The never-seen but often-mentioned tortures that Civvie is put through for refusing to comply. Combined with his attitude, it's easy to figure he's just stopped caring. Every so often, those things cause a brief breakdown, but the fact that his first onscreen reaction to being told to report to a flaying chamber is to "Just lay the tarp down in here" speaks volumes of how emotionally numb he's become.
The series in it of itself thanks to the background lore going on with Civvie's Uncle Frank. It first started out as a small gag for the series before it hints at something ominous with the shogo episode, which later culminated with the MDK episode's ending...
What makes this worse is... Civvie doesn't really care. The world is under threat by horrific forces and Civvie just doesn't care about it. And even then, he's just a regular inmate.
Civvie outright states that the map "Hunted" in The Plutonia Experiment gave him nightmares as a child, and then treats us to a virtual re-enactment of said nightmares. He's walking through the maze, spots an Archvile, then turns around to find his path blocked. When he turns back toward the Archvile, it's much closer to him and prepares its fire attack; within the flames can be seen horrifying visions of hellish torture (along with the Angel of Death from Raiders of the Lost Ark), before the Archvile finally casts the attack and kills him.
The Hellraiser episode sees Pinhead take control of Civvie's workstation, and shove a hook through the poor guy's hand. The act alone is freakish enough, but what's worse is Civvie's reaction to it: taunting Pinhead's "vanilla" ways and considering it a break. It says so much about the shit Civvie's been through that a hook spearing through his hand barely registers to him.
Civvie himself states that the "gas mask horse" (officially called the Semik) from HROT is this for him. When he eventually reviews the game's first episode, he lets the viewer in on the nightmares.
Civvie seeing Duke's model in the leaked 2001 build of Duke Nukem Forevernote Which was fixed in later versions of the community restoration, it looks like it's gonna lead into the usual "NICE FUCKING MODEL" gag... only for Deadlite Ash, out of nowhere, to hijack the gag, music and all, roaring and saying "join us!" Quite the Jump Scare to start the video.
The way Civvie builds up to the ending of Scratches. After going back into the basement for the final time, and enters a closed off room, he points out two items of note: a pile of raw meat, and a torn up teddy bear. He then proceeds to ask the audience some questions:
Civvie: Did you ever consider that no one was really murdered in the traditional sense of the word? That maybe that haunted mask stuff was bullshit? I dunno.Let's ask Robin.
Although he isn't a fan of the "Last Visit" DLC due to how it over-explains everything, it forces him to talk about one particular plot point that even he states is too dark for this channel: the fact that Robin turned out to have been a Thalidomide babynote a victim of severe birth defects brought about from Thalidomide use from expectant mothers, back when it was pushed as a cure for morning sickness.
While its mostly played for laughs, its a little unnerving that in the world Civvie lives in, there's a virus that causes those infected to turn into Steve Blum. And apparently, Civvie isn't the only one in the DSC who's been infected by it.
Just a reminder, the facility that Civvie is held in has routinely visited upon him horrendous tortures so heinous that they should cause every copy of the Geneva Convention regulations on the planet suddenly burst into flames. But this is the one that can be considered "Desolation". This one is the extra special awful one. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The fact that Civvie was willing to detonate a nuclear warhead just to facilitate his escape makes you wonder if he actually does deserve to be there after all.
The Cryostasis video is actually pretty normal, suggesting that whatever the Clown Room was, Civvie didn't really have too much a problem with it. But as the video goes on, things start to seem...off. For one thing, Civvie seems to be cut off from Katie. More concerningly, AX3 doesn't punish him for making bad puns. At one point, Civvie, seeming more unnerved than he's ever been on the show, makes a string of increasingly bad puns in an attempt to get a reaction, but there's nothing. Towards the end of the video, he clearly starts dipping into Sanity Slippage from how deprived he is from everything, with some of the editing reflecting his mental state. When H4MMER told Civvie that he'll find only "desolation" in the Clown Room, it's clear he meant it.
The NecroVision review takes place in a pod in the arctic, and Civvie's usual punishments have been switched to making the door open up so the creatures outside can attack. The first time, all we see is a big white hand grabbing the door frame before a Smash to Black. The second time, we see a silly-looking smiling head on a long neck... that rises up to reveal it's attached to some kind of red blob with a live-action blinking eye in it.
