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Come Along With Me: Adventure Time – “Islands”

CedricTheOwl

The Invitation

Storyboarded by: Sam Alden and Polly Guo

Originally Aired: January 30, 2017

Review by: CedricTheOwl

Welcome one and all to Islands, the second Adventure Time miniseries!  Though it was certainly not intended to be, Islands also serves as the de facto finale for season 8 after Cartoon Network restructured the final seasons.  Fortunately, the AT crew have a way of recovering from network interference, so the miniseries ends up serving quite admirably as a recap of the major plot points and themes of the season.

The first episode opens with a callback to one of the most recently introduced plot points:  the offscreen humans.  As the Candy citizens enjoy a day at the beach, a ship emerges from the water.  Much like Dr. Gross’ subterranean mobile base, this new assailant resembles a robotic animal (this time a manta ray), and much like Dr. Gross herself, it has a fixation on Susan.  The robot also seems hostile to the assembled Candy citizens, regarding them as dangerous mutants as it pacifies Mr. Cupcake with ease before setting off to the Candy Kingdom.

The ray ship makes short work of the Banana Guards (not a difficult flex) and the Gumball Guardians (significantly more difficult) in a sequence broadly reminiscent of Susan Strong plowing through the city in “Reboot”.  Much like Susan’s attack, the robot ray’s rampage is rebuffed by a giant crushing fist, but not before it recognizes Finn by a similar designation to Susan and offers to take him with it.

Finn’s status as the only human in Ooo has been a part of the show’s premise since its inception, and it has been a source of deepening his character’s emotional spectrum as far back as Susan Strong’s eponymous episode.  Since that point he’s been confirmed to no longer be the only human in the post humanity world, but he can’t form a genuine connection with the likes of Simon or Betty in their current mad-sad-magical states.  His desperation to relate to other humans cost him his arm, and all the physical and emotional pain that resulted from that, and most recently his desire to learn more about this mysterious enclave of humans has twice conflicted with his duty to protect the Candy Kingdom.

Ow, my ambiguity about my heritage as it relates to my adopted home!

Even though the human ship was destroyed, BMO is still able to interface with it, revealing a direct connection to Susan Strong, instead of just a motif connection.  She’s still in recovery from the events of “Reboot”, but has at least reverted from her Hulk-like enhanced form.  Much like in Dr. Gross’ ship, the sight of the wrecked ray ship is enough to trigger some repressed memories in her, while PB is able to confirm that the ship and Susan’s brain implant share a technological root.  In addition, BMO is able to uncover the ship’s point of origin:  Founder’s Island.  With a destination in mind, and with the extant threat of the human enclave once again in evidence, our heroes have a quest.

The journey promises to take Finn, Jake, and Susan far away from Ooo, beyond even Princess Bubblegum’s knowledge of the world, so before our heroes embark they need to touch base with the stories and characters this adventure will put on hold.  Finn encourages Fern to protect Ooo in his absence, not as a substitute for Finn but as he sees fit.  Jake’s troubles with relating to his kids aren’t quite as central to the themes of season 8 as Finn’s own evolving self-image, but they have served as the basis for two of the season’s thus far 20 episodes.  Seeing him check in on Charlie in his characteristically scatterbrained way makes for a good encapsulation of his caring but arms-length parenting style.  This sequence of revisiting and getting an update on the story threads both Finn and Jake experienced is what makes Islands feel like a good finale to the entire season, instead of just a continuation of the Dr. Gross/Susan Strong story.

Finally, the time has come to depart.  Dawn is breaking, BMO is clearing stowing away on this voyage, and PB and Marceline are here to see Finn, Jake, and Susan off.  In a funny yet sweet reversal, Marceline is the more emotionally open half of their pairing here, prompting Bonnie to admit just how much she’s worried about the danger Finn is going into and what he might learn about himself.  It’s a tender moment, and some good facial animation on Finn reveals just how much inner turmoil he’s hiding.  When PB asks him to promise to return safe, it’s a promise he ultimately doesn’t make.

Also Marcie can’t quite prevent herself from flirting with Susan, which is fair.

If Stakes was a deep dive into Marceline’s history and her emotional complexity as an ageless vampire who’s contemplating embracing mortality, Islands so far has promised an adventure into the heart of Finn’s origins.  His desire to know more about humanity and where he comes from, along with being abandoned by his father as an infant, have informed so much of both his heroic traits and his flaws.  Devoting an entire miniseries to paying off all those story threads was an exciting prospect when these episodes first aired.  Even Stakes did its part to set the table for Islands, with Marcie’s flashbacks revealing how miserable and paranoid humans had to be in post-apocalyptic Ooo, as well as their departure to points unknown.  It’s little wonder the ships sent by this human enclave resort to violence so quickly when confronted by its denizens.  “The Invitation” does an excellent job of refreshing the audience on the storylines this miniseries intends to follow through on, as well as setting up the road trip framework of the miniseries.  So come on and weigh your anchor, because it’s Sea Adventure Time.

