Despite ostensibly being a family-friendly show aimed at Christian families, from its debut in 1987 Adventures in Odyssey has repeatedly proven that it is not afraid to occasionally delve into Darker and Edgier plots that deal with serious and often outright frightening elements. If an episode opens with Chris or a show crew member telling the viewer to bring their parents in to listen with them before the start of an episode, chances are very good that you're in for a heck of a ride:
The Radio Show
- The grim discovery that sets the plot of "The Case of the Secret Room" in motion: While Whit is working on an invention in the basement of Whit's End and conversing with Tom Riley and Tom's young great-niece Jami, Jami stumbles upon a secret room while trying to find a part Whit dropped, and on the other side Whit and Tom find the skeletal remains of a man with a bullet hole in his shirt, and Tom just barely keeps Jami from seeing the corpse as well. Until then, the man, named Spencer Barfield, had been down there for more than 40 years, all without the knowledge of Whit nor anybody else except the people who shot him and put him there, and the whole time it had been assumed that he had been an accessory to a bank robbery. For a time, the album that featured this two-part episode even used artwork showing the looks of horror on Whit and Tom's faces as they enter the room and see Barfield's body
◊ (which is thankfully off-screen). - The Downer Ending of "The Battle", which ends with Lucy severely injured after Blackgaard sends a power surge through the Imagination Station and causes a huge explosion, sending the plot headlong into its Darkest Hour as a devastated Whit begins contemplating closing Whit's End down.
- "The Mortal Coil", where Eugene experiences what Hell would be like for him.
- Dr Blackgaard has more than a few of these, but his resurrection in "Blackgaard's Revenge" is particularly horrific. Abraham Lincoln going on a killing spree. And he was about to kill a little girl before Whit intervened.
- In "A Name, Not A Number, Part 2", Blackgaard has the driver of a car commit murder-suicide to get rid of Mustafa, the leader of a terrorist group with whom Blackgaard was previously associated.
- The Marquis of Matrimony from "The Marriage Feast" (an adaption of the story in the Book of Matthew). Unlike the Duke of Terra and the Countess of Bovine, he is against the emissaries right from the start, and then orders them to be tortured; which leads to the actual death of one of the said emissaries.
- The disguised voice in "The Search for Whit, Part 2", that gives a lackey named Benjamin instructions. It comes completely out of nowhere, and it's a rather unnerving sound.
- An early, skit-based episode "The Devil Made Me Do It"'s final act is a demon awards show where the final nominee is Satan for tempting Jesus in the desert. However, the show goes horribly awry when, of course, Jesus resists the temptation and quotes scripture at him. Not only is the voice for Satan absolutely monstrous, but the awards show dissolves in panic down to a "Technical Difficulties" jingle glitching out into silence and the episode just ends.
- Episode 438's B-story is a "parable" about how two men end up in Hell despite taking completely different paths in life. On Kid's Radio, in-universe!
- In "Plan B, Part II", Bennett Charles takes Arthur Dent captive and subjects him to "another 'experiment'". The audience is never told what exactly Dent was subjected to, but Joanne later remarks that he looks like someone who's been through shock therapy, and Charles menacingly tells Dent that he's going to help them "whether [he] want[s] to or not".
- The Novacom Saga:
- "The Black Veil", a dark chapter in the Novacom Saga where a new satellite system is causing an inexplicable Hate Plague with several characters becoming strangely irritable and violent. Oh, and this is just an opening stage of the villain's Evil Scheme, and things get worse. The icing on the cake for this episode has to be the scene where Whit decides to see for himself exactly what alteration Novacom made to the Imagination Station's operation and implements the changes onto it. He has Connie and Eugene stand by just in case anything goes wrong...which things happen to go horribly wrong mere seconds after starting the Station. He then crawls out practically clawing for his dear life talking about how he was portrayed as all of the worst monsters in history, like Cain, Pharaoh, Stalin, and Hitler. No, not witnessing them, being filled in their roles. You know, for kids!
- The scene in the episode "The Unraveling" where Rachel Mitchell plays the answering machine message of Justine Baker, a friend of Robert Mitchell who worked at Novacom, as she ends up followed by a Novacom agent due to her knowing too much about Novacom's schemes and ultimately run off the road.
- Near the end of "The Imagination Station, Revisited", when Kelly is trying to leave a malfunctioning Imagination Station and desperately trying not to see the crucifixion of Jesus.
- In the blood drive episode, Whit explains why he's afraid of getting his blood drawn: he lost a lot of blood in the war and woke up to find a nurse mistakenly taking more blood from him.
- Olivia's hallucination of Leonid Zepanov during the "One of Three Will Fall" arc starts off as another humorous imaginary friend in the same vein as episodes with Lawrence Hodges and Trent Dewhite before her. But as the arc goes on and Olivia plunges further into doubt, Leonid stops being funny and starts being mean. The doubts he sows push her further away from her friends and family. This all culminates in "The Lost One" two-parter. Once Olivia hits her lowest point and feels completely and utterly alone, Leonid's voice transitions from a Russian philosopher to a voice that sounds downright demonic. If not for Whit's intervention, things could have ended very badly.
The Animated Series
- "A Twist In Time" features Dylan and Sal entering the (not yet unveiled) Room of Consequences and being shown a very grim future where they have been missing for decades and Whit and their families exhausted themselves (physically and financially) trying to find the boys, and as a result, Whit is implied to have passed away penniless and in very poor health, Whit's End is in shambles, and an elderly and nearly senile Eugene is trying to keep the place standing. At least it was just a simulation and isn't the actual future of Whit's End and the people involved with it, but still, Dylan and Sal were lucky to get through that without being traumatized in some way.
