A Glitch is a Glitch | Written, Storyboarded, and Directed by: David OReilly | Airdate: April 1, 2013 | Reviewed by: Prestidigititis

The now-familiar music soundtracks a flying camera view of the landscape of Greater Ooo as we soar through the Ice Kingdom and Candy Kingdom, past a hissing Marceline, through to the Grass Kingdom and Treehouse of our heroes and pals, Finn and Jake. But everything looks different. Flatter, but at the same time more fluid. Com-Pu-Ter-Y. It’s a jarring introduction to an out-of-nowhere guest episode, the first in Adventure Time’s run, “A Glitch is a Glitch.”

To say this episode blindsided people is not just hyperbole. “Glitch” was deliberately not promoted or previewed like other episodes had been. Ads that Cartoon Network ran the week before its airing warned that the next episode was “too crazy” to show. They even went so far as to put a clip from an episode of Regular Show in the commercial instead.

And boy, they weren’t kidding. “A Glitch is a Glitch” takes all we expected from AT, and runs it through a very mechanized filter, giving it a weird sense of familiarity and otherness. If you’re of a certain age (a bit older than the purported target audience of kiddy-ages), it radiates recent nostalgia too, feeling the way computer-stuff might have seemed just a decade or so before. And yet…advanced well past then, from an animation perspective. Which is to say, things kinda looked like this, but when they did, they didn’t move like this. What mad genius is behind such visuals?

So, David OReilly (no apostrophe after the “O”) is an Irish animator who’s been working since the mid-2000s. He’s worked on movies like Her, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, music videos for U2, short films for Tim & Eric, and his own self-produced shorts, augmented reality projects, and video games. His style is that of a low-res 3D aesthetic, giving the sense of an unreliable style of computer animation; clunky and streamlined at the same time. Everything about early computer animation becomes part of his palette, including compression artifacts, text-to-speech voices, and the fragility of an unsophisticated virtual environment. In a very real sense, OReilly’s chosen medium is “glitch.”

From the earliest days of Adventure Time’s production, Pen Ward had been in contact with OReilly about directing an episode. Pen allowed OReilly complete control over the episode, writing and creating it all on his own. A pretty unheard of amount of creative freedom for someone who was entirely outside the production pipeline for Adventure Time. Of course, this wouldn’t be the last time that AT brought in guest animators to apply their own styles to the show. Adventure Time brings the audience to a place so far outside our everyday lives. Opening the show up to other artists makes more sense than keeping it hermetically sealed and stodgy. At least, that’s my opinion.

Still, it’s surprising how much this episode doesn’t feel like something way off the deep end. The story beats are true to the patterns and characters we’ve come to know. Ice King goes after Peebs, and is a giant doofus who endangers the world despite himself. Finn and Jake are intrepid, fearless heroes who have no doubt that they will find a way to save everyone and everything. The Candy People are hapless. The environment is malleable. The jokes are silly and fun. And like always, there’s jokes to appeal to the adults in the room.

Maybe a few too much, in fact. The interplay between Ice King and Princess Bubblegum verges pretty close to outright kink this time around. (Are any of us surprised that Ice King reads as being a “sub”?) Bubblegum making out with her own hand is kinda weird (though being reunited with Jake’s hand at the end mitigates some of it). The part that stuck out for me was the “kissing” getting intense enough that PB had to slow things down with a pointed “NO.” To her own puckered hand. This is still a kids’ show, right?

But the biggest differences are what OReilly brings to the table, and not just visually. His perspective outside the production pipeline leads to some fun metatextual commentary, like the boys trying their hand at computer animation, Jake trying to read subtitles backward (one of my favorite jokes in the episode), and the dive down into the Universal Source Code, and back out again. But we don’t get too crazy; of course F&J save the day. 

Things remain lively and breezy throughout. We could have gotten bogged down, with this unusual look and feel calling so much attention to itself that it forgets to be a cartoon—or worse, forgets to be an episode of Adventure Time. If you can get past the jarring visuals and unusual jokes that come with it (and I know some people can’t), you’re left with an episode that slides into place in Season Five of Adventure Time pretty seamlessly.

NOTES:

—Like all the guest-animated episodes to follow, this episode is considered non-canon. For whatever that’s worth.

—The video file Finn and Jake play to unleash the virus was a small animation OReilly made earlier, unrelated to AT, in order to emulate the “shock sites” of an older internet era. As someone who lived through that, it’s pretty authentic of the time, but much less horrifying, thank goodness.

