Bizarre Subliminal Messages Buried In Popular TV Shows

Remember when television used to be a safe place? Back in the old days, we'd see the same crew of characters once a week, and all their problems would be resolved in 30 minutes. Nobody died, everybody did a group hug at the end, and a valuable lesson was learned. Nowadays, we're living in the Golden Age of Television, which means nobody's safe anymore. Storylines spread across 13 episodes or more, and favorite characters get their heads busted up with baseball bats. The TV revolution has also upped the ante with complex writing, stronger direction, and higher production values.

One of the weirdest storytelling tricks that your favorite TV shows now employ just as cleverly as the movies is subliminal messaging: the art of sneaking little clues, imagery, or hints right in the corner of your eye. Get ready to have your brain snapped around like a rubber band because once you know how ingeniously these shows have been messing with your head, you'll never trust TV again.

Even though The Simpsons has been on the air for a mind-boggling three decades, the denizens of Springfield still look really ... strange. The yellow skin and blue hair are weird enough, not to mention whatever bizarre cartoon magic is going on with Lisa's spiky head. On top of that, no one in all of Springfield has normal hands. They all have four fingers or, well, three fingers and a thumb. Why is this irregularity so consistent among everyone in the entire town?

To be fair, most cartoon characters in history have had four fingers. As the A.V. Club points out, it's just easier to animate, plus a lot of other reasons. However, in the strange, yellow-tinted world the Simpsons occupy, there's at least one powerful being who possesses supernatural hands loaded with an entire five fingers. That being, of course, is God. 

Yes, when God takes some time out of his schedule to hang out with Homer in the episode "Homer the Heretic," the divine creator has five-fingered hands (and five-toed feet), just like we do. It's a subtle detail, hard to catch if you're not looking for it. This clever subliminal message raises many questions, though. Is God the true animator of the Simpsons? Is he one of us, in the real world, and that's why he has our hands? Furthermore, if there's a God in our world ... does s/he have six fingers? Hmm.

Yep, that's right. In the Golden Age of Television, even a more conventional multi-camera sitcom like How I Met Your Mother isn't safe from the dark psychic powers of subliminal messaging.

How I Met Your Mother certainly didn't employ this esoteric black magic on a regular basis, but it did make clever use of subliminal tactics in the episode "Bad News." The episode plays games with potential reveals, making viewers wait for the end of the episode to find out what the titular bad news is. However, the most clever trick played by the show runners, as described in The Atlantic, is the placement of the number "50" in the background of the first scene, immediately followed by a "49." From that point on, the countdown begins, and every scene shows the next number placed in some subtle way. A character drinks a beer with a 48 on it. A book is titled 40. A calendar is turned to the 21st day of the month.

Any viewers who are sharp-eyed enough to have noticed the numbers know that the bad news is inching closer and closer, like the sort of awful root canal that you know you need to get, but you'll do anything to push off until a little later. Finally, at the end of the episode, the countdown reaches 1. The news is revealed, and — as expected — it's quite bad.

Centuries from now, when our big-headed, alien-hybrid descendants are sorting through the remnants of our society, trying to piece together clues about what kind of wackjobs we really were, a little show called Breaking Bad could be regarded as the Shakespearean epic of our time. Breaking Bad is basically the ultimate TV show. It does everything right. It's got character progression, fantastic writing, great acting, and, of course, subliminal messaging. Every item, scene, and moment in Breaking Bad is there for a reason, particularly when it comes to the show's use of color. 

Breaking Bad's color coding has been written about a lot, with major publications like Slate and Time both putting in their two cents. To briefly summarize, the colors that any character wears on the show will hint at what's going on in their head. When we first meet Walt, he's a mild-mannered creampuff who wears the mild, muted colors of a potato sack. When Walt becomes Heisenberg and starts getting drunk on power, his wardrobe switches to darker, stronger colors. But in Walt's moments of insecurity, such as when his cancer comes back, or when he's pushed into giving up his meth business, Walt immediately switches back to his milder khaki color scheme.

Walt isn't alone in this, though. Throughout the series, every character from Jesse to Skyler to Hank cycles through different colors to represent their emotional growths, struggles, and traumas. It's crazy stuff. Next time you rewatch the series, start keeping color tabs.

Even though the star of Netflix's Daredevil is a blind man, the series plays heavily with color-coded subliminal messaging. Though Daredevil's fight scenes are some of the most intense, realistic battles in superhero history, the best part of the show is when it delves into the psychological trauma that turned Matt into a costumed vigilante ... and the darkly similar path taken by Wilson Fisk, a driven intellectual with the temper tantrums of a child.

In the original comics, Fisk called himself the Kingpin and always wore luxurious white suits. But in Daredevil's first season, Fisk never uses this name, and he wears black instead. According to actor Vincent D'Onofrio in a Cinema Blend interview, the black outfits show that Fisk isn't Kingpin yet. He's just Fisk. Which, frankly, is terrifying enough. But pay attention, because Fisk's progression into Kingpin is shown through clever color coding: the more evil Fisk gets, the lighter he gets. Later, when Fisk's girlfriend, Vanessa, convinces him to go public, she also steers his fashion sense toward lighter gray suits. It's not until Fisk's final scene of the season, sitting in a prison cell, that he finally wears white.

This color coding plays a key role in Fisk's psychology. As a boy, Fisk's father forced him to stare at pale walls as a punishment. Thus, the color white symbolizes Fisk's rage. When he finally wears white, it means he has accepted the rage within him, which is bad news for a certain blind lawyer.

Let's reopen that box of crayons one more time for another examination of color-coding. The 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica took the human vs. robot concept from the original series, combined it with fascinating political debates, and then injected it with a sharp dose of political controversy. One of Battlestar's most popular characters is Gaius Baltar, a sleazy and egotistical genius. In the pilot episode, Baltar accidentally plays a major role in ending the world due to his sexual relationship with a Cylon sleeper agent, Number Six. 

Throughout the series, Baltar hallucinates — or does he? — a vision of Number Six. These hallucinations are so influential on him that he soon begins a sexual "relationship" with this ghostly Six. According to the book Finding Battlestar Galactica, this is where the subliminal color-coding comes in. Six almost always wears red, signifying lust and sexuality. But sometimes, she wears other colors, like blue or white. When she's wearing other colors, it signals that a change has occurred in the emotional relationship between Baltar and Six, and that Baltar's current storyline is about to rapidly shift gears.

Finding Battlestar Galactica further explains that the color red plays a major role in the series as a whole. A red glow is often used to light up a character's face when they're experiencing heavy emotional trauma. Intense mood shifts are often highlighted with red. So if you're watching Battlestar Galactica, and you see red, fasten your seatbelts.