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.
