So Weird Was SO GOOD!

Ned has one of the worst moments of his life and still manages to spend it loving the kids. Fi saunters into the underworld without a second thought. Clu milks a cow.
Chelsea shares her cancer-survivor perspective on Gabe. Hannah desperately hopes Patrick Levis didn't experience too much Satanic Panic backlash for his involvement in this show.
This entire episode is full of people loving and protecting each other, and it gives us warm fuzzies.

Quick question: did we all have fantasies about being able to astral project when we were kids, and did those fantasies evaporate once we all got our drivers' licenses? Asking for a friend!
Astral projection acts as an allegory for escapism from the stresses of life in this episode. Capitalism sucks, the 90's treatment of "gifted children" was highly misguided, and it turns out humans need enough free time to experience boredom in order to live up to their full potential. Sometimes that full potential is creating podcasts about 90s children's sci-fi, and THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.

PUPPY!!!!!!
And by "puppy" we do mean "Bigfoot." Join us for the "feel good episode" in which Fi literally finds the corpse of a Civil War soldier.
Themes include giving your life for someone else, self-awareness, compassion for outgroups, communication, Colonialism, ecological preservation, intent versus impact, respecting autonomy, and bringing families together.
Tangents include Desperate Housewives, Tarzan, and gawking at how incredible the creators of this show were (as always).

What if you can't trust your own mind or memories? What if you don't have the resources you need to stay alive? What if you are under the control of people who are not in their right mind and they make poor decisions that put you at risk? Each of the characters respond to this situation wildly differently, and deciding who is right and who is wrong is not straightforward.
Drugs? Mental illness? Alzheimer's? Caregiver neglect? Lack of resources? Somehow this episode about aliens is relevant to all of these things, and therefore one of the most relatable stories ever set to film. One trip to IMDB later we are pretty sure this was intentional. Yet again, this show had the best team imaginable and they created magic.

This week we talk about plots that got scrapped on the writing room floor (thanks to the other So Weird podcast that did ALL the research and archiving to keep this show alive during the dark years), Molly's (and Mackenzie's) triumph over addiction, the season 3 that could have been, the pure brilliance of the theme song, Henry Winkler's contributions to Millennial culture, and that's all before we even start talking about the episode at hand.
In this episode: phenomenal rapport between the characters, intense turning points for technology in 1999, the importance of communication (which is probably going to come up a lot in this series), WEAR YOUR SEATBELT AND DON'T CLICK ON MYSTERIOUS EMAIL ATTACHMENTS.
Go check out the original So Weird podcast.
Go watch What Dreams May Come.
After listening to this episode go listen to the full version of In The Darkness again.