The Pit | Boarded by: Jesse Moynihan and Ako Castuera | Originally Aired: November 18, 2013 | Reviewed by: Lyssie
Picking up where the last episode left off, Kee-Oth is carrying Jake through a void full of shards of glass, and then into a huge pane of glass, disappearing into it. The glass collapses into itself and seems to reform as our view of Kee-Oth’s realm – but with lines splitting it up into pieces. It conveys the idea of this being a figurative, and even literal, mirror dimension; but it also gives a feeling of looking at this through a cracked piece of glass, a broken mirror.
The cliffhanger last time immediately sent me back to the cliffhanger at the end of season 4. Our hero gets sucked into a portal by a hellish villain, to who knows where, leaving us and the other characters in the dark about what just happened. And this is all the result of past mistakes that have come full circle to disastrous consequences – (Finn giving the enchiridion to the bear; Joshua imprisoning and torturing Kee-Oth). In both cases we’ve even got a character suffering from the mistakes of their ‘mirror image’ – Farmworld Finn from Finn, and Jake from Joshua.
So I was already thinking about the parallels we can find in this episode – or, mirror images. But then I started noticing more and more things regarding mirrors (would it be too obnoxious if I said that it’s like a lens through which you can look at this episode?). And I kind of think the episode is trying to say something about perception and understanding.
See, the way Kee-Oth’s realm looks could also be a cracked tv screen. It’s as though the medium that we, the viewers, have for seeing this world, is itself cracked. Our perception of what’s going on in the show is fractured, to represent how the situation is crooked and that we’re confused about what’s even going on; same as the characters. And then some of the characters need to peer into a tv screen of their own! Finn and Rainy need to watch what someone else has made, not entirely unlike us. They can’t interact with it or affect it, not its length or content, not the way it’s presented to them, not even any outside influences like whether or not someone taped over part of it; they can only take what it gives them and see what they can make of it. And only once they’re able to step through the looking glass will they be able to affect things for themselves.
Now granted, mirror realms are often used to present a particularly surreal or twisted version of reality; like and unlike, weird and unexplained. And that’s not really the case here. Kee-Oth’s realm… well, it just isn’t that strange by AT standards. Hell, it isn’t even that strange by non-AT standards! (And I’m not gonna spin some yarn about how being pretty mundane compared to Ooo, or to mirror realms in other stories, is itself another mirror image etc etc.) But I do see a theme here of the different ways that a surface in which you see things is a portal to somewhere else. And that can be someone else’s ideas, a fictional realm, even an actual realm you step into. We, the viewers, are transported across the mirror but only with our eyes and ears and mind; Jake is taken through the mirror, in mind and body; Finn and Rainy do both, first one and then the other.
And I think there’s another layer, of dealing with performativity and trying to look past it. The viewers are [consuming] the show’s performance, and often trying to look past the surface level to pick up on any deeper meanings, like I’m doing now. And Finn and Rainy engage with Joshua’s performative boasting about his ‘catch’, looking through it and past it to find a solution to the crisis. And then Jake has to deal with Kee-Oth’s exaggerated performance of revenge – making a point to dish out some poetic ‘justice’ to Jake and parading his satisfaction, and forcing Jake himself to perform suffering for him; all while Jake is just kind of confused and trying to understand why any of this needs to happen.
If there’s an actual strangeness to Kee-Oth’s realm, a way in which this mirror realm is a twisted version of reality, it’s this. Compared to Ooo, where people are generally blunt (comically so!) about what they want and why they want it, here’s a place where you’re supposed to put on an act of what you’re supposed to be feeling. Even Kee-Oth’s eyes are kind of a mirror hiding his thoughts, in contrast with eyes as a window to the soul. Maybe toxic masculinity is the mirror that Jake needs to peer through and try to understand… (Samantha seems to take on the vibe much more than Jake, although this might simply be because of her more abrasive personality, and she also doesn’t seem to hide what she’s feeling).
Of course Jake and Finn have both exhibited bits of toxic masculinity at times, though never nearly to this extreme. And Finn actually did recently withhold his desires in a way that hurt someone. It’s maybe not a coincidence that at the end of this episode he cheerfully says that he still misses Flame Princess. Not just because he’s relieved to get Jake back, but also to contrast him with people like Kee-Oth and Joshua who go through life putting on an act – or rather, to show him growing past that.
Not sure if I have a conclusion to all of this… I was going to say that the showrunners usually do these sorts of things for a reason, but I’m not sure if that’s true here or if I’ve just spun a whole theory out of a cool visual effect and found a lot of stuff to fit into it. (Even Kee-Oth’s tablet has some kind of mirroring thing going on It even feels intentional that there’s one last glass-reforming effect when we cut to everyone back at the treehouse – the viewer is still looking through a mirror!). But it was fun trying to chart out what I think this episode is saying, and I think what that is is basically – you never know what you’re going to find when you look through the glass.
Stray Observations
- This article got pretty philosophy-rambly, but I’m still not going to be so pretentious as to say something about how our screens are themselves some kind of mirror of who we are, that’d just be silly.
