Skyhooks

Storyboarded by: Sam Alden and Polly Guo

Originally aired: April 24, 2017

Review by: Josephus Brown

For yet another episode, we essentially pick up right where the previous one left off, with the guys getting off the banana boat with BMO as it arrives at Ooo, and Finn does a little lean on the fourth wall, “This was the longest adventure we’ve ever had”, and I like the casual reference to Hall of Egress, especially because it means that Jake believed Finn when he told him about it.

Right off the bat everything is weird, but Jake is too tired to deal with any of it so he immediately slides about as far into denial as we’ve ever seen him.

He’s right about trips, though. I remember when I came back from Europe for the first time, just standing on the corner of a giant six lane road, stunned by the realization that streets that big were incredibly weird.

He can’t keep it up once he reaches the treehouse and faces the first real obstacle to his hot shower, though he takes the whole thing in stride. BMO, on the other hand, is acutely aware that something weird is going on and they are there for it.

The different versions of the characters are great, I love how much effort they put into these. NECTR in particular is amazing.

“I’m going to start treating him as an equal!”

I love how blasé Jake is about the prospect of them having slipped into a parallel universe of candy, after everything he’s seen hanging with Prismo that would barely register on the list of weird shit. I also like BMO’s insistence that they couldn’t have, because if they had he would know.

The creepiness keeps slowly ramping up, as the candy people make veiled allusions to “the tower”, and then the pink lemonade Lemongrab turns up to scream joyfully at people about his fluids.

“I used to have lots of anger and sadness but now I’m FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!!”

It’s interesting to notice how easily Jake always gets caught up in chanting, make a note of that for later. Here, when the camera cuts back to a wide shot, you can see he’s joined in with “sours get the tower!”

He tries to talk Finn down, too. It’s interesting that his argument is “Maybe they don’t need you to fix ‘em”, given how Bubblegum claims she “fixed” everybody. I also really love this moment where Finn considers Jake’s point and this tiny smiling jelly bean. The way Finn delivers “I always believe you when you use that voice.” as a flat statement without inflection or changing his pissed off eyebrows feels like a watershed moment, where he won’t let Jake talk him down.

Ultimately what snaps Jake out of his denial is seeing a scared child, even if it’s a nine foot tall 500 pound toddler incarnation of the spirit of death and entropy, and he comes around to this being a problem that has to be addressed.

“If you intend thus to disdain,

It does the more enrapture me,

And even so, I still remain

A lover in captivity.”

Scaling the tower they find a candy-fied Marceline, née “Marshmaline, the Campfire Queen”, and them taking five solid seconds of the guys stumbling over that incredibly awkward name is my favorite moment of the episode.

The tower turns out to be a monstrous Bubblegum, and before she can make gummy versions of the guys, Ice King rescues them with the hangers he swore he was going to return back in Elemental, swooping them up into the clouds from where they can see the whole of Ooo laid out beneath them.

I like how you can clearly see the Terrible Tower Bonnibel and Saint Pim’s Dome in their respective areas.

Random Thoughts:

• This is a pretty good placesetting episode, and it has a lot of work to do. The boys don’t even get to change their socks after the exhausting trip that was Islands before they get plunged into this madness, and the show does a great job of pivoting straight into another huge adventure.
• My gut says that Marcy Marshy singing Greensleeves is significant and I excerpted the lines from it above that jumped out at me when I first saw this episode years ago.
• I like how Finn calls him Simon to his face this time. He’s been doing that more, it feels like?
• Skyhooks are an old term for something impossible in a construction job, like if an architect came up with an idea that would be impossible to reach a crane into someone might jokingly say “we’ll just use skyhooks”. It was also something you’d send an apprentice out to get as a snipe hunt, like how old circuses used to haze new roustabouts by telling them to go clean out the non-existent baggage trailer.
• It’s also a vastly less insane than it sounds version of a space elevator, where instead of being a tower that reaches up from the ground it’s a giant spinning tether in low orbit, with a hook on the longer end, that swings down just above the atmosphere on each rotation. A plane flies up to the edge of the atmosphere, gets hooked by the tether, then gets hurled up into orbit.
• “We live here now. Me and the skyhooks.”
• What happened to the cloud kingdom? Was the last time we saw it when Ice King froze a bunch of people at a party in Astral Plane?

