“All the Little People” Written by: Ako Castuera & Jesse Moynihan Air date: December 3, 2012 Coverage: Mrs Queequeg

Ah yes, my favorite jerkass returns. Magic Man has what’s essentially a glorified cameo, dropping off a bag of characters from Ooo for Finn to play with. 

We open with the boys watching the sunset on ruins. They’re having a discussion about attraction and a little head vs heart in regards to dating. Jake makes a Jay T Doggzone-esque joke and immediately takes it back. Meanwhile, Magic Man has been in the cahoots of the Door Lord, and pops up within the grass. He listens to their discussion and laughs at the pairing of BMO and Ice King.1Hilariously, to me, Stars’ favorite and least favorite characters He enchants a bag, tucks it into Finn’s shorts and does not return.

When the boys notice the bag, they’re both intrigued and disconcerted that there are miniature versions of the denizens of Ooo. Finn dumps them out on the table (see notes) before deciding to play with the main characters. And Little Mr Cupcake. Jake’s initially disgusted that Little Jake wants to jam out with Little Ice King, but then concedes that they have good chemistry together. 2Interesting, while the Little speech sounds like Charlie Brown wah wahs, we can understand the Little music. Not sure if that’s how sound works, but it’s a fun layer Finn hears the word chemistry, and the gears in his brain start moving. 

There’s so much about this episode that I like. We have Finn continuing to learn how to be an adult. He was asking advice, or really guidance, about picking a good romantic partner. What makes romance work? Compatibility? Chemistry? Do you need to be similar in personality? From the outside, it looks easy to matchmake, after all countless attempts have been made by people. Surely, all you need to do is put the pairs together. It will work easily. 

But Finn’s not yet at an age where he can properly comprehend his consequences, especially socially3He does look at Jake before he starts matchmaking. He understands that this can be dicey, but he doesn’t understand how poorly this can and will backfire. He will not learn this lesson completely until a future episode (which is arguably my favorite arc). He can’t sleep, fixated on the potential pairings he now has control over. He has absolutely no ill will towards his best buddy, but he breaks Little Jake’s heart as he introduces him to Little Lady and Little Mr Cupcake’s hookup.

When Jake wakes, he finds an insomniac Finn. Jake spies his Little self and asks to see Little Lady. Finn explains that they broke up, and she’s dating a cool guy. Jake finds Little Lady wrapped around Little Finn.4Under the Jay T. Doggzone book. Pausing shows the text reflected on both sides, but it also seems that rampant douchery aside, Jay T is still a romantic at heart – “Now to be clear, Jay T. Doggzone does not condone random flirtation with wanton babes, but rather careful consideration of which lovely honey gives your heart the bu-bumps. ‘Cause it’s all about the bu-bumps.” I repeat, douchery aside Clearly, Finn’s long since lost the plot. How he got to Little himself with Lady after the cheating dustup is explained away by Finn’s understanding that none of them are real. Finn has no respect for the Little People as independent, sentient beings, which is very true of younger teens. Even the idea of seeing a teacher out in the wild is jarring. They’re not real people, they live in the bag at school. 

Jake is extremely uncomfortable with the pairings that Finn has orchestrated. He leaves for Lady’s for a few days. 

Finn continues his experiments, ripping Little Finn from Little Lady, as he did with Little LSP and Little Mr Cupcake. Placing Little Finn near Little Flame Princess, they initially ignore each other. Finn looks momentarily put out, before walking Little Finn over to instigate interaction. Little Lady comes out to see them sharing a cookie and starts sobbing. Still not understanding chemistry or able to read the moment, Finn plops Little Princess Bubblegum down, who instantly kills the mood with her whistling. Again initiating contact, Finn gets Little PB to give Little Finn a backrub in a moment that feels gross for the viewer, and confusing for Finn. Initially Finn is put out that Little Finn hits it off with Little Bubblegum. This also sets off a fight culminating in LPB dousing LFP with Little Lady’s tears, which I found hilariously dark. Finn’s shocked … and flattered.

Finn has no dating experience. He liked a girl but it was unreciprocated. He likes a different girl, it is reciprocated, but they’re so different that it’s hard to be together. He’s at the age where he has no knowledge and without good guidance, he can learn to equate drama with passion. I’m sure we can all think of many people who’ve made that error. 

