From Bad to Worse

Boarded by Kent Osbourne and Somvilay Xayaphone

Originally Aired: October 24, 2011

The year is 2011.  Nighttime in a devastated cityscape.  Panicked survivors flee for shelter, pursued by a horde of the risen dead.  You check the channel to make sure you aren’t watching AMC.  In a world after the premiere of The Walking Dead, you can never be too sure.

“From Bad to Worse” is the second of Adventure Time’s 2011 Halloween sequel episodes, this time a direct follow-up to the show’s very first episode, “Slumber Party Panic”.  That episode had a lot on its plate, from introducing the world and the principle characters, the show’s off-kilter sense of humor, all while telling a sensible (by Adventure Time standards) story.  It’s little wonder the actual zombie content felt fairly perfunctory.  This episode gives the opportunity for the team to do a more focused parody of zombie tropes.

After holing up in the palace, Princess Bubblegum relates the story to Finn, Jake, Lumpy Space Princess, and Lady Rainicorn of how Cinnamon Bun consumed a piece of zombified candy flesh and kicked off the candy zombie affliction anew.  But before she can concoct a cure for the infection (perhaps THE standard zombie story plot point), she’s dragged out the window by the horde and turned herself.  Her parting words to Finn are to “Let science do the work!”  Their best hope of thwarting the zombies now numbered among the dead, the party retreats to PB’s lab and tries to muddle together a cure.  None of them can make sense of PB’s notes, so they resolve to split up into groups to make different versions of the cure, figuring that will increase their odds of at least one of them getting it right.

After a fun montage of the party mixing chemicals and stopping to admire PB’s dancing rat (and definitely nothing else), Finn tests his cure on the zombies outside the window.  Unfortunately for them, the episode is called “From Bad to Worse”: Finn’s “cure” only causes the zombies to grow wings, making it much easier for the zombies to break through the barricade.  They retreat to the princess’ secondary lab (You thought PB only had one?  Have you met her?) to try their luck with LSP’s cure.  Instead, it causes them to grow puffy, luxurious lips, prompting LSP to run outside and try to drink the rest of the cure off the ground.

Look, I’ve seen dumber reasons for a survivor to exit the safe room

Jake and Rainicorn’s cure fares no better, and in fact fares markedly worse, causing the zombies to grow huge muscles and shatter the brick walls protecting the dwindling party.  Finn, Jake, and Rainicorn fall back to PB’s third lab (girl knows what she likes), which has a door made of candy steel capable of keeping out even the new super zombies.  Or at least most of them…

In another classic zombie plot, a lone zombie emerges from its hiding place in the lab, and Jake is bitten in the ensuing struggle.  The trope is given a fun Adventure Time twist when Jake simply elects to stretch away from his infected arm, delaying his zombification for as long as he can keep running.

Or in a pinch, spinning.

Unfortunately, Jake’s cardio regimen doesn’t meet the Zombieland standards and succumbs to the infection. Lady Rainicorn soon follows suit with the tried and true “can’t be separated from the turned loved one” zombie survival mistake.  With the situation looking grim, Finn manages to rescue PB’s pet rat and take shelter in the surprisingly roomy safety shower.  While ruminating on all the people  he’s let down, Finn finally notices the rat’s name: Science.  Finn finally realizes what Princess Bubblegum’s words meant:  Science the Rat can make the cure!

With the cure finally in hand, a new problem presents itself: how to administer it.  Dosing Jake only results in him immediately getting dogpiled and reinfected.  But this is Finn we’re talking about; if there’s a problem, he’s going to solve it in the most reckless way possible.  He covers himself in the remaining cure and launches himself into the horde, and the camera cuts to black as he’s being dragged down and devoured.

Fortunately, his insane plan works!  Princess Bubblegum calls a National Day of Apology so all the formerly zombified citizens can smooth things over with the people they’ve bitten.  She also takes the opportunity to recognize the hero of the kingdom:  Science the Rat!  Science saves the day yet again.

As I’ve mentioned above, the episode is much more focused on parodying zombie tropes, which had then-recently been brought to the forefront by the explosive popularity of The Walking Dead.  Much like in “The Creeps”, the candy citizens’ unique biology is used to great effect to simulate blood and gore, and the ridiculous ways the failed cures make the zombies even more dangerous makes for some great comedy.