—Jake’s paean to his own arm is one of my favorite diversions in the whole series. 

—The crazy sound effect of the boys diving into the virus glitch to reach the Universal Source Code is revealed to be just Jake making noises with his rubbery lips. I love that bit.

—A special piece of end-credits music was provided by electronic hip-hop producer Flying Lotus, but was not shown when the episode was aired, mainly because this was when Cartoon Network was still airing two episodes in a half-hour block, which would have meant the other ep’s credits would not be included. 

SNAIL STUFF: At first, lots of viewers thought this episode did not feature the waving snail. When that alternate closing credits sequence above became available on YouTube, people noticed a Waving Snail asset during the montage and suspected that you were only meant to see the snail during the closing credits. But in actuality that little snail asset is in the episode, and can be seen. It’s just a very blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment: 

Puhoy

Written and Storyboarded by Tom Herpich and Steve Wolfhard, Directed by Nate Cash and Nick Jennings, reviewed by LibraryLass

Star Trek: The Next Generation’s cast are widely present throughout the show’s run– Michael Dorn, LeVar Burton, and Marina Sirtis all made appearances in the land of Ooo, and this week it’s Jonathan Frakes’s turn as the adult Finn of Pillow World (alongside Deep Space Nine’s Wallace Shawn as the Pillow Sage Rasheeta and as Finn’s imagined version of Jake.) But that’s not where the TNG references end. I’m just gonna come out and say it: This episode is a parody of TNG fan-favorite “The Inner Light.” If you’re familiar with both shows, this statement might have shocked you a little. But I think it’s pretty clear if we look at it.

For those unfamiliar with the episode, The Inner Light is an episode in which Captain Picard is granted a vision of an entire alternate life in the form of the memories of a long-dead scientist from a long-dead planet, an experience which gives him the chance to experience a life where he marries, starts a family, and lives the domestic life that his dedication to Starfleet has denied him. The vision is a pivotal moment for him and is shown to have profoundly affected the captain for years to come. It’s widely cited as one of the greatest episodes in TNG’s entire seven-year run.

But Adventure Time is a theater of the absurd, and this episode delivers an alternative spin on the opportunity to experience an alternate life. On a rainy day, Finn broods about a possible downturn in his budding relationship with Flame Princess, as she didn’t laugh at a joke he made on their last date. Jake proposes to teach him a lesson in non-attachment by throwing his own favorite cup out into the destructive deluge of the Knife Storm raging outside. Finn, dissatisfied, crawls into Jake’s pillow fort and finds himself traveling through a portal to a world where seemingly everything is made of pillows, blankets, and bedsheets. 

Seemingly trapped in the Pillow World, Finn spends years trying to return before ultimately settling into his new lot in life, marrying Roselinen, the daughter of the local village mayor and having two children, Jay and Bonnie (presumably named after Jake and Princess Bubblegum.) As the years go by even his memories of Jake begin to fade and distort, culminating in Finn’s decision to choose to remain for life. At long last, Finn, now elderly and decrepit, dies in his bed, surrounded by his family and new friends and the relics of a life well lived…

Only to find himself emerging back into the Tree House. He begins to explain his experiences to Jake, only to be interrupted by a phone call from Flame Princess, who finally got the joke. With his train of thought interrupted, decades of life, a whole family, all effervesce for Finn and are forgotten as quickly as a dream. Unlike Captain Picard, Finn’s alternate life will have no impact on his life whatsoever.

Breaking up the story to facilitate the timeskips, we return to Jake and BMO at the treehouse periodically. Humorously, despite the zen message both he and the episode wish to impart, we are shown a little hypocrisy from Jake, as he uses a fishing pole to retrieve his lost cup, and to bribe BMO with hot cocoa when the little robot takes it for a playmate. Jake may find his way to bodhisattva-hood one day, but for now he is only a man. Or, well, a magic dog.

Stray Notes:

As Finn experiences his own death in the Pillow World, we get our first glimpse of GOLB. At the time this episode aired, I remember assuming that this was Finn only half-remembering Grob/Gob/Glob/Grod, but now I guess Finn truly came close to meeting his end there.

The first appearance of another -MO robot can also briefly be seen– early in the episode as Jake in backhoe form dumps a pile of pillows, CMO bonks off Finn’s head and rolls away.

Roselinen’s *horny*, man.

Yet another alternate Finn loses his forearm and gets a prosthetic replacement.

Finn references his future voice actor when he refers to his vision as “the Number One wildest dream!”

Snailwatch: He’s behind a pillow person at the celepillowbration.