Three friends trapped in a house of dread.
Lessons taught will fill their head.
One a duck, The other red.
And the last, the yellow guy, is
Dead.
Hello Internet.
Welcome to Film Theory, the show that knows that a family is just a group of people who
live together and have the same lawyer.
Ladies and gentlemen, it happened!
The new Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared TV series has finally hit the airwaves and it is GREAT!
To catch you up: Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared or DHMIS for short started as a series of
YouTube videos that took Sesame Street and Jigsaw and then made the two of them kiss.
The YouTube series followed three protagonists named Red Guy, Yellow Guy and Duck as they
went on adventures, learned important lessons about things like…
Or…
Then injected pure nightmare fuel into our eyeballs with imagery like this.
When the series concluded in 2016, most of us thought that it had entered the great YouTube
playlist in the sky, lost alongside Niga Higa and Jenna Marbles.
faded to occasionally pop up and recommended feeds from now until the heat death of the
universe.
Whenever the algorithms sense that we are starting to get nostalgic, or at least that's
the way it was supposed to go until Don't Hug Me did the Impossible and got a TV show.
Earlier this year, the creators managed to wrangle together a real six episode DHMIS
TV series on the British Channel 4.
And after watching it, I got to say, it nails the tone of those original YouTube videos,
all without feeling held back or tied down by them.
In fact, it's clear that while the esthetics look the same, the series has moved on.
The calendar that appears in every episode has moved from the original June 19th date
that it was stuck on to June 20th.
It's a turning of the page, a symbolic new leaf.
And whereas, the original series was all about the corruption of art and children's programing,
this new TV series seems to tell a more personal story about these characters because they
are actual, real characters now, no longer are they just symbols for kids or creators
or…ducks…I guess
These three now appear to have histories and LORE.
In fact, when you start piecing this puzzle together, the story of these three characters
is tragic.
They're a trio that's trapped inside of a repeating cycle built on one woman's guilt
and pain.
And if I'm right about this, at least one of these three characters is dead.
So, wakey wakey gang, it's theory time.
Just theory time.
You'll see.
For the first four episodes of the show, things proceed normally, or at least as normally
as they can for the world of DHMIS.
Our three characters start each day in some mundane way before eventually being joined
by the teacher of the week; an anthropomorphized object that's there to share some twisted
lessons about topics ranging from jobs to death to electricity.
Oh, sure, there's some weird bits mixed in there, like yellow guy's dad Roy viciously
ripping apart a creepy family or duck killing off his own doppelganger, but nothing that
out of the ordinary.
But then comes episode five, where we see the reality of the show starting to fray.
In this episode, our main characters are confronted by an old living train, basically the nursing
home equivalent of Thomas the Tank engine, Thomas the Hoveround engine?
Anyway, at one point the teacher turns into a car and then promptly dies.
So our heroic trio does the reasonable thing and hops into his rotting carcass to take
a road trip.
And it works.
Not only do they manage to drive past the desiccated remains, their original TV pilot.
They manage to drive so far that they break through what appears to be a simulation.
They leave their cartoonish world behind, only to end up in a realistic dystopian one.
Lost and confused.
They set up camp for the night as they sit around a fire contemplating their new world
and hoping that the “neighbors” will show up to help, a mysterious voice begins to echo
through the night.
Suddenly, Yellow guy sees something out of the corner of his eye, and we cut to black,
only to then watch as a mysterious hand rolls a model of their car up to a doll house, the
same house that we've been watching at the start of every episode.
Now this is important because earlier this very episode, the characters had already talked
about the episodic nature of content and how everything always winds up resorting to a
status quo.
And sure enough, when we rejoin them in episode six, the characters are reset right back to
where we started, none the wiser about their junkyard excursion the night before.
And that's when things start to really pick up.
At first, the season finale is all about electricity, our three friends get an electric bill and
they don't want to pay it because.
So of course their fuse box Electracy comes to life to teach them more about the wonders
of electricity and how it powers phones and televisions and radios.
