Mortal Folly

Boarded by Adam Muto and Rebecca Sugar

Originally Aired: May 2nd, 2011

Reviewed by CedricTheOwl

Sometimes you watch an episode of TV and you just know it has forever changed the trajectory of the show.  Oftentimes it’s the point where the show wastes whatever credibility it may have had, ie the shark jumping moment.  Sometimes it’s the point where the creators, the writers, and the actors all find their groove and the show becomes the best version of itself.  In rare cases, you see an episode that transforms the show from its original premise to something wholly new.  For me, “Mortal Folly” is among that last kind of episode.

We open with Finn, Jake, and Princess Bubblegum attempting to meditate, but keep getting distracted by errant thoughts.  Finn imagines a cooler, older version of himself while Jake thinks of his girlfriend Lady Rainicorn.  PB, however, is troubled by darker visions.  Trusting in Finn and Jake, Peebles brings them to the heart of the tree that forms the basis of the Candy Kingdom… and to the amber prison of the Lich.  Sealed away by Billy the Hero (as seen in Billy’s song in “His Hero”), the Lich is an existential threat to all life in Ooo, and the jeweled headgear that Bubblegum provided the boys are the only thing protecting their minds from his attempts to influence and control their minds.

Even with perspective working against him, the Lich is massive.

That’s when the episode pulls a fast one:  the Snail emerges from Finn’s backpack and quickly falls prey to the Lich’s influence.  I just love that this episodic running gag, noticeable only by the eagle-eyed viewer but otherwise a meaningless background detail, suddenly becomes instrumental in the Lich’s bid for freedom.  The smallest crack in the Lich’s prison is enough to allow him to escape, and Finn’s attempt to smite him with the improvised Jake Sword proves ineffective.

With the Lich loose in the world, the Candy Kingdom needs its heroes more than ever.  PB takes the boys to a side room (the same room from “Enchiridion” where Finn first received the quest to prove his heroism) and grants Finn Billy’s gauntlet, the one weapon that can harm the Lich.  But that’s not all she has.  Switching to a much less official tone of voice (Hynden Walch is in top form this episode), she gives Finn a sweater she made herself.  It’s self-admittedly not very well made and will likely serve little purpose beyond basic comfort, but she insists.  Despite Finn’s aversion towards things he finds “frilly”, as seen in “Rainy Day Daydreams”, he enthusiastically accepts.  After a brief diversion to shoo the Ice King away, the chase is on.  

Finn and Jake’s pursuit of the Lich takes them across the breadth of the Candy Kingdom, and unfortunately for them the Ice King isn’t so easily dissuaded.  He’s determined to get the boys’ blessing for him to marry Princess Bubblegum (by far one of his least threatening schemes), but the pressure of the situation leads Finn to rebuff him, with a little coerced help from Billy’s laser-firing gauntlet.  F&J continue to chase the Lich across Iceberg Lake (the same lake from “Business Time”, as you can briefly see the gauntlet dock in one shot), and Finn gradually begins to earn the gauntlet’s trust, aiding them in their quest.

Never punch your ancient weapon of power in the ball.

Finn and Jake reach the far side of the lake, only to find the Ice King awaiting them, with a kidnapped Bubblegum in tow.  Ice King kidnapping PB is usually treated with less weight than Bowser kidnapping Peach, but in this episode it carries an unusual sense of urgency.  In a beautifully colored scene, PB urges them to forget about her and stop the Lich, but a mushroom cloud of vile energy informs them that he’s already reached his place of power.  Time is running out.  With Billy’s gauntlet, Finn is able to blast his way through the Lich’s undead thralls and enter the Lich’s hidden sanctuary.  At last, they can take the fight to him!

Homie don’t play that.

The Lich intercepts Finn’s attack, destroys the gauntlet with a mere touch, and discards the heroes without a second thought.  This scene is what turns the Lich from a somewhat generic doomsday villain into a true AT original:  he too possesses some savviness of fantasy tropes.  See a hero wielding a weapon that is purported to be your only weakness?  Target and destroy the weapon as your first move.  The Lich adds a fantastic touch of menace to it by shushing Finn and Jake just before destroying the gauntlet.  They might as well be unruly children before him.  Jake’s follow-up attack is similarly ineffective, and in the melee the jewelry protecting Finn from the Lich’s mind control shatters.

