Thank You | Written and Storyboarded by Tom Herpich |
Air Date: November 23, 2011 | Reviewed by hippenbobber64

Well the show finally did it. Adventure Time has moved on from Finn and Jake. Gone are the days of whimsical adventures shared between a human boy and magic dog. Mathematical dungeons and murder pranks? You can put all that behind you as the boys are eternally punished to live in the background in a never-ending fight with The Ice King.

But enough about those old worn out characters– let’s meet our new characters shall we?

• Snow Golem: This non-human is made of snow and they like to eat pears.
• Fire Wolf Cub: Is sort of like a magic dog but its fire. Can backflip.

They’re not adventurers but rather just characters going about their day grocery shopping and whatnot. And neither of the characters have any real lines of dialogue!

Okay so I admit this might feel like a departure from the regular AT episode. No F the H, J the D, dialogue, or some contribution to an arching plot? Why would your AT viewer sit through this episode? Well it’s only eleven minutes so whatever. And more importantly the people behind this programme have shown throughout the season they have growing ambitions and are willing to take on more out-there ideas. This season we’ve seen a gender-swapped episode that’s not superficial but actually really digs into the how a female Finn would be different, an episode featuring a heavy amount of music and honesty, an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style surreal trip through memories, and this week we have a one-off mostly visual story and an episode that heavily deals with death and acceptance1Great write-ups worth reading!

Getting back to the episode– it’s a pretty straightforward slice-of-life foraging trip that becomes a story about two opposing elements getting along with each other. The Snow Golem and fire wolves are first seen confronting each other at the border of their respective kingdoms. The border is animated with heavy amount of steam in the air which itself is used to conceal the violent fight that takes place.

The Snow Golem nonchalantly proceeds with their day gathering up pears and repairing their cart only to find a stray fire wolf cub in the aftermath of the fight. The Snow Golem being elementally opposed– initially sees the cub as an inconvenience when it follows them home.

The Fire Wolf Cub however… is really cute. The Snow Golem is unable to resist, especially seeing it helpless in the cold being pecked/pondered by vultures. They get along and have a good time until the Snow Golem realizes they need to return the cub back to its home.

Lone Golem and Cub make their journey to The Fire Kingdom and in a moment of courage the Snow Golem sacrifices a good deal of body mass to make sure the Fire Wolf Cub gets home safely (it’s okay I’m pretty sure they can rebuild themselves). The cub reunites with their family and Snow Golem respectfully backs away through the smoke. Their episode ends with a surprise visit from the cub with the seeming approval of their family. But Finn and Jake are also there and IK receives a kiss on the cheek upon pondering the real lesson of the stolen sandwiches.

Much like Springfield (The Simpsons) or Pawnee (Parks and Recreation)– the Land of Ooo is a world that continues to develop throughout the series run. It’s a world with characters that have their own lives and daily routines regardless of what you see on the screen. The characters learn lessons, go on their own journeys, and may even have thoughts on Finn and Jake (notice how Snow Golem sneaks by F&J perhaps worried about their loose affiliation to The Ice King(?) or still remembering the time F&J knocked out their head in the third episode).

The episode itself is a sweet heartwarming episode– but the bigger deal to me is the show confidently making a big step into a larger world and its trust that its audience will stay on the ride.

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The New Frontier | Written and Storyboarded by Tom Herpich & Bert Youn | Aired November 28, 2011 | Reviewed by Ralph

We don’t get enough time with the animals and people we love. That fact may interrupt us as we peacefully enjoy our morning beverage. It may mess us up when we’re 13 years old. 13-year-old Ralph thought he would be ready to deal with the death of a loved one someday when he got older. I’m 40 now, and over the past year death has beat my beautiful ass twice—once last summer when my dog died, and again a month ago when my dad died. In both cases I was neither ready nor unready. Readiness, I discovered, didn’t really factor into it because, ready or not, it just happened and time kept going at more or less the same rate it always does. In some ways I’m surprised at my ability to deal. I’m also surprised at how utterly grief fills me up and empties me out. Over and over again.

Art helps. Writing helps. Apologies to my beloved, loathsome Tree Trunks, but I wasn’t in any kind of state to write my scheduled review of “The Apple Thief” a few weeks ago (thanks for taking over for me, Josephus). I want to write this review of “A New Frontier,” though, because it’s one of my favorite episodes of Adventure Time, and I want to give it the appreciation it deserves. And also because I want to try to do something with all this grief. I want to put it somewhere.2 Is the Avocado a good place to put it? I find myself wanting to apologize for getting so heavy in this critique of a cartoon episode on a pop culture website that once ran fake recaps of a made-up Tim Allen sitcom. But I also find myself wanting to fight the urge to apologize because I think the readers of this pop culture website that once ran fake recaps of a made-up Tim Allen sitcom are generally thoughtful, compassionate people, who don’t mind getting bummed out every once in a while. And, anyway, I didn’t know my dad was going to die when I signed up to review this one. This review was always going to be sad; I just didn’t know it’d be this sad. I’ll just acknowledge this tension and move on. One of my absolute favorite literary critics, Helen Vendler—who (sigh) died last Tuesday at the age of 90, “Like all other perennial human activities, criticism exists because it gives pleasure to those who perform it.” Thanks, Helen. I’ll let that be enough.

