline in the fountain and a match. And, honestly, it doesn’t feel like such a monument’s “erection” could even be possible in the present climate, with long-standing statues of white supremacists already being political battlegrounds, let alone brand-new ones.

In the wake of the explosion, during which time Wednesday happily plays Vivaldi’s “Winter” (from The Four Seasons concerto) on her cello, Principal Weems automatically accuses Wednesday of the “crime.” By now notorious for being an outcast among the outcasts, Weems chastises her, “You’re a trouble magnet.” Wednesday replies, “If trouble means standing up to lies. Decades of discrimination, centuries of treating outcasts like second-class citizens or worse.”

The idea of labeling Native Americans as “outcasts” might be a bit of a whitewashing, slightly offensive move unto itself, and yet, was that not how all “minorities” were made out to be by the white European settlers of the 1600s (and beyond)? Wednesday adds to her ardent condemnation of, among other things, Pilgrim World and the white supremacy it promotes, “Why be complicit in this cover-up? Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.” And maybe that’s why Americans continue to engage in the “act” of Thanksgiving every year, all while wondering how racism can remain be the dominant “tenet” of the nation.