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Bespoken For

Written and storyboarded by: Seo Kim & Somilvay Xayaphone | First aired: April 24th, 2017 | Reviewed by: Lyssie

What do you do when the person you love is still here, but isn’t here anymore? It can be very tempting to try and bring them back, to do whatever you can to undo the damage, draw them back out. But that might not work, try as you might. And at some point, if you want them to still be in your life, if you don’t want to give up on that – then you might need to accept who and what they are, now, and do the best you can with that.

Betty is dealing with that dilemma in this episode. After trying so hard to bring Simon back she’s ready to give up; nothing has worked. Not even recreating their past experiences together. And the thing is, she had every reason to believe she’d succeed – she’s using magic, the power to make the impossible possible! But still, every power has its limits, and the ice crown is magic too, after all. So she decides to accept Simon as he is – as the Ice King.

The problem there is that it’s damn near impossible to form a relationship with Ice King. He’s kind of a fundamentally broken personality, barely recognizing other people as people, if he recognizes them at all, and motivated mostly by selfishness. Still, as I’ve written before, his humanity has gradually shined through, like grass growing from cracks in the pavement. I mean, he’s genuinely embraced Finn and Jake as his friends over time, we just saw him saving their lives, and he even gives them cute handmade sweaters! He even managed to become friends with Marceline; for her, this new friendship hasn’t replaced the old one, but it still means a lot. So maybe Betty could find something like that with him… And as we’ll see in the next few episodes, he actually does remember and like her enough to want to save her, even if she’s still just “Weird Girl” to him. Sometimes you gotta take what you can get.

Stray Observations:

• Betty and IK playing together is just too cute
• Patience is the worst
• Sorry, I meant Marshmaline, of course.
• Would candy Finn be Flan?
• Would candy Jake be Cake? … wait a minute
• Ice Cream
• Tiny Candycorn
• Lime Filling Magus
• I’m too tired to think up ones for Betty, Gunter and Patience, hit me up in the comments with your best suggestions!

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Winter Light

Directed by Cole Sanchez, Written and storyboarded by Steve Wolfhard and Laura Knetzger from a story by Kent Osborne, Jack Pendarvis, Julia Pott, and Adam Muto

Original Airdate: April 25, 2017

Review by: LibraryLass

The op is on! Simon has a plan to break into the dome-covered Ice Kingdom via the sewer line and take Patience out… or, rather, he has a placemat from Captain Tasty’s Seafood. Same thing really. He also has a gift for Finn and Jake: their own bespoke sweaters, complete with a picture of their best friend on them. That’s right, Finn on Jake’s sweater, and the Ice King on Finn’s. The holes in the plan are immediately obvious even to Simon, and while Finn leans over a cloud to plot his next move, Ice King comes up with a new approach on the spot and just shoves Finn off. While the falling Finn tries to come up with a suitably Rattleballs-ian plan, Jake and IK jump after him and they break on through to the other side. It’s too co-o-old for Finn here, so Jake, being possessed of fur, lets his little bro hold his hands (and everything else) in the holes of his sweater.

And now we come to the reason I wanted this episode, because it sets up one of the most enigmatic gags in all of Adventure Time. Finn puts Jake’s sweater, the one with his face on it, on over the top of the Ice King-faced sweater he was already wearing. When Simon turns to look at him and sees this, his reaction is one of extreme terror, throwing his hands up, wailing, and hyperventilating before he seems to have an epiphany. “Oh… I get it,” he says. “The top one’s fake!”