With the hero helpless before his influence, the Lich beckons Finn to end it all by stepping into his cauldron.  But the cold doesn’t bother Finn anyway, because he’s got a sweater.  The memory of PB’s sweater and the feelings it represents allows Finn’s heroic willpower to overcome the Lich’s mind control.  Then in true Finn fashion he takes it one step further:  he loops PB’s sweater through the Lich’s empty eye sockets and uses the leverage to split his skull in half! 

With the Lich vanquished, it seems all’s well that ends well.  Ooo is safe, and the Ice King is so moved by the sight of Finn’s heroism that he willingly releases Princess Bubblegum.  Unfortunately for everyone, he releases her straight into the Lich’s cauldron.  Our episode ends on a cliffhanger as PB submerges into the noxious liquid while Finn and Jake look on in horror.

There’s plenty to love about this episode:  the Lich has a terrifyingly great design and is voiced to perfection by Ron Perlman, the artwork and backgrounds are frequently beautiful, and all the major characters and their voice actors are at their best.  But what makes it so transformational for the show is that it treats the Lich and the quest to defeat him completely seriously.  Raised stakes are pretty common for season finales, but Adventure Time is a show that thrived on mocking and subverting every fantasy cliche under the sun.  In any other episode, the Lich would have an incongruously normal voice and the means to defeat him would probably involve farts to some degree.  Taking a step back, it’s conceptually wild that a show like Adventure Time would make an episode about a completely straight-faced fantasy quest.  It would be like Police Squad!  suddenly putting out an episode of NYPD Blue.  

And yet the tonal shift completely works.  Through all the wackiness and parody, Adventure Time has gradually built up a congruous (if outlandish) world and populated it with emotionally complex and interesting characters.  Finn, Jake, Princess Bubblegum, and even Ice King are more than just joke dispensers that act however the writers need them to in a given scene.  They struggle, they can be imperiled, and most importantly they care about one another (yes, even Ice King).  The episode even takes hoary fantasy tropes like The Lady’s Favor and makes them work.  PB’s sweater isn’t part of a grand plan she’s concocted to ultimately defeat the Lich.  It is in fact a recognition that this isn’t a problem she can control and account for, which does a lot to sell the Lich as an intimidating villain.  Normally PB has a perfectly sensible solution to every problem (which Finn promptly ignores so the plot can happen); here she is faced with the very real possibility that she’s ordering her best friend to his death.  That seemingly insignificant token turns out to be the key to victory, as the Power of Lll…Liking Someone A Lot always prevails in the end.  As long as you use it to rip the villain to pieces.

This episode is just the first part of the season finale, but it already broke significant narrative ground for the show.  Adventure Time started out as a wacky parody of D&D and generic fantasy tropes, but by the end of its second season it built a setting and a cast of characters capable of selling a high fantasy story completely straight.  There’s still plenty of comedy in this episode – I am particularly fond of how peevish Billy’s gauntlet is – but the Lich is treated completely seriously as a villain, and tropes and character beats that would normally be ruthlessly mocked are instead used to great effect.  After an episode like this, returning to just simple parody would feel regressive.  The stage is set for the show to blossom from an unusually smart kid’s show to something truly special.  Hold onto your bear hats, there’s no turning back now.

Stray Observations: 

• It’s been over half a season since we last saw the Ice King, way back in “Chamber of Frozen Blades”.  It’s almost jarring to see him suddenly appear again.
• As I mentioned in my review, I love the coloring in the scene where Ice King reveals he’s kidnapped Princess Bubblegum.  The dusk sky being bathed in the sickly green of the Lich’s power looks amazing.
• Billy’s gauntlet is wonderfully emotive for only having one eye to make expressions with.

Dispatches from the Commentary

• Most of my knowledge of the location callbacks (the glowing room from “Enchiridion” and the lake from “Business Time” come from Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones-Quartey pointing it out on the commentary track.  I am not good with small details like that.
• Rebecca Sugar gushes about how scary the Lich design is and how much fun she had drawing it.
• Rebecca Sugar also tells a story about how she tried to draw some designs for Finn where his sweater and hat were ripped up from fighting the Lich, but she claimed it just made him look like a backup dancer in a bad 80s music video.
• PB’s sweater was originally supposed to be magical and shoot lasers to defeat the Lich.  Rebecca Sugar championed the idea of making it an ordinary sweater.  I’m in favor of her version, both because it fits with my analysis above and because it made the Lich fight much more brutal

Mortal Recoil

Original airdate: May 2, 2011

Director: Larry Leichliter

Written and storyboarded by: Cole Sanchez and Jesse Moynihan

Reviewed by: Cordyceps

Season 2 of Adventure Time upped the ante for the show. We went to the Nightosphere, the crystal dimension, the Underworld, and a video game. We started exploring questions such as “Are there any other humans left?” The world expanded in a big way, while also keeping the emphasis on silliness (remember The Pods?). So it feels inevitable that these ideas would collide in our season finale, blending action, horror, and comedy into a tight 11 minute package. 

