The following post contains SPOILERS for Inside Out 2. After this, you won’t be able to scream at me like Lewis Black while fire explodes in your head. You have been warned.
by Pixar Inside Out 2 takes us even deeper into the recesses of 13-year-old Riley’s mind. Joy and company’s quest to recover Riley’s “Sense of Self” from “Back of Her Mind” meanders through all sorts of locations cleverly inspired by the human psyche – like the “sar-abyss” that opens up near the “Flow of Consciousness.”
At one point, Joy, Anger, Fear, and Disgust are all captured by the “Mind Police” (which really should be the “Thought Police,” right? That was an obvious joke that they inexplicably missed) and thrown into some kind of vault where thoughts Riley doesn’t want to contemplate are locked away – including some of her most embarrassing crushes, like a cute but ineffectual video game character.
Also locked in this same prison is a burly, hooded figure, identified only as Riley’s “Deep, Dark Secret.” There are a few lines speculating what this could be, but then Joy and the other emotions escape the Mind Police and continue their search for Riley’s Sense of Self. It feels like a Chekhov’s Gun type situation where the film presents us and then your instinct is that they have to compensate somehow. And in fact, one of the other characters in that vault, Pouchy, becomes extremely important for Joy to complete her mission. But the “Deep Dark Secret” is never revealed.
Did she kill a guy? Is she an assassin sleeper agent working for a foreign adversary? Does she harbor an irrational hatred for birds? What is the secret?
SEE MORE INFORMATION: Read our full Pixar review Inside Out 2
It turns out that the secret is not kept in the back of the mind; is coming out after the end credits. If you go through a long crawl after completing the main story, Inside Out 2 there is a post-credits scene, and it is here that Deep, Dark Secret confesses his true identity.
Joy returns to the same vault where she and the other emotions were kept, and tells Deep, Dark Secret that it is now okay to say what happened to Riley, that it was such a horrible thing that it needed to be locked forever in a far corner of your subconscious. It’s a little difficult to understand Secret’s hoarse voice – the father sitting next to me couldn’t understand his speech and his daughter had to translate for him – but he says he “burned the carpet”.
In other words, at some point Riley accidentally burned the family rug and felt so ashamed about it that she covered up the evidence and suppressed the memory. Kind of like how I blocked out the moment that high school bully pushed me into a locker in gym class and it took 20 minutes for the gym teacher to find me and get me out (uhhh nevermind, forget I said it).
In turn, Joy is completely perplexed by this revelation.
“That is all?” she answered. “I thought it was when we peed in the pool!”
So there you have it: Riley’s Deep, Dark Secret is a bit of an anti-climax. That’s why they saved it for the post-credits scene, I suppose. If you don’t stay until the end, you really don’t lose that much. I will still hope that Inside Out 3 it’s about Riley being activated as a sleeper agent and then Joy and Sadness have to fight their last emotion: Bloodthirsty.
Inside Out 2 It’s playing in theaters now.
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