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The Midnight Gospel. Man, what a trip! Who would know that Pen Ward’s new project inspired of listening Duncan Trussell’s Family Hour podcast with Jesse Moynihan while working on Adventure Time (whew! Sorry!) could be one of the deepest shows of 2020? Only eight episodes of wacky backgrounds and profound subjects of Clancy interviewing random chosen people for his spacecast.

The art of the show brings us back to two Adventure Time episodes storyboarded by Ward himself: S5 Bad Timing and S8 Imaginary Resources from Islands miniseries. The first one is LSP finding and losing love while several creatures wander around the camera; the second is BMO inside a VR MMORPG where they are popular and different from who they are. I can say both are kind of ancestors of the show that has a unique idea: an animated podcast! No one had done this before.

The plot is simple: Clancy, a guy living in a trailer, goes into different worlds through a World Simulator and interviews different people about things that could be simple or quite deep. Could be about love, death, meditation, the souls or whatever. The concept is hard to digest at first, at least it took me two episodes to catch on with. But once you balanced your ears in the topic and your eyes in the action on screen, it’s a quite enjoyable trip.

It is very stoner, yeah, with psychedellic characters and universes, but also cute backgrounds like the Kitten Ship. It has such beatiful music too. I want a Midnight Gospel album, Netflix! The best episodes to me were Trudy (Paulie Shore is the bad guy!), the one of the green oil about meditation that cuts the interview aspect for a “normal” episode where Clancy has to fix his simulator, and the penultimate with a nice chat with Death about death.

But boy, the last episode. It rips your heart and jumps on it many times! It’s very emotional and very sad and I’m not gonna tell you because you got to experience it.

The Midnight Gospel offers us a time for reflexion about different subjects and have a good time with the action happening behind from zombie apocalypse or sailing to riding an elevator with the Devil making out with a sax guy. It’s worth the trip.