Moral Orel/Nightmare Fuel

Don't let the title fool you...there's definitely disturbing stuff in Moral Orel. Lots of disturbing stuff. Let's just put it this way: after "Nature", Adult Swim asked Dino to make Season 3 as dark as possible -- darker than anything Adult Swim had ever aired before...

Spoilers below.

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• In the episode "Grounded", as a result of having his friends do a bloodletting, Orel is banned from going to church for a month. Afraid of damnation because he is not going to church, Orel slowly begins to go insane. By the end of the first week, Orel to turn his room into a Room Full of Crazy, drawing a church on the wall, along with numerous Bible verses. In week two, he constructs a cardboard church whilst muttering "Church church churchy church, which is then taken away. On the second Sunday, Orel finally has a mental breakdown, wearing the remains of the cardboard church, and believing that he is a church. When his friend points out that there's no cross on the cardboard steeple, he finally steals a cross from a store sign on the roof, and is struck by a bolt of lightning (as it was very cloudy). After becoming convinced that God is trying to kill Orel because He misses him, Orel becomes suicidal, trying to electricute himself and having near death experiences. In his third NDE, Orel sees himself praying (which consists of the backmasked phrase "I am a church", before seeing a Mind Screw montage relating to himself and church. as seen here. It's also filled with some beautiful symbolism that ties in very neatly to Orel's gnostic revelation. The episode concludes by him promising to his dad that he'll never attempt suicide again, and then leads to the events of the horrific Nature two-part episode.
  • Add some Fridge Horror to that: Orel's "I am a church" vision was an epiphany that Faith is a personal relationship between the self and God, and his father beat that enlightenment out of his son's memory out of pure spite.
• Bloberta mutilating herself in "Numb" to seduce a doctor with a gore fetish. There's no visible gore, but you hear it. She puts power tools in her vagina and leaves them running. For entire days.
• "Alone", the first episode after the "darkening" of the show. When network execs were treated to a screening it, they were so disturbed that they canceled the entire series and cut the size of the third season in half practically on the spot.
• Clay's rant in "Nature". As he goes through his rant, the camera is slowly zooming in on his face, and his voice is getting raspier and louder until his face takes up the entire screen and he's doing nothing but drunkenly moaning and screaming.

Clay: You sit there for the rest of your life, with no-where to go... and no-one to beeeee! AAAAHHHH!!! AAAAHHHH!!!

• • The rant, in all its horrible glory.
• Clay's visions in "Nesting" are unsettling, to say the least. And a bit too Freudian.