The Visitor
Originally Aired February 5, 2015
Storyboarded by Tom Herpich and Steve Wolfhard
Reviewed by Prestidigititis
At its core (one of its cores), Adventure Time is about fathers. Specifically, how fathers fail us in one sense or another. I’d like to think that the concept was mined by AT writers to show how the process of growing requires us to reconcile how the world is presented to us by the “elders” we learn from. Or that finding your own moral compass is part of every person’s journey. But to be frank, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the AT folks just had dads who weren’t great. Fathers in typical comedic Western cartoons tend to be dumpuses and goofuses to an overly comedic degree–Simpsons, Family Guy, Gumball and the like. That’s all well and good. But AT was never one of those shows.
Since Finn’s first run-in with his father back in the Citadel, he’s mostly not thought about the man. There was that one time he decided to build a tower to space so he could tear off his dad’s arm. But who among us, am I right? Since then, it’s been All Quiet on the Daddy Front. We viewers, on the other hand, know Martin’s fast approaching in a starship that has been mistaken for the Catalyst Comet by the folks of Mars. Looks like he’s on a collision course…with wackiness emotional confrontation!
In one of the most symbolic (and personally affecting) dreams in AT, sleeping-Finn is poked “awake” by a blazing comet, as he and his baby-self (inner child?) stand at the bottom of the sea. Between current and younger Finn, our hero knows he’s supposed to follow the comet…somewhere. As they start to follow, LittleFinn tells BiggerFinn to hold on tight, to which BiggerFinn says “I won’t ever let you go.” Which immediately leads to BiggerFinn thinking to himself, “that’s…true,” almost amazed by his own insight. The comet finds its way into a crevasse, causing a burst of pure white light. At which point LittleFinn announces that it’s time to wake up now.
Finn wakes…to find he’s followed the actual “comet,” two days’ walk away from his bed in the treehouse, on the other side of the Ice Kingdom. He discovers the comet to be a crash-landed spaceship cratered beside a teensy little farming village populated by cute little clown-nosed critters who are happy to share their water with Finn.
Suddenly THE TREE SPIRIT bellows forth commands of Finn! Which Finn immediately pegs as the voice of his FATHER! Uh…that is to say…the voice of his father. No caps, no exclamation point.
From here, things get really really uncool. Martin Mertens, Finn-abandoning Dad figure, shows himself again and again to be just the worst person. Misleading a whole race of wee farmer folk to get his escape pod up and running. Positioning himself as the avatar of some tree god type deal so he can chill and eat and be cared for/about by his new labor force. Right from the get-go he pretends he’s lost an arm himself, because he suspects Finn’d still be armless, and he doesn’t want to make the kid angry. Smarmy as anything, he makes sure to stress that “arms come and go…it’s family that’s important.” But once he’s assured Finn harbors no real animus over the lost limb, he drops the ruse and goes in for a hug.
Martin is using the labor of these wee little farmers, and their appreciation for a few snuggles, to go into his crashed spaceship and repair an escape pod so he can get the heck back to whatever he’s doing out in the skies. He doesn’t care about their well-being. He doesn’t want to do anything himself. He doesn’t want to “cramp Finn’s style,” so he is pushing to get things fixed up so he can get away from there. It’s hard for me to watch all this, because (surprise, surprise) I, too, had a rotten father who made excuses and positioned arguments like Martin does. By talking as though he’s doing me a favor by engaging. By displaying the behavior and presumptions of a selfish crudbucket. It’s uncomfortably familiar, and it’s not fun to watch.
So let me take a slight swerve here and mention that Stephen Root does fantastic work as Finn’s father. Not a surprise: Root is one of our most reliable character actors, and he’s no less skilled in his voice work. The way he layers the sweetness and the affability atop those clearly devious lines is masterful. Less canny actors would’ve let the selfish, nasty intent beneath it all sneak through with a bit of a growl or a low meanness. Something to telegraph that the character can’t hide that he’s being duplicitous. But Root doesn’t do that with Martin. He’s upbeat and positive at all times, even when he simply reveals he’s been lying about a missing arm. He’s jovial in his selfishness. It’s a perfect performance.
