Bonnie & Neddy
Boarded by: Tom Herpich and Steve Wolfhard
Originally Aired: November 2, 2015
Review by: CedricTheOwl
Welcome everyone, to Season 7 of Adventure Time. The previous season of the show saw the AT crew indulge in some of their most esoteric, heady, and thoughtful episodes yet, often in ways that were challenging, controversial, and truly uncommercial. More often than not it made for incredible television, unlike anything seen in Western animation before or since, but it was not without cost.
I will be frank about this: Season 6 was by far Adventure Time’s most divisive. In my anecdotal experience, if there’s a lapsed Adventure Time fan, they usually dropped the show sometime in the sixth season. It could be because the show got too morbid and glum during the arc of Finn’s lost arm. It could be because the show focused so much attention on weird side characters instead of wacky adventures like in earlier seasons. It could just be because of the increasingly inconsistent scheduling and streaming services eating into the viewership of network cable. Whatever the reason, the numbers tell a grim tale: this season opener averaged less than a third of the viewers as the previous season opener.
But ratings aren’t everything, and the AT crew clearly didn’t limit themselves to just pleasing fans, and in the process they had taken the show in some wildly unexpected directions. The most notable direction they took, the one highlighted in our opening scene, is deposing Princess Bubblegum from the Candy Kingdom and putting the King of Ooo in her place. PB’s increasingly paranoid and authoritarian stances finally metastasized into her own subjects voting her out of office, driving her into exile and themselves into the arms of a two-faced huckster. It’s the culmination of a character arc for her that started way back in season 2, but in true Adventure Time fashion, the show “yes, ands” her fall from grace into a new arc for her.
Our episode opens with the King of Ooo and his underling, Toronto, knighting Finn and Jake into his service, complete with a new set of foppish armor for the two of them. After recapping the events of the season 6 finale, KoO sets them upon a new task: helping him plunder the Candy Kingdom of its wealth.
He leads them to a door marked with hastily scrawled warnings, then forces the two to enter, just in case it’s hiding treasure. Inside are three rotten Banana Guards, sworn to defend the inner sanctum with a riddle. Predictably, they’ve forgotten the riddle and are too busy being a lovey cuddle puddle to offer any further resistance. Finn, Jake, and the King of Ooo proceed further into the depths.
In the heart of the forbidden sanctum, the King of Ooo finds his treasure, albeit not in the form he expected: a candy dragon, sucking on the roots of the large tree the Candy Kingdom is built around. In turn, the dragon excretes candy juice, which provides power and water freely to the kingdom. Of course, the King of Ooo immediately starts plotting to monetize this resource for his own gain, even yelling at the dragon to increase production so he can start exporting the surplus.
The dragon has other ideas. It screams in fright and flees, smashing through the walls of its sanctum and flying away. While the King of Ooo plans how to spend the Candy Kingdom’s last remaining hours living in luxury, Finn and Jake seek out an actual adult to help figure things out. Princess Bubblegum is still a little sore about being overthrown by the waxy charlatan, but she tells the boys who the dragon is: her brother, Neddy.
As PB, Finn, and Jake fly on Bubblegum’s swan in search of Neddy, we get a flashback of PB’s origins. She emerges from an entity called the Mother Gum, landing safely in a puddle and signaling to the rest of the gum that it’s safe. The next of her siblings, Neddy, drops down only to land painfully on a piece of rubble, triggering his panicked flight into a storm. As baby PB pursues, she’s entranced by the beauty of the forest newly washed clean by the rain. Meanwhile, Neddy has found a tree root he can suck on, calming him down. Unfortunately, the traumatic events of his “birth” have left him too scared to do anything else, terrified of even the butterfly baby!PB shows him. Instead, she hugs and soothes him with a popping, clicking song of her own making.
