The Midnight Gospel is the wondrous yet strange brainchild of Duncan Trussell, and is exceedingly hard to explain. The best way of describing the Netflix show is that it is an action-based cartoon that pinpoints and examines various aspects of humanity, including spirituality and reality, life and death, reincarnation and the endless void of “un-life”, all through the lens of wacky science-fiction fantasies. Similar to a lot of adult cartoons these days, it features a strange mix of whimsical, pastel-toned imagery, with the occasional 18+ sequences. But what is it all about?
The show, on paper at least, is a podcast adaptation, with dialogue taken directly from Trussell’s interviews found on The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, a weekly podcast, where the comedian and guests talk openly about a large variety of topics. Snippets from these conversations have been adapted into seemingly unrelated, yet somehow still perfectly poignant, visual stories, centred about the destruction or natural end of a universe/life. The Netflix show follows the protagonist Clancy (Duncan Trussell himself), a strange pink humanoid figure, who lives in a caravan with a matrix-style “used universe Simulator,” alone and isolated from anyone he knows. The simulator is a strange mix of technology and biology, that births Clancy into a selected simulated universe, into an organic avatar, much like jumping into a video game and interacting with the NPCs there.
The main difference here is that, although a simulation, these NPCs are not the glitchy run-of-the-mill NPCs, and have a soul of sorts, and are full of various insights into the universe. These personalities Clancy encounters are exactly what he is after, attempting to interview them for his “Spacecast” show The Midnight Gospel. Spacecasting is the envisioned future of podcasts, but almost 4 dimensional, incorporating psychedelic visuals and a whole lot of other strange interacting elements. He mines the proverbial goldmine of intelligent beings for interviews, accompanied into these universes with an array of floating recording equipment, all in an attempt to become rich and famous.
While the episodes start in a similar way each time, with Clancy being whisked away into one of the seemingly infinite universe simulations, the episodes themselves are always creatively very different. They do tend to gravitate to topics involving or adjacent to death, however, but they explore it in a multitude of different ways. The first episode whisks viewers to a world on the brink of a zombie outbreak, where Clancy and the President, voiced by American media personality, and addiction medicine specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky, are attempting to escape the hordes, all while having a relatively calm conversation. Trussel uses this setting to have an in-depth conversation about the political philosophy of American drug policy, all while the effects of a bite slowly transform Pinksy into a zombie. He concludes, on the brink of death, that in his opinion drugs are not bad, it is just the circumstances that they are taken in, and the life-altering punishment for doing so.
One big critique of the show is that it could be perceived to be mocking the topics and interviewees through the seemingly random visuals, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. The clearest examples of how the seemingly unrelated visual story and the interview collide are in the episode “Annihilation of Joy”, which is as hallucinogenic and wacky as the other episodes. It is a commentary on the American penal system, the setting being a hell-like prison for those suffering from existential dread. Clancy gets talking to an inmate’s spirit guide, a talking bird that discusses the evolution of Tibetan Buddhism (no, not the racing game winning kinds of Buddhism).
As they explore the prison audiences start to match up their conversation with the seemingly unrelated visual story. They discuss the Buddhist concept of the self as a source of suffering, as well as rebirth. This is paired with the visuals of an inmate dying over and over again, just to be reborn to suffer the same fate, combining both Buddhist beliefs with deeper Nietzschean trains of thought over eternal return - the idea of living one’s lifetime and time again, but with every detail repeated, both pain and joy. While they don’t specifically talk in-depth about Nietzsche, the striking and colorful visuals pair this poignant suggestion with the all too relevant topic of conversation, a dichotomy that did not exist within the original conversation.
While the show features a lot of thought-provoking philosophy, the final episode takes things in a much more sentimental direction. It’s an episode best left for audiences to discover on their own, but the crux of the episode is to explore Trussell’s relationship with his dying mother, through the thinly veiled avatar of Clancy. They discuss Trussell’s birth, his life, and her impending death, as well as how the ego changes the older we get. There is a moment where these walls break down completely, a moment shared between Trussell and his mother that transients Clancy. As more and more of the fourth wall breaks away, the two talk to each other openly and directly, until audiences are left with their final remarks and thoughts about her inevitable passing: “It breaks your heart open, […] Our hearts have been closed, because we’ve closed them, we’ve defended ourselves against pain. And this opens them.”