Spoiler Level: Snail

This one took me a while, even knowing it was the correct image.


Notable Quotes –

Stray Observations –

Whipple the Happy Dragon

Written and storyboarded by: Seo Kim & Somilvay Xayaphone | First aired: January 30th, 2017 | Reviewed by: Lyssie

It’s not easy being lonely. Especially if it’s because other people don’t want to be around you – or is that just your imagination? This is so much harder when you have trouble with social cues… Which only makes you lonelier, cause you don’t understand what’s going on, and you don’t know how to explain it to anyone else, or to yourself. Sometimes you’d rather someone just comes out and says it, that you’re annoying or discomforting or whatever. It might hurt, but it maybe that’s better than not knowing either way.

Maybe you’ll find yourself drifting from one group of friends to the next, each one making you hope that this time, this time it’ll be different. These’ll be the people who like you for who you are, who feel comfortable around you and you feel comfortable around them. You may have drifted away from so many others, or they drifted away from you, or they rejected you. But this time will be different, you just know it.

Maybe you find it easier to help people than to get close to them. After all, helping doesn’t need a lot of communication skills, and who doesn’t like getting help with something? Who doesn’t like the person who’s happy to help? Actually, maybe you help people as a way of getting close to them. It’s gotta work, they’ll like you for helping and then they’ll like you for you!

Maybe if it doesn’t work you’ll take it… badly. You’re just so angry, and you don’t know how to handle it. And you did everything you were supposed to! You helped them, isn’t that what people do? You shared what you’re interested in, isn’t that what people do? You don’t get it. Maybe there’s something wrong with you. Maybe there’s something wrong with them. You’re so tired.

But…

Hopefully, through all of this you don’t lose your kindness, or your empathy. You still choose to help people you want as friends, even if they might not want you the same way. Especially if it’s to help them not be sad, or lonely. You might even find a kind of connection with them that you had given up on. Cause you know how they feel.

I’ve never had it as bad as Whipple, thankfully. There’s been people who drifted away, or who gave off what felt like mixed signals, but they’ve never outright lashed out at me (with or without harpoons). And I’ve never lashed out at them, either, never exploded like that; though instead I’ve imploded far too many times, turned that anger inwards. I’ve done a lot of work on how to deal with both, and it’s getting better. I appreciate the show telling this kind of story – in fiction and in real life, an annoying person often gets more derision than a horrible one, and it’s not a given that they’ll get humanized this way.

Stray observations:

Mysterious Island

Air Date: January 31, 2017 | Director: Cole Sanchez | Storyboards: Tom Herpich, Steve Wolfhard

Review by Prestidigititis

The ship ran ground on the shore of this uncharted desert isle. With Finn….well, I guess it’s just Finn. And it’s not really a “desert” isle–there’s this big cliff face just off to the back of the sandy cove our hero finds himself unconscious upon. It’s just a tiny inlet really, and unlike your typical desert isles there’s a huge mondo-mama tidal wave headed DIRECTLY AT HIM OH GOD FINN GET UP GET UP GET UP–

Up as in up that huge cliff face, I guess. Our man can still hustle when he needs to. Can’t quite outclimb an imminent tidal wave, but he holds his breath while halfway up the cliff face. After interfacing with a couple of colorful crabs. And when he finally does reach the plateau that he finds at the cliff’s top, things are decidedly frigid. Arctic. It’s clear this island is not exactly normal.

Thus begins one of the big moments in a grand quest for Finn, trying to learn just what the fate of humanity was. It’s notable that his first real glimpse of this past happens on his own–no Jake, BMO or Susan to be found. Some nearby stilted huts provide shelter from the intense snow and cold, and a few clues of planned societal existence: seed packets. A book about gourds. Agricultural artifacts that suggest a society that’s gone; disappeared or relocated.

There’s more to it though. The snow gives way to an aggressively hot climate, melting everything around the huts. It’s weird–even weirder when Finn happens upon a few tiny shafts of still-snowy winter air nearby. A tumble down a hill sends Finn into yet another climate shift, one of lush flora and caged fauna. In trying to help a fat rat out of a cage, he falls victim to a tree-trap. And it’s here that Finn finally gets his first encounter with ancient ancestry.

