Well well, look who’s inside again. I don’t think I’ve actually rewatched The Inside Outtakes in its entirety - I’ve listened to the album plenty, and individual bits, but not the whole. So it was interesting, nearly a year later, to come back to it. I’d forgotten how much it holds up as its own entity, effectively a special in its own right. It becomes an outlet for the more explicit material about capitalism and big tech, in a way that has space to breathe here and that allows Inside itself to be more focused on the individual reaction to the world it has created. There’s a lot in the outtakes that hints that Inside was potentially going to just be released on YouTube full stop, and I wonder at what point Netflix became involved. To review text rather than subtext, there are real stand out songs that hold up to those on Inside itself, and getting an overall view of how many different configurations and endings he considered is fascinating. The tiling of multiple takes of e.g. Welcome To The Internet does oddly more to reinforce the loneliness of the pandemic than much of the rest of the special.