In the present, PB tracks Neddy to a cave where he’s taken refuge from the world that terrifies him. She instructs Finn and Jake to stop Neddy if he tries to flee, then enters the cave alone to try and placate him. As in the past, PB repeats the popping song she came up with to soothe him, which lulls him to sleep. She then transports him back to his sanctum in the kingdom, bringing him peace and restoring the kingdom’s supply of candy juice.
With Neddy safe and the rotten Banana Guards newly armed, Finn and PB take time to catch up with one another. Bonnie tells them about how she created the Candy people after she secured Neddy, and about how despite their goofy antics she craves their company as a reminder of her birthplace in the Mother Gum. When Jake questions why Neddy is so different from her, she declines to pass judgement on him, simply saying that his differences need to be respected, not dissected. She also confides in the boys that she’s not a fan of her own company, which is why she seeks out the company of others even if they aggravate her.
I’ve long championed Princess Bubblegum as my favorite character in the series, and I don’t blame anyone not familiar with the show for questioning my taste the more the show leaned into displaying her authoritarian tendencies. “Bonnie and Neddy” does a lot to tie together the ways the show has developed her and given her character wonderful complexity through the seasons. She takes it upon herself to defend those who aren’t able to protect themselves, even if she employs very questionable methods to do so. And yet despite this, she has infinite patience for Lemongrab, one of her creations who has nevertheless threatened her and her people on multiple occasions. Both of these tendencies stem from her relationship with her brother Neddy, her oldest companion.
Neddy’s condition undoubtedly invites comparison to someone with developmental disabilities, someone who needs special methods of care, especially in a world like Ooo with countless things that mean them harm. Princess Bubblegum was cast as a protective, motherly figure from her earliest days, and it informs her relationship with her subjects and her friends.
Spoiler Level: Season 10
Later on we’ll learn that Neddy is unique among Princess Bubblegum’s family because he’s the only one who wasn’t created by her.
This episode also informs her contentious relationship with one of her most erratic creations, Lemongrab. He too seems to require special considerations above and beyond the other Candy people, and PB not only tolerates him, but defends him from other people suggesting that he needs to be changed or treated as a threat. This all stems from her empathy with Neddy, and her understanding that his trauma is rooted in the circumstances of his birth, not anything he’s done wrong. And if we understand Lemongrab to be one of PB’s earliest Candy creations, we can further understand her patience with him as a result of blaming his inability to relate to the world like the other Candy people as her own fault.
Adventure Time opened its seventh season with a deep dive into the origins and motivations of one of its best and most controversial characters. Princess Bubblegum has been through a lot in her centuries of life, and she’s responded to those events with both an instinct for fierce, nurturing protection and a blatant disregard for the rights and autonomy of others. But now she’s removed from the position of power and responsibility that’s defined her even since she founded the Candy Kingdom, and that has presented her with an opportunity to change.
Spoiler Level: Snail
Fig 1: Two slimy, gross pests and a snail.
Notable Quotes –
- “Well it looks like the Candy Empire is finished. But the four of us will live like kings until the juice runs out.”
- “Why do I always gotta unblizz everything?”
- “Oh no! I just want consistency!”
- “No holds barred. Moosewood Stadium freestyle” – Feel free to debate amongst yourselves what this entails
- “Maybe he likes his own company better than I like mine”
Stray Observations –
- The King of Ooo’s recap of the events of “Hot Diggity Doom” and “The Comet” is an unusually direct infodump by Adventure Time’s standards. I wonder if the crew knew about the half-year hiatus between the season 6 finale and “Bonnie and Neddy”.
- I enjoy how the boarders don’t show Toronto hitting Finn in the head with a sword while trying to knight him, but do everything to call attention to it in the scene afterwards. More jousting with CN standards and practices, I imagine.
- The King of Ooo is a far worse ruler of the Candy Kingdom than PB could ever hope to be, but the KoO wigs on the Gumball Guardians are a nice addition.
