Graybles 1000+
Written by: Steve Wolfhard, from a story by Kent Osborne, Pendleton Ward, Jack Pendarvis, Steve Wolfhard, and Adam Muto
Directed by: Andres Salaff
Review by LibraryLass
In the distant future– though not quite as far in the future as these framing devices normally seem to take place– our ol’ pal Cuber’s big sister Tuber searches for him in the bushes. But tiny Cuber is not in the bushes, he’s in a cave at the top of a mountain, having wonders done for his physiological bable. At least he was, until the ledge he’s on collapses and deposits him in the den of a horrible monster. As he screams for help– whoops, never mind, it is that far in the future after all, as Cuber was simply reviewing an incident from his own past. The squeaky sage takes this opportunity to introduce a theme of this episode: the present is more interesting than the past. And indeed, we’ll see as we go that Cuber’s present is very interesting indeed to those of us who are emotionally invested in the land of Ooo in Finn and Jake’s time.
Cuber’s spaceship nears an orbital platform– literally– where a wedding is taking place. As he draws closer we can see the near-featureless alien? bride and groom in their space helmets, with glassy white-in-black eyes much like Lady’s. Cuber’s approach accidentally shatters the bride’s glass, resulting in her being sucked out into the void and understandably enraging the wedding party, who shoot him down to the planet below– Ooo. As they descend, Cuber flees in search of Survival, trusting in the Graybles of old to keep him alive– and forget a unifying theme. Of course, as you may have already guessed from my capitalization, there is indeed a unifying theme to this episode: and it’s the five steps on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Back in the present, BMO is perched atop the treehouse with a blanket, watching the clouds roll by and pretending to be a weather vane. He calls out to Finn, but Finn doesn’t notice as he’s busy digging a hole. So BMO changes his game! Now, he’s a cliff diver, and now Finn is paying attention, leaping to catch the little robot just in time to stop him shattering himself on a flagstone. The hero boy brings BMO to watch him work as he continues his digging. Seems he and Jake (mostly Jake) won an enormous wand from a wizard, and Finn is burying it for the sake of Safety while Jake relaxes on a nearby lounge chair. Jake arrogantly decides to demonstrate the wand’s power to alter reality by using it to finish the hole, but in classic Jake fashion, instead he conjures a substantial-looking veggie sub and sends Finn right back to work.
One match cut later, back in the future, on almost the same exact spot, Cuber digs and unearths the wand. Bobble bobble, as the dead might say! The aliens track down Cuber in the hole, and he unleashes its power to conjure a gigantic sandwich that launches him into a creek, breaking his leg on impact. Grayble #2 takes place in the home of the Ice King, who is awoken by his creepy-sad alarm clock to find that his leg, too, has broken, and not, it seems, for the first time. He agonizingly sets the bone right and asks a nearby, brick-wielding Gunther what might have happened. The penguin keeps suspiciously mum, but the Ice King is onto his business. Cuber imitates Simon’s example and forces his leg back into alignment… and immediately passes out from the resulting agony. Cuber awakens hours later, out of a dream of Tuber reassuring him he can do it. The aliens are still searching for him as he tests his leg and, inspired thus by his sister’s Love, decides to make a go of it and crawls into a nearby cave– the same cave in which Marceline’s house still, a thousand years later, stands. And it’s still inhabited, no less! But whether by friend or foe, Cubert knows not, so he takes shelter under the deck and turns to the Graybles for his next move.
PB is chilling in bed, running a surveillance state, as one does, when she notices Starchy is way out in the grasslands. He spots what he’s looking for, a fearsome Grass Lard, and rips a tracking implant out of his teeth pretending to be picking wildflowers as he does for the benefit of its inbuilt microphone. Finding no tooth sockets in the Lard’s mouth to bury the tooth in, he announces he will leave it in the beast’s ear– before correcting himself and saying that all his walking will give him a nice rear and improve his Self-Esteem. The grass Lard chooses this time to wake up and almost actually devour Starchy, conveniently adding to his deception as he makes his escape. The little conspiracy theorist celebrates his newfound freedom from the nanny state as Bonnibel frets that she may have just heard a man die.
Back in the distant future, Cuber approaches a hillock– in fact the fossilized grass lard– and retrieves Starchy’s tracking device. The aged grass lard thanks him and staggers off as Cuber reprograms the device to call out an SOS. The aliens approach first and the former groom calls out something in Korean, revealing that they are not aliens, but descendants of the Rainicorns– perhaps even of Jake and Lady. But help, too, is on the way. A huge gumball guardian greets Cuber as Starchy and retrieves him, storing him inside itself alongside a huge number of gachapon-like plastic pods.