16 WEEKS LATER

Jake returns, having gotten over the absolutely messed up stuff that Finn was doing, only to find him a mess and the place an absolute kip. Little Finn is despondent, Little Lady is still sobbing, and Little PB is now a gym rat.5Love that for her Jake correctly calls Finn out, “This is messed up. You’ve crossed the line from weird curiosity6Again, accurate to the age into some dark, messed up stuff.” Jake gets judgey on some coupling, but I conceded that Little Peppermint Butler is not long for this world without intervention. Finn breaks down and agrees but refuses to abandon them. He is compelled to fix his mistakes, after all, Little Finn is “staring into his darkest mind-hole.”

Communication is a big theme in this episode, as is understanding of others. The Little People seem simple; plug and play, but Little Finn gets to a very existential place. He stands on a cliff, yelling his plight to the heavens. Finn desperately wants to help, but doesn’t know how. He attempts to communicate, yelling in Little Finn’s face, licking him, but nothing works. We get a look at Little Finn’s world, he sees himself on the cliff that started the episode. Jake’s suggestion of shaking and yelling does work, it appears that they’re vibrating at different intervals. Finn apologizes to Little Finn and the Little ladies for his crummy actions. Finn repeats Magic’s Man from the intro, “I’m not coming back.” He convinces everyone to have a dance party, which seems to have everyone at peace. A night out dancing is indeed cathartic. And look at that, Ice King’s dancing with BMO.

Friend of the show and fellow recapper Josephus has mentioned his interest in the show when it explores its universe. This is absolutely one of those episodes. Finn can see Little World, but they are not able to see him. This is one of those philosophical and/or whatever field studies parallel universes that hurts my brain too much to think about. What if we exist inside another universe that we are unable to perceive? Where an omniscient – or just extremely powerful – creature is able to exert influence on our lives and our choices? Were those moments of ‘I have no idea why I did that’ actually Finn moving us around? 

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly spiritual person, but Little Finn’s anguish and calling out to a higher force moves me. I’ve never made the comparison before, but Godfellas is one of my favorite episodes of Futurama. If you’re unfamiliar, Bender is accidentally shot into the universe on his own and life forms on his torso after colliding with an asteroid. Bender attempts to be a benevolent god, but each action he takes ends up too extreme for the little universe that exists on him. In the end, he meets a? the? god who tells him, “that if [Bender] does things right, no one will be sure that he did anything at all.” 

Subtly is another motif, and one that’s hard to balance. It’s easy to remember the kid who tried too hard to be your friend, or the friend who put too much effort into cultivating a persona. Even with good intentions, coming on too strong can sour a chance. Certainly animals spook when not given space. I’ll forever borrow the analogy from Steven Universe that all relationships are a conversation, but even that is oversimplifying the skill that you have to cultivate to be able to properly listen to others and respond appropriately. 

I love the episodes where we get to see Finn grow. He knows who he wants to be, but it sure is hard to get there, as we see in all teen-based media and our own lives. I want to pin this thread until we get to Frost & Fire in Season 5B. 

Jake has some excellent stretching powers with his head. I didn’t think he could top grid-face, and then he made heart face beat.

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“Jake the Dad”, Aired March 18, 2013
Written and Storyboarded by Hanna K. Nyström and Aleks Sennwald

Being a parent is hard.

I remember when we got home with my son. I set him down in his bassinet on the coffee table… And he was just there now! A BRAND NEW PERSON JUST LIVING IN OUR HOUSE WITH US NOW. FOREVER. And they just let us take this baby! Did you know that? They’ll let pretty much anybody just HAVE a baby? That’s insane! There’s no handbook, no user’s guide, not even so much as a T&C we had to sign! Just a person! In our house!

It’s really hard to express how overwhelming that feels, and I can understand Jake totally abdicating all decision making responsibility to Mom’s Manual.

Personally, I was never as overbearing as Jake is here, but this is still really recognizable. I definitely once had an “oh my god I can’t tell if he’s breathing” moment, but, because a disturbing number of my cultural references are from 1920’s detective novels, I instead very reasonably got a mirror and held it under his nose to see if he fogged it. Which he did, because I was being a paranoid weirdo, so I went to bed.

So, again, I can understand Jake’s desire to have someone who can tell him what to do when faced with the prospect of suddenly being responsible for a tiny helpless life. It’s scary.

