Midnight Burger is an American comedic science-fiction audio drama podcast that premiered in 2020.
In the aftermath of the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic, with her restaurant shuttered and never re-opening, Gloria answers a help wanted ad on Craigslist for a diner called Midnight Burger. But it's an odd situation — when she shows up, the manager, Casper, isn't even aware of posting an ad on Craigslist. And then the curiously old-fashioned radio on the counter, which had been playing old-timey music and Christian sermons, begins talking to Gloria. Even more curiously, this doesn't surprise Casper at all. Nor does it surprise Leif, the diner's cook, or Ava, a brilliant theoretical physicist who's apparently a regular customer at the diner.
As it turns out, Midnight Burger is no ordinary diner. It is, instead, a time-traveling, dimension-spanning diner — a "point of null entropy," as Ava insists on calling it. Every day, it travels through space and time to some planet (sometimes Earth, usually not) in some timeline, and plops down in a random spot for six hours. Casper, Leif and Ava have no control over any of this, but they're used to it, and hey, they have a diner to run. So every time the diner settles in a new location, they open the doors and sell food for about six hours — well, Casper and Leif do. Ava isn't so fond of this "work" thing.
With nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one tying her to Earth, Gloria agrees to join the team, and she's whisked away with the rest of the crew when the diner makes its next jump.
But it turns out that several entities in the big bad cosmos have taken an interest in Midnight Burger — some nice enough, most quite malevolent. That includes an intergalactic empire with a control fetish and absolutely no tolerance for the kind of chaos the diner represents.
Created by Joe Fisher (who voices Casper) and Finlay Stevenson (who voices Ava), with Fisher writing and directing. Concurrent with the third season, there was also Young Leif, a prequel miniseries about Leif's early days of space travel.
This Podcast contains examples of:
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: The premiere of season three focuses on two completely new characters running a motel in rural Oregon. They have absolutely no relationship with the established Midnight Burger characters or the show's ongoing plotlines. A mysterious redheaded woman named Clementine keeps showing up in these people's lives, then mysteriously disappearing. She'll go on to be the Arc Villain of the season and connect the motel owner with the diner.
- Apathetic Student: Casper describes his son as a person who is so smart and so insightful that he recognizes all the hypocrisies and cruelties of the world and, as such, sees absolutely no need to perform any school work or put in any academic effort of any kind. Casper admits that he was like this himself as a kid, but not nearly to his son's extent — after all, his son is a lot smarter than he is.
- Berserk Button: Don't sit in Ava's booth. She also gets mad when Leif brings up the principle of fecundity
. - Bigger on the Inside: The diner's deep freeze storage leads to a massive ice planet complete with its own atmosphere and ecosystem with live wolves and deer running around.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: This is functionally how the Teds run their empire. They don't have much of a standing army (though they do have prisons and security forces), but they've essentially built up a ruthless monopoly over most forms of commerce in the Triad. They exploit their subject states less through military force than through the relentless application of various rules and regulations designed to prevent these planets from competing with the Teds.
- Deadpan Snarker: All the characters have elements of this, but Casper is particularly fond of snapping back at people with snarky remarks. He's at his "best" when being interrogated by an official of the Ted empire, to the extent that he basically drives the guy insane.
- Disproportionate Retribution: In one alternate universe, Casper's ex-wife apparently hated him so much that she created a time-travelling, dimension-hopping android for the sole purpose of confronting and annoying every version of Casper in every alternate universe. The android later reports that she had confronted approximately 11 million versions of Casper.
- Distracted by the Sexy: During their brief interlude on the Mucklewain family farm, Gloria and Ava step aside and have a very important conversation...about how shockingly sexy Effie and Zebulon are. They were not expecting the Mucklewains to look like two stylish indie folk rockers.
- Fate Worse than Death: Clementine banishes the diner to a ruined tourist destination planet where they spend weeks...serving brunch to tourists. Gloria explains that, for a restaurant, a never-ending brunch rush really is hell.
- Just Friends: Everyone else assumes that Leif and Bert-Bert used to date, but they never did — they had a Vitriolic Best Buds relationship, with Bert-Bert bitterly disappointed in Leif's embrace of the criminal lifestyle. They clearly did have feelings for each other, and they each brought the other home to meet their parents, but the relationship never turned romantic.
- Heel–Face Turn: The diner crew initially hates The Ex, who shows up from time to time to torment them by taking on the personae of their various exes. It turns out that she was created by Casper's ex-wife in an alternate universe, then set to confront different versions of Casper in every conceivable alternate universe. After spending a long time at the bottom of a creek in Harlan County, Kentucky, The Ex emerges with a new outlook and eventually becomes a close friend to Casper and his co-workers.
- Humans Are Special: Humanity is often treated as a punch line by the universe's denizens, as humans seem to be a technologically backward race compared to everyone else. But it turns out that Earth's cultural exports, including television, music, food and even the English language, are incredibly popular across the cosmos. One of the reasons the Teds are so eager to suppress technological advancement on Earth is because they understand that if Earth ever got its act together scientifically, then that, combined with the planet's cultural dominance, would make humanity a serious threat to the hegemony of the Ted empire.
- Jerkass: The Teds are basically an Empire of Jerkasses, running their intergalactic fiefdom with a combination of genuine evil, apathy toward the lives of trillions of living beings, and low-level pettiness.
- Moral Event Horizon: In-universe. So far as Ava is concerned, Casper crossed it hard when he locked her into a makeshift spacesuit and shoved her out into deep space. He had his reasons, and she put the diner in a pretty bad place as a result of her actions, but she was furious about it for a long time.
- No Full Name Given: Aside from Ava, who is named in Season 2, and the Mucklewains, we don't learn the last names of any other diner crew members until the Season 4 premiere, when Casper and Gloria talk and realize they don't know each other's last names or Leif's.
- Really Gets Around: Ava relentlessly mocks Leif for sleeping with so many aliens.
- Running Gag: Ava and Casper insist on mispronouncing Leif's name — it's actually pronounced "Layf," but they call him "Leaf." They absolutely, positively, 100 percent know the correct pronunciation. They just think it's funny to say "Leaf." Gloria uses the correct pronunciation, as do the other important people in Leif's life.
- Team Chef: Despite being a pretty bad cook, Leif actually held this role after leaving his life of crime — he's from Earth, and the people of the cosmos love Earth food, so he was able to get work on various ships as a cook.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: Time moves differently in the icy wilderness of the deep freeze, apparently because of its powerful gravitational pull, so months spent in there feels like just a few minutes in the diner.