The Future Rainicorns follow, and a shot from one of their laser weapons blows open a pod Cuber throws into the way to protect himself, revealing Crunchy alive and well inside it. The next shot hits Cuber’s bag of graybles, causing a release of energy that blows open the guardian’s head, destroys several Future Rainicorn ships, and releases the other Grabyles into the sky. Cuber is only able to save one– the one floating on the end of his hat– as he crawls into the gacha pod belonging to a gumdrop girl. This is the memory he was viewing earlier from his own infancy. Tuber arrives just as the beast is about to pounce on little Cuber and throws a rock at it. She drops one down to her brother and encourages him with a message of Self-Actualization– he’s a hero, and what a cube can be, he must be. He wings the creature right on the nose and drives it away as she slides down to the rescue. This is enough to encourage Cuber to go on the offensive once again, siezing the groom’s spaceship and escaping to the ice kingdom, where a strange, Ice-King like bird, having long since degenerated from taking the crown’s curse after Simon was freed of it, before blasting off and returning to his own heavily-damaged ship. It turns out Tuber was aboard the ship too the whole time, and Cuber sticks his head through her window and reassures her that he loves her, too.
The entirety of this episode is foreshadowing for things to come that we won’t know much about in full until the series finale, “Come Along With Me”, and in some cases not even until Distant Lands or Fionna and Cake. I still have no idea how to do spoilers in wordpress so I won’t get into them here, as had been my plan in lieu of any additional show notes, but those who know, know.
Hoots | Aired: May 14, 2015 | Reviewed by Grumproro
What a fun and slightly upsetting episode! A delightfully weird combination of a romantic comedy turned tragedy, mixed in with Twin Peaks dream logic and imagery, and all of that Adventure Time goodness. What’s not to love?
Love at first sight.
Personally, as a big fan of the romance genre, I prefer to have a happy ending in that department, but every now and then I’m in the mood for a tragic romance like the one presented in “Hoots”. For reasons beyond our couple’s control, their relationship can never be. The Cosmic Owl learned a hard lesson by trying to mix work and pleasure, but it’s a mistake that I think is easy to understand. This eternally lonely cosmic being just wants to share his life with someone, ya know? He’s got a good friend in Prismo, and that’s great! But he seems to want something else too. Not something everyone wants, but he does seem to be yearning for someone to say “Welcome home!” when he walks in the door, and a conversation partner to have dinner with.
Whoooose gonna have dinner with the Cosmic Owl tonight?
So what if he breaks a few…major cosmic rules in the process? It’s romantic! He’s willing to defy the gods and the very universe itself for love!
Grumproro watching/reading romance stories.
Okay but those comic rules are pretty important, and watching him break them is honestly a little stressful. Like you just know it’s not going to end well. You can see it coming miles and miles away. Even worse, you have to watch what feels like manipulation when his new friend gets a little too excited by the prospect of visiting Princess Bubblegum’s dream.
“It’s okay to feel manipulated, right?”
Ouch. I hate to watch our cosmic feathery friend get hurt like this. But it does make for a great story, doesn’t it? I think so! It really does feel like a horrible betrayal when the lady bird goes all…weird and donks up PB’s dream. Yikes. That’s going to be…a problem I think?
As we all know, the owls are not what they seem…but in this case we totally DO know what the Cosmic Owl means so PB should be a little concerned. Some dreams mean stuff!
Yes, I’m easily amused.
But more immediately, my heart is just breaking for our doomed pair. Instead of simply being a story about the lady bird manipulating and betraying the Cosmic Owl (been there, read that a million times), it’s so much more heartbreaking that she doesn’t even know why she acted that way. She still wants to make it work! She really didn’t mean to hurt him! But we all know it can never work, it was never going to work.
“You’re dreaming, kid. And it’s time to wake up.” </3
To make it even more interesting, we see that Gunther was the one dreaming all along! What does THAT mean? So yes, there are A LOT of other details to discuss in this episode, but I think it will be more fun to dissect it all in the comments. First-time viewers especially, what do you think is up with all those dreams we saw? Any predictions? What was even happening in Finn’s dream? Did you figure out what Jake was saying, upside down?
I started to look stuff up thinking I’d write more about it in this review, but honestly I’d rather see what you all think about this episode and how you interpret it!