And yes, even your shredder, when the lesson suddenly turns to portable sources of energy
like batteries, Yellow guy gives us the surprise revelation that he too is powered by batteries.
Which is a strange detail that we’ll come back to you.
Regardless, his current batteries are old, corroded and clearly out of juice.
So Duck switches them ou for Electracy’s.
Suddenly the once doofy Yellow guy is juiced up to the max and instead of being dimwitted,
his mind explodes with intelligence.
Equipped with this new awareness of the world around him, Yellow Guy becomes the first person
of the trio to realize that they're only on the bottom floor of what's a multi-story house.
Yellow guy climbs the stairs to discover the big boy room on the second floor.
Inside, he finds older versions of Red Guy and Duck that are able to learn not just one,
but two lessons in a given day.
Unimpressed.
He continues up to the third floor where he finds the more advanced, bigger boys room,
housng even smarter and more futuristic versions of Red Guy and Duck.
Eventually, he's turned off by their heartless and cruel experiments, things like electrocuting
an innocent lump of living flesh.
So for a final time, Yellow guy leaves the room and moves up another flight of steps.
At the top of the house things are extremely different.
Here, Yellow guy finds a door labeled Lesley, and we immediately get an answer as to what
that means on the other side.
It's made clear that this is the woman that we heard reciting the rhyme at the end of
episode five.
It was also her gloved hand that was resetting the dollhouse back to square one at the end
of the last episode.
But now the dollhouse is opened and we can see small figures of the trio inside recreating
the exact events that we're watching play out in this episode.
Yellow Guy is obviously full of questions, and Lesley promises to answer all of them,
provided he plays with the dolls.
She then produces a large leather bound book covered in a wacky looking code before sending
him back downstairs to his friends.
Right as he's about to read it, Duck and Red Guy rip the batteries out of his chest in
order to power the house.
Yellow guy forgets what the book was for in the first place and decides that it's something…
The season ends as the three friends cheer at the destruction of the book so close to
answers or even an escape, but instead trapped
inside their ceaseless prison once more.
Making matters worse, Yellow guy never realized that there was yet another level to the house
that he never got to.
It's an incredibly sad, surreal ending to the season, which leaves us on this unusual
cliffhanger.
Can Yellow Guy make the journey up the stairs again?
Based on the pictures that we see behind him, hanging on the wall as he goes up, we know
that he's made this journey before.
Hopefully there's a second season where he's able to do the whole thing again.
In the meantime, though, we're left with a lot of questions.
The first and foremost being who or what is Lesley?
She's the only human character that we meet throughout all of DHMIS, which in and of itself
is odd.
Her design is also noteworthy.
She's a bizarre mix of puppet and flesh.
She's clearly a human, but her coat makes her look like one giant muppet that's covered
in fur, and her face has been stitched and scarred like a creature that's been sewn together.
More importantly than her design, though, she acts like the puppeteer for this world.
She's the one that's turning the crank at the start of every episode.
She also appears to be controlling the actions of all the others through her miniature figurines.
And when one of the dolls breaks, she has a drawer full of replacements.
Well, I suspect that I know what's going on here.
And it all begins with one key line.
As Lesley sends Yellow Guy on his way, he asks whether he can stay on the top floor
with her.
She immediately rejects the idea by shouting: At first, this just seems like a random outburst,
a combination punch-line/jump-scare to keep us on our feet.
But I think that this is actually the key to understanding everything about this new
series.
Taking Lesley at her word here, Yellow Guy isn’t her real son, but he's close.
You see, I suspect that Yellow guy represents Lesley’s real son.
A real son named David, a son who died.
In episode two: death
we see the name David etched onto the grave where Duck gets buried.
Later, we see a large group of human mourners show up in the kitchen for David's funeral,
where they, again, mistake Duck for David.
So what would make me say that Yellow guy is David?
Well, take a look at what's stitched in Yellow guy's overalls.
On the front pocket.
There's the large letter D and at the foot of Yellow Guy's bed, the letter D again.