But upon rewatch, there’s something else I noticed: the changing way the show regards Finn and Princess Bubblegum’s relationship.  In the first two seasons, when Princess Bubblegum gave Finn and Jake a quest she usually outlined a sensible plan, one they promptly ignored for the sake of comedy.  After a series of shenanigans and misunderstandings, Finn eventually eked out a solution while PB grudgingly praises him despite ignoring her instructions.  By contrast, Princess Bubblegum’s plan eventually carries the day here, and the episode ends with the kingdom praising Science the Rat (and by extension, science in general) instead of Finn.  Even so, Finn manages to carry the day with a trademark reckless-yet-creative improvised plan; the narrative is just less inclined to heap praise on him for it.  It’s a subtle way to indicate the show’s sensibilities are maturing, indulging less in wish fulfillment for the teenage boy hero and showing PB being more insistent on her love of science and following her plans and methods.  It’s a character shift that will become more pronounced in the following seasons.  It’s easy to write this episode off as a retread (however fun), but the contrast between this episode and the original episode it references helps us measure how much the show has changed

Notable Quotes –

• Lady Rainicorn’s translated dialog:
  • As she’s looking at zombified Jake in the safety shower: “No, he loves me.”
  • At the Day of Apology: “I wanted you to bite me”.
• “My formula is going to cure the zombies because I made the prettiest formula!”
• “Finn the Human.  Will you please stand aside?”

Dispatches from the Commentary –

• Somvilay Xayaphone challenged himself to put as many unusual, dynamic camera shots in this episode as possible, most notably in the potion mixing scene.  Tom Herpich describes his determination as “spiteful, but in a kinder way”
• The label under Science’s name, “TS-19”, is a deliberate shout-out to The Walking Dead.  “TS-19” (or Test Subject 19) is the designation the CDC scientist gives to his infected wife near the end of season 1.
• Pen Ward talks briefly about how much he has to suppress his shy, quiet nature to properly voice Lumpy Space Princess
• Rebecca Sugar talks about doing scratch recordings (placeholder dialog for animatics) for Steven in Steven Universe.  I would love to hear her doing her impression of a hyperactive anime protagonist on those animatics.
• Kent Osbourne was responsible for Jake running from his zombified arm, which is my favorite joke in the episode.

Beautopia

Written and Boarded by

Adam Muto & Rebecca Sugar

Technically, I’m not sure this was meant to be a Halloween episode, because on the listings it’s The Creeps and From Bad To Worse that are described as such. However, this one could easily qualify, as could next week’s No One Can Hear You. That one, especially.

To start with, I want to spend a second on this title card.

Seriously. Go back up there and look at that baby. It’s clearly done in the style of these old 1950’s travel postcards:

But this one here is amazing all on its own. You have people sailing, swimming, playing volleyball, a huge glowing orb in the center of the city, and a woman wearing a very Finn looking hat in the letter “I”. 

A huge floating city? A beautiful utopian floating city in the ocean? That’s sunk and forgotten and infested with horrors and when we actually see it, it turns out to basically be a big glorified mall? With a vague retro-future aesthetic? It’s like we’re watching a Bioshock adaptation.

The episode opens with a great quiet moment of the boys making coffee during a rainstorm by candlelight, which definitely feels like it’s setting an ominous tone for the rest of the episode, but I still love these little bits where we just get to see the guys hanging out.

Suddenly

Susan asks for Finn’s help (specifically Finn, I noticed), along with his “magic of red flower”, which is a nice little Jungle Book reference. Jake points out that she’s probably a crazy fish person and tried to eat their friends last time, but Finn clearly still desperately wants to believe that he’s not the only human left in Ooo, and Jake agrees to come along but only so he can be a giant load.

A great shot of them going down the hatch later and we’re passing through the Hyoomans’ territory. Susan explains that she means to retake the Hyoomans’ old home of Beautopia back from something called “Lub Glubs”, and after delivering a great, “I’ll be back”, she tells Finn they can swim there and shoves his face into the water, only find out he doesn’t have gills.

They set sail on a neat little garbage raft and head for Beautopia, serenaded by a great little Jake song. I love how they’re willing to make it seem like Jake really is improving this by having him suddenly just lose interest. Susan stays completely unflappable as she navigates the boat straight down a giant whirlpool as the boys flip out, but a pool floaty drifting past makes her panic and insist everyone be quiet.

Jake gives Finn the greatest smug face at this evidence that Susan is just crazy.

Soon they arrive at The Clashing Gates, giant stone fists that do a fist bump over and over into eternity. Jake suddenly has the reality that they could die down here sink in all at once, but Finn is so determined to give Susan a chance that he completely ignores Jake’s perfectly valid point that he could just stretch them right over this.

They (barely) power through, and we get them rowing the remainder of the boat through this eerie silence and this creepy cave.

