The Prince Who Wanted Everything

Boarded by: Bert Youn, Kent Osbourne, Adam Muto, and Lyle Partridge

Aired: June 26, 2014

Reviewed by: CedricTheOwl

It’s been a while since we dropped in on the land of Aaa, everyone’s favorite Rule 63 universe and spawner of a thousand cosplays.  A full double season of the show, a year and a half in real time, and the show has gone through some radical changes since then.  Romance and breakups, revelations about characters’ pasts that completely rewrite our understanding of them, the deaths of gods and demons alike, and our boy Finn shaken to his core by the loss of his arm.  How does the world of Fionna and Cake evolve with these enormous changes in status quo?  With a… *sigh*… LSP episode.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Lumpy Space Princess hater.  She’s been on a real hot streak of late.  “Bad Timing” is easily my favorite episode of hers, and while “Breezy” is a contentious episode, it’s raw and challenging.  This episode, for better or worse, is not.  Lumpy Space Prince’s self-absorbed self-regard feels like a rehash of previous LSP episodes.  Part of the appeal of Fionna and Cake episodes is seeing how the genderbent characters are different than their counterparts:  Fionna is slightly older than Finn and her relationship with romance reflects that, Marshall Lee is more straightforwardly malicious than Marceline until Fionna puts him in his place, and the Ice Queen is much more competent than Ice King.  Lumpy Space Prince just feels like Lumpy Space Princess with a pitiful teenage lip caterpillar, and he so dominates the episode that even the title characters of the universe feel like bit players.  We see cameos of other new designs in group shots, such as Flame Prince and Magic Woman, but no characterization beyond that.

“Hey Vegeta, what does the scouter say about his shoujo level?”

But a Fionna and Cake episode isn’t just about the genderbent designs.  Since the audience knows it’s an in-universe story now, there’s also the framing device of the episode to consider.  This time, in an admittedly funny reversal, LSP has kidnapped the Ice King and is forcing him to read her own Fionna and Cake fanfiction.  She doesn’t just want a captive audience though, she’s hoping that Ice King reading the story will result in it coming true, since Ice King originated the genderbent universe.  The Adventure Time creators love to tease the idea of Fionna and Cake crossing over with Finn and Jake all through the show, first seen in “Mystery Dungeon” with the Ice King trying to literally bring their world to life, and the ending of this episode is yet another instance of them yanking the proverbial football away.

Aside from that bit of meta-text, the episode doesn’t really offer any new insights into Lumpy Space Princess.  We see Lumpy Space Prince rebelling against his parents and running away from Lumpy Space like she has been doing since Season 2’s “To Cut a Woman’s Hair”.  We see him briefly infatuated with Fionna’s simplicity and self-reliance, as she was in Season 4’s “Gotcha!”.  Even the climactic confrontation with Lumpy Space Prince’s monstrous parental amalgamation feels like a recap of Season 5’s themes of parenthood, albeit greatly simplified from Finn’s own very complex feelings about his parentage.  Shouting “I don’t care!” until your problem explodes may work for petty teenage drama, less so for the abandonment issues that form one of the pillars of Finn’s character.

LS Prince blowing up his parents even after they’ve reverted from monsters is the laugh of the episode, though

I wasn’t a fan of this episode when it first aired, and the rewatch has done little to improve its standing with me.  Aside from some funny jokes (LS Prince’s crazy outfit resembling Char Asnable from Mobile Suit Gundam is a gag made specifically for me), this episode feels like a recap of Lumpy Space Princess as a character, and her arc just isn’t complex enough to require an entire episode to cover it.  I’m a big booster of the first two Fionna and Cake episodes, but this one just doesn’t land for me.  Probably because of how little it features Fionna or Cake.

Stray Observations –

• For those of you paying attention to the credits, storyboarder Lyle Partridge is credited under his deadname in this episode.  This is his first episode as a storyboard revisionist and would later get full boarding credits in season 7, as well as doing promo art and comic covers for the ongoing Boom Comics series.
• Peter Serafinowicz gives LS Prince the exact kind of self-important pomposity that I imagine LS Princess would think is cool. A+ job, and only really unremarkable because it’s so expected.
• LS Princess has Ice King’s legs bound in a reference to that scene from Misery. You know the one, even if the kids watching this episode at the time didn’t.
• I couldn’t fit this joke in the review, so enjoy it here instead!

“I’m fab and fit and fine and firm and able!  No longer need a baby for a table!”

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Something Big
Directed by Andres Salaff and Nick Jennings
Written and Storyboarded by Jesse Moynihan
Review by Josephus Brown

A Zen master told his pupils about an old woman who had a teashop, and that her understanding of Zen was even greater than his. The students did not believe this, so they would travel to the teashop to meet her. She would ask them if they were here for tea, or to learn the secrets of Zen. If they said tea, she would serve them graciously. If they said Zen, she would take them into the backroom and beat them with a fire poker.1This is a real Zen koan from an actual ancient text.