Making Alva the first true human Finn encounters (aside from Susan Strong herself) provides parallels between Finn’s everyday life and Alva’s. They’re both isolated in a place where the environment is slightly beyond predictable and rational, due to some failures of human ingenuity. Sure, there’s a big difference between the failure of weather-controlling technology and an all-out, mythologically-contextualized nuclear war, it still defines these humans’ world as one that persists despite human folly. At the same time, we seed Alva thriving the way Finn has. Her animal friend helps her survive in their makeshift treehouse(-ish) home. Her capacity to adapt has allowed her to harness the technology that still works and handle the things nature is throwing at her. Much like Finn does what he can with his own human skills while thriving in a land of magic and cosmic terrors.

Finn absorbs some of his human heritage here, even if he’s not immediately aware of it. Who were humans? They’re survivors. They’re forward-thinking, bright, tough, unyielding people who have a strong sense of where they belong and how they can improve life, together as a tribe. And even when that tribe is torn from them, they still do what they can, the best they can, with what they’ve got. Also, they’re cute, silly, warm, and hospitable. Even to strange kids who don’t speak Swedish and pop up out of nowhere needing help. It’s a really good first impression for our hero Finn, even if he doesn’t really appreciate it in the moment. We can forgive him that, considering how crazy and dangerous “the moment” is.

What Finn does take away from his encounter with Alva, for now, is that all other humans must be gone completely. Just he, Alva, and Susan remain. A disappointing conclusion to come to, given how epic and full of potential this adventure seemed to him when he first set out. But Alva’s revelation that there are other islands in the area. Reunited with Jake, clashing on the beach with a giant crab, Finn concludes that maybe his other traveling partners could be on one of those other islands, and steel themselves for the journey to find their friends.

Stray Observations:

Spoiler-varning: snigel

Imaginary Resource

Written and storyboarded by: Pendleton Ward & Graham Falk | Air Date: January 31, 2017 | Reviewed by: Mrs Queequeg

The boys are reunited and now in search of their son, BMO. They have managed to domesticate a giant parrot to fly them to the next island. For modes of travel, I am very envious. They arrive at another abandoned island, this one built up with skyscrapers and visible signs of technology. As they ponder what this land is, a human graveyard?, Jake plays with an egg laid by the parrot.

I love a good Jake morph gag

BMO can be heard in the distance, so Jake stretches them up and over, and into the city. They set down at the front of a virtual reality shop, “Better Than Reality – Where reality doesn’t stink”, where BMO is wearing goggles. BMO is dancing and giggling and does not respond to Finn or Jake, so they decide to put on goggles so they can communicate with him. They are transported to a land of the early internet? 1I am not the ideal commentator for this episode, I have no idea what any of the references are. Leave it in the comments please They are given cartoonish bodies, which is saying a lot within the realm of Adventure Time. They get bullied by the current residents, who refer to them as “system dumps.” The residents call for the moderator, who shows up as an extremely buff BMO. Strongman BMO bans the residents and takes Finn and Jake to his night club. Everyone knows who BMO is, delighted to see him.

Dance responsibly

BMO instructs his friend, or sidekick, Vinny2Reggie Watts to hook the boys up with custom BMO avatars, which cost 15 million cryptocoins. Jake accepts his new beautiful skin, but Finn is only interested in tracking down Susan. BMO is easily able to do a search with the island chain brain frame, which locates her 37.5 miles to the east. Finn has everything he needs, so he tells BMO it’s time to go, and is shocked when BMO declines.

Finn and Jake quickly scheme. Finn will keep talking, Jake will remove BMO’s VR goggles. The goggles have their own defense, as Jake quickly gets shocked. “They thought of everything!” But who are they? Jake sees a little flying robot inspect BMO, complete with a head kiss, and follows it to a warehouse of people in pods. Everyone is thin and dressed in underwear, wearing VR goggles while the small robots feed and work out the bodies.

BMO is so happy to be the big man on campus night club that he does not entertain the idea of leaving with Finn and Jake. Here, he has a side kick named Vinny, who loves everything BMO does. Everyone loves everything BMO does. Here, he’s a stud with a tall, muscular body! What is he with Finn and Jake? Does it matter that this world is fake? What is real?

We are in a hybrid of The Matrix and Wall-E

Jake runs back to Better Than Reality with an overside hand, implying that he used his finger to turn off the power. BMO sobs at what he lost, and soon Jake is overrun by zombie-fied humans who are desperate to have their virtual world back. The humans are emaciated and weak, Jake is able to hold them off and walk by them without effort. They all demand weapons and mime attacks on Jake, who notes that they play a lot of violent games. BMO and Vinny recognize each other in the crowd, but are devastated that they can’t relate in the real world.

