Candy Streets | Storyboarded by: Luke Pearson & Somvilay Xayaphone | Air date: June 24, 2013 | Reviewed by: Mrs Queequeg

Poor LSP! She has been done wrong! Robbed! Without any thought to her poor … heart? The title card is noir themed, telling us that this will be a dramatic episode and there will be a sexy dame that’s nothing but trouble. 

We open with the boys playing acting with cats doing a business, in the Candy Kingdom castle. LSP bursts, frantic because something was stolen from her. Princess Bubblegum knows just how to handle the situation, which involves drugging her with a Gumball Guardian sized syringe. LSP manages to get the name “Puh-Pete. Pete Sa – Sass” out before passing out.

Finn and Jake realize they need to become detectives to solve this crime. Jake morphs into a magnifying glass, and Finn finds a hotel key for The Coolest Hotel, a fabulous art deco style hotel. *dun dun* The boys head to a trashed hotel room, kicking the unlocked door in just for good measure. We’re in genre mode, after all. The room is full of pizza boxes and other trash, which BMO catalogs. The trio is puzzled until the discovery of blood on the floor. Finn asks BMO to do “the woiks” of a blood sample, while Jake envelops Finn to transport them to the drug store. Jake has a problem. The little yell that Finn gives while being smothered by Jake is hilarious. 

At the Candy Drugstore, Finn and Jake meet Ann, the clerk who can recall an absurd amount of information about Pete Sassafrass, despite the sheer number of customers that she sees each day. I love the animation in this scene. Jake smacks the paper out of Finn’s hand, then transforms into a notepad but resists Finn’s attempts to take notes. Meanwhile, Ann is doing all sorts of business behind the counter, giving both shopkeep and bartender vibes as she spouts exposition at them. Finn has to cut her off to get a name 

Ann gives Pete’s last name, and the specifics of his schedule, so the boys rush off while there’s a quiet *dun dun* sound effect. They have Pete’s name and schedule, but no physical description. At Platform 5, they see a ‘nasty tranch’ and head in pursuit.1I’m not sure if “Let’s book ‘im, son” is as clear a reference as the Law & Order sound, or necessarily what it’s a reference to. Danno? They hop the turnstile in their haste, and they get busted by the fuzz. Who are these blueberry cops? How do they work with the Banana Guards? Either way, like a lick of Jake’s back, the boys are released for tasting like police. 

Jake envelopes Finn again, this time from overhead.2Jake’s truck looks like a mouth. All of it is very upsetting. Finn is not pleased about this course of action.

Coupe Jake heads down the rails, but has to take a shortcut to catch up to the train that looks a lot like the Mystery Train. They confront Pete, who has no idea what they’re talking about. Jake, slightly out of breath from driving himself to catch a train, then transforming into a gun and manhandling the suspect, transforms into handcuffs and walks himself up to secure Pete’s wrists. There’s a smash cut to Pete Sassafras behind bars. He belongs in the genre, delightfully, calling the boys flatfoots and demanding a lawyer. There’s been a crazy coincidence! Jake performs the most impressive bit of shapeshifting yet, creating a defense attorney that appears to speak in Pete’s defense. They mock him and walk out to get donuts as a reward for a case cracked. 

Finn and Jake discuss their solid work. They’re awesome at being cops, they crumbled this case. They eat and talk until Finn almost takes a bite out of Jake, who abandoned his car model to be a donut. He’s sweating, he’s addicted to the shapeshifting! I really like the tight shot on Finn’s face that hides that he’s now sitting on the street because Jake shrank. BMO walks up, because we are still in a noir of coincidence, and he informs them that the blood sample from the hotel floor is TOMATO SAUCE! 

They’re momentarily puzzled before they remember the many, many boxes and the coincidentally named Sassy Pizza. They ask for the pizza delivery boy – Petey – who’s out delivering a pizza to LSP tying up loose ends. Finn calls Princess Bubblegum on a rotary phone, by making the keypad noises with his mouth. I have questions about how the Candy Kingdom’s phones work.3I’m going to assume that Princess Bubblegum can listen to all phone calls. Privacy? She doesn’t know her. Finn tells Prubs to assign guards to LSP’s hospital room, only to find out that LSP woke up and headed back to The Coolest Hotel. 

The boys frantically run back to the hotel, noticing that the delivery car is parked out front. It delights me that they stop and wail, “LSP!” at the receptionist. They hear a struggle in her room, and it’s Jake’s turn to kick down the hastily repaired door. They find LSP laying across Pete, full of accusations. Petey stole LSP’s heart and she doesn’t know how to deal with that. Finn and Jake pull Petey out, and send him on his way.4Petey mumbles that there’s no tip, and that’s just how things are around here, which is hilarious and I didn’t notice without the captions Jake morphs back into the car and they leave LSP sobbing on the floor. Reusing animation from earlier in the episode, they burst out her window again. The status of Pete Sassafras remains unknown.

