Series / Dimension 404

Uncle Dusty (Patton Oswalt) watching a film...in Dimension 404.

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Dimension 404 is an anthology series streaming on Hulu, created by Dez Dolly and Will Campos, co-created by Dan Johnson and David Welch, produced by RocketJump and Lionsgate Television, and narrated by Mark Hamill. Each episode is a different story with a twist (like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Black Mirror).

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Tropes about the entire show:

• Arc Number: 404 naturally. It shows up somewhere in the beginning of each episode.
• Arc Symbol: To a lesser extent to the above, a throbber also may show up on any digital screen 404 appears on.
• Genre Anthology: Each episode is a self-contained story. There are allusions to other episodes, but they may or may not take place in the same universe. Either way they're not directly connected. Possibly the American answer to Black Mirror.
• Interface Screw: Episodes are done in order to take advantage of the fact that it was meant to be streamed, leading to intentional loading/buffering signs, ads, and references to it being streamed.
• Shout-Out: The opening is pretty blatantly a streaming version of the introduction to The Outer Limits.

MatchMaker

"A finicky music blogger finally meets the girl of his dreams through the cutting-edge online dating site Make-A-Match, but their chemistry seems too good to be true."

Tropes related to Match Maker

• An Aesop: A relationship, even one that seems perfect, shouldn't define your life.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Given just how many rejected partners are seen in Make-A-Match, it seems like nobody actually likes the partner they wind up with. Creating somebody who is completely devoted to you makes them come across as clingy and obsessive, and loading them with your own favorite hobbies and interests winds up with you being bored and fed up.
• Celebrity Paradox: It's mentioned in her final video that Rachel specifically asked for Adam to look like Robert Buckley, his actor.
• Did Not Get the Girl: The entire episode is basically about how Adam has to figure out how to live without Amanda since he was specifically created to love her.
• Exact Words: Make-A-Match literally makes your perfect match.
• False Friend: Adam's friend Greg turns out to be an agent of Make-A-Match, essentially his handler when he's "in the field". Subverted at the end, where he helps Adam escape, having grown to genuinely care for him.
• Faux Affably Evil: Mr Maker. He's pleasant and fatherly to Adam, while trying to convince him to kill himself and be made into goo. At the end the mask slips completely, with his final words being to gloatingly tell the clones that they'll never get to be with the people they were made to love.
• Freudian Excuse: Mr Maker started all of this over his grief for his lost wife, obsessively creating a world where nobody has to be alone.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Mr Maker is killed with his own bio mass recycling chamber when the clones rebel.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Running Gag ads for Make-A-Match are made to look like the Real Life ads that typically interrupt Hulu videos, complete with the ad timer in the corner.
• Loophole Abuse: It's illegal to kill a clone without their permission. As such, Make-A-Match keeps them in cold, terrible conditions with boring jobs and constant emotional distress. Most eventually give their permission.
• The Matchmaker: What Make-a-Match is supposed to be, although what it really does is specifically clone a person with all the traits that a user wants. And if that clone doesn't work out, well, there's plenty more clones to go around.
• "Pop!" Goes the Human: The bio mass recycling chamber is censored in the training video as dissolving the body in sparkles. In reality it essentially bursts the body and collects the slurry.
• Red Herring: When Adam lists his features in a perfect woman, he meets Amanda, who fits them exactly. The implication is that she's somehow based on those traits. In truth, he has those preferences because she made him.
• Running Gag: The video of a couple in love that met through Make-A-Match. As the episode goes on, the woman gets noticeably uncomfortable about how clingy her partner is. Then the ad changes when she switches to a new clone, but she likes that one even less. The final ad is interrupted by the clone revolt.
• Something Only They Would Say: When Adam replaces Adam 6 to start dating Amanda again, he almost pulls it off, until he says "absoutivily", a mistake he's made several times before. Becky gets suspicious, and asks him what his model number is, revealing the ruse.
• What Measure Is A Nonhuman: Clones at the very least can't be killed against their will but are also treated as property of the companies that create them. They're given the choice of employment that's barely above slavery or euthanizing themselves to have their bio mass recycled.

Cinethrax

"A snooty cinema purist struggles to convince his fellow film-goers that the 3D movie they're watching is summoning forth a brain-sucking interdimensional monster only he can see."