The episode kicks off with a kinda Kubrickian croak dream. A combination of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining. A close-up of Jake’s face as his eyes spring open. Jake in space. A little space-helmeted Banana Man floats by. Jake reaches futilely for the busted shuttle as he struggles for breath. A dissonant swell of voices (something like Penderecki’s “The Awakening of Jacob”—from the soundtrack to The Shining) swirls around. Jake runs out of air, turns red, and deflates. The screech of the Cosmic Owl startles him awake.

Stoked to have foreseen his death, Jake rushes to tell Finn, who finds himself unable to confront the reality of the situation. He doesn’t want Jake to ever die. But Jake,trying to get his bro to see this for the good news it is, explains: 

Finn, when I die, my individual Earth consciousness is gonna go all over everywhere while Glob tallies my deeds. . . I’m gonna be all around you—in your nose, and your dreams, and socks. I’ll be a part of you in your Earth mind. It’s gonna be great!”

A perhaps comforting thing about dogs is that those sweet little doofuses seem oblivious to their all-too-short lifespan. Or they at least don’t seem terribly bothered by it. And perhaps it would be comforting if we knew they shared Jake’s destiny-driven metaphysical outlook. If only they could talk.

But, hey, wait! Have y’all noticed that Jake the Dog can freakin talk? He’s a talking dog? What the heck?!?! Among all the amazing things Jake can do, I guess we lose sight of the simple fact that he can also talk. But it’s worth considering here because his facility with language, and his openness to chatting about mortality, makes him part of a long literary tradition.

Fictionalized talking dogs (as opposed to real ones, I guess?) aren’t a new thing. Teresa Mangum noticed that late 19^th century Britain saw “the emergence of a surprising new literary voice: that of the aged autobiographical dog.” In her essay “Dog Years, Human Fears” she connects this spate of literary elderly talking dogs to a then-nascent cultural concern with aging. Around the end of the 1800s, she observes, British government was debating social responsibility to fund pension plans for older citizens, industries enacted mandatory retirement programs, geriatrics emerged as an independent medical field, and Queen Victoria was getting old as hell right before their British eyes. And around that time we saw a rise in popular fiction and poetry told from the perspective of dogs. While Mangum argues that, in Victorian Britain, these doggo-biographies 3 Get it? Like “autobiographies” but “doggo” instead of “auto”? Sorry. may have been ways for readers to assign subjectivities to voiceless marginalized figures (such as dogs and older people, who were too often ignored and cast aside), she concludes in a way that’s maybe more relevant to this episode of Adventure Time:

“The fictional animal is a form of subjectivity that requires us not only to attend to the stories it tells but to reconceive our long-told narratives of helplessness, frailty, utility, and obligation as we struggle to comprehend marginal subjects. We are compelled to compose these alternative narratives in the face of our older human companions, of our aging selves, and of death itself—a subject seldom shirked by canine storytellers.”

Despite Finn’s despair and discomfort with his friend’s death, Jake certainly doesn’t shirk the subject. In any case, Jake is only able to reassure Finn by noting that they don’t even know Banana Man and so he’s probably going to live for another 100 years or something anyway.

So, of course, cue Banana Man.

Through the rest of the episode, Jake pursues his croak dream determinedly while Finn attempts to prevent its realization. Most of the other reviews I read of this episode focus on the issues the writers raise about destiny, Finn’s attempt to cheat it, and Jake’s attempts to rush fate. It’s cool to see the Cosmic Owl do its thing and all, but I’m more interested in the simple story of a boy coming to terms with the fact that his dog/brother/friend is going to die at some point—some point sooner than he’d like.

This is an emotionally fraught afternoon for Finn, and I love the understated ways the animators show him working through the early stages of DABDA. Here he is lowering his mug of coffee (or tea or cocoa or whatever) as he first learns of Jake’s croak dream:

Here he is telling Jake not to talk about his death anymore:

Here he is clutching Jake to keep him from flying off to his demise alone:

More than any character’s pained wailing and rending of clothes, more than any raging against the dying of the light, these little line adjustments make the kinds of indelible images that attach themselves to my sub-conscious and surface when I’m going through something tough to help me recognize, understand, and work through my own feelings. See, for another example, Calvin’s eyes in this one panel:

My point is simply that it’s incredible what some subtle marks placed carefully on a graphic space can do.

Finn and Jake’s destiny-tug-of-war leads them to crash Banana Man’s rocket, as—to borrow Banana Man’s technical language—there weren’t “enough boom boom stick hole sticks in the boom boom stick hole”—and it’s Finn who needs saving.

Realizing the loop-hole that his bud can’t croak if he’s there with him, Finn informs Jake, in a delightfully creepy voice, that he’ll just have to always stay by Jake’s side.

Whew. That review felt heavy, but this was a heavy 12-ish minutes of television. Let’s end with a palate cleanser: