Both the musical and its movie adaptation largely leave out a key piece of worldbuilding from Gregory Maguire’s novels—making the repeated use of ‚Clock Tick‘ in ‚For Good‘ come off weirder than any other Oz-ism.
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.
