No One Can Hear You | Written and Storyboarded by: Ako Castuera and Jesse Moynihan | Air Date: November 14th, 2011 | Coverage: Megara Justice Machine
The storytellers make clear from the get-go that this is going to be a horror episode:
- The title itself echoes the tagline from the film Alien “in space, no one can hear you scream”
- The title card visually riffs on both Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream and the poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo.
Their story begins in medias res with Finn and Jake chasing a deer that’s bounding around (I almost want to say “prancing,” because the animation really captures that type of delicate leaping) the Candy Kingdom, licking various candy people – which all feels comfortably low stakes, right up until the deer shockingly and very deliberately breaks Finn’s legs. Twice in fact. The deer then throws Finn into a pole, knocking him unconscious. All of this occurs in the first minute and second of the episode, and that includes the opening credits, no time wasted!
Finn wakes up in the hospital and, in a nod to other horror films such as Day of The Triffids and 28 Days Later, discovers that he’s alone, and immobilized in a cast from his waist to his toes. Going exploring in a wheelchair, he can’t find anyone anywhere at all, the Candy Kingdom is a ghost town. Then he finds Jake, who’s dressed in a raggedy cloak and digging through a trash pile. There’s clearly something wrong with Jake, because (cloak and trash aside) his head is bandaged and he’s very sure that everyone in the Candy Kingdom is just hiding, waiting for a chance to spring a surprise birthday party on him. Jake is otherwise acting normally enough, so Finn just goes along with it.
Finn does start asking questions later though when Jake mentions that it’s been six months since he broke his legs (whether or not that’s actually true has been speculated about, but clearly Finn’s been gone for awhile). Jake keeps saying weirder and weirder things until bugs climb out of his ear, making Finn, talking to himself, recognize that “your best friend is gone.” Nearly half way through this episode now, and Finn’s seeing the outlines of the story’s horror.
Jake freaks out and restrains Finn, and tells him that all his Candy Kingdom friends are here now for the surprise party… but they’re not really there, they’re just puppets that Jake’s made from scavenged junk (junk standing in for candy, now there’s a dark subversion). Jake also has some colorful party balloons tied to his head that lift him from the ground, and cinder blocks tied to his feet to keep him from floating away. Combine those with his multiple arms to control all the junk puppets and the warped calliope music (my favorite touch), and Jake is clearly not normal at all. Finn manages to escape Jake and flees down into the sewer where he thinks he heard voices of the missing Candy Kingdom citizens coming from.
This makes for a classic “katabasis” (or “catabasis”), which is a fancy Greek term for the common storytelling trope (“trope being a word that’s easier to spell than anything Greek, probably) where The Hero descends into “the underworld” or Hell to try and save someone or to bring back knowledge – think Orpheus, Dante’s Inferno, or Luke Skywalker going down into the scary tree on Dagobah. This particular Hell that Finn’s entered is the nightmare root from which this story has grown and now fully blooms. See, down in the sewers, Finn finds all the candy people stuck to the walls and pipes with orange goo, moaning in misery. This moment reminds me of a deleted scene from the movie Alien (there’s that film again) that I’d read about years ago, where Ripley finds two of her co-workers trapped in some kind of monster-secreted goo and (according to the Alien fan wiki) their bodies mutating into new eggs to birth more Aliens. One of her friends is still alive, barely, and can only manage a weak “kill… me…” That horrific scene is on YouTube, if you want to look it up.
Now in Hell himself, Jake goes full-blown loony, only to be cured ala Gilliagan’s Island-logic when Finn knocks him on the noggin again. The thought occurred to me that one might criticize this story for being unrealistic about mental illness, if not tone-deaf or insensitive on the subject, but I’m also not really qualified to go into it beyond mentioning that it occurred to me. But this show and story are no less a cartoon than Gilligan’s Island was… Anyway, now back to his usual self, Jake briefly fears he’s the one who’s slimed the Candy Kingdom people down here, but the goo-covered Peppermint Butler instead tells Finn and Jake that it was… him… for the deer has returned.
Even beyond that wild story-telling swerve, our understanding of normality and existence now fully shatters as the deer stands upright on its back legs and slips off its front (fake) hooves to reveal two hands. A gif of this bizarre scene was the first thing I knew about Adventure Time, and what led me to seek it out, it’s why I asked to write this review in fact, because I love it. It’s everything to this story, perfectly subverting anything we thought we knew about the deer, even with its otherwise relatable finger wiggling like you might flex your toes after taking off a tight shoe, and the undertone of aggressive challenge, like cracking your knuckles before a fight.
And so, what is our new reality now… what is this deer?!
Deer don’t have hands. Hands signify an agency that we wouldn’t normally expect from a normal woodland creature (especially a herbivore), and hiding them in turn signals deception, cunning. This deer has even somehow defeated everyone up to this point in the story too:
- It broke Finn’s legs
- It injured Jake in both body and mind, although it’s never quite spelled out how, mind you. This deer must be positively Lovecraftian… maybe Jake went mad once he comprehended its true nature.
- It has even captured Princess Bubblegum (plus Peppermint Butler, but that’s getting into spoilers).
But how has it managed all this? Nameless, wordless, without obvious powers or magic, and intending to return to slowly consume its captives, this deer clearly hides malevolence behind those blank eyes.