And here, reader, lies the rub. For years Simpsons fans have debated whether Ralph Wiggum’s famous description of sleep as “where [he’s] a Viking!” refers to Ralph dreaming about being a literal Viking or a strange, impenetrable metaphor about Ralph being extremely skilled at the act of being asleep. This gag is Adventure Time’s answer to that immortal debate. Does the Ice King momentarily mistake Finn for a two-headed monstrosity before wrongly concluding that, Blemmye-like, his face is actually in the center of his chest? Or does he have the object permanence to remember his own face on the first sweater and see the change as a sign that he and Finn are not as close as he thought?

My dear friend and former partner Lily Bones, who many of you surely know for her excellent games journalism, and I once had a real knock-down-drag-out argument about this joke. Who took which position I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Simon conjures a sleigh of ice to speed them across the icy floor of the dome. Everything is dark and silent, and the sleigh crashes into a snowbank outside of the house of the Cloud Kingdom’s own Carroll, last seen in “The Tower.” It seems that just as Bubblegum’s transformation into pure elemental Candy has infected her portion of Ooo with incessant joy and leisure, Patience has suffused her with the desolation of despair. Carroll, already a deeply unhappy person, seems little different in personality in her new form, and she and Finn get on about as well as they did before. Finn invites her to join their mission, but she decides to stay home and work on her hobby of drawing elves, a pursuit Finn seems quietly impressed by.

The trio continue on in a new sleigh to the Ice Palace, now frozen over into a huge silvery pyramid with a face. Ice King espies a penguin turned all to ice, but when Finn gets his attention he drops the little fellow, shattering it. Strangely, he refers to this one as “Pengie” rather than some variation on Gunter’s name. Anyway, Finn’s found a tunnel in, so in they crawl and parachute to the floor as Mrs. Fox sings a moody chanteuse song. Snow Eater, we give our ice not for honor, but for you. As they reach the bottom, the melancholy of the place begins to affect Jake, who grows a rainipup-like horn of ice. While Mr. Fox and Ice King experience a moment of great confusion, Patience arrives, with Carroll, who has ratted the boys out, in tow. She likes this situation. Not surprising, I suppose, if anyone’s in her element being miserable it’s her.

Finn charges in an effort to make Patience set things right, but he can make no dent in her and she explains that even if she wanted to, she couldn’t, as thanks to the sheer power of Magic Betty, she’s lost control of the spell intended to bring Bonnie, Phoebe, and Slime Princess– does Slime Princess not have a real name?– onto her level and turned all four of them into something she has no power over. Ice King is distracted by shrampies until he finds Betty frozen in a block of ice and absconds with her. Finn drags a despairing Jake away just in time as Patience and Ah-Choose Goose contemplate the meaningless of friendship. Back in the clouds, Simon serves Betty and a back-to-normal Jake some warming soup. Unfortunately rescuing Betty has not done anything to the elemental spell, and Betty’s magic is almost entirely drained. But she has an idea: the enchiridion, which doesn’t exist anymore, but Finn stole the Farmworld copy of it. As Betty takes it she shrieks with maniacal laughter.

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Cloudy

Air Date: April 25, 2017 | Written & Storyboarded by Kent Osbourne and Graham Falk | Story by Kent Osborne, Jack Pendarvis, Julia Pott, Patrick McHale, and Adam Muto | Directed by Elizabeth Ito | Reviewed by Malcolm Rambert

Finn’s freaking out about the whole situation to the point where he believes any amount of help will speed up the process. This gets on Betty’s nerves.

We’re getting character dynamics we’ve been longing for.

Betty calls on Jake to distract Finn while she and the Ice King try to find a solution to the dilemma of the Four Elemental princesses going Ultra Instinct. They end up taking a nap on a cloud and get separated from the group. When they wake up and realize this, Finn gets even more agitated and stressed.

Jake then put on his big brother pants and does a game they used to do as kids, where he roleplays as a barber to help take the edge off.