This one’s light on content but big on laughs. LSP turns out to be the dame with a dark side that you can’t trust, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s watched this show. LSP has always been pure id, the consummate teenager, and this episode slots in nicely with the romantic themes of season 5. She’s moved beyond trying to figure out her emotional availability and readiness, she knows she’s ready now, she’s looking for a willing partner. I guess we can be glad she’s not doing public displays, trying to emotionally manipulate someone into a relationship, which is definitely not something that happened to me at 15.5In fairness, his motivation wasn’t manipulation, he needed the support of friends to be confident in asking me out. And I was into him. But I remember that moment clearly, and even then my response was “sure” instead of something more enthusiastic. We dated for a month, most of it over summer. We will get one of my absolute favorite LSP showcases and single episodes with Bad Timing (5-49) towards the end of the season. 

Noirs are regular life turned up to gritty, and this episode highlights the mundane of the Candy Kingdom. These characters have lives in which they go to work, earn money, and pay for things. Finn and Jake have never done any of these things. Now, maybe it’s just that I was watching Ocarina (6-12) earlier, but it’s kind of poignant to see lives that we consider normal existing in the wilds that Finn and Jake normally exist in.6And the literal woods that LSP lives in. It’s not surprising that Finn would become a cop, the black and white thinking of right and wrong appeals to his hero mindset, and he’s young enough to think that he’ll always solve the case correctly. I’m surprised that Jake would agree though, aside from his now well-documented life of crime, it’s much too structured of a day for him. 

Next time, we have Jake Suit and Be More.

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Here’s one of our most well-known public communicators of science making a really terrible argument on behalf of scientific enterprises:

This is a bad argument because it is vague and brushes past all sorts of complexities. What does he mean by “Science?” What does he mean by “true?” It is also a bad argument because it doesn’t take persuasion seriously. It very much does matter that people “believe in” scientific evidence if we want to, for example, understand, predict, and mitigate the effects of climate change in a way that aligns with our best scientific evidence. Because belief is a prerequisite to action. And it is a bad argument because it creates the dogmatic, “ivory tower” version of science that has driven people away from the sciences for hundreds of years. It is the kind of thing that makes people say, “Welp, I guess I’m just not a part of this scientific group. I guess I’ll just stay in my place here on the outside.”

But NdGT’s stupid tweet is understandable because, yeah, it can be frustrating to deal with people who—because of all kinds of complex ideological reasons—ignore scientific evidence and undermine scientific institutions. If you’re like me, you sometimes do just want to scream this kind of thing in their freakin faces. But this would be a bad idea, and I think “Wizards Only, Fools” helps us see why.

We open the episode with Finn and Jake sitting outside a hospital room, from which emanates a desperate shriek: “Nooooooo!”

It turns out Starchy’s got a cold, and he’s refusing treatment—in the form of an injection of some kind of serum—from Princess Bubblegum because, as he puts it, he “only takes magic.” In a Neil deGrasse Tyson-esque bout of frustrated pedantry, she princess-splains to him, “All magic is is scientific principles presented like mystical hoodoo, which is fun, but it’s sorta irresponsible.” Then she makes fun of magic in a way that Starchy and Nurse Poundcake find disrespectful and dismissive.

Again, I can see where she’s coming from. But, again, this is a bad way of persuading people of the value of the scientific evidence-based medicine. And PB seems to realize this.

So, how should a physician like PB care for a patient like Starchy?

I prefer to think of sciences as disciplined ways of managing uncertainty. Often, good uncertainty management requires admitting to some degree of uncertainty. Indeed, admitting uncertainty is a huge part of scientific language conventions. In their writing, scientists are much more likely to write that their results “suggest” or “may imply” something rather than “demonstrate” or “prove” something. But scientific ideologies often grant scientific arguments more certitude than the arguments, as they’re written, indicate. In our day-to-day conversations, we may construct an aura of certitude around much more tentative findings and claims. This aura of certitude scaffolds the ivory tower that a lot of people are so skeptical of.

These scientific ideologies can create a sort of regime of thought that doesn’t admit other perspectives. In Wizard City we see what this looks like when we replace a scientific ideology with a magical one. To even get access to Wizard City, you must look like a wizard and speak with the voice of a wizard.

Once inside the hallowed walls, we learn that Wizard City operates according to its own magical ideological regime, and the denizens enforce that regime through violence.

