Box Prince | Aired: October 7, 2013 | Reviewed by Ralph
Over at the A.V. Club, Oliver Sava1 wrote, of “Box Prince”: “It’s one of the few times the show has exhibited signs of fatigue during this lengthy 52-episode season, spinning wheels for a forgettable chapter that doesn’t take advantage of the more complex circumstances provided by recent events.”
Gotta disagree. I think I know what led Oliver Sava to his conclusions about this one, but I think “Box Prince” is a weird little gem of an episode that deserves a lot of love.
My favorite episodes of tv shows that center on a developing narrative among a core group of characters are the ones where the writers just go off in some other direction and do something else. I love those episodes of Enlightened that ignore what’s going on with Laura Dern’s character. I love that one episode of Twin Peaks: The Return—you know the one. That one episode of The Last of Us is obviously the best. And I think Mad Men fucked up so bad by never doing a “day in the life of Bert Cooper” episode.
Usually, those one-offs round out characters that make up the larger world of the show, and they’re celebrated for doing that. But “Box Prince” doesn’t do that. It’s not really a character study. It’s a study in story structure. Specifically, it’s a study in closure. Specifically, specifically, it’s a study in not getting what we’ve come to expect from stories 2.
Jake, munching on some nachos 3 gets a chip stuck between his teeth. He and BMO talk philosophically about why Jake shouldn’t just “get big” to let the chip fall out, and why he needs to get the stuck chip out the old-fashioned way, without any of Jake’s magical stretchery. “To live life,” Jake explains, “you need problems.” To which BMO replies:
But Jake, sagely, responds: “If you get everything you want the minute you want it, what’s the point of living?” I think that’s a smart thought to think.
After several attempts at extraction, the chip remains inter-dentally embedded.
Meanwhile, Finn the Human follows a cat in a cardboard box back to its kingdom, where he susses out that this cat he followed is actually the true prince of the Box Kingdom and has had his throne usurped by a pretender. Finn centers himself as the outsider-hero in an ongoing epic saga of feline conflict of royal succession, and, as he usually does, he sets about righting some wrongs to restore order to a realm in peril. It turns out none of this was the case. It was just a bunch of cats in boxes being cats in boxes. When Finn realizes this, he’s trampled by cats and presumably dies the best possible death a person can hope for:
How, we might ask, did those boxes end up in those configurations? Why, we might ask, did those cats seem committed to regal acts, like a big parade and a jousting match? What the fuck, we might ask, was all that for?
We’re stuck with those questions as soon as we ask them. They will never be resolved for us. We don’t have to accept Finn’s conclusion that none of this was anything other than cats being cats. We can make up our own conclusions about what went on at the box kingdom. Go ahead! Nobody’s stopping you! But, had the show decided to end with Finn restoring the Box Prince to his rightful throne, that would have absolutely stopped you from doing any sort of storytelling your own damn self. That, to borrow Oliver Sava’s term, would’ve been forgettable.
And, look, probably the biggest issue I take with Sava’s review is the idea that this episode is “forgettable,” because, for me, it’s the most memorable episode of Adventure Time ever. I think about it a lot. And I wonder about using the term “forgettable” to describe an episode of a show you just watched. What, exactly, makes you think you’re going to forget it later? I think it’s probably that we expect episodes of tv to—if not wrap up neatly each time—to at least work toward that wrap-up. And that expectation can be a problem.
Two of my favorite Davids in the history of Davids—David Lynch and David Berman—have both spoken about this sort of thing. Discussing the idea of “closure” in storytelling, Lynch said 4:
Closure. I keep hearing that word. It’s the theater of the absurd. Everybody knows that on television they’ll see the end of the story in the last 15 minutes of the thing. It’s like a drug. [. . .] As soon as a show has a sense of closure, it gives you an excuse to forget you’ve seen the damn thing.
And, similarly, David Berman sang, in a Purple Mountains song 5:
You got storyline fever, storyline flu.
It’s filtering how everything looks to you.
Don’t you reckon it’s affecting your attitude?
Storyline fever got its hooks in you.
Storyline fever got its hooks in you.
Lynch vented his frustration with closure as a narrative necessity—particularly in television stories—because it limits the kinds of stories we can tell and how we can tell them. Berman lamented the way humans tend to map narrative structures onto the greater world, creating expectations that are, as Lynch put it, “the theater of the absurd.” These expectations get their hooks in us and drive our dissatisfaction.
Storyline fever got its hooks in Finn, too, filtering how everything looked to him, until he was able to recognize how maybe just cats being cats is all we really need.
And storyline fever got its hooks in Oliver Sava, too, I think.
I wonder if I ran into Oliver Sava in line at the Dairy Queen Grill & Chill and asked him if he remembered the tortilla chip/box cat episode of Adventure Time if he would, in fact, remember it. I bet he would. And I bet he’d remember it because he didn’t like it that much. Because it didn’t give him what he wanted. But sometimes not getting what you want from something helps make it memorable. That dissatisfied feeling you get from a lack of closure is kind of nice because it’s a very alive feeling. Part of being a human (or a stretchy dog or whatever) is getting that chip stuck in your teeth. And either getting it out or not. It’s such a simple little lesson, but one that bears repeating every now and then.
Red Starved | Aired: October 14, 2013 | Reviewed by Ralph
Come along with me. Back to 2015. I’m sitting in the living room of a rental house I recently moved into. I’m working on something for my new job, and my wife put on this show, Adventure Time. I’m not paying close attention. I sort of know this show because my 10-year old step-brother used to watch it when I babysat for him one summer. I remember liking Adventure Time better than some of the stuff he watched. I could not stand Spongebob Squarepants, which was his favorite. So my lady-friend is watching it and I’m tip-tapping on my computer, and at some point, I glance up and see this:
And that’s when I became a fan of this show. There was something about the huge, mystical monster being kind of a regular dude. There was something about the way Finn talks to the mystical monster guy in a chill, conversational register. But mostly the thing that really catches me is the way Finn’s little legs dangle. The way he kicks them as he sits on that ledge. Here it is again:
That little choice to have Finn kick his legs in that moment gave me a sense that this guy was imbued with interiority and life. I could tell that a deep reservoir of feelings, tendencies, tics, and energy resided in this Finn kid. And I wanted to know more about him. And so I set my work down and watched for a while. And so I paid more attention to it, watched it with my wife, and it became a part of our lives. And all because the animators decided to make Finn precociously kick his little legs in this one little part of this one little scene.
Oh, also, Marceline and Jake and Finn are trapped in a cave and Marceline is starving, and Jake gets hungry too, and they threaten to eat each other, but then Princess Bubblegum drives in on Shai-Hulud at the last minute and saves them from each other.
But those little spindly legs!
Do y’all remember the episode that hooked you? It’s hard to imagine many (any?) of us started on episode 1. So when did you decide this weird little cartoon was worth your time? Can you pinpoint the moment? I’d love to hear about it.
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