In episode three: Family, Yellow Guy is even given a special locket with the letter D engraved
on it.
Over and over again, Yellow guy and the letter D are connected, D for David.
But the connection between the two goes well beyond just a letter.
Going back to the death episode when our happy trio first show up at the cemetery, the coffin
assumes that yellow guy is the one who died.
And throughout the rest of the series we watch as both flies and worms are attracted to Yellow
Guy and no one else.
It's almost like he's a dead, decaying body.
Plus, there's a strange moment in the intro of episode five where Yellow Guy seems to
dissociate and remember something about his past.
He's clearly remembering a dream where he saw another version of himself, he's seeing
David.
The same thing happens again later that same episode when he looks out the car window.
He's connecting with a past iteration of himself, with David.
We're also explicitly told that David is not Duck's name.
We also know that Red Guy isn't dead based on his ID.
So by process of elimination, if one of these characters is representative of David, it
has to be Yellow guy.
This may also explain why Lesley says this to him when he first enters the room:
Sounds almost motherly, but this is far from the full story.
The tragic twist of the tale is that we know exactly what killed David, he died in a car
crash.
In episode five, When Red Guy tells the Yellow Guy that they're going to be part of a community.
Yellow Guy fantasizes about living in a new city named Mulhoven.
He imagines joining a neighborhood, befriending the people of the town.
Yellow Guy then moves into a new home where Red Guy is his neighbor and Duck is his pet.
Everything is great until a clergyman offers Yellow Guy a bird as a welcome present.
The bird flies away and Yellow Guy gives chase into the street.
From there, you can guess the rest.
Yellow Guy is hit by a car.
I suspect that that dream sequence may be more true to life than we initially expect.
Listen to the narrator of that little story.
It's Lesley's voice.
In fact, it's Leslie screaming for Yellow Guy to get out of the street.
And the reason she's screaming?
Because she's the one in the car.
Lesley killed her own son, David.
Duck: What did you say?
Yeah.
You heard me.
Lesley killed her own son in this accident.
Why do I say that?
Well, first of all, when we meet Leslie in episode six, her face is covered in stitches,
almost like she went through an awful accident herself.
Secondly, take a look at the license plate of the car that the gang drives throughout
this episode,
It spells Lesley.
And most importantly of all, we know that David wasn't the only person in the family
involved in a car crash that day.
At the end of episode three, as they're wrapping up what they learned about families.
Yellow Guy describes a family as a group…
Unless his father, Roy, also died in a car accident that same day, which seems pretty
unlikely.
I suspect that this line is meant to describe Lesley, who metaphorically died that day.
And you see, that gets to the core issue here.
That's why I think she's created these characters, this dollhouse, this world.
It's to escape from that trauma.
The sad truth of Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared is that it isn't the story of three wacky
puppets learning disturbing life lessons.
In reality, it's the story of a mother grieving over her dead son, a woman that is stuck in
a spiraling cycle of guilt, creating playthings that represent him so she can impart all the
lessons that she would have taught him if he had lived.
And she has dozens of back ups to ensure that she never loses him again, and for as much
as Yellow Guy reminds her of her lost son, he can never truly be the real David.
You're not my son!
“Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared”.
It's a weird name, right?
We've never really stopped to question it, have we?
It's always just kind of been there.
So.
Yeah, DHMIS, that's the name duh.
But really, think about those words.
“Don't hug me, I'm scared”.
It's a reference to someone so damaged, so hurt that they're afraid of something like
a hug.
They're scared of affection, of love, of opening themselves up to someone else.
That right there, that's Lesley.
Afraid to love again because she's afraid of being hurt again.
But I suspect that in order to move forward, to get to that final level of the House, that's
exactly what needs to happen.
A hug, Lesley, to forgive herself and Yellow Guy to give her a hug then and only then will
both of them be able to transcend, to move past their stagnant lives inside that house
and climb to the final level to finally be free.
But hey, that's just a theory, a film theory.
And cut.