Season 4 doesn’t open so much as it leaks. Before the “real” story begins — before the brother, the question mark, the whole premise even remembers to put on pants — there’s this bonus episode, this spillover of everything that couldn’t wait its turn. It’s the sound of someone rifling through their own archive at three in the morning, convinced that if they just open one more folder, one more Word file, one more VHS tape, the universe will finally explain itself. Spoiler: it doesn’t. But the rummaging is spectacular.

This is the episode where timelines buckle. The blue-haired high school president materializes again, staring down a boy who thought he could get away with yelling “fag” from a safe distance. There is no safe distance. Not from that stare. Not from the crowd watching. Not from the version of you who learned non-violent resistance by accident and then weaponized it with a smile. Meanwhile, in some other decade entirely, a fox puppet is mouthing Artaud, a drag queen is dripping sriracha, and a Notes-app folder is breeding like a fractal organism that refuses to be named.

And somewhere in the middle of all this — or maybe underneath it — you’re trying to figure out whether writing about the past or the future is just another way of writing about the present badly. Whether God is a punchline or a job title. Whether the apocalypse is a cliff you fall off or a cliff that falls up. Whether listening to your own podcast to fall asleep is self-care or self-sabotage or just another habit pretending to be a story.

So yes, technically this is a bonus episode. But really it’s the overture, the fever dream, the purple fog that rolls in before the season knows what it’s about. The real brother hasn’t shown up yet. But everything else has.