The Great Bird Man
Boarded by Ako Castuera and Jesse Moynihan
Originally Aired: March 4, 2013
Review by: CedricTheOwl

I don’t know if anyone was asking for a sequel to season 2’s “The Silent King”, but at this point in Adventure Time’s run, the creators will increasingly follow whatever inspires them.  Jesse Moynihan is certainly the most likely boarder I would suspect of writing an entire episode about the further adventures of Xergiok, deposed goblin king turned desert cryptid, because he’s never met a callback character he didn’t like.  “The Silent King” was all about what happens to a kingdom once its tyrannical ruler has been deposed; “The Great Bird Man” instead follows the path of the twice defeated tyrant to see how he’s trying to turn his life around.

Our episode opens much like an early season adventure, with Finn and Jake in search of the elusive Bird Man under orders from Princess Bubblegum.  However, the mission this time is just a little different.  Bird Man hasn’t directly threatened the Candy Kingdom yet, and in fact there’s no hard evidence that he even exists.  Yet PB is fully committed to finding out everything she can about him just in case he becomes a threat.  It’s a small character bit, but it illustrates how she’s become subtly more proactive (dare I say, paranoid?) about identifying and dealing with anything that could threaten her realm.

After a cute callback to “The Other Tarts”, where Finn also tossed away a magic crystal communication device to sign off from talking to PB, our boys continue wandering the desert.  They’re clearly not equipped for the journey, and before long they collapse and are rescued by a mysterious bird-shaped figure emerging from the sun.  The savior is none other than the Great Bird Man himself, Xergiok.  He’s been blinded by a wizard who took his eyes (or rather, hid them in his own beard), but in his suffering he’s found both peace and purpose.  Not only is he caring for a rookery full of big-nosed birds, he’s reached a point of spiritual enlightenment where he can swap body parts with a wounded creature in order to take their suffering upon himself.  He’s completely turned his life around from when he was king, but is it too good to be true?

Autobots, Transcend and Roll Out!

Jake certainly seems to think so, and says as much when Finn floats the idea of telling Xergiok about the eyes in his beard.  Finn has always been more trusting of people’s better natures than Jake, but this time around he may have an ulterior motive for wanting to believe Xergiok has changed.  His current paramour Flame Princess is torn between her desire to do good and the evil influence of her father, and while Finn has grown a lot from his once simplistic black and white view of good and evil, his beliefs have never been tested on a scale like that of FP’s story.  I can see him seeking out in Xergiok a confirmation of his belief that she can change.  Jake relents, and they take him up into the sky to restore his sight.

What follows is a short musical number that feels very much like a movement from a 60s prog album.  Odd, seemingly disjointed lyrics, psychedelic colors and visuals, and a sudden turn into the discordant and unsettling.  It certainly doesn’t instill the viewer with confidence that Xergiok will keep to his new lifestyle now that he can see again.

See with eyes unclouded by beard dandruff

Sure enough, he begins to ask the boys leading questions about the current state of the Goblin Kingdom.  He’s not thrilled that Whisper Dan is their new leader, and under the pretense of flying the boys to the treehouse he instead lands at the Goblin Kingdom and rouses his bird friends to prepare for a spanking rampage.  When Finn and Jake try to intervene, he abuses his transposing powers to give Jake his broken leg.  Increment the “AT Crew Contrives a Way to Put Jake Out of a Fight” counter. His offensive gets no further than that, because he’s so hard-up to spank a butt that he starts striking the nose of his bird friend Cardamon.

The birds flee his ham-spanking frenzy, and Xergiok is quick to come down to earth and realize just how over the line he went.  His delusions of grandeur are framed like an addiction by the narrative, with his actions here similar to a recovering alcoholic falling off the wagon and going on a bender that ends up alienating his friends.  Xergiok remorsefully restores Jake’s leg, then removes his eyes in order to shut out the temptation to slap hams ever again.

View post on imgur.com

This story has some loose parallels to Oedipus, the mythical king of Thebes.  He too was a king who rose to power and committed terrible acts, and in the most popular version of the myth he realized his crimes and blinded himself in his shame.  He spends the rest of his life as a miserable beggar, accompanied by his daughter Antigone (to add further parallels to Xergiok’s story, Antigone is a genus of crane).  Admittedly having a ham-spanking fetish is hardly comparable to murdering your father and fathering children with your mother, but Oedipus and Xergiok have the same reaction to finding out about their crimes:  making sure they’re incapable of ever doing it again.

But what does this mean for Finn’s vicarious search for confirmation about Flame Princess’ desire to reform?  The answer is complicated.  Despite how much he seemed to outwardly change, Xergiok immediately fell back into old habits once he had the power to do so.  Our previous episode, “Vault of Bones”, seemed to show FP getting lost in the thrill of raining fiery vengeance upon her foes once she cut loose with her power, with Finn unsure how to react to it.  In the end she saved the day by adopting Finn’s methodology, but will she do the same when her boyfriend’s hot buttered buns aren’t on the line?  Only time will tell.

Stray Observations –

• Thanks to the boarder commentaries from season 2-4, I now know about Ako Castuera’s penchant for gross-out humor.  I have no doubt the milking scene and the eyeball bits were her ideas.
• The ending to this episode feels even more random than Adventure Time’s usual ending gags.  Part of me wonders if the AT crew thought Cartoon Network wouldn’t go for the implication that Xergiok drowned himself in despair, so they came up with the buxom mermaid ending intending for it to get thrown out and forced to go back to the original ending.  If so, that’s one bluff that CN called them on.
• Xergiok’s power to swap an injured body part of another onto himself may be a reference to Illmater, the deity in the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons and Dragons whose followers can take the injuries and afflictions of others onto themselves.

