Sorry this one is late, I completely missed the opening of this set of episodes. But here we go!

When we covered both King Worm, I mentioned how impressive it was that this show manages to capture the weird, hallucinatory feeling of a real dream. Lots of different shows have had “dream episodes”, but honestly I can count on one hand the number of media depictions that actually nail it.

It’s interesting that the whole episode is kind of a transition. In the immediate sense, it’s the connective tissue between the Islands miniseries and Elements, and it’s kind of wild there’s only this one episode between those two huge stories. At this point in its life, Adventure Time is clearly interested in telling much larger scale stories than the little silly twelve minute goofs it started as, and there’s no clearer demonstration of that than this episode.

Ignoring that it’s basically just a single bridge episode between two epic-scale adventures that span five episodes each, where most shows might have a nice little breather episode, instead we get an intense delve into the fears and anxieties of the main characters.

Fun!

Jake is clearly repressing his anxiety about the source of his powers, and possibly fear that his parents have been lying to him. He and Jermaine bury their dead father, only for Jake’s mother to turn into a monster who kills him. We see the shapeshifter from Joshua and Margaret Investigations peering through the window, hinting that on some level Jake does know something.

Digging holes in dreams is supposed to symbolize buried feelings or memories, and even though I don’t really put a lot of stock into “standard dream symbols”, this is a constructed narrative, and since the writers intentionally put these symbols in, it’s worth a bit more to look at these interpretations.

Jake also seems to fear aging, given the throwaway bits we see where he’s getting prepped for BMO’s play, which makes sense. That comes up again later this season, and it’s long since been established that Jake is going to have something more like a dog’s lifespan because he aged faster than Finn. That his “timeless style” won’t save him from the advance of time.

Finn’s fears seem more like him being powerless to help. The whole “teeth falling out” thing is real common, but it’s usually your own teeth, and usually it symbolizes fear of losing control, or powerlessness.

The grass devouring him is probably pretty straightforwardly about him worrying about Fern, and boy does that end up coming back. He also has the clearest visions of what’s coming in Ooo, where he sees the landscape covered with candy and lava and the sky filled with slime and ice.

BMO apparently is afraid that he’s actually a bad person. Having seen what AMO was like, BMO seems terrified that he could be like him without realizing it, the same way AMO seemed oblivious to what a jerk he was. BMO thinks he’s being good because people love him, but what if that wasn’t proof and everybody loved him even if he wasn’t? This is a little bit more childish, but it’s fully in character for BMO’s fears to be little bit more childish.

In a way, in this transitional episode, each character is afraid of their own transitions.

BMO had to grow up and face AMO and he’s clearly still struggling with that.

Jake is afraid of having to face things he’s been repressing for his whole life, which tracks with a lot of fears of middle age, when Jungian psychologists say you need to begin looking at the things you’ve pushed away about yourself and engage with shadow aspects of your psyche in order to keep growing.

And Finn seems like he’s afraid of hitting the limit of his ability to help people, that he’s turning into an adult and the simple ways he’s been facing problems his whole life might stop working.

Stray Observations:

• Joshua and Margaret had the Ark of the Covenant apparently? I think it’s sitting in the dining room, with a canvas on it. It’s the proper one, not the sold gold one from Indiana Jones. I couldn’t find a screenshot of it, though, and Hulu has decided that screenshotting one of their shows is verboten.
• I feel like almost every part of this episode has a reference to some bit of the show’s own history in it. A million loose ends tossed together to remind us of how far the boys have come.
• I like how as soon as Finn and Jake show up in BMO’s play and start effecting it, he goes, “That’s not what I wrote!”
• “You’re going to wish it was scientifically possible to put those words back in your mouth!”
• “Now it’s too relatable!!”
• Finn has both his arms in dreamworld.
• “We won’t trade them for anything less than something pretty and/or cool!”
• BMO ending the episode where they reveal what’s happened to Ooo in their absence with, “like a dream”, after all the nightmares is a good dang piece of writing.