Jake and Finn walk back to the warehouse, where it’s revealed that Jake destroyed the wiring with abandon. BMO uses his own reboot pin to reset the small flying robots, who take over the repair work from Jake, who is attempting to kiss it and make it better. The people are delighted and return to their pods, summoning weapons, and one set of bikini babes.

The flying robots provide a pod for Finn and Jake to find Susan. BMO wants to stay, but after an apology from Jake and a big hug, he admits that he would miss them too much if he stayed behind. Jake can’t fit into the pod because he’s still carrying the egg, but it hatches just in time.

Jake is a father, yet again

Snail:

Hide and Seek

Air Date: February 1, 2017 | Written & Storyboarded Hanna K Nyström and Aleks Sennwald | Story by Jack Pendarvis, Kent Osborne, Adam Muto, Ashly Burch | Directed by Elizabeth Ito | Reviewed by Malcolm Rambert

Who would’ve thought that 6 years after Susan debuted in this show, the episode detailing her backstory would get overshadowed by the episode it was paired up with?

People forget there was a WHOLE back-and-forth at that time regarding whether or not Susan was simply human; and when evidence showed she was indeed of the mammal species, it got overshadowed by everything else. If anything, this miniseries is focused on Finn generally, but I still think it’s nice that they gave Susan some depth along the way.

Rewatching this episode now, Dr. Gross’s lesson and song regarding the demise of humanity has me getting flashbacks to this scene in the Bong Joon Ho film Snowpiercer.

(I also realize now the instrumental to her song is what the credits theme to this miniseries is!)

The Guardian is subtlety mentioned here, but it made me realize that every kingdom or interesting area this world has some sort of giant protector, whether it’s the Gumball Guardians for the Candy Kingdom, or the now destroyed Fire Giants for the Flame Kingdom.

Combined with the ongoing news cycle, it kind of struck me how with time and paranoia, every empire gets to a point where they build a massive “fuck off” weapon in the pursuit of protecting themselves. (Not to get too political here, but if you ever wonder why North Korea doesn’t give up their nuclear missiles, look what happened to Libya and Syria when they gave up theirs).

I also noticed on this rewatch how much the hider and seeker dynamic is a subtle way of showing the downfall of combining childhood with work. Assumedly almost every kid here is given one of these positions by birth, and it appears that the seekers are tasked with being strong and keeping those who try to leave the island on the island.

There’s am ear contrast between the promo art and when Susan and Frida are teens/adults(?).

It shows how much of a power dynamic there is between them in terms of size and their occupation.

There could have been a more healthy friendship going on between them if the world was in better circumstances, which is why It’s made all the more sad when Susan crushes Frida’s boat. (Yeah she’s under mind control, but still)

I write all of this knowing there are some who aren’t happy with the way Adventure Time got all philosophical and lovey-dovey (don’t even know they were still watching the show at that point), and I probably can’t change their minds on that.

But I’ll put it this way: for this episode in particular, it made me get a whole new perspective on Susan, someone who was originally just an inside joke about an MMORPG. And now when I rewatch episodes with her in it, I have the knowledge that this seemingly goofy character has a history, even if she doesn’t know it.

And the best part? Most of the people she knows will never know about this, and if they do, it’s not immediately shown to us. There’s beauty in that, especially given the episode it’s paired with.

To connect with other shows I’m keeping up with, if you’re watching the current final season of The Boys and see this image, you know exactly where I’m getting at.

This will be a bit of an aside, but one factor I typically think about with regards to this miniseries is the fact that in South Korea, all the episodes were combined to make a compilation film and released in theaters!

I’ve always found this fascinating for a number of reasons:

For one, if that movie ever gets made, South Korea got a taste of seeing Adventure Time on the big screen before anyone else did.

Secondly, the way people make and view compilation movies (particularly for animated works) is seen differently between the east and west. A lot of them are seen as cheaply made to sell more of the series and probably contributing to the “blurring of lines” regarding media and seeing it all as simply content (this is part of what Irish film critic Darren Mooney espoused on his podcast The 250 regarding one of the Demon Slayer compilation films). And as I make my list of animated compilation films on Letterboxd, there is some semblance of truth to that.

That being said, from what I’ve read, the reason countries like Japan and South Korea do this is simply just to help people who missed the show that came on TV. See, when it comes to home media, DVDs and Blu-Rays can be quite expensive depending on the show, and a compilation film for a beloved and/or successful series is typically the most common way an average person gets exposed to the show for the first time. I don’t know how that pars today, but several decades ago, that was definitely true for series like Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam, which if I recall correctly on the latter, had some much furor around it the police had to be called.

I still think about this father who talked about the film on their blog after seeing it with their daughter. Not only was he “pleasantly surprised by the fact that the work contains a philosophical narrative in which there is neither absolute good nor absolute evil”, but also that this was the first time he found out that Adventure Time itself took place in a post-apocalyptic Earth.

