29 Disturbingly Dark Episodes Of Kid’s Shows You Won’t Believe Actually Aired

19. Teen Titans experienced an apocalypse

Teen Titans (the original, not GO!) dealt with a lot of dark themes – racism and hatred, PTSD, the friggin’ apocalypse – but as a kid, the darkest episode was the one where Starfire is sent forward in time by Warp. The future is literally a bleak, depressing, gray city. If it were any more hopeless, it would be a smoking ruin. Starfire finds that all of her friends have kinda horrible lives. Cyborg is run-down, obsolete, and trapped in the tower (think a laptop with a horrible battery that dies if it’s unplugged for more than a few minutes). Beast Boy is fat, bald, and ostracized by society to the point where he willingly traps himself in a freak show cage. Raven literally goes insane. Robin is now Nightwing, and while his life is better than his former friends’, it still blows. He continues to fight crime, but is clearly completely alone. Earlier in the series, Robin states that the main difference between him and Slade (Deathstroke) is his friends, so Robin has become a vigilante version of what he hates. Aside from the deus ex machina at the end, the entire episode just feels hopeless and cold. As a little kid, that has horrifying.

Of course, as an adult, I’d have to say that the real darkest episodes are a toss-up between the one where Robin’s inner demons almost kill him and the ones where Raven’s dad literally destroys the world and only plot armor saves the day in the last three minutes of the last episode in the arc.

20. Tommy fell ill and had hallucinations

Rugrats when Tommy got super sick. Angelica had to share a room with him and ends up opening a window. He gets sick, they mention a fever, and he sees the nights events in weird ways like everyone is planets and stars and shit. In the morning he’s back to normal, and you notice all the adults are sleeping in the same room. So this baby got so sick that not only did all the adults feel like need to sleep in that room but he HALLUCINATED all night. And they didn’t even keep Angelica away from him to prevent her catching it too.

Also another Rugrats where Tommy and Chuckie go adventuring on the package belts at a post office. Parents aren’t paying attention, they almost fall in a pit that already contains a skeleton in a mailman uniform.

Holly is the author of Severe(d): A Creepy Poetry Collection.

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