PB arrogantly and recklessly insists on her own scientific worldview and almost gets them all turned into sticks by the wizard police. They do, however, yoink a cold spell from Ron James’s Spell Palace as they narrowly escape the fuzz. The non-magic users, Finn, Jake, and PB are eventually nabbed, though, and they’re brought before a judge, and PB triples down on her insistence that magic is nonsense. So she gets them all thrown in prison where Finn gets traumatized by some underpanties.

Abracadaniel challenges PB to “an honorable prison stabbing . . . to the death.” They fight a bit and then unleash the cold spell, which was actually a cold spell. It gets them out of that pickle and out of Wizard City.

Back in the hospital, PB decides to compromise by presenting her biomedical approach in a magical way that might make Starchy more comfortable. Sort of. Abracadaniel struggles to awe the nervous patient by conjuring a rainbow. Finn then holds Starchy down (again, he upsettingly screams, “Noooo!”). PB babbles some magic-sounding words, makes a fart noise, and jabs the syringe into Starchy’s arm. End of episode.

Bubblegum may have complained that magic was just a matter of presenting scientific principles in a mystical way. But presentation matters, and has always mattered, to biomedicine too. Medicine has a lot of dramaturgical stuff going on in it. Surgeries take place in an operation “theater.” The costumes that physicians wear carry serious symbolic weight. Physicians enact the performance of “physician,” and patients enact the role of “patient.” The language of medicine is, in many ways, impractical, yet necessary to establish credibility, convey urgency, and foster compliance. It’s admirable, I think, that PB realizes she doesn’t want to insist on a strictly biomedical approach to treating Starchy. But she also isn’t cool with leaving him to his own devices, which she sees as insufficient and maybe even harmful.

We might see this as a tension between two competing healthcare paradigms. One is the paternalistic approach, which positions the physician as the sole authority by virtue of their expertise, and the patient as the passive recipient of medical interventions as determined by the expert. There are a ton of problems with a strictly paternalistic approach to care. Just see that episode of The Golden Girls where Dorothy’s doctor doesn’t believe her about her chronic fatigue syndrome. The other healthcare paradigm is the (more recently ascendant) patient-centered model of care that attempts to privilege patients’ worldviews. This model corrects for a lot of the problems with the paternalistic approach. But, as the philosopher Annmarie Mol argues, a problem with the patient-centered approach is that it tends to operate according to a “logic of choice” that insists that patients are rational decision-makers. The logic of choice treats patients like customers, and it leads to all those “ask your doctor about . . .” commercials. Sometimes patients aren’t in a good place to make decisions for themselves about their care. Mol suggests that we should operate, instead, according to a “logic of care,” that is flexible and collaborative. The logic of care doesn’t grant ultimate authority to the physician or absolute autonomy to the patient. It operates in a complex moment and requires that those involved attune and reattune themselves to the complexity of that moment in an honest way. It is a messy and imperfect process that never fully resolves. Mol uses a term I love, “tinkering,” to describe this process. Maybe she doesn’t handle Starchy’s situation perfectly, but her middle-ground approach is a good example of tinkering.

And what’s next for Starchy? The episode ends as soon as PB sticks the needle in his arm and makes a fart noise. Will he ever trust PB’s medical establishment again? Perhaps. Perhaps he will be cured, and he will be grateful for that. Or, perhaps he will resent PB and her biomedicine and will resist future care. It will take serious effort and open communication to continue to provide Starchy with the care he will need. Indeed, her decision to go to Wizard City in the first place took a lot of effort beyond her normal duties. It’s not easy work, and it’s not “scientific” in the conventional sense. It’s uncertain. But it’s ethical and necessary.

One last thing. I noticed, reading about this episode, that some fans seem bothered by the fact that PB’s rejection of magic seems to contradict a lot of what we’ve seen before in the show. Which, yeah, there’s obviously a lot of magic in AT that can’t be scientifically explained. And, yeah, I’m pretty sure PB has done some magic of her own in the past. But this is a good example of how the show Adventure Time is operates according to the Bakhtinian narratological concept of the chronotope of “adventure time” that accommodates and helps explain these kinds of inconsistencies. I wrote about this stuff way back in my review of “Prisoners of Love.” The writers wanted to explore this tension between science and magic, and PB, who is Ooo’s resident technocrat, is the right bubblegum-based sentient entity for the job. Maybe this sounds like a cop-out—a way of hand-waving away narrative laziness. But the show is titled Adventure Time! I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that, with a title like that, the showrunners are letting us know (in a kinda oblique, but also kinda direct, way) that continuity, as we tend to understand it these days, isn’t their primary concern.

What do y’all think? Did PB violate Starchy’s autonomy? Was there a better way to handle this situation? Will Finn ever recover from his underpanties-related trauma?