I think Cedric hit the nail on the head in saying how the trajectory of the show changed with Mortal Folly. It’s not the first time the series has introduced continuity, and you could even argue it’s not the show’s first two parter (I can see a case for season 1’s Tree Trunks and season 2’s Crystals Have Power being a two-parter, albeit a two parter spread across two seasons). But here we have a jam-packed season finale that raises the stakes in a way we haven’t seen before, and a villain unlike anything we’ve met yet in Adventure Time. Check out the description of The Lich from the original series pitch:

The Lich isn’t a wacky villain. He’s something evil and terrifying. But that doesn’t mean everything around him has to be treated with quite the same gravity, and so we’re treated to a dark, silly episode to close out our season.

We pick up in the immediate aftermath of the previous episode. Princess Bubblegum is being rushed into surgery following the Ice King dropping her into the Lich’s pool. Doctor Ice Cream gives Nurse Poundcake the grim prognosis: over 90% of her body is totally gross, the other 10% is crazy nasty. Will she make it? “I don’t know, Nurse Poundcake.”

Fortunately, her sugar levels stabilize, and she’s back to… normal? Ice King worries that something weird happened to her, because he saw something strange when he dropped her, but Finn interrupts before he can explain any further, and Ice King departs after everyone calls him old.

A pastiche of The Exorcist follows as a bed-ridden Bubblegum thrashes about. Finn tries to thank her for the sweater she gave him in Mortal Folly, imbued with the power of liking someone a lot, and admits he likes her a lot too. Way to go, Finn! Confess those feelings of liking someone a lot. But all Bubblegum does in return is ask for a mix of ammonia, bleach, lighter fluid, gasoline, plutonium… You know, “lady stuff.” Jake attempts to cheer her up with some music, but she reacts rather violently to that.

Bubblegum uses the chemicals to make a noxious pool that looks just like the one the Lich fled to in the previous episode, begins drinking from it, and transforms into a massive monster. Easily swatting aside Finn and Jake, they’re smashed into a room with the Ice King, who informs them he stuck around because Bubblegum is possessed by the Lich. See, he saw it happen with his WIZARD EYES, which sometimes show things that are real, but sometimes just “crazy, crazy, crazy, in your face, all the time.”

After a failed attempt to save Bubblegum, Finn, whose like-like sweater fails, enlists Ice King’s help, and Ice King is able to freeze Bubblegum… which works out great until she falls and shatters.

Back to the hospital, where they try to restore the pieces of Bubblegum, but there just doesn’t seem to be enough. What do we do? “I don’t know, Nurse Poundcake.” Bubblegum is okay, but there were some complications… She is now 13 years old. The same age as Finn! She gives him a hug, and everyone is happy! The day is saved, the Lich is defeated and… wait, has anyone spotted the snail this episode?

This episode has the potential to be actually kind of terrifying (as far as kid’s shows go). Possessed Bubblegum thrashing about, making horrifying faces, turning into a monster, and being somewhat gruesomely split into several pieces. It’s genuinely a lot for a kid’s show. But the magic of Adventure Time is in its humor, which wonderfully works to cut against that terror and make it palatable for a younger audience. It walks a delicate line in treating the stakes as serious and real, but keeping a regular array of jokes anytime it risks becoming too scary.

This is also the perfect time in the show to start raising the stakes, and introducing more continuity and complexity into the world. Some seeds have been planted here that will become fodder for future plotlines down the road (see the connections block down below for more details). And as the season closes we’re left with another cliffhanger… what is going to happen with a 13 year old Princess Bubblegum?

Let’s look forward to finding out in season 3!

Great moments:

• “We’ll do magic tricks?” “Like fake magic?” “Yeah, like bluh bluh bluh bluh I was here the whole time!”
• “I’m a cat! I’m an agile cat!”
• “Okay, I didn’t kill her this time. Everybody saw that, right?”
• Ice King immediately leaving when Bubblegum is revealed to be 13 years old.