Hot to the Touch | Written by: Cole Sanchez & Rebecca Sugar | Aired: April 2, 2012 | Review by: Mrs. Queequeg

Season 4! Here we are with a brand new crush for Finn. Too bad she’s evil. 

Naw, man, I peeped beyond her burning gaze, and noshed hot lunch with her soul. She ain’t evil. She’s passionate.1This is the most teenager shit Finn’s ever said

I’d mock his poetry of steam off a dog’s nose while searching for ham in the snow, but that’s a reference, not an analogy. Finn goes after Flame Princess, insisting that she’s misunderstood and he wants to apologize and get to know her better. He finds her burning flowers next to a pond and remains enchanted. 

He tries to talk to her and she extinguishes her fingers in the water and flees. He follows into a meadow, where she ambushes him. Finn continues to compliment her, which is confusing for her. I respect and appreciate Finn’s continued honesty in this situation, where he tells her that he likes her, he even thinks he likes likes her. And he doesn’t know how to talk to her, but he has a strong attraction to her and just wants to sit on the couch and play BMO with her. 

Flame Princess enjoys the honesty and attraction that Finn praises her with, but then remembers the fuckboy she thinks she knows. 

You told me you liked me, and you made my flame grow brighter, but then you put me out, which hurt!2I like the literalness of this analogy. That’s exactly how it feels

She thinks this must be a trick. Finn is intentionally trying to impede her, so she leans into her instincts: to burn. Jake convinces Finn to fight her by appealing to his deepest interest: being a hero. They go to build fire-proof suits and find Neptr. Talk about unrequited love. 3I didn’t miss him. Sorry, Neptr Finn and Jake fly some sweet suits over to the Goblin Kingdom, where Flame Princess is wreaking havoc. Finn tries to talk her down and she correctly points out that she’s heard this all before. Jake starts to put some flames out and Flame Princess goes down like Josh Hart.4This is a reference for exactly two people. Dated May 19th

Neptr takes control of the suit to solve the problem. Finn redirects the foam blaster, but still takes out a lot of her flame. Flame Princess takes her final form to burn down the whole kingdom. There’s a tight shot of her face with a flame tear. This is a sitcommy miscommunication plot, with Finn not having all the information to know why Flame Princess is so upset, but instead of being contrived for jokes, it leans into the emotional impact of not being able to properly say what you mean or be understood. 

Finn tries one last appeal to her back, and then gives into his tears. Rebecca Sugar is having a hell of a crying duology. Flame Princess looks back in anger, but realizes he is in pain as well. She shrinks down to get a better look, touching his tears and shrinking her flames. Finn’s embarrassed to be noticed in his time of pain, and surprised to be labeled as a water elemental. 

Rebecca Sugar: Yeah, he cries and cries all the time.

Penn Ward: No. He doesn’t usually do that.

Rebecca Sugar: That’s his power.

Penn Ward: No! N-N-N-NO-NO-NO!5I assume that’s how the pitch of this pair went

She recognizes that they’re opposites and that the most likely outcome of their relationship is hurting each other. Finn wants to try defying nature for her, but when they hug, he gets burned. Flame Princess isn’t ready to try (yet) and leaves. Jake tells Finn that everyone’s safe, he saved them after he ate the foam, and asks how things went with Flame Princess. He’s completely invested in Finn’s relationship and emotional well being, the delivery of “woah!” sells how close the boys are. Finn says that their physical encounter hurt, but he has anime eyes so you know this is not their end. 

I don’t love the suggestion that someone you’ve been explicitly told is evil is misguided, smacks of the attraction to bad boys, etc., but it’s dropped very quickly in the plot. It’s clear that the message is that people are often misunderstood because they’re assumed to have the same experiences or backgrounds as someone else. And that they can be hurt when you make assumptions without knowing who they are. Flame Princess is furious with Finn for physically hurting her, not realizing that he doesn’t understand that he is. She’s the one who realizes they’re elemental opposites. They have to find common ground physically for them to have any chance at a romantic relationship. 

Notes: 

• Finn’s abuse of Jake’s squishy form is great. Jake refuses to answer while being played with like Play Doh
• I love the rainbow tattoo on Finn’s fireproof suit. It’s very close to Rainbow Dash’s cutie mark
• “I feel like I could touch heaven! And sock angels”
• From the wiki: It is revealed that more than 15 months, 4 days, and 9 hours have passed since “What is Life?”. This is consistent with Finn and Jake’s birthdays, as Finn turned thirteen in “Mystery Train” and Jake’s birthday was in “The Creeps”. According to Pen, Finn turned fourteen at some point after “The New Frontier” in Season 3, which means that between “What is Life?” and “Mystery Train” there’s a time period of more than 3 months and 4 days.
• Flame Princess moving as a flame is super cool

Snail:

Behind the box of chips while Neptr helps build the fireproof suit

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Five Short Graybles | Written & Storyboarded by: Tom Herpich, Skyler Page, Cole Sanchez | Aired: April 9, 2012 | Review by: Katie

It feels inevitable that, if a cartoon runs for long enough, it eventually gets an episode comprised entirely of shorts. Adventure Time indulging in this tradition is, in and of itself, entirely unremarkable. But by its 4th season, Adventure Time was not interested in being unremarkable. So the result is “Five Short Graybles”, maybe the strangest conceptual break the show’s had to this point.6Really the only competition is “Fionna and Cake”, and even that ties back to the show’s normal reality right at the end We get our 5 shorts, but wrapped in the framing device of an alien storyteller named Cuber. Cuber speaks in complete nonsense half the time, to the point where it can be hard to tell at first that he’s even speaking English. Like, look at his first few lines:

Hmm? Oh, greeble bayble grapes. You’re just in time. Bayble Cuber’s going to watch an inkle dribble adventure from days of old on my holo-pyramid viewer.

Until we get to “adventure from days of old” it’s just complete nonsense. The scattered English words and phrases are like listening to a foreign language you don’t speak that has some loan words for your ear to latch onto. Adventure Time likes its nonsense slang, but Cuber takes it to a whole new level.

His segments are also presented with the grammar of a preschool show. A gentle adult, speaking directly to the audience, telling them stories, asking them to guess a theme about the five senses. It’s right out of Blue’s Clues. But, of course, Adventure Time is not for the pre-K set, so there’s more going on to this one.

First off, the shorts themselves highlight a few different ways the show’s matured over its first few years. We get BMO’s make-believe adventures with Football. He roleplays human/grown-up behavior he’s observed from Finn and Jake, like an actual young child might. But, despite BMO’s insistence that he is not a robot but a “real, living boy” he doesn’t quite get the finer points of the bathroom.

BMO really commits to the bit with Football, too. For us viewers, and for the voyeuristic Finn and Jake, Football is just an imaginary friend, BMO talking to himself. After all, she couldn’t be real, right? Just a reflection. We even see BMO speak for Football, complimenting him on how good his peeing is. Still, the show otherwise has fun with tight shot/reverse shot framing, keeping you from ever seeing BMO and Football at the same time, bringing you into our real living boy’s imaginative play.

I also really enjoyed Princess Bubblegum’s segment. We’ve known since the very first episode that she’s a bit of a mad scientist, but here we get to see her in a creative frenzy, disheveled, frankly a bit destructive towards others. It can not have felt good for that poor cow7Speaking to remind the viewer that there are no “normal” cows on Ooo anymore, strapped into a centrifuge and forcibly milked. Nor was that jellyfish likely down to be killed in a forced merger with a red balloon. But sometimes sacrifices must be made in the name of science. This builds on the character we first8In the sense of PB as a character with interiority, beyond her role as The Princess saw in “What Was Missing”. PB is brilliant, but dismissive of others in pursuit of her goals. It’s all worth it, though, for the most perfect sandwich that has ever or will ever be created. …which Cinnamon Bun proceeds to eat through a stoma.

The other segments are good, though I have less to say about them. Finn and Jake have their own segment, are around for two others in spots, and fly through the background of the other two, so you can’t exactly say they’re absent. But, we still see the show more willing to break from their POV than it has been at any point besides “Thank You”. The Cuber framing means the boys aren’t even the audience POV this time; the audience itself is! Ice King is still a sad weirdo, made just a touch more affecting now that we know he used to wear glasses. And for once, LSP actually is being wronged by someone else, rather than it being her own self-centered delusion.9It’s honestly pretty bold of those candy galls to steal a song about Lumps from a Lumpy Space Person, and then accuse her of ripping you off when she tries to perform it anyway. Those candy people are guilty of cultural appropriation! Overall, it’s another strong episode from a show that has undeniably hit its stride. I’ll see you trimpy flimmers on triode flimpin’ the diode!10in the triode. straight up “flimpin’ it”. and by “it”, haha, well. let’s justr say. My diode

Stray Observations:

• Could you guess the theme? It’s stronger for some shorts than others; I’d say touch, taste, and scent all fit, no problem, while sight and hearing were a bit of a stretch. Maybe those two are harder to pull off, since they’re the only two senses a television show can engage in the first place.
• Cuber seems to only know some of the people in his graybles. The way he calls Ice King “the blue guy” and LSP “the other thing” has a very Homestar Runner-esque cadence to it.
• The harder high fives sting a little, but Finn doesn’t mind. He likes the pain. Which, bro, we know. We saw how you were with Flame Princess.
• PB vocally saying “ding ding ding ding ding” when she gets her lettuce the right size is really cute
• LSP was shockingly good at basketball. I’ll bet the Mavs wish they could sign her! (NOTE: This joke was written before Game 2 of the finals began. If the Mavs actually win that one then please disregard, or substitute in “Celtics” if the Mavs really beat ass)