- Going back to the beginning of the season again, I just noticed another parallel – the title card for The Lich is the same as those for Finn the Human and Jake the Dog! And in all three the characters’ eyes are like mirrors reflecting the things they’re focusing on! Mirrors again, it all fits, it’s like poetry it rhy-*gets yanked off-stage*
- This was another article of mine that gets really focused on one specific thing in the episode, so here’s some assorted thoughts about other stuff in the episode:
- “This is my yoga room… and this is your new home! Downward, dog” this is still cracking me up
- Kee-Oth draining people’s blood was gruesome, as was Joshua drinking holy water so that Kee-Oth would poison himself. And also Finn’s trick with the holy grape juice sword, tbh, but that’s more okay cause it’s just to free someone. And even so, the cute little creature’s death was probably the most brutal thing in the episode. Buddy just made their first friend!!
- Besides being thematically interesting to me, Kee-Oth’s revenge was also really funny. Posing in a hat made of Jake’s blood, putting booby-trapped amenities in the cell, that’s some good pettiness.
- I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s any hidden message in Kee-Oth’s tablet… like obviously there’s a letter-swap of ‘maple syrup pancakes’, but I can’t make out if there’s anything else to be found there, including if maybe Kee-Oth’s name is something else? Anyone have any ideas?
James | Written & Storyboarded by Cole Sanchez and Anthony Ristaino | Aired November 25, 2013 | Reviewed by Ralph
In the episode of Adventure Time titled “James,” when the goo monsters threaten to barf their way through the hull, and the radio is ker-plowed, James comes to the rescue with his lucky coin.
Ta-Da!
I am fascinated by the very existence of this coin in the Candy Kingdom. Where did it come from? Why does it exist? Adventure Time has alluded to the existence of money in other episodes. The Pup Gang, for example, coveted “the big cash money wad.” But this is the first time that the show has drawn attention to money as a material object. This coin, in fact, is the dominant image on the title card. It’s a fascinating object. We have to talk about this coin–what its existence means to the Candy Kingdom and the Land of Ooo. Which means we have to talk about where coins come from in our own world.
The brilliant anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber, discusses the emergence of coinage in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, as part of a system that he calls the “military-coinage-slavery complex.” Here’s an extremely simplified account of how the system worked: Conquerors around the 7th century BCE needed to pay soldiers and expeditionary forces, so they melted down gold and silver and shaped it into coins that could be easily distributed in denominations smaller than ingots. Those coins were stamped with symbols of the regency that made them identifiable as an official standardized currency. The gold and silver that comprised those coins was mined by slaves, who were often prisoners of war. Those coins carried value in the places that soldiers frequented.
So, there is an empire-driven, militaristic, political, administrative-state dimension to the creation and spread of coinage. This is worth thinking about when Princess Bubblegum announces that the expedition to the pit is meant to colonize that region. This is also worth thinking about when we think of what James is doing there. He is, as Princess Bubblegum puts it, “special.” But beyond the “military-coinage-slavery complex,” Graeber’s history of coinage has serious implications for ancient philosophical thought.
This is a lot of writing. Gotta break it up with a cute James gif.
Coins were valuable in their contributions to philosophical thought, as well. Around 600 BCE Greece, soldiers brought coins to bustling cities like Miletus, where, at the same time, three philosophers were arguing a lot about what primal substance was the substance from which all other material things (trees, rocks, skateboards, corndogs) sprung. Thales argued it was water. Anaximenes said it was air. Anaximander said they were both doofuses and invented his own substance that he called apeiron (“the unlimited”), which evaded our perception but nevertheless was the material basis of every Zeus-damn thing. Building on the work of classicist Richard Seaford’s Money and the Early Greek Mind, Graeber argues that the advent of coinage was an important inspiration that prompted the thinking behind these materialist philosophies. Whether the primal substance that shaped every single corndog in the universe was water, air, or apeiron, what the three materialist philosophers agreed on was that this primal substance “was something that could turn into everything.” And, as Graeber points out, “so was money.” He expounds on why this is new object—the coin—would have had such a profound effect on Greek philosophers, who were concerned with the material underpinnings of not just corndogs and trees and stuff, but also abstract things like “mind” and “spirit”:
Gold, shaped into coins, is a material substance that is also an abstraction. It is both a lump of metal and something more than a lump of metal. [. . .] A coin was a piece of metal, but by giving it a particular shape, stamped with words and images, the civic community agreed to make it something more. But this power was not unlimited. Bronze coins could not be used forever; if one debased the coinage, inflation would eventually set in. It was as if there was a tension there, between the will of the community and the physical nature of the object itself. Greek thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type of object, one of extraordinary importance-as evidenced by the fact that so many men were willing to risk their lives to get their hands on it-but whose nature was a profound enigma.
Graeber allows that “it would be foolish to argue that all [this materialist] philosophy was simply a meditation on the nature of coinage.” But he and Seaford think that the advent of coinage helped pre-Socratic philosophers “to frame their questions in the peculiar way they did, asking (for instance): What are Ideas? Are they merely collective conventions? Do they exist, as Plato insisted, in some divine domain beyond material existence? Or do they exist in our minds? Or do our minds themselves ultimately partake of that divine immaterial domain? And if they do, what does this say about our relation to our bodies?”
In other words, what Graeber and Seaford are getting at here is that, if you were an ancient Greek dude with some time on his hands and you’re hanging out on the Ionian coast just admiring a new coin that had recently been minted, such an important object might just get you thinking. You might think about the relationship between what we can perceive (the shiny coin, the human body, the outer shell of the corndog) and what lies, imperceptible within (the agreed-upon value, the spirit, the flavor of the corndog).
Similarly, if you’re a teen boy adventurer with a “teen boy body” (Finn’s words, not mine) or a magical stretchy dog with a magical stretchy body, and you just watched a sentient wafer sandwich man named James sacrifice himself to save you and a bubblegum princess from a bunch of goo monsters, and then you saw a new version of the same wafer sandwich man revealed through the science of cloning, you might get to thinking about the relationship between the material, perceivable body (“teen boy body,” wafer sandwich body, stretchy dog body, or otherwise) and the imperceptible soul within.
The coin is a symbol of these metaphysical relationships, and it is a product of the military-coinage-slavery complex. And the questions and tensions involved in all of that are woven throughout “James.”
I think it’s these questions and tensions that have Finn and Jake so messed up at the beginning of the episode. Though they may look dapper in their suits, they can’t hide their pain. And it’s not just the bandages on Finn’s head. They’ve both got bandages on their consciousness. Jake can’t even make a normal face:
At this point in the episode, as Finn and Jake head to the ceremony, we flash back to the expedition to the pit, where we first meet James. I freakin’ love James’s whole thing. His machinery noises are cute. His attempts at folksiness are adorable. His shooting form is textbook.
More like Lebron James!
His doofy style gets on Finn’s and Jake’s nerves. When the goo monsters start to attack, things keep going wrong, and they start to suspect James of sabotage. But Princess Bubblegum was the saboteur all along! She’d calculated all the escape plans and decided that the only way out was to conk Finn and Jake on their heads, and to sacrifice James to the goo monsters—but not before grabbing a chunk of his body so she could clone it later.
PB once again (much like in “Wizards Only, Fools”) lets her citizens believe they are exerting agency while she makes important executive decisions for them. There’s something especially weird about it this time. When the goo monsters start to infiltrate the ship, she asks Finn what he thinks they should do. He seems taken aback by this request. She then seems to patronize Finn and James when they enact their ideas. Maybe she’s buying time to figure out a workable plan? Unclear.
While her behavior is opaque, I feel like we get an even clearer view of the kind of ruler Princess Bubblegum is, and the coin is an important symbol of her ruling ethos. It is also an important symbol to James, who is himself an ideal citizen/expeditioner. Indeed, the fact that James envisions himself as a sort of robot—an instrument—tracks with this reading. Why did PB bring James along on this dangerous trip? She says it’s because he’s “special,” which, I take to mean that, should things go off the tracks, he is amenable to sacrificing himself and being cloned.
Machine noises.
His affinity for the coin is an indicator of his willingness for self-sacrifice. James loves the coin because he is the coin. He is the product of science (which, as the coin reminds us, is “A-OK”), and he seems like an important instrument–a “special” one–in the Candy Kingdom version of the military-coinage-slavery complex. His tendency to imagine himself as a machine–a pre-programmed instrument of PB’s colonial agenda–is interesting in this light. And he is replicable, like the coin. There is nothing to stop PB from duplicating all the Jameses she might want. And she’s not just duplicating the material “James”; the personality of the clone-James is stamped with the same value and values as the original—the value and values assigned to it by the state.
As clone-James receives his accolades, Finn asks, “Is this right or wrong? I can’t tell.” Jake replies, “I don’t know, man,” and then he gives clone-James his lucky coin, much to clone-James’s delight. This scene reminds me so much this exchange between Cinnamon Bun and Flame Princess in “Earth and Water”:
I’m realizing that this question of whether Princess Bubblegum is good or not is maybe the central question of this season. And I feel like the only right answer (at this point anyway) is “I dunno.”
I read some criticism that this ending doesn’t make sense considering where Jake and Finn started out. Why would they seemingly be less messed up about what went down at the goo pit by the end of the ceremony when they were so messed up at the beginning of the episode?
I don’t see any such problem with the ending. It’s not that Finn and Jake are perfectly okay with what happened. They are, perhaps, ambivalent about it. They have a new James. Same as the old James. The new James seems happy—he’s all smiles and fun mechanical noises. He’s been granted a prestigious medal (another fascinating object lesson in military power). He’s got his coin. “This day keeps getting better and better,” he proclaims. Where Jake and Finn end up is where a lot of us end up. It’s where a lot of philosophers end up when they ask the sorts of questions that Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaximander asked like 2600 years ago.
But, wait! What’s that emerging from the goo pit? Is it . . . ? No! It can’t be!
To be continued!