Both Wicked and its new sequel, For Good, are littered with “Oz-isms”—the occasional word tweak here and there to make the Land of Oz feel just askance of our own reality, like “obsessulated,” “rejoicify,” or “braverism,” and so on. But there’s one that For Good goes back to over and over, to the point of weirdness: everyone tells each other that they’ll do something in “a clock tick.”
For Good already has a peculiar relationship with time, given that the movie itself (and even the creative team throughout its press tour) is hazy about just how much time has really passed between the events of the films—Madame Morrible notes in the opening that it’s been “12 tide turns” since Elphaba stole the Grimmerie, but we’re never given an indication of just what frame of time a tide turn is—or how the passage of time in the film itself is meant to be interwoven with the events of Wizard of Oz in the background (as with the musical, it’s best to just not think about that at all).
But it’s a “clock tick” that comes up over and over in For Good. Characters are frequently telling each other to wait a clock tick, or they’ll be back in a clock tick, or they only have a clock tick. It’s particularly odd, given that Oz also has “just a sec” as a turn of phrase—Glinda says exactly that when she has to pop her bubble to hear the Munchkins talking to her in Wicked‘s opening, so a clock tick must be the equivalent of a minute or two, but it’s not necessarily the construction that’s the issue; it’s that it’s used multiple times in For Good, including in adapting the one time it’s used in the stage show during Elphaba and Glinda’s catfight.
The rest of Wicked‘s Oz-isms become background noise, which is in part why they’re so effective—they don’t stand out as particularly jarring to our ears, in the way the repeated use of “clock tick” does. But there’s also another reason… because neither the musical nor its movie adaptation really uses a pretty major element from Gregory Maguire’s original novel, the Clock of the Time Dragon.
In Maguire’s version of Wicked (which is wildly different from the events of the musical in many ways), the clock is a crucial piece of Ozian culture, taking on a spiritual significance. A traveling mechanical puppet theater, the clock is a large tower-like object that travels across the various regions of Oz, putting on shows that people begin to believe are actually capable of prophetic visions. Elphaba has a particularly important connection to the show, as in the book she is actually born in the clock; one of its shows attempts to reveal the nature of her true parentage to her, and several characters’ ill demises in Wicked and its sequel novels are predicted by the Time Dragon, which even eventually becomes a place of safekeeping for the Grimmerie.
But the clock is never really brought up in the musical or the movie adaptations as much. The musical is at least a bit more involved with it, as the production is staged with the Time Dragon hanging over the stage, with its clock face forming a key background piece throughout, but it’s set dressing as a nod to its importance in the original book, rather than a significant plot point. The movies, meanwhile, are even more distanced: Glinda mentions the clock in Wicked‘s opening when she describes the time Elphaba’s melting occurred, and Shiz University has an elaborate clock that features a dragon motif in its design as a nod, but that’s about it.
The fact that the Clock of the Time Dragon is so unimportant to either Wicked the musical or Wicked the movie adaptations honestly makes the repeated usage of “clock tick” in For Good all the stranger—intentional nod or otherwise.
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