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Common Side Effects Took a Different Kind of Mushroom Trip
The co-creators of the animated series looked beyond common psychedelic tropes to imagine a world that’s “neither good nor evil; it’s just there.”
The outsider ideologies of mycologist Paul Stamets and ethnobotanists Richard Evan Schultes, Wade Davis, and Terence McKenna informed protagonist Marshall Cuso’s (voiced by Dave King) approach to the natural world and the healing mushroom he finds growing in toxic runoff in Peru. And the tension of thrillers like Michael Clayton and The Fugitive, the pacing of The Big Lebowski, and interviews with retired DEA agents shaped Marshall’s quest and the FBI assault on his forest compound in the season finale, “Raid.” But in the episode’s final minutes, after connecting in the psychedelic “portal world” where people who ingest the fungi mentally go, Marshall and his high-school lab partner, Frances Applewhite (voiced by Emily Pendergast), agree that the mushroom should be free to those who need it.
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