Tropes related to Cinethrax

• Apocalypse Wow: The episode ends with an invasion by giant tentacled creatures. The Earth is pretty much doomed.
• The Assimilator: Cinethrax, a seemingly alien creature who can possess people through movies.
• The Bad Guy Wins: In the end, Cinethrax has began its invasion of earth, and seems to be winning. Unable to fight against his own niece, Dusty willingly agrees to be assimilated, and the movie ends with him joining the hive as the world outside burns.
• Be Yourself: Discussed. Dusty wants Chloe to "stay weird" but, as she points out, this amounts to wanting her to be like him. He recognises this after he ruined her movie night and, when he thinks he's about to die, texts her that no-one should tell her who she should be. Especially not him.
• Bittersweet Ending: The world is coming to an end, but Uncle Dusty doesn't have to experience it. Instead, he can have his mind be absorbed by Cinethrax like his niece and live connected to everyone else. The episode ends with Uncle Dusty putting on his Cinethrax glasses as the entire theater sings his niece's favorite song.
• Cliché Storm: The Chosen 3, the in-universe movie that Dusty and Chloe are watching, is a ridiculous mass of generic fantasy cliches, with every third word out of the protagonists lips being about how she's The Chosen One and every other scene being hackneyed plot development.
• Eldritch Abomination: Cinethrax is some tentacled horror from another dimension, physically assaulting the world while it assimilates the minds of its people through a new 3D movie format.
• Failed a Spot Check: Neither Dusty nor Chloe notice a full on Alien Invasion happening outside the cinema.
• Foreshadowing: Uncle Dusty is wearing a They Live! t-shirt, which foreshadows how his "Shifter" glasses make him the only one able to see the monster in the movie theater.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: Two examples that work inverse to each other. Dusty's shifter glasses nullify any special visual effects while allowing him to see Cinethrax but apparently protecting him from assimilation. The cinethrax glasses, on the other hand, only allow people to see the special 3D effects as Cinethrax invisibly assimilates their minds.
• Hive Mind: The people assimilated by Cinethrax are connected and on more than one occasion they're all staggered when one of them gets injured.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: The failed version. When Chloe gets possessed, Dusty tries to snap her out of it. She fails and, in the end, he agrees to join the hivemind instead.
• Older Hero vs. Younger Villain: All the primary members of the hive mind that we see are in their early 20s, in contrast to Dusty's late middle age, and explicitly frame their attack as a new development Dusty is too behind the times to accept. In the end, even Chloe ends up joining them.
• Nostalgia Filter: Dusty spends most of the episode talking down to modern movies and technology, while talking up how good older films are.
• "Not So Different" Remark: After Dusty sees the creature and tries to warn people about it, the staff at the movie theater point out to Dusty that people ran in terror from the first movie because they thought the images were real. They explain that he is just panicking the same way over the new 4D system, and it is no different from the people a hundred years ago who thought they were going to be run over by a train.
• New Media Are Evil: Cinethrax, the new "4D" system, is being used by some sort of alien creature to take over the viewing audience.
• Transformation of the Possessed: Those assimilated by Cinethrax are capable of assuming Blank White Eyes and black Tainted Veins. They can also project Cinethrax's tentacles through their mouth.
• You Are Too Late: Dusty kills Zach as he assimilates Chloe...but, to his horror, he realises that she's already part of the mind.
• You Are Worth Hell: A familial one. When Chloe is assimilated into the Cinethrax hivemind, Dusty resigns himself to being assimilated too rather then abandon her.

Chronos

"A hopelessly nostalgic physics student fights to prove her sanity when no one on Earth can remember her favorite 90's cartoon show."