It’s a scene I appreciate for a number of reasons. One is that they are sort of returning Jake to his original roots as a character. I don’t know if anyone else agrees, but over the course of the show they basically turn him into an overall immature goofball (probably to contrast with Finn maturing throughout the series), much like most of John DiMaggio’s other characters he voices, like Bender from Futurama. They actually kind of do an inverse of that by having Jake be cool with Ooo turning into a Bizarro version of the bending world of Avatar by having him say he was only pretending so he wouldn’t freak out Finn even more. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a great way of establishing the layers with which this character operates on; he’s worried about his wife and kids, but he also doesn’t want to upset his little brother.

Another thing I like is the word usage they give Finn. He compares being a hero for so long like being Employee of the Month, and feels him going off on his own adventure away from everyone with Fern to look over is the equivalent of him giving the keys to someone else, only to come back and see the whole place is wrecked.

It had me thinking of other media that deal with kids inadvertently adopting big responsibilities and how that affected their psyches. I think of how in Steven Universe: The Movie, Steven is constantly stressed and impatient about another world-ending threat coming his way, in almost a similar way to Finn. Though in this case, it’s just another random thing from his lineage’s past coming back for him to deal with. He didn’t ask for this. Just the role of your average hero.

Speaking of heroes, I think for good measure, I should post this quote from beginning of The Incredibles, where Mr. Incredible is being interviewed about his role as a hero:

Eventually, they get back to Ice King and Betty, but not before dealing with a Cloud Lard that is hungry, but well read in his tastes. While riding the Lard, Jake makes a good point about how this Element bizz would’ve happened no matter what, and they were lucky not to be there when it happened.

As someone who can get bogged down by the relentless news at the current moment, I needed to hear that. Recycling and supporting someone’s GoFundMe? Those are things I have control over. An international war being orchestrated by the dumbest people by far to run the country you live in? That’s out of my hands for the most part.

Favorite Quotes:

• “Graduate student? What the heck is that? You graduated but you’re still a student? How does that work?”
• “There’s a door.” “I don’t care. Don’t look in this direction. It makes me feel like you can hear my most private business.”
• “A food critic”

Other Things:

• In the time between my last analysis and this one, I found out Adventure Time alumni Graham Falk (who helped storyboard and co-write this episode) is the creator of the underrated Canadian cartoon Untalkative Bunny. A nice chill show that’s worth checking out.

• Also random trivia: you know that constantly-reposted image of Cartoon Network characters looking at the Powerpuff Girls Z protagonist all creepy like that was drawn by Studio Trigger alumni Yoh Yoshinari? Untalkative Bunny is actually in that drawing on the bottom right. It aired a good amount on Japan’s division of Cartoon Network during the 2000s.
• Every time I see this episode and I’m reminded of the door, I can’t think of anything else but Super Mario Bros. 2

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Slime Central

Storyboarded by Aleks Sennwald and Hanna K. Nyström

Originally Aired: April 26, 2017

Reviewed by Prestidigititis

Now that Finn has been tasked with an actual quest, and a means to get Ooo back to normal, he dives headlong into the Slime Kingdom to find Slime Princess’ crown gem. As the miniseries goes on, we’re going to see what happens when a single element’s power takes over its part of the realm. In so doing, we’ll learn about the powers inherent in the elements themselves. Ice has its immobilizing, cold, and repressive aspects. We’ve just watched Candy aggressively morph everyone and everything into a sinister, gleeful version of themselves, projecting aggressive positivity like a weapon. And now we find out that at its very base…the element of Slime is basically a manifestation of roller disco.

I haven’t studied enough of Slime Princess’s appearances to know whether it makes “sense” that her superpowered elemental version would become a consuming hulk that seeks to pit her subjects against each other in the ancient martial art of boogie. But there she is, in the middle of the roller rink floor, bopping and jamming to the slick beats of DJ Plop Drops (John Hodgman returning as the slime-intensified version of Elder Plops).

All kinds of familiar faces are here, transformed through the prism of Slime. Not just in body (all of whom have a great slippery oozy gleam to them), but in name as well. While the Candy denizens embraced a maniacal positivity, the slime folks are simply grooving on Slime Princess’ brave new world of skate battles and disco beats. A cadre of familiar princesses, teaming up as the Snack Pack, start to display their skills, and are mocked by the Party Bears’ slimeified leader, Party Splat. Obviously a skate battle must commence.