Finn isn’t happy about any of what Martin’s feeding him. But he’s also too bummed out by it to force anything. The little villagers are easily swayed, and seem to like helping Martin even when they’re told they don’t have to. They don’t even really believe in the “Tree Spirit.” Martin throws a big festival rager for them because he gets some stink eye from Finn, but even then he misses the point. When Finn asks for some answers from Martin about his history, Martin’s retelling of it all feels like a lie, or at least a fib. He uncomfortably skips over describing Finn’s mom. He brushes past harrowing details. He barely sets the scene. But there is one moment that stands out: when Martin describes two roads diverging, and that he couldn’t take Finn with him, he mentions “that’s…true.” Reminiscent of Finn’s own dream voice when he tells LittleFinn he’d never let him go. An interesting bookend moment, emphasizing how Finn’s care of his inner child conflicts with what Martin’s treatment of the real Little Finn must have been like. The father has nothing more to say to the son. In the uncomfortable silence that follows, Martin attempts a playful wrestling move. Y’know, like fathers do. To their sons. Amiable rough-and-tumble. Very genuine, very paternal.
In the morning, as one of the villagers says, “everything is ruined.” They’re fat and immobile. The corn and water are gone, the fields parched and depleted. The shipwreck is spewing out heat and might explode…and Martin’s about to skeedaddle without telling Finn or anybody else. Finn’s inherently kind nature makes it seem impossible that Martin would just up and leave when there’s danger present, but…kid, that’s just your dad I’m afraid. Finn seems to get that at least a little, because when Martin tries to be chummy and offer to wait for Finn, maybe do some exploring of the cosmos together, Finn just launches the escape pod with Martin in it, and goes off to be the hero. A timely hug from a stowaway villager gives Finn the strength to activate the heat dump, and he’s left to ponder the meaning of his brain’s own future-vision, as he carries the villagers back home, away from their ruined land.
This episode was a rough watch for me, both back when it first aired and for this review, for personal-historical reasons. That’s to Adventure Time’s credit. Even when it’s giving us bad feelings and challenging us to examine our own lives and reckon with our histories, it’s making it deep, real, genuine, and with an eye toward helping us become better. Plus, it wraps it all up in a good, fun, enjoyable little cartoon adventure.
Notes:
–Apparently the episode makes reference to elements from the game series Pikmin. I’ve never played that game so it went over, under, and around my head.
–There’s a ton of stuff in this episode that gets referenced, resolved, and explained in future episodes, but I think it’s fine to leave that all to be discovered on its own. The AT crew are nothing if not experts in dropping lore hints and picking up on small details later in the series to serve their storytelling.
–I leave you with Snail:
SPOILER LEVEL- Snail
The Mountain
Written & Storyboarded by
Jesse Moynihan and Sam Alden
Oh, Moynihan, I love you.
Here we have Lemongrab and Finn go on a journey vaguely reminiscent of Buddhist parables and Alistair Crowley’s Hermetisicm, where they are led to the abyss by a guardian spirit, must face their own ego-death to cross it by freeing their spiritual essence, then are reborn, purified, in the City of Pyramids Ziggurats.
We start with a view of the new synthesis of White Lemongrab and Black Lemongrab, which happened in Bubblegum’s lab way back in Lemonhope Part 2. He’s wearing grey now (Heh, earl grey) and has a badge with a white and black triangle on it, symbolizing that he’s a more complex being, having reconciled the two Lemongrabs’ identities in himself.
The country Lemongrab seems to be prosperous. There’s industry and agriculture, people have food, and things seem to work. Mostly.
Still, Lemongrab has a hole eating at him, and he doesn’t have peace. He leaves on a quest to the Mountain of Matthew, hoping to find it. Finn, trying to distract himself from feeling bad after seeing Flame Princess out having a good time with her new boy, trails him, worried that Lemongrab could cause problems heading into a legendary magic dungeon.
Jake can’t get past the mystic guardian, who tells him he has no business in the mountain, while Finn does. I like this, because Jake is definitely more at peace with the world than Finn.
Meanwhile, Lemongrab is having anxiety over being in a cave, and he encounters three mirrors. The first shows him something he desires- for Princess Bubblegum, his creator, to understand him and admit that they’re similar. The second shows him something he fears- Lemonhope leading his people away and taking everything he has from him.
The third mirror, however, shows him the act of violence and cruelty that led him down his path, a shameful moment where he destroyed something innocent and precious. He rejects fear and desire and instead chooses to protect something pure from himself.