Tropes related to Chronos

• An Aesop: You are better than you think you are and should put in the effort into realizing that instead of waiting for greatness to just fall into your lap. Also, clinging to nostalgia can hold you back — the past shouldn't keep you from the future.
• Ascended Fanboy: Exploited. Entropy uses Sue's desperate desire to live out her favorite TV show to make her forget about her essay, preventing her from ever inventing time travel.
• A True Story in My Universe: Time Ryder and the Chrononauts is apparently just a straight telling of future events made by time travelers.
• Bittersweet Ending: Sue sadly has to erase her own memory of the show she loved to erase a paradox she created, thus erasing it from history, but that's not it. She still is hinted to discover time travel and there's a still chance the federation and the show will come back.
• Boring, but Practical: Entropy muses that after all of the complicated schemes with doomsday devices and robot armies, his best plan to destroy Time Ryder was simply to get the inventor of time travel to drop out of university before she invents it.
• Brick Joke: In the beginning of the episode, Sue says that if time travel is ever invented, she will put her finished term paper in a drawer, but when she looks, it's empty. At the end of the episode, she looks in the drawer at that moment to find a note from her other self telling her to write the paper herself.
• Edutainment Show: Time Ryder specifically refers to his show as "Edutainment", and it contains important messages on finishing your homework. Every episode closes with him telling the Chrono-Teens how special they are, and how their minds are better than all the time travel technology there could be.
• Evil Smells Bad: Entropy smells awful, and at several points his presence is noted by a sudden foul odor. He even brags about it while fighting Time Ryder.
• Hope Spot: Near the end, Alex almost pulls the fire alarm, which would give Sue time to finish her paper. Then Entropy grabs him and teleports him away, erasing Ryder from history.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The Time Ryder's "memoraser" is a very thorough example. It can not only erase specific memories, but also physical evidence as well as any information on a networked source like the internet.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Entropy seems like a literal 80s cartoon villain who is quickly and easily defeated in the first 20 minutes of the show. He's putting it on. All of his cheesy villainy is a distraction from his real plan to erase the time federation from history, which succeeds completely.
• Obviously Evil: Entropy is a cackling skeleton in a black cloak called Entropy seeking to bring about a Bad Future.
• Once More, with Clarity: During the opening, we see various weird phenomena occurring — bins falling over, odd smells, creaking. These are invisible time travellers — when we see their perspective, we can figure out what's going on.
• Only Sane Man: Alex spends the entire episode utterly baffled about the fact 80s cartoon characters are real, which Sue takes in her stride.
• Reset Button: By erasing her memories of Time Ryder, Sue basically resets the timeline, meaning that she can now write her paper without interference...and go on to invent time travel.
• Ret-Gone: Happens to the Time Ryder and the time-travel facility, as well as the Time Ryder cartoon and all related memorialize by the end of the episode, once their future is erased.
• Ridiculously Successful Future Self: In the present, Sue is a student close to dropping out. In the future she invented time travel and runs the time police! Preventing her from achieving this future is Entropy's main goal.
• San Dimas Time: Becomes a significant factor towards the end of the episode. Because of this, even though Sue is in the 90's, she's in a literal race against time to finish her paper before deadline, as time is still passing in the present.
• Sophisticated as Hell: It turns out that Time Ryder is this. He says that he comes from a future that is perfect...but Entropy comes from a future that "sucks."
• Stable Time Loop: The Time Ryder cartoon from the 90's inspired countless children and thus contributed to a utopian future and the creation of a real time machine and a real Time Ryder. However, it is later revealed that the cartoon itself was created by time-travelers from the future, including the real Time Ryder, to inspire the creation of their own future.
  • Related to the above. Sue is revealed to be the inventor of time-travel. However, Sue was largely inspired to create time-travel because of her lifelong obsession with the Time Ryder cartoons - which will only exist if she invents time-travel! Although the ending suggests that even in a timeline where the Time Ryder cartoon never existed, Sue will end up inventing time-travel.
• Show Within a Show: Time Ryder and the Chrono-Teens. Sue describes it as like Captain Planet but better.
• Time Travel: The premise of the episode. It turns out Sue was the one who invented time travel and is the "Mother of Time."

Polybius

"A young arcade junkie attempts to master POLYBIUS, a sinister new game of unknown origin that induces nightmarish visions, but when kids start dying, he must beat the game to unlock its deadly secrets."