But at the same time, you can drive yourself insane reading about all the horrible things that can happen to kids. More information doesn’t always help anything. Like, just to pick a random example, if you, say, have a degree in cognitive psychology and briefly flirted with going into children’s psychopathology like a certain reviewer. Knowing about things like “childhood disintegrative disorder” will keep you up at night. Even more so if you, like me, have a disabled child, and watch them start to miss developmental milestones.

So while I can really sympathize with Jake here, I never wanted a manual, because I knew enough about the woeful state of information about child development that I knew any purported manual is gonna be bullshit. I just wanted to be a parent. I wanted to read bedtime stories and sing lullabies and put my kid in a backpack to hike through the woods and watch them discover why you’re not supposed to eat sand at the beach. At the same time, what I was doing there was still emulating my memories of how my parents took care of me as a kid.

Which to me gets at the key difference. If I had pages and pages of advice my parents wrote back when they were still raising me (cause notice, in at least one of these recordings you can see that she’s making it when Finn and Jake are still babies) I bet it would all have been uniformly terrible advice (French toast recipes aside). Your memories of how you were raised and what your parents actually thought they were supposed to be doing when they raised you likely did not line up at all.

It seems at first wildly out of character for Jake to abandon how focused he is on people needing their own life experience, but honestly having tiny beings utterly dependent on you for everything is intense. So I can see the temptation to reach for a manual. Especially if, as in his case, he clearly idolizes his parents, having long since lost them, so having a virtual Grandma around to lean on when anxious must be very tempting. And he’s also robbed of getting the potentially more aged and refined version of his mom’s parenting advice that he’d be getting if she’d been around long enough to be a grandma, because in my experience lots of grandmas will admit when things are a bunch of junk.

So honestly, anxiety is fine. But eventually you have to learn to accept that sometimes you’re going to be scared and anxious and there’s nothing you can do about it. Because otherwise you become one of those parents. You know the kind I’m talking about.

And one of those parents Jake absolutely becomes. I think we forget what being a kid was like. Which is a funny statement to make about someone who seems to be perpetually as childish as Jake does, but he clearly has. To feel stifled by rules, to be annoyed when someone won’t explain why you’re not allowed to do something, to be certain of your own capabilities but be denied the opportunity to prove yourself. 

There’s also an interesting bit that a lot of Jake’s overbearingness starts to be the product of him running himself ragged- he’s creating every problem for himself. He chucks the book out the window right into the hands of the waiting foxes. As he’s hauling the kids on their walk through the woods none of them are allowed to do anything because he’s too exhausted to handle anything except the bare minimum. That’s real common, and I know I’ve almost slipped into that myself. You don’t want to play, you don’t want to deviate from the task you assigned yourself, you don’t want to have to do anything but just get through this. But sometimes you just have to take things as they are and live in the moment, and not taking care of yourself can rob you of the ability to do that.

Jake is really spared a lot of torment here by the narrative contrivance quirk of Rainicorn biology where Rainicorns reach adulthood extremely quickly. I like to think he learns something from this, though I’m not entirely sure what that might be. But in the end, he gets to finish the episode returning to his old life, where things are familiar and make sense.

Stray Thoughts:

• I actually had something thematic to say about this episode so I didn’t do as much recapping as usual. But holy crap is this one an A+ episode, I laughed so hard the first time I watched it and it still never fails to bust me up.
• The VA for Mr. Fox comes back. I love his weird low key delivery, he’s always a delight, and his, “Fellas, there’s never gonna be a perfect baby” might be one of my favorite line reads in the entire run of the show.
• Jake and Lady’s pups having crazy weird powers is awesome, and I like how they make sure to show that some of them are clearly inherited from him, and I love how they keep it up as they grow up or have pups of their own.

• Kristen Schall makes her first appearance as the voice of Jake Jr., she’ll continue to be voiced by her throughout the series.
• The first time I saw this, I laughed at that butterfly’s side eye so hard I missed the next thirty seconds of the episode.
• This is the second episode with “Jake The [Blank]”, thus establishing a pattern. Eventually we get “Jake The Brick” and then

• “Baby-Eating Fox And The Babies” is clearly meant to be a Little Golden Book, and holy shit do they nail the vibe of coming back to a something you hadn’t seen since childhood.