I could bet that whatever’s been stressing you out lately is not a sassy interdimensional triangle. But maybe it should be, just for a little while.

Allow me to introduce Dipper and Mabel Pines, a pair of 12-year-old twins from Piedmont, California.

Their first brush with the absurd and the surreal can, and should, be blamed on their parents, who ship them off to spend the summer with their great-uncle in an off-the-map town in the Oregon woods.

With Wendy, a laid-back, tomboy-ish high-schooler, and Soos, a friendly and kind-hearted handyman, they slowly adjust to the banal routine of keeping “Grunkle” Stan’s shady business afloat.

While reluctantly putting up flyers around the forest one day, Dipper stumbles upon a mysterious metal tree with a hidden compartment containing a strange, radio-like device.

A click later, the forest floor shifts open to reveal a battered journal filled with notes on the town’s creatures, oddities, and impossible phenomena; the third in what appears to be a series.

Who wrote these journals? Where are the previous two? And what became of their author?

Answers don’t come quickly, but the clues certainly do.

Each episode of the animated series, titled after the name of the mysterious town, is packed with hidden symbols, ciphers and easter eggs, most notably, the cryptograms that appear during the end credits.

Nothing is what it seems, and every detail really does matter; each is carefully crafted to foreshadow future events and deepen the mystery.

And despite all that careful plotting, Gravity Falls never forgets to be funny.

Its humour combines character-driven punchlines and absolute absurdism. Fast-paced banter, running jokes, meta-television pokes, and occasional bursts of dark humour keep the show kid-friendly while giving older viewers plenty to appreciate.

Throughout its run, Gravity Falls focuses on the value of family and friendship, the painful but necessary process of growing up, the danger of holding onto past hurts, and the importance of staying true to who you are, even when it’s not the easy choice.

It wraps all of this in supernatural metaphor, letting monsters and mysteries stand in for fears, insecurities, and anger we all recognise.