After the rockin’ and rollin’, the princesses prevail. They’ve earned the right to be absorbed into the gelatinous body of their ruler, slowly dissipating and vanishing with the most content smiles on their faces. Of course this is horrifying to Finn. And pretty much no one else. Even LSP (Lumpy SLIME Princess, thank you very much) seems to admire and envy that winning dance team and the fantastic reward they’ve earned.

Finn is disturbed by it all, but it does spark a plan for him: enter a skate competition, win, and then grab Slime Princess’ jewel before his team can be assimilated. Like every Finn plan, this one hinges on his presumed superior heroism. If he believes in himself, there’s no way he would allow the assimilation process to affect him. “She can’t absorb us if we’re self-absorbed.”What follows is a lot of good old Adventure Time humor, mainly focused on LSP and her aspirations to teen rom-com tropes and successes. Jake fulfills his chaos goblin role, almost ruining everything by replacing the disco with some solo viola, leaving Finn and LSP to save the day. Finding an untapped connection between the two of them which expresses itself in DANCE, SLP casts herself as the heroine of a “true Cinderella story” as she is hoisted up high by Finn in their own private Dirty Dancing moment.

But LSP’s enthusiasm ends up knocking down Jake, which causes his viola bow to go careening into Slime Princess’ face, and our heroic skaters are declared losers by default. It does all work out, however, since assimilation is also the punishment for losing teams (just from a more shameful entry point). Finn’s hero nature seems at first to be holding off the absorption as planned, but Jake falls prey to his main achilles heel—coziness. Horrifyingly, he allows himself to fade and be incorporated into the goo. Horrified by the death of his bro, soon Finn’s own conviction starts to slip. On the verge of dissipating, it’s LSP who rallies him. Her stubborn determination not to give in (even if the reasons are typical LSP vanity about her outfit and plucky underdog story) causes a great disturbance inside the Slime Behemoth. The first hints of the arc of the miniseries is set up here when we are shown that LSP was just pretending to be slime, and somehow had the fortitude to prevent her own absorption. It’s the kind of storytelling you can only recognize in retrospect, and I love how they introduce it here.

Out they are cast, from the Slime and the kingdom. Finn’s won the jewel but lost his bro. He’s cowed, stunned. But luckily LSP is there to keep things on track. Berating him for always being the victor, Finn realizes that there MUST be a way to save Ooo and get Jake back. But so what? LSP is getting the storybook rom-com ending she’s always deserved, and that’s what counts.

Stray thoughts:

• How did Jake know the “Skate to Assimilate” chant when the Slime folk first started it? Maybe he’s just that eager to be part of the party crowd.
• Some slime-ified names for you: Blechfast Princess, Bileberry Princess, Hot Blob Princess, Spurtle Princess, Abracajamiel, Party Splat. And of course, LSP.
• It makes sense that someone like Party Pat would be drawn to the kingdom of dance battles. Hot Dog Princess and Wildberry princess…are they basically just slime folk with their own realm?
• Jake got the best Dirty Dancing reference in the episode: “I had the slime of my life.”

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Happy Warrior

Storyboarded by: Sam Alden and Polly Guo

Originally Aired: April 26, 2017

Review by: CedricTheOwl

After their adventure in the newly expanded Slime Kingdom, Finn is up one princess crown gem and down one brother.  He’s understandingly taking it hard, and neither LSP’s well-meaning but insensitive comforting nor Betty’s worrying habit of laughing maniacally is reassuring him.  The Ice King of all people turns out to be the voice of reason, preventing Finn from diving back into Slime Kingdom in an attempt to save Jake and convincing Finn to focus on their plan.  Finn relents, and the tenuous fellowship makes its way to Fire Kingdom.

