Apr 24, 2020

Midnight Gospel: A Gay Teenager Ruminates on Death

Pendleton Ward's Midnight Gospel, on Netflix, is advertised as an adult Adventure Time.  There are certainly similarities in animation style and tone, but Clancy is no Finn.  Or Jake.

An amiable young man with pink skin and anime-eyes, shirtless, usually wearing a purple wizard's hat, Clancy (Duncan Trussell) lives in self-imposed exile in a virtual world called the Ribbon. We don't learn why, although there are a few hints:

His friends and older brother call to say how much they miss him. 

He encounters abusive fathers everywhere.

One friend ominously warns Clancy that someone is coming to kill him. .

His sister calls and begs him to come home, and he angrily hangs up.

He orders a pie online, but when it arrives, it is horribly decayed.

His mother visits, and we learn that she is dying of cancer.  She takes him through his whole life, from birth to death, and then he gives birth to her and goes through her life, from birth to death again.

I'm guessing that Clancy is dead, or else is so traumatized by abuse and his mom's imminent death that he has retreated to his room to play video games.  Clancy himself doesn't seem to know which it is.  

He passes the time by visiting various virtual worlds and interviewing the inhabitants for his "spacecast" (like a podcast, but beamed into space).  The dialogue consists primarily of the interviews, laconic late-night-talk-show discussions of conspiracy theories and wacko holistic healing techniques.  Meanwhile, on screen, Clancy and his friends are having bizarre, trippy adventures. 

For instance, he visits a world overrun by zombies, and must help the President of the U.S. escape from a besieged White House.  Meanwhile they discuss the merits of medicinal marijuana (for cancer patients, Clancy?). 

In a Medieval world, he helps a warrior re-animate her murdered boyfriend, and learns about forgiveness.  

In another episode, Clancy interviews Death  (he's not a ghost: his avatar is made of cream).  She talks about how the funeral industry makes us spend thousands of dollars to embalm our dead loved ones and make them look nice, when it is absolutely unnecessary: corpses are usually safe, and if you have the funeral within a few days, they won't decay enough to notice.  Death advocates washing and dressing your dead loved one at home, as a way of saying goodbye. 


Meanwhile, they travel across a weird Bosch-inspired landscape, fighting various monsters, including ghouls who jump out of mirrors. Death tells him that they are Regrets, and he can vanquish them by forgiving himself.  The Archangel Michael and a chubby demon join the team.

Watch with the sound turned off, and again with dialogue only, and you get two completely different shows.

I've never made it through an entire episode without fast-forwarding.  The interviews are bizarre, and we never get a sense that Clancy needs to hear them in order to move on.   We really don't learn much about what he wants or needs.

But we do learn something very important. Clancy experiences sexual desire -- he tries to visit a planet of orgies (and water slides) -- but he is not interested in women.  He never gets a girlfriend, or expresses an interest in getting one.  However, he does buddy bond with several of the male being he interviews, and all of the friends who call him are male.  

My verdict:  Clancy is gay.

See also: Adventure Time

3 comments:

  1. Given the amount of work to make Bubbline canon (Basically it only became possible when Adventure Time alumna Rebecca Sugar kinda forced CN International to let her have her gay wedding by making that same episode a major plot point.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. He’s actually in his forties,not a teenager

    ReplyDelete
  3. So why does he have a teenager's body? His spiritual essence, or maybe an alternate reality avatar?

    ReplyDelete

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