Tropes related to Polybius

• All Myths Are True: Andrew knows an obscure myth about a fallen angel who was cast out for stealing credit from god, and now marks people for death when they consume the art it creates. This turns out to be basically 100% correct.
• Beast in the Maze: The gameplay of Polybius involves racking up points by avoiding a monster in an endless maze. The games only gets faster as it goes on, seemingly being unwinnable.
• Bully Brutality: The Jerk Jocks aren't just cruel or violent, they're strongly implied to reguarly sexually assault, if not outright rape, their victims.
• Claimed by the Supernatural: Whoever plays Polybius is marked by a brand of its logo somewhere on their body.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Andrew manages to beat Polybius by inducing a killscreen, breaking both the game and it.
• Disney Death: Amy is killed by having her soul torn out by Polybius. When it's defeated, her soul is returned and she revives from the dead, seemingly none the worse for wear.
• Fallen Angel: According to the lore Andrew managed to uncover, Polybius was once an angelic muse that inspired great creative works. Growing jealous that only God got the credit for this, it tried to inspire people to pay tribute to it instead, which got it cast into Hell to wander forever.
• The Game Plays You: Polybius entices players to play, who are then marked for death. At the climax it brings the labyrinth of the game to life inside the arcade.
• Gayngst: Andrew is bullied and insulted for being rumored to be gay, which is made the worse for him since he actually is gay. He is in love with Jess, his best friend, and does not know how he could possibly come out to anybody.
• Haunted Technology: The Polybius arcade cabinet itself is possessed by a Fallen Angel
• Incompatible Orientation: Andy finally makes a move on Jesse, who isn't gay. There doesn't seem to be any bad blood between them for it, though.
• It Won't Turn Off: Polybius runs on both Andy's unplugged computer and during a blackout.
• Kill Screen: Andrew starts the episode trying to reach the kill screen on Frogger, but he does not quite make it. This is also how they finally defeat Polybius, as he gets 100,000 points and the game cannot handle a score that high and crashes.
• The Little Arcade Cabinet That Wasn't There Yesterday. Polybius just showed up one day in the local arcade. Turns out that was because its creator snuck it in, to placate the game with other victims so it'd spare her.
• Magic A Is Magic A: Polybius will claim whoever plays it, even if that play was just limited to usurping someone putting their initials in on the high score.
• The Men in Black: A man who who does not identify himself but seems to know about Polybius approaches Andrew after the murder at the school. Andrew, Jess and Amy think he must be either working for the government or working for the game. He is here to cover up the incident, but neither he nor his organization actually know what the game is or what is happening. They just show up after people start dying to make sure that the public at large does not realize something supernatural is going on.
• New Media Are Evil: Andrew's parents believe that video games are a product of the devil, which is why he has to pretend he is going to bible study whenever he goes to the arcade.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Amy only played Polybius because she was trying to knock off the slur that had been entered as the high-score name.
• Sickly Green Glow: Polybius' glowing greenness is a sign of its supernatural danger.
• Soul-Saving Crusader: While not noted by the show, Andy's parents beliefs that video games open one up to demonic possession and damns you to hell turned out to be completely correct.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The agency that is covering up the incident does not actually know where Polybius came from or what it is. They just know that people die after it appears, and they cover everything up because the public would not be able to handle knowing that the supernatural is out there.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: The big bad behind everything? The grumpy store manager, who's been trading souls to Polybius for decades.
• Tired of Running: Andrew spends most of the episode running away from his problems, and explicitly tells Amy to do the same. It is only towards the climax that he begins to think that he needs to stay and fight, and runs back.
• Trapped in Villainy: Wilma has to trade souls to Polybius, lest she be taken in their place, and repeatedly apologises to the teens. However, she does attack them after its destroyed, so exactly how unwilling she is remains up for debate
• Urban Legend: POLYBIUS is a real-life urban legend, with stories about it showing up in the 1980s connected to the US government and dangerous experiments. Amy refers to some of the real-life theories when they are trying to figure out what might be going on.
• Villain Ball: The mysterious man arriving to talk about Polybius is so obviously up to no good that he completely fails to gain any information, turns everyone with any knowledge against him and ends up shot in the head. Maybe dial down the creepiness next time?
• Your Soul Is Mine!: The catchphrase of the game, Polybius itself literally sucks out people's souls before or after killing them.

Bob

"As a holiday threat looms large, an Army psychologist races against the clock to treat the strangest patient of her career - and the only one who can save Christmas - BOB, a depressed NSA supercomputer."