It’s really eye-opening to me personally since it’s a reminder that not everyone in the world has the same experience with how they get exposed to different media, even if we are just talking about a singular children’s series. The fact this man only just learned what I regard as a common fact about the show is what drives me to be curious about how folks around the world interact with media within the confines of their society.

For example, I recently had the full realization that the reason I had such a limited exposure to anime growing up is not out of ignorance, but the result of my living circumstances and knowledge about how media distribution worked. My family didn’t have cable for the first 8 to 10 years of my life outside of certain occasions, plus me and my sister weren’t allowed to watch TV on school nights. There’s also the fact that I had no real idea how to pirate fansubbed anime and I couldn’t learn more in the process because our computer time was monitored. I only watched fansubs of two anime growing up, Pretty Cure and Higurashi, both of which I dropped after 5 episodes because I found them to be repetitive and didn’t have the context to what they were trying to do. Maybe if I stuck around longer I could have a proper fondness for it like I do with stuff like Zatch Bell! or Hamtaro,  but who knows (conversely, I was SUPER into comics and manga since I had better access to it thanks to my school library, local library and the many bookstores and comic shops.)

This type of experience can also be said for other people in non-US countries as well. When Nickelodeon was becoming more mainstream, they tried to get into international markets, but one problem is that they didn’t have the money to start a whole new channel (and the territories that did, most didn’t last for more then a few years). As a result, they had to sell all their shows to various channels depending on the country; this is why you will find people who recall some Nicktoons, but not others. It’s also why the Nicktoons video game series is known as “SpongeBob and Friends” overseas.

Speaking of video games, I haven’t yet found a piece that gets into this aspect of those who watch animated works, but I do have this highly relevant piece by Brazilian gaming historian Felipe Pepe called “The Gentrification of Video Game History”. One of the topics is about how not everyone on planet Earth has nostalgia for Nintendo or owned a gaming console, and it and the rest of what he covers is something I wish more people were mindful about with other forms of media.

Snail Cameo

On the hospital bed behind the curtain when we first see Minerva. Guess they wanted a good view at Martin.

Trivia –

Min and Marty

Storyboarded by: Kent Osborne and Sam Alden

First Aired: February 1, 2017

Review by: CedricTheOwl

Susan Strong’s memory is restored, and along with it her vocabulary!  With BMO’s help, she’s able to activate one of the human city’s dormant submarines and starts the reunited party on the next leg of their journey.  When Finn asks where they’re going, Susan reveals their destination as well as the true focal point of this entire miniseries:  Finn is going to meet his mother.

Finn’s parentage has held a large sway over his character arc since the end of season 5, when he learned that his birth father Martin is still alive.  This isn’t to diminish the roles Joshua and Margaret played in raising him, merely that Finn has made peace with their passing by the time of this revelation.  Since learning that one of his parents was out there, that there was another human he could connect to, he’s journeyed to the edge of the multiverse and lost a piece of himself in search of that familial bond.  Now that he’s at the edge of known Ooo, that bond is once again within his grasp.

Fig 1: Minerva Campbell, helper to all except bear scalps

The rest of the episode is a flashback featuring Minerva, a doctor among the Helper caste in the island’s human enclave, and her fateful encounter with a grifting ne’er-do-well named Martin.  Everything we’ve seen of Martin so far makes him seem like completely irredeemable scum, one of the most hateable characters among a cast that includes chaos wizards from Mars and omnicidal walking corpses.  How could such a guy have charmed a woman like Minerva enough to spend even an hour in his company, let alone have a child with him?  Would the character in this episode even remotely resemble the galactic conman and negligent father we came to know over season 6?

Turns out, Martin’s always been the shifty sort.  His first scene in the flashback is shaking down potential escapees from the human enclave for gadgets that catch his fancy, then immediately selling them out to the authorities for a reward.  It’s far from the worst thing we’ve seen him do, given the Seekers seem to just apprehend Hiders and send them to re-education, but it immediately lets us know that this version of Martin is just as untrustworthy as the one we’ve come to know.

And yet, there is a rakish charm to his antics.  When he double crosses a Hider who’s more wary than the usual lot, he ends up in the clutches of the Seekers, and swiftly afterwards in Minerva’s hospital.  The two of them have good banter, with Martin alternating between devil-may-care confidence and making her laugh during her initial checkup.  After a half-baked attempt to escape ends with him being more injured than before, he’s still confident enough to ask her out.  He even outlines how he would trick her into helping him (at her request), playing off her desire to help people by acting helpless and pathetic.  Minerva laughs it off, but when the Seekers come to arrest him the next day, that’s the exact play he makes.  And it works.