This deer is a monster, an unsettling reality-warping thing of fear and loathing, and all the more frightening because it is unknowable. (This is clearly hokum on my part. It may be tempting to dismiss this offscreen effectiveness as a plot hole, but it’s the storytellers themselves pulling a deftly executed sleight of hand to intentionally break the reality of an ordinary deer to create a surprising twist). The Lich by comparison is just a boring “ol’ big skull face o’ evil magic because evil” to me, the sort of cartoon that Billy might have painted on the slide of a van. It’s got nothing on this deer (or these storytellers).
Finn and Jake of course defeat the deer, by dropping those two cinder blocks from Jake’s feet onto its head and rolling it into the sewer with a toilet-flushing sound effect (which is humorously prosaic, imagine defeating Cthulhu with a large cartoon mallet). I also like to interpret Jake shedding his cinder blocks as emblematic of his full return to sanity and effectiveness. The monster now defeated, everyone can return to the happy candy-colored life in the Candy Kingdom. Now everyone can use Jake’s head-balloons to improbably escape the sewers, so both those and his cinder blocks end up serving a story purpose besides being just funny costuming, which is neat.
I’m guessing the deer must be dead, check out how that cinder block laying on its head before they roll it into the drain looks like the empty eye sockets of a skull. Some people have claimed that a deer briefly seen in a season four episode is this deer, but I doubt it because (not to spoil things too much) that deer has no agency and only briefly appears before being profoundly undone. I’m glad we never see this character, “the deer,” again, because another appearance would have diluted its eeriness in this story. Or perhaps more correctly, the eeriness of this story. You just can’t repeat a good magic trick and get the same effect twice.
Stray Bits
- Sorry I didn’t spot the snail, someone else will have to point it out in the comments.
- I didn’t even touch on how funny that “taking off its hooves” scene plays, somehow being both unnerving and generating a real laugh. Probably related to that axiom that says comedy is about being surprised.
- This episode also takes time out from the horror to make a pretty good string of potty jokes and puns for a moment. I’m generally not a fan of those, but I think they put in enough wordplay effort to earn them here.
- Jake tells Finn how to cook hot dogs that he presumably found in the trash earlier: “Just gotta char off the rotten parts – good as new, man!” Finn, you really should have been suspicious by this point!
- Interestingly, this episode aired less than a month after a Regular Show episode that also featured a strange upright-walking deer(ish) character called Stag-Man, on Oct. 17th (“Camping Can Be Cool”). Something must have been in the air at the time; maybe the stars were right…
Jake vs. Me-Mow | Aired: November 21, 2011 | Written and Storyboarded by: Adam Muto and Rebecca Sugar | Reviewed by Katie
We’ve talked a few times this season about how Adventure Time’s 3rd season is when the show really became something special. You can see that in conceptual flexes like “Fionna and Cake”, in the emotional honesty of “What Was Missing”, in some other standouts we’ll cover in a few weeks when they come up. But Season 3 isn’t just a couple set-piece episodes. The show took a leap forward in every aspect, even in the “filler” episodes.1
“Jake vs. Me-Mow” is a simple concept, so simple it was pitched by a literal child. (Gunnar Gilmore, a young fan who drew the title card you see above) And in its first two seasons Adventure Time often struggled with simple concepts. “Mystery Train” fumbled a pretty basic stock cartoon plot because it got caught up in subversions, in not taking things seriously because straightforward takes have been done already. This sort of irreverence is wonderful, a key part of Adventure Time’s entire ethos, but at first the show did not know how to properly wield it, and was instead wielded by it. “Jake vs. Me-Mow” has a simple plot, and it sticks to it. Jake accidentally foils an assassination attempt, is forced to complete the assassination, we get a few escalations based on Jake trying to get out of this predicament, eventually he does, the end.
That’s not to say this is a ho-hum episode, of course. The simple spine is what allows for all the oddball energy to shine. The escalations are silly in that trademark AT way, with Jake’s astronaut walking hand, or Finn obnoxiously meowing so loudly that Jake has to throw him out the window. I especially love how Jake eventually gets out of Me-Mow’s poison, shape shifting his liver to be so large as to make the poison irrelevant. It’s the sort of solution that’s clever and just a bit goofy.
I also really love the detail that the Wildberry Kingdom is incredibly nonchalant about dead animals and are seemingly prolific hunters. I mean it makes sense, right? To a bunch of sentient berries, murdering fruit is far nastier business than harvesting some mere animals. And yet, cutesy talking berries in a tree kingdom making meat pies is just offbeat enough to really stick with you
“Just offbeat enough to really stick with you” is as good a summation of Adventure Time as any, really. It’s a wild world with miniature feline assassins and carnivorous raspberries and magic stretchy dogs. And by season three the show knew this well enough to not sell past the close.
Stray Observations:
- Finn comes across as a bit dense in this episode. I feel like he probably should have understood Jake wasn’t messing with him? But also, Jake does often do weird things just to mess with Finn.
- Wildberry Princess lost a lot of her body there at the end. Maybe Me-Mow shouldn’t be so glum, he might be able to spin this to the guild.
- “We found this note stabbed to my door…man” just an amazing delivery.
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