While Ice King’s powers start to wane as they draw close to the superheated kingdom, Betty summons up enough of her power to imbue Finn and Gunter with her own Flame Shield spell, enabling them to set foot on the scorched terrain without dying.  LSP follows them down, curiously as immune to the heat as she was to the slime in Slime Kingdom.  As soon as Finn, Gunter, and LSP land in the kingdom, they are beset by an armored attacker wielding a flaming sword.  Fortunately it’s just Tree Trunks’ ex Wyatt, hardly more of a threat after being transformed by the fire elemental than before.  The party relieves him of his armor, suits up, and sets off to explore the blackened landscape.

“Groovy”

The Flame Kingdom has become a blasted wasteland of senseless fighting, and it’s not long before the group is attacked by yet another converted fire denizen.  This time it’s Lady Rainicorn Flamecorn, sporting a nifty blue fire redesign and out for blood.  Finn is understandably reluctant to fight part of his extended family, but the more her attack delays their progress in retrieving the princess gem, the more his temper threatens to overwhelm him.  Before he’s forced to attack, Flamecorn is driven off by none other than Cinnamon Bun, shielded from the out of control elemental energy by his own flame shield.  He leads them to Flame King’s castle, but warns Finn that she might be beyond reasoning.

After stamping out a hostile Flambo, the party infiltrates the remains of the Fire Kingdom’s castle.  Inside is another tableau of carnage, as the inhabitants are locked in an eternal battle against anything they see.  Even ones split apart in battle form new bodies to immediately continue the fight.  Above it all, a dragon surveys the scene and occasionally attacks the Fire Kingdom subjects… and that dragon has Flame Princess’ gem caught in its teeth.  Finn leaps into action to retrieve the gem, but he sees something familiar in the beast’s eyes.  The dragon didn’t eat Phoebe. She is her.

As a character beat, I like that Finn recognizes Flame Princess despite her radically altered physical appearance.  It mirrors how he recognized the sweet, innocent spirit in her amidst her initial rampage through Ooo, while also reinforcing his claim that he’s forged a platonic friendship with her based on emotional growth and rebuilt trust.  He recognizes her from just a glimmer in her eye, not just her body.  But this moment also speaks to why this episode, and the miniseries itself, frustrates me:  Finn may recognize this version of Phoebe, but I do not.  There’s always been an element of casual violence to FP’s character, but that’s always been a relatively minor part.  Even when she was first released from her lamp prison and had known only her father’s evilevilevil influence, she’s still equally enamored with nature and just experiencing the world.  This straightforwardly bloodthirsty version of her is just a small part of who she is, and arguably a much lesser one after five seasons of character growth.

Maybe that’s intentional.  Maybe, as the miniseries title suggests, it’s all a part of breaking down Adventure Time’s cast into the building blocks of their character and reflecting that through character redesigns.  This flattened, single minded version of FP is simply less interesting than the textured, three dimensional character we’ve come to know and see grow throughout the series.

While Finn may recognize Flame Princess, she does not remember him in her transformed state.  She attacks Finn, quickly reclaiming her gem and swallowing it for good measure.  This final setback to his plan to save Jake causes Finn to finally snap, giving into the elemental corruption he’s been wrestling with since setting foot in the Fire Kingdom and turning him into a full flame element.  He squares off against the transformed Phoebe, leaving LSP alone as the sole non-combatant in the kingdom.  Her attempts to assert her need to be the center of attention does temporarily bring the fighting to a halt… just long enough for Flame King to decide that attacking the Candy Kingdom is a better use of their time than fighting amongst themselves.  With Finn in tow, the war party sets off to smash those goody-two-shoes nerds, leaving the heroes’ plan to reverse the elemental spell thoroughly in ruins.

At least it’s good to see exes getting along

While I find this episode frustrating in how it chose to distill Flame King’s character, the action does at least lend some forward momentum to the story.  The first half of the miniseries was heavy on exposition, but with events established and an actionable plan in place, the second half can focus on actually resolving the conflict.  While the previous episode saw our heroes succeed but at a steep cost, here they flatly fail:  Phoebe’s gem is farther out of reach than ever, Finn is lost to the elemental spell, and the elementals are breaking containment to fight one another instead of sticking to their quadