The internet is a vast web of hearsay, conspiracy, and uninformed conjecture, and The A.V. Club is here to make it even more complicated with our new eight-part audio series, A.V. Club: I Know It Sounds Crazy. Hosted by Erik Adams (the skeptic) and Sean O’Neal (the believer), in each episode The A.V. Club’s own Scully and Mulder investigate pop-culture fan theories from the slightly plausible to the utterly ridiculous.
In the inaugural episode, Just A Figment Of Your Imagination, Sean and Erik delve into one of the most common types of fan theories: That a character in a movie, or even an entire movie, exists entirely inside another character’s head. So what has Fight Club, the movie credited with popularizing this type of theory, wrought? Well, in this episode, the idea that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is actually the lonely daydream of a bedridden teen, that The Big Lebowski’s Donny is a hallucination brought on by Walter’s PTSD, and of course much more.
I Know It Sounds Crazy is being distributed by Howl, the official service from Earwolf/Wolfpop. To hear all eight episodes—including discussions of Star Wars, Toy Story, Disney movies in general, interconnected universes, dying hallucinations, heroes and villains, and Jesus Christ himself—sign up for an account on the Howl website, go to checkout, and enter the code “AVClub” for a free month.