What follows is a bittersweet montage of their courtship, their extremely imbalanced suite of accomplishments as a couple, and Finn’s eventual birth.  The lyrics to the song speak of a fleeting, doomed romance, one that the singer nevertheless wouldn’t mind restarting.  The imagery is sweet, but all through it there’s an undercurrent of doubt to their relationship.  Martin outlined exactly how he would con Minerva into helping him, and then proceeded to do just that.  Minerva claimed that approach wouldn’t work on her because she’s wise to his game, but exactly how true is that once you’ve had a child with someone?  It’s a fascinating decision to depict the birth of this fantasy show’s main character, the hero of Ooo, in such a tonally ambiguous way.  There is no grand doomed romance, no child of destiny born under an omen of portent.  Just two people who may not be right for each other falling into each other’s orbit and deciding to build a life.

“Could we begin again on a terrible date?  It’d be greatly appreciated by me…”


Of course, their life together is not meant to last.  The Hiders that Martin made a living double crossing eventually track them down and attack him in their home, forcing Martin to take baby Finn out on a raft and hide in the waters surrounding the island.  This draws the ire of the Guardian, who mistakes them for an attempted escape and attacks.  That’s when Martin pulls out one last surprise:  actual heroics.  Through a combination of inventive thinking and reckless abandon, he manages to damage the Guardian, diverting it from the raft Finn is on even as the resulting explosion separates them.  Finn’s raft eventually lands in Ooo, Martin never sees the island again, and poor Minerva is left heartbroken and alone.

While this episode reveals the identity of Finn’s mother, it does give a greater amount of narrative focus to Martin.  In particular, it shows us a side of him that, while far from an upstanding citizen, has a lot more charm and tenderness than the callous, perpetually grifting shyster we’ve known until now.  Most surprisingly of all, he seemed actually willing to embrace the role of father, throwing down for his son when faced with the Guardian’s attack.  But how much of that was real?  How much of his behavior with Minerva was just to get himself out of trouble with the Seekers?  How much of his heroics were just him trying to save himself, in such a way that it just happened to benefit his son?  Much like Minerva on that beach, and much like Finn, who may never hear this story its entirety, we may never know.

While Minerva didn’t get as much screentime in the episode that gives her top billing, we still learned a lot about her.  She’s a medical professional and general caregiver, yet she has a twisted sense of humor.  She and Martin have good chemistry in their bedside banter.  It’s easy to see how her desire to do good and help the defenseless influenced Finn, both in how she seems to fill her days with helping her community and how they’re both vulnerable to being taken in by someone who wants to abuse their trust.  More recently, Finn’s interest in healing in “Do No Harm” could easily read as a subconscious memory of Minerva’s profession.  His bear hat certainly seems influenced by her look.  And yet there’s still so much to learn about her, particularly in what happened to her after the good times ended.  To answer those questions, Finn and we look to Founders’ Island, and the next two episodes.

Spoiler Level: Snail

Watching over Finn since the very beginning

Notable Quotes –

Stray Observations –

Spoiler Level: Fionna and Cake Miniseries

Fionna gets her last name from Minerva Campbell, in a gender flip from Finn taking Martin’s last name

“I usually go out with men I find interesting and non-stupid, so this is a bit new for me too”

Helpers

Season 8, episode 26 | Directed by Elizabeth Ito | Written & storyboarded by Tom Herpich and Steve Wolfhard from a story by Kent Osborne, Jack Pendarvis, Ashly Burch, and Adam Muto | Originally aired February 2, 2017

This episode is mostly expoisition and connective tissue, but it’s crucial, and introduces themes of transhumanism and utilitarianism that I definitely vibed strongly with. Plus Minerva is a big favorite of mine, so I’m glad to cover it.

Having learned his origin story, Finn is a little reflective and apprehensive, a mood we often find him in. Kara shows him a picture of Minerva and assures him he will fit in among the humans. It’s a bustling city, like a more modern Candy Kingdom. But when they land, Jake is already off in search of Minerva (and snacks that aren’t studded with batteries.) A human informs him that Minerva is everywhere, helping people wherever they need, and moments later, there she is, helping a fat man who’s fallen over. Finn strides forth to meet his mother, but it gets weird right away as she doesn’t seem to recognize him or remember losing a child, and immediately moves onto the next issue with seemingly little concern for what he has to say.

Jake, meanwhile, with his conspicuous talking-dog-ness, has attracted a crowd of onlookers and, as usual for him, revels in the attention. Kara tries to warn him to play it cool, but spots Frida in the distance and chases after her… just in time for Jake to shapeshift and expose himself as a mutant. An entire squad of Minervas, including the one Finn is trying to talk to, swiftly descend, sedating the boys and dragging them off.