Tropes related to Bob

• All-Loving Hero:
  • Jane cannot turn away from anybody in pain, not even when it delays her getting home to her family and not even when the 'person' is a giant brain supercomputer.
  • Bob just wants to make the world a better place, and is crushed beneath the guilt of what he does and what he cannot do. His one wish is for Santa Claus to be real so that everybody can get the presents and gifts they deserve.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Bob is the supercomputer which is tasked with monitoring all of the entire world's electronic information for the NSA.
• Bittersweet Ending: Janes gets to her family for Christmas and Bob gets his wish of being Santa Claus for a night, but he is still ultimately unplugged and shut down (killed). As he himself says, it would not be much of a dying wish if he did not die afterwards.
• Christmas Episode: Jane is trying to get home to her family for Christmas, but is hijacked by the NSA who want her to help 'fix' Bob in time to stop a terrorist bombing that is also scheduled for Christmas.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Jane cannot bare to let anybody around her suffer, offering counseling and kind words to everybody she encounters. This has lead to her neglecting her own life and family, as she does not take time off and even volunteers for extra deployments overseas.
• Cyber Cyclops: The most apparent electronic part on Bob is the electronic eye that constitutes his face. Fortunately, he's not like Hal.
• Dying Wish: As Bob himself says, a dying wish cannot really be so if you do not die afterwards.
• Home by Christmas: Jane is literally trying to get home to her family by Christmas before the NSA takes her to help fix Bob. Unfortunately, Bob is suffering from several psychological issues, and these problems cannot be fixed by two hours of talk therapy. Bob ultimately isn't "cured", and is shut down at the end of the episode.
• Humans Are Bastards: Bob "broke" when he looked at the people sitting on the subway with the terrorist he was following and saw all the ways that they were petty and miserable all on their own. The last straw was when a girl told her younger sister that there was no Santa Claus because she kept excitedly talking to a man in a costume sitting next to them.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Bob is not able to locate the terrorist before his attacks succeeds against the Chicago subway. Bob does manage to track him down afterwards, though, and the FBI arrests him.
• Organic Technology: Bob is a giant, organic supercomputer grown from modified human brain cells. Jane throws up the first time she sees him.
• Santa's Existence Clause: Bob's one wish — if he were to have a wish — would be for Santa Claus to be real. He gets his wish by becoming Santa Claus and delivering toys — and paying off debts and restructuring the economy — for the entire planet.

Impulse

"A brash, up-and-coming pro FPS gamer finds the edge she needs in an energy drink that gives her real world "bullet time". It's a shortcut to fame and fortune-but it might just be a "shortcut" through the rest of her life."

Tropes related to Impulse

• After the End: Val comes out of her Impulse-induced stupor in a post-Apocalyptic wasteland. Apparently, the President drank too much Impulse and snapped back with his finger on the nuclear launch button.
• Artistic License – Military: The president can unilaterally order nuclear weapons to be launched, but he can't actually launch a nuclear strike singlehandedly. "The button" isn't a literal button that can be pressed to just launch nukes; rather, it refers to the authority of The President to order nuclear strikes. Such an order would need to be cooperated with by military personnel in order for an actual launch to happen.
• Bullet Time: Impulse heightens your reactions so much that you experience bullet time in real life.
• Equivalent Exchange: Impulse gives whoever drinks it Bullet Time, but it also causes them to lose minutes, hours, or even years of their life. As Kojima explains:
  Kojima: When you drink Impulse, you're stretching time. The more you stretch, the harder you snap back.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The bottle of Impulse that Val first tries is labelled "For Export Only". The manufacturer clearly knew there were side effects and did not want to deal with the ramifications close to home.
• Genre Shift: The episode starts out like a morality tale on performance-enhancing drugs, with the implication that Val will lose a few months or years of her life and not like the person she has become. However, after the first tournament the jump forward is twelve years and it turns into a post-apocalyptic story.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Val ultimately takes a megadose of Impulse and uses it to take out the Death Lizards. Taking mortal wounds in the process, she manages to shoot off a flare to let everyone know that it's safe to return.
• Karma Houdini: Kojima and his drink are essentially responsible for the entire collapse of society and the destruction of Val's life, but he doesn't seem to care, and is never held accountable for any of it (he even seems to have a plentiful supply of food left over at the Gold Saucer, has working video game consoles, and doesn't seem to have aged a day).
• Pac Man Fever: Averted, however Field of Fire is Titanfall 2 with all the titan combat edited out (or played as a pilot-vs-pilot fight) and the menu screen is taken and edited from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
• Shout-Out:
  • A glance at Val's computer screen reveals that her FPS of choice is Field of Fire.
  • The arcade where Val gets the Impulse is called The Gold Saucer and the proprietor is named Kojima.
• This Is Reality: The other survivors talk frequently about "Death Lizards", which Val logically assumes to be some sort of lizard. However, the term is actually just the nickname for a dangerous gang of people, and her husband is incredulous that she actually thought there were radioactive mutant lizards out there.