Varmints
Written By: Kris Mukai and Adam Muto, from a story by Kent Osborne, Pendleton Ward, Jack Pendarvis, and Adam Muto
Directed By: Elizabeth Ito
Recap by: LibraryLass
When you abruptly lose the status quo you’ve depended on for a long time, even when it’s a toxic one that should have ended a long time ago, it’s a disorientating experience that can leave you completely directionless. I know this from hard experience and it’s made this a very important episode to me. We raise the curtain on Marceline, flying on bat wings through the night as she hums “I’m Just Your Problem,” the song that kicked off the beautiful lesbian ship that has been one of Adventure Time’s most beloved throughlines since it was introduced. She alights on the tower of the Candy Kingdom’s castle to find that Bonnie’s job, her home, and even her clothes have all been taken by the King of Ooo, who tells Marcy that PB has exiled herself to her uncle’s cabin off Lake Butterscotch. As she heads off to meet her girlfrienemy, the waxman encourages her to tell *everyone* that he’s wearing PB’s nighties.
At the cabin, Bubblegum is spending a sleepless night on the rocking chair with a shotgun in her lap when the Vampire Queen comes in for a screaming landing. Marceline is pissed that she had to hear about Bonnie being deposed from a third party, two months after the fact, as Peppermint Butler emerges from the pumpkin patch with a shotgun of his own. PB dismisses her loyal retainer so the girls can talk privately and apologizes for keeping secrets. She retreated to the cabin to take some time to get a rational, objective perspective and on some things she’s been thinking about and unlearn some of the meanness that has become a habit for her– but the dang varmints raiding her pumpkins won’t let her think or rest.
Marcy, supportive as ever, volunteers to keep her company, but soon finds herself bored and tries to exchange some chisme, when a rustle from the patch reveals the creepy, four-armed, eyeless pumpkin thieves. The two manage to shoot one varmint and pursue the other back to its Varmint Hole. PB uses one of the many functions of her gun to excavate, leading them to a mine tunnel overgrown with iridescent pink rock candy– a place the two have been together before. Marceline, waxing nostalgic, drags PB off on a literal trip down Memory Lane, but Bonnie is in her head about the weight she’s felt of all the responsibilities the growing Candy Kingdom required her to take on since the days when the two of them were closer. Their heart-to-heart is interrupted by the arrival of the enormous Alien Queen-esque Mother Varmint and the two leap into battle with practiced teamwork. The wounded Mother Varmint falls on Marceline, and PB rescues her before they’re forced to make a run for it. They duck into a cave and take out most of their pursuers, arriving at the spot where on a previous trip into the dungeon, Marceline egged PB on into leaving a very neat and tasteful graffiti tag.
It’s at this point when PB bursts into tears. Losing her hat in the chase was the last straw and now the moment of catharsis has inexorably come. The life she had, and the control she thrived on, is totally lost and right now what she needs is to cry, and then to kick some butt. In this moment, a breakthrough comes for the Bubbline relationship as Bonnie finally feels ready to apologize to Marcy for pushing her away during their previous romance. Marceline immediately forgives her and begins to formulate a more permanent escape plan, having gotten a few pointers in underground tunneling from watching the Varmints, though it must come at the cost of Bonnie’s old graffito. Bonnie, newly healed, is willing to let go. While she bellows threats at the approaching varmints, Marcy digs them to freedom and scoops her up for the rescue.
Back at the cabin, Bonnie reflects on how exhausted she is, despite having not solved her problem. Marceline, encouraging her to save the worries for later, offers to stand guard so Bonnie can rest– just a power nap, she insists as she falls asleep on the vampire’s shoulder. Marceline promises to wake her in 15 minutes, but it’s clear she’s gonna let her sleep until sunrise.
Goddamn, these two are crazy about each other.
Stray notes:
- PB’s tag reads “Marceline made me write this – Bonnibel Bubblegum.”
- PB’s battle cry bears repeating: “I’ll eat you! I’ll eat your mom! I’ll eat your eggs!”