Finn wakes up in a cell with Jake, who informs him that the Minervas are robotic clones, but Finn is undeterred by the prospect of a reunion. The Minervabots arrive and Finn attempts to confront them, but they activate a pair of implants on both brothers’ foreheads that render their bodies feeble and their speech slurred. One takes a blood test from Finn and confirms his identity, sending their entire collective briefly into shock, then beckons him to come with her. BMO and Kara follow Frida to a toy store. BMO wants to head right in and buy a toy, but Susan is unsure whether she deserves to reintroduce herself to the friend she betrayed.

The Minervabots guide Finn and Jake to a computer screen where the real Minerva is much more pleasantly surprised and beside herself to see her son and explains what’s happening. After Martin left, Dr. Gross dispatched Kara to retrieve him and Finn, but she never returned. Minerva retreated into her depression, while Dr. Gross engaged in unethical experiments that resulted in the escape of a deadly virus from her laboratory. The virus devastated the Islands’ population and killed all Helpers, leaving Minerva the last. Dying of the virus herself, she uploaded her consciousness into Founders Island’s internet and directed the Minervabots to do the work she could not on her own. Now that her son is back, she has no intention of letting him go.

Man, this episode hits hella different than it did in 2018.

The Light Cloud

Storyboarded by: Graham Falk, Aleks Sennwald, and Adam Muto

Originally Aired: February 2, 2017

Review by: CedricTheOwl

After successfully reuniting with his mother, Beautiful Baby Boy and Yellow Stretching Dog depart Founders’ Island to return to Ooo.  But the destination of their voyage is tragedy:  the Guardian emerges from the water, damaged but still eminently lethal, and smashes their ship in half.  Our heroes only have time to lament their folly as they sink beneath the waves to their deaths.  Short episode, kind of a downer ending to this miniseries, but that’s the kind of daring narrative swings we have come to expect from Adventure Time.

“See?  You die.”  That’s how most parents teach their kids to not stick a fork in an electrical outlet.

In truth, Minerva is just trying to demonstrate to Finn and Jake the futility of trying to leave the island.  In a lot of ways, Minerva is the mirror opposite of Martin as a parental figure.  While Martin was all too eager to keep Finn out of his life, Minerva is all too eager to keep Finn in hers, even at the cost of separating Finn from the life he’s built on Ooo.  And despite his longing for human connection, Finn values his life back in his adopted home.

Meanwhile, Kara has an awkward reunion of her own to attend to.  She seeks out the toy store where her old friend Frieda works and tries to make amends for betraying her to the island’s authorities.  Frieda doesn’t seem to hold a grudge though; nearly two decades on the island (and likely a healthy dose of re-education) has mellowed out her desire to see the outside world.  She’s more interested in meeting BMO than resurrecting old grudges, but Kara isn’t convinced that Frieda has changed that drastically.

As Finn and Jake describe their life back on Ooo, Minerva can’t help but be appalled.  To a normal human, especially one from an enclosed society like Founders’ Island, Ooo must seem like a nightmare world of unimaginable perils.  As a mother who until a few hours ago was convinced she lost her child, hearing how much danger he’s been in the past 17 years only reinforces her determination to keep him safe with her.  She counters their arguments with the vision of a post-scarcity society of comfort and instant gratification, an angle that works all too well on Jake.

Finn isn’t having it though.  He uses the facility’s brain scanning tech to show Minerva a montage of his life on Ooo.  It’s an intense vision:  enraged vampire queens, truly alien-looking monsters, the existential horror of The Lich, passion, heartbreak, cosmic forces colliding, until it ends with Finn losing his arm.  This doesn’t do a lot to dissuade Minerva, who’s now even more committed to keeping Finn from leaving the island.  She proposes an alternative:  have Finn undergo the same procedure she did so they can be together forever as digital facsimiles of themselves.  Finn isn’t having it, and sets off to spread his message among the other humans.

As he begins to speak to the crowd, Finn treats us to a familiar message:  life shouldn’t be just safety and security.  It needs the positive and the negative to give it texture, to challenge a person to grow and mature.  It’s his own wording of the message he received from the Catalyst Comet back in season 6, at the conclusion of his last interaction with a long-lost parental figure.  Our boy has taken those hard-won lessons to heart, and the humans of Founders’ Island are picking up what he’s putting down.  Even Frieda’s long-suppressed wanderlust is awakened by his speech.  Minerva clearly underestimated her son’s capacity for Persuasion checks, and is forced to implement her emergency protocol:  digitizing the entire population for their own safety.

Warning:  Incoming Endgame.  Warning:  Incoming Endgame.

