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The Midnight Gospel Review

The Midnight Gospel is a fantasy animated streaming series that premiered its first season on Netflix in 2020. It is a commendably inventive series that deserved more seasons.

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“Death opens your heart. It breaks your heart open.

Our hearts have been closed before we’ve closed them.

We’ve defended ourselves against pain“

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Set in a dimension known as the Chromatic Ribbon, a spacecaster named Clancy Gilroy owns an unlicensed multiverse simulator. Through it, he travels through bizarre worlds on the brink of disaster, interviewing some of their residents for his spacecast. This series was created by Pendleton Ward, a man behind ‘Adventure Time’. And you can really see the influence of that show on this one, at least visually speaking.

The animation done on this show is pretty psychedelic, gorgeously colorful and populated with characters that are interestingly designed and varied in their appearance. The score is also terrific and quite lively while the show’s editing, structure and overall atmosphere are all quite creative.

My issue with it lies in the voice acting, which is often too preachy and too much resembling a podcast. That was the point, but still for an animated series you really need to sense that the characters themselves are speaking and not the actors behind them. The podcast format was authentic, but too often in the first half in particular the tone that they employed was condescending and off-puttingly pretentious.

Taste of the King is one of the weaker episodes as it’s all about the pros and cons of drugs, which as a subject isn’t interesting to me in the slightest. It’s only the type of issue that artists concern themselves with. Officers and Wolves is another forgettable episode and this section of the season was the weakest one.

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Hunters Without a Home is typically obsessed with Buddhism as the primary spiritual target, which again showcased the pretentiousness of these artists and filmmakers. Blinded by My End is a pretty good episode about human connections and the importance of valuing them. Annihilation of Joy is also a pretty strong episode about self-awareness that is visually quite arresting.

Vulture with Honor is all about seeing things around you and how crucial it is to be aware of your surroundings. It’s a great message that is hugely important in today’s day and age of endless distractions. Turtles of the Eclipse is this very intriguing, dark exploration of death and how people cope with it and its aftermath. It also deals with the decomposing of bodies in a very interesting way.

But Mouse of Silver is undoubtedly the highlight of this entire season. A story about life, death and rebirth, it teaches us how we are so emotionally closed off from even thinking about death that when it finally happens to our closest ones, we for the first time become aware of it and start to appreciate our own lives even more. Experiencing death can be turned into a positive thing and I highly appreciated the series for striving away from nihilism when discussing these issues, which is often the case with today’s media.

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