They arrive at Beautopia and we’re treated to the same musical sting as the title card over its ruined remains.

Susan says they just have to get the red flower into the city heart, but the music drops away and a dozen or so more pool floaties drift out of a flooded storefront and Jake, trying to prove to Susan that she doesn’t need to be afraid of pool floaties gets a surprise.

The boys leap into action, followed shortly by a newly emboldened Susan, and as Finn and Susan take on the monsters, Jake hurries to stretch up to the city heart, pursued by a giant towering mass of Lub Glub with multiple mouths and limbs.

Then all the tension just gets yanked out from under you by my favorite moment of the episode.

The fact that not only does he calmly count to three but then *doesn’t throw it on three* is utterly hilarious to me.

Another brief Freudian inkblot joke as the towering eldritch horror of mouths and pool toys catches up with him and the fire is lit, the Lub Glubs are disintegrated, and soon the Hyoomans are moving in to their new home.

Then, we get this incredible moment between Finn and Susan, where she tells him to stay, and he insists “I’m not like you”, and her response is this.

All in all we get a pretty spectacular outing here. Good monsters, a Jake song, some excellent worldbuilding, we get to see Susan again AND we get pretty solid confirmation that she’s not a fish person! The first real clear sign that Finn might not be the last human on earth.

Watching this one again I was struck by how many cool shots it has. The overhead rotation then zoom into the hatch when they go down to the Hyoomans, the cool little downward shot that twists around as they start sailing the boat at the beginning of Jake’s song, the great quiet moment in the big weird drippy cave, Finn sailing away into shadow as a well-lit Susan waves from the shore as the episode ends. It’s very cinematic all throughout.

It’s also very dark. Not in tone- well, okay the shoggoths-come-Lub Glubs are a pretty dark development, but no- I mean it’s a visually dark episode. It starts on a stormy night, where the treehouse is lit by candlelight, and then it stays that way going underground. I really noticed it as I started collecting the screenshots for this- they stand out in thumbnails from other Adventure Time shots cause they’re so muted.

All of it together, it definitely feels like it’s collectively part of a turning point for the show. It was always clever and had heart, but at this point in this season, considering the past few episodes (and the next few) it really feels like it matures. The characters really feel more grounded, and even the way they’re animated is less cartoony and more realistic. Finn almost never goes all rubber-hose armed and gets weird cartoon eyes anymore, and the shot composition and visual direction has gotten much braver and creative. You can really see the extent to which the show has come together and found itself.

Random Thoughts

• Between the goofy Freudian jokes where Jake keeps thinking the inkblot looking monsters are his parents, and the shot where one of the Lub Glubs is gnawing on a very Fionna looking skull, the internet really had a field day speculating on this one. A surprising number of people had no idea what the Rorschach test even was anymore, and were very very confused. It’s funny how suddenly a reference like that can slip out of general awareness.

• Jake’s song is great, though I had a hard time finding out who wrote it. A credit for the album it was re-released on says Tim Kiefer & Penn Ward, but I’m not confident that’s accurate because on the same page I also found this amazing, probably AI generated summary of the song, which I’m going to share here: “This song is sung by Jake the Dog, and it’s about him being on a boat with a couple of whackos, his actions, such as shaking his hips and dipping his abnormally large toe into the water, before announcing the increasing heat of the boat’s group, which he calls a party, until he takes all his statements back, and saying that the heat has rendered everything stupid.”
• I really love how much this episode opens up the potential reality of what’s in Ooo. We’ve already seen entire sunken cities at the bottom of the ocean in Ocean of Fear, but this is real next level.
• Jake spends a lot of time just being “disruptive and obnoxious”, so he’s funny as heck this outing. Honestly, if I had his level of power I feel like I would absolutely use it to just joke around like he does all through here.
• This episode has a lot of my favorite plot devices in Adventure Time, which is, “How do you keep any kind of threat with a character as powerful as Jake the Dog”. Like when Susan just squishes him into the ground so that her and Finn can have a moment together, or when Jake explicitly points out that he could easily negate the Clashing Gates as an obstacle but Finn is too determined to give Susan a chance to prove herself to listen.
• Speaking of the Clashing Gates, they’re pretty clearly a reference to the Clashing Rocks from Jason and the Argonauts, the cliffs or boulders (depends on who you ask) that smash any boats that sail between them, right down to how the rock clips the back of the boat as they just make it through. Though Susan loses substantially more of her vessel than Jason does of the Argo.
• The rasterized style of all the Adventure Time title cards is one of my favorite things about the show’s aesthetic, but for this one in particular it’s gorgeous and really adds to the image.