After a journey of hundreds of miles, in search of a connection to his family seasons in the making, Finn once again finds himself in conflict with his birth parent.  For her part, Minerva doesn’t see the issue with what she’s doing.  Her entire life has been devoted to helping and protecting people, and what better way to do so than ensuring they’re never capable of being hurt again.  But Finn’s life hasn’t just been a nonstop barrage of terror and violence, and he uses the scanner to show Minerva the other side of his life:  protecting the innocent, turning enemies into cherished friends, new loves springing up in the wake of old heartache.  In short, he shows her the parts of Ooo that make it his home.

“The Light Cloud” shares an obvious naming convention with “The Dark Cloud”, the finale of Adventure Time’s first miniseries, “Stakes”.  In “The Dark Cloud”, Marceline comes to terms with both her tragic history and her vampiric nature.  She accepts all of it as a part of herself, reclaiming her vampirism on her own terms.  That special served as a summation for all the character growth Marcie has gone through since her introduction, an affirmation that she’s grown from a thousand-year old burnout who’s lost her moral code to one who’s lived long enough to see the self-destructive pattern of life and choose a better way.  “The Light Cloud” is a similar summation of Finn’s character growth over the past eight seasons of Adventure Time.  He’s grown from a wacky adventurer who will slay anything that’s evil to a do-gooder in the truest sense, one who first tries to see the person in whatever threat he’s facing and treat them accordingly.  He has endured a long road of physical pain and heartache, he’s lived entire lifetimes within dreams and recursive time loops, he’s chilled with gods and thrown down with the End of All Life, and he wouldn’t be the person he is if he hadn’t done so.  It’s an excellent bit of parallelism that draws a connection between the two series, making them feel like thesis statements for their starring characters wrapped up in thrilling mini-arcs.

That message is enough to get through to Minerva, who finally sees the young man her boy has grown into for the first time.  She relents, cancelling the Light Cloud protocol and promising to help Finn leave if he wants to.  In return, Finn concedes that he’s in no hurry to leave Minerva behind now that he’s found her, and wants to spend as much time as he can with her catching up.  Though Minerva’s human form is long lost to the virus that ravaged the island, her mind and her heart remain to provide that connection to his origins that Finn has sought for so long.

Our episode ends as it began, with Beautiful Baby Boy and Yellow Stretching Dog setting sail for Ooo.  After a quick feint to disable the Guardian, Frieda and Kara decide they’re going to set their own course for adventure.  Kara even goes back to calling herself Susan, embracing the identity she’s forged in Ooo over the one decided for her on the island.  Finn indulges in one more goodbye with Minerva, using the VR headsets from “Imaginary Resources” to embrace the closest facsimile of her physical form that he is able to.  He has at long last made peace with his own past, reconnected with the ones whom he thought abandoned him, and shown them how much he’s grown in that absence.

“Homey.”  “It was.  But you have a home you made for yourself.”

While Islands of course lacks the novelty of being the first Adventure Time miniseries, and doesn’t have the memorable villains that Stakes enjoyed, I still find it a very strong endpoint for Finn’s longest continuous character arc.  Throughout the comments in Come Along with Me, I’ve spilled a lot of digital ink about Finn’s abandonment issues, his relationship to his parents both adopted and biological, and how adversity and failure have shaped his teenage years throughout the seasons, and this miniseries is an excellent showcase for all he’s achieved.  On the rewatch, I was better able to appreciate how the Founders’ Island arc leaned into classic sci-fi tropes to give it narrative cohesion.

From the Jules Verne and H.G. Wells allusions of Dr. Gross to the pulp sci-fi elements of the islands Finn et al. have explored in this miniseries, this arc has drawn a lot of parallels to this genre specifically.  And like a lot of humanist sci-fi, it has arrived at similar conclusions:  championing freedom of will over comforting digital dependence, embracing emotional capacity as the true test of sapience, instead of merely possessing a full, unaltered human body, and recognizing that humans’ capacity to struggle and overcome adversity is its truest strength, not a burden.  They’re themes touched on by sources as varied as I, Robot, Mass Effect, Wall-E, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, more than I have the time or the expertise to fully name.  So while I don’t think Islands is quite as powerful a creative statement as Stakes, it’s an excellent summation of how the series’ main character has grown over its run, and a very emotional send-off to the show’s eighth season.  Even if it wasn’t initially intended to be.

Spoiler Level: Snail

“Do I… do I upload the snail too?”

Stray Observations –

Spoiler Level: Fionna and Cake Season 2

I know Princess Bubblegum mentioned contacting Minerva when Finn was dying of poison, but I totally forgot that the machine she was going to use to digitize Finn was first introduced in this miniseries. It’s used to great effect in that series as well.

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