He finds himself in a black abyss, rolling across a bizarre landscape covered in grease, and discovers that it’s his own lemony grease, and he is perched precariously on himself.
Saying goodbye to his grease body, he ejects his pure lemony essence into the void to cross the abyss.
Meanwhile, Finn catches up, and we see his desire- to be the one who Flame Princess is with- and his fear – essentially for Jake and BMO to exist without him. He is distracted by Lemongrab screaming from somewhere out of frame, and his angel appears to him as himself, and takes him to go help someone.
Finn, a lot more comfortable with himself and spirituality, seems to take the next part in stride, laughing as his spirit self restores its arm and he runs freely into the abyss, leaving himself behind without a second thought.
Purified and wearing white robes, the two adepts have now reached the City of Pyramids, and we get what is for my money hands down one of the greatest scenes in the entire series.
Lemongrab: These lemonjons are me, and I wonder if they can destroy you.
Finn: Ooh, boy. Lemongrab, hold up!
Lemongrab: If you are the head that blooms atop the ziggurat, then the stairs that lead to you must be infinite!
Finn: Careful with those metaphors, bro!
Lemongrab: Infinite stairs are unacceptable!
Presented with the choice of embracing his own ego death and becoming a tiny pebble making up the pyramid, Lemongrab instead throws a fragment of his own fundamental identity into the godhead and by so doing annihilates it.
There’s a saying in Buddhism: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
There’s like three different ideas bound up in this one, but one of them is the idea that there is no end of the road. There is no “now I’m enlightened I’m done”. Nobody will ever be the Buddha, because it’s the road itself that’s the Buddha, not anything on it or anywhere it leads. Lemongrab rejects fear and desire as illusions to get there, but what is the point of throwing yourself away if the desire to do so is also an illusion?
There’s no fears to flee, and there’s nothing at the end of the road. So even what Matthew offers is an illusion. The stairs that lead to the top of the ziggurat ARE infinite, and infinite stairs are unacceptable. Lemongrab asserts the idea that his individual self is fine as it is, and the lemonjons he uses to do so are themselves the product of Lemonjohn’s personal sacrifice.
He returns home and realizes that he could have filled that hole that was keeping him from having peace the whole time, because he fills it with himself.
Yo, yo, it’s grease.
RANDOM THOUGHTS
- This episode does some neat things. Aside from the whole “feeling like a cartoon version of the Hermetic journey”, it uses “grease” as a metaphor for acceptance of oneself. In one of the earlier Lemongrab episodes, one of the punk kids calls him Lemongrease and he angrily insists, “I AM NOT GREASE!” The metaphor still holds up if you haven’t seen that one but this is a cool moment where the callback really helps give it depth.
- The mosaic at the beginning pretty well depicts the journey. You pass the guardian, choose one of three, then reduce yourself to your smallest component and then present that to Matthew. It’s also interesting that the Matthew in the mosaic has more holes in him than the Matthew we meet. Presumably he’s absorbed a bunch of people since then.
- One of the cultists just jumps off the cliff and commits suicide in the background after they get thrown out of Matthew. I’m surprised they got away with it.
- I also love how Lemongrab angrily calls all the cultists who got tossed out of Matthew “grease”, reasserting that they’re the same as he is, and still grease bodies in this grease existence.
- How fast and calmly Lemongrab accepts that he’s going to have to gnaw his own leg off never fails to make me laugh.
- I like how calmly Adventure Time can have a bit character say things like, “I keep adding to myself until the second Age of Terror, when I will reveal my final form.”
- The guardian is a great bit character, too. “Get out a piece of paper while I school you on this biz.”
- In Hermeticism, when you pass through into the City of Pyramids you’re like, reduced to a stone based on how much energy you’re bringing, so most people are like pebbles. I think that’s why the Guardian and Matthew seem to be made up of tiny bits, maybe.
- The symbolism of the Earl Grey wearing the little black/white logo to represent himself now is so great, I love it to bits. I think it’s also meant to evoke the Head of Zohar, a sort of kabbalistic symbol used to represent the reciprocity between heaven and earth in Hermeticism.
- I wonder if this is the first cartoon to use the phrase “ecstasy of my own ego-death”.
- Researching this episode has led me to have some really absurd tabs open.
Sorry this went up late! No idea what happened to my draft so I had to re-write it from my notes.
SPOILER LEVEL: Snail
In the bottom left, on the bottom of the pillar.