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Simon and Marcy | Written & Storyboarded by: Cole Sanchez, Rebecca Sugar and Adam Muto | Aired: March 25, 2013 | Review by: Lyssie

Well, here we go, another Simon and Marcy episode – and this one’s even called Simon and Marcy! The first episode focused on them since we discovered that they have a shared history, and already the show has decided to dive right into it with a story about their time together. This is an episode that’s a bit unclear what exactly it’s trying to say, and that has a lot of open questions about what characters are doing and thinking; and in writing this article I’ve realized how great it is because of it.

The opening basketball game shows us a shift between Marcy and Simon. Before I Remember You she only wanted for him to stay away, so she could avoid being hurt by him not remembering their past (and treating her horribly). But after that episode she seems to have decided to have him be a part of her life, at least a little and however she can. This feels like another parallel with the ways people in real life cope with loved ones with dementia. Some will stay away from them to avoid the pain, some will stay close, some will shift between one and the other or be somewhere inbetween.

Her telling this story is another aspect of her changing attitude towards the situation – she wants to tell people about it and feels more comfortable with it, and she also copes better with telling IK about their past and seeing him not remember a thing. The fact that Finn and Jake are also there feels like a bit of “main character needs to always be present even when the story’s not about them” syndrome (why yes, I have been rewatching Steven Universe). But unlike in I Remember You, here it feels relevant to me; both in giving Marceline a reason to tell the story to someone (and by extension to the viewers), and because we get to see F+J learn about Marcy’s past – though it’s unclear if by the end they’ve realized that the Simon she’s talking about is IK.

When we jump back to the past I’m immediately struck once again by how radically different Simon was. Not just that at this point he still has his identity and memories, but also that he’s caring, responsible, smart, and brave. To a lesser extreme there’s also a very different Marcy, young and naïve, openly caring and frightened where now she’s jaded and always wearing a mask of apathy. Here Simon can and does take care of Marcy, while at present she’s powerless to help him no matter how much she might want to.

The way Simon uses the crown here gives us a glimpse of how he changes into the Ice King over time. It’s not the gradual deterioration of dementia, and instead he shifts sharply back and forth between his normal behavior without the crown and being different with it. But it is also gradual in other ways, both in the fact that Simon is still himself under the crown but it seems to force a change in personality, and in that it’s getting worse over time. And then, even real world dementia has episodes, with the person getting a bit better again but getting worse as time goes by.

It’s unclear to me how much Simon’s relationship with the crown is a kind of addiction, or just a conscious choice to take this risk again and again in order to protect Marcy. He says he’s been learning how to control it, and the last transformation shows that he almost can. But it’s still taking a toll on him and taking over him; he can barely take it off, can’t control himself when he has it on besides that last time and even then hardly at all. And each time he takes it off he looks worse, signified most clearly by calling Marcy ‘Gunther’ a few times. Is this him losing his grasp of reality in some way, or getting some kind of future vision and not being able to tell present from future? Or even just seeing / sensing things that others can’t – we’ve seen before how he can see an entire spirit world.

The Ice King has perhaps never been more frightening then when he was a reluctant hero…

It’s not a coincidence that the last transformation of the episode leads to him leaving behind his glasses – he’s losing his ability to see clearly. Or that the song he sings to Marcy and later uses to keep his hold on reality is about everyone knowing your name – and soon no one will no his name, not even himself, no one except Marcy who’ll have no one to tell.

Now, I’ve been focusing on this heady analysis of memory and identity, but when it comes down to it a lot of this episode is just this sweet snapshot of Simon and Marcy living and surviving together. Play-acting at TV, her making him breakfast, him taking care of here when she’s sick and just wanting so bad to find her some chicken soup. It’s heartbreaking to see what they had and what they lost, and to see in real time how Simon was losing himself and how painful that was for both of them.

And then there’s the bubblegum entity, which I guess is an early form of PB? I’m looking forward to what happened there, but it’s already sweet to see how early they were in each other’s lives – PB helped take care of Marcy even before she fully existed!

I’m not sure what to make of Marcy’s “and they lived happily ever after”. Is she making up a false ending to the tale to avoid telling the harsh reality? Choosing to believe that the two of them really will find their happy ending some day? Or just expressing how they’ve found a way to be happy together right now? It’s probably some combination of all three.

Stray observations:

• The basketball game was a cool foreshadowing (backshadowing?) of Simon and Marcy’s past adventure, with Simon being able to pick Marcy up and run and jump with her in hand to get to safety, while she’s able to throw a snowball and knock of the crown in one try.
• More on the topic of the game – the interaction between them speaks to how much their dynamic has changed, Simon begs for her to ask for his help and rely on him, while she basically ignores that and makes the shot all alone.
• MOTHER MOTHER MOTHER MOTHER MOTHER MOTHER MOTHER
• Okay, but actually – that’s funny on its own right, but is it also a John Lennon reference on top of how Simon looks?
• The Cheers song feels like the most direct connection to the real world we’ve gotten so far. I wondered if that was meant to make us feel more connected to Simon and Marcy, like they’re basically people in the same world as us, just five minutes and one apocalypse into the future. But that probably wasn’t what the writers were thinking, considering that the kids watching at home don’t know what Cheers is.