DuckTales: Inside the Finale’s Big Webby Twist

This DUCKTALES article contains massive spoilers for the finale.

The DuckTales finale had a lot to wrap up. One of the biggest mysteries introduced in season 3 had to do with Webby. Beakley was keeping secrets about her but we weren’t sure what. The finale gave us answers but not in the way we expected. 

Early on we’re introduced to what we’re told are Webby’s sisters, clones of her. As Webby begins to investigate she learns more and more, confident she’ll get some clue to her past. She gets that and a whole lot more. The audience and Webby both learn she’s not actually Beakley’s granddaughter, she never had real parents. She was created by F.O.W.L. solely to obtain a magical artifact that would prevent Scrooge from ever having adventures again. In order to do that she needed to be a descendent of Scrooge… so Webby was made from Scrooge and is basically her daughter!

It was a huge shock. The episode handled it extremely well but some fans may be left scratching their heads. Wasn’t a huge theme of DuckTales that family is the greatest adventure of all and you didn’t need to be related by blood to be family? Does this undercut all that?

The answer to that is of course up to the individual viewer but we spoke with executive producers Matt Youngberg and Francisco Angones to get their reasoning behind this choice and how it’s actually been the plan all along.

DEN OF GEEK: Did you worry when crafting this twist about Webby actually being related to Scrooge that it might undercut the “family is what you make it, even if they aren’t related by blood” theme of the show?

FRANK ANGONES: That was an idea that we had all the way from the pilot, really. Part of the discussion was we have to do right by these characters because Webby and Launchpad for the most part, Beakley, a couple other characters only ever existed in the original DuckTales. It’s very easy to forget about them. It’s very easy as these characters and their legacy go on to be able to kind of sweep them under the rug. That’s why we really wanted to make sure that they were interwoven into the narrative into not just our story but also kind of trying to get them into the cannon.

I see your point. I understand your point. It was a thing that we had set up all the way through. So if you go back and you watch ‘Woo-oo!’, if you watched ‘Confidential Casefiles of Agent 22!’, and you start to realize this is a father and a daughter who do not know that they’re related getting to know each other in an interesting way, in a cloney way. With Webby, the entire point of the finale is talking about what found family is and what a real family is. Sometimes it can be blood and sometimes it’s not. Webby’s come to accept that before she makes the decision (to go with her sisters.) She regrets that, but the whole point was to tempt her with these sisters, right?

The thing that she always wanted was that sense of belonging. I feel by the end of it she’s earned her way square into this family. We had a line originally where Webby says, “I guess I’m part of the family now, too.” And Dewey says, “You always were. You already were.” But just to have that extra interesting connection, it also set up an interesting dynamic should we ever get to revisit these characters again. What is Scrooge McDuck as a dad? It’s real easy to be very dangerous with your nephews and the housekeeper’s dog. But that’s why my favorite thing is that the last thing that Scrooge does in the finale is the first thing that Donald did in the pilot, which is suddenly freak out. They’ve switched roles entirely.

For sure. It’ll be easy for some people to dismiss the finale if this plot about Webby is a huge sticking point for them but so much of the cast is part of the family and they still aren’t blood related. It’d be one thing if Webby was the only one welded onto the family but then because so many people like Launchpad are a part of it to, it works.

ANGONES: That’s why Scrooge has that big moment at the end. He says, “You didn’t lose to me. You lost to my family. All of them.” And you see everybody standing there. It’s enough to get all the villains to back off. 

MATT YOUNGBERG: I think there’s something to the fact that with Scrooge himself and his relationship to Webby, as we established throughout the series, it grew to a point where he wanted her to call her Uncle Scrooge. By the end, he loved her as much as anyone else in his family, but the revelation of her being his daughter, it wasn’t one of shock and disbelief. It was one of almost…

ANGONES: Of course! It makes all the sense in the world.

YOUNGBERG: He’s not going to love her any differently.

ANGONES: They would have been family anyway. It’s funny because when we started the whole DuckTales process, we looked at a photo of the original DuckTales characters. We knew that adventure was going to be the drive of our show and the theme of family being the greatest adventure of all. So we really wanted to point out what an odd family dynamic this is, right? This isn’t a father and a daughter. This is three identical triplets, and the housekeeper, and the housekeeper’s granddaughter, and the pilot, and the mom who was lost in space, and the temperamental uncle, and the Gizmoduck. And so just seeing how that evolves, Webby has that whole speech where she says, “Family’s not the person who made you. It’s the people who will do anything, sacrifice anything to love you.” And I think that ends up being the message by the end.

DEN OF GEEK: As we wrote in our review of the DuckTales finale, we whole heartedly agree with Angones and Youngberg here. Even if Webby is now related by blood to the family there are still so many others who aren’t, yet they’re all still loved and accepted as part of it. Plus, Webby’s not just a regular daughter. She was a genetic creation made out of Scrooge’s DNA and then raised as someone else’s granddaughter. Like so much of the family in DuckTales, she’s anything but normal but she’s still loved.

Don’t forget to read our review of the finale!