I’m a big fan of esoteric weirdness and Zen, so I love this episode. The beginning part was apparently meant to be an Adventure Time movie, which fell through, so the storyboards and ideas were recycled into the battle at the beginning here, making the lead in at the end of Sky Witch of her planning “Something Big” make more sense. It also makes it more clear why the battle seems like just the first act- this was originally meant to really be “something big”, but they only had a little bit of it finished to work with.

In any case, they do a lot with the time they have. It’s always impressive how much this show manages to cram into eleven minutes. Maja uses Bubblegum’s shirt that’s imbued with PB’s love for Marceline to summon a primordial being named Darren, the Ancient Sleeper. The summoning scene is utterly fucking amazing, both in visual design and in the writing. “In this moment, which is all moments”, that’s some top notch wizard talking.

Darren is an unstoppable force of nature, a being from a simpler time who knows only life and death and has no conception of mortal concepts like “feelings”.

Him veering from being a terrifying engine of destruction to a vaguely sad and confused fish out of water is really impressive characterization. “What is caring…? What kind of world is this?”

The fight against him goes poorly, but just when things look like they’re at their worst, we get Finn and Jake on the Ancient Psychic Tandem War Elephant, who he calls Ellie (which is just fucking adorable).

While Ellie keeps Darren busy, Finn infiltrates his head and stabs him in the brain seed, giving every warrior what they secretly long for: Dissolution

But it’s not over yet. The war has been fought but the warriors remain. What is the place for a fighter in a world with nothing to fight? Humans have grappled with this problem for millennia, going back to the Iliad. A successful warrior obviates their own reason for existence. The entire point of fighting a war is to have peace eventually. So what is left for a living death machine who exists only to follow commands when there’s no more commands?

Left to his own devices, Ellie wanders off. He has no purpose anymore. But what is the purpose of anyone being alive? What is the purpose of your life? To eat and reproduce and die?

His psychic powers let him listen in on the thoughts of insects and birds, and, it turns out, the Sun, who is apparently sentient. The Sun poses him a question of his own, asking what the purpose of anything is.

“Hey, elephant. I’m more ancient than you. Someday I will engulf the solar system. What was and what will be is meaningless. Meanwhile, you should wonder: 

Are you just a two-headed pile of meat on a crash course with the cosmic dump? Or do you contain the soul memory of a million dead stars? How do you light a candle without a match?”2I checked the transcript and it’s “soul memory”, not “sole memory”, which I think is fucking awesome

This is the episode’s real thesis. We all have programming. We all have a “reason” for existing. But none of those are our purpose. So do you seize the course of your own existence, or do you merely exist? Do you light the candle despite there being no such thing as a match?

Choosing to take control of his own purpose, Ellie heads back to the remains of the battlefield, rescuing Maja and offering to take care of her, much to her horror. A war machine choosing to dedicate itself to compassion and caring, rejecting its programming in favor of trying to care for a victim of his own violence.

“For now I am the match and the candle.”

That’s probably easier when you have two heads.

STRAY THOUGHTS:

• Apparently the voice of Root Beer Guy wanted him to die a heroic death, because they didn’t have plans to make the Banana Guards any less useless, and he didn’t want him to fail at his job because he liked him too much, hence his noble sacrifice here.
• Darren, the Ancient Sleeper, continues this show’s tradition of giving mundane names to fantastical creatures. His speech on waking is really great, too.
• Jesse Moynihan is one of my favorite writers and can always be counted on for some excellent spiritual meditations.
• The Legion of Cadmus is a pretty clear reference to the legend of Cadmus, who was instructed by the gods to plow a field and plant dragon’s teeth, who then sprout up into a bunch of warriors. Cadmus then tosses a stone among them which causes them to fight amongst themselves until only the five strongest are left.
• “How do you light a candle without a match” is a good example of the kind of question that exemplifies a Zen koan. Most people are familiar with a famous one: “Two hands come together and make the sound of clapping. What sound is made when one hand is alone?” But there are many, many others. They don’t even have to be that mystical, either.
• How do you get an elephant into a refrigerator?3You open the door.
• When Darren dies, his sparkles bring back everyone who got killed by his magic. Finn reappears surrounded by them, implying that Finn got merked by the explosion of Darren’s brain seed.
• Crunchy blows up from fear, which is something we haven’t seen any candy people do since waaaaay back in Season 1.
• Gridface Princess has shown up in the background a lot, but this is the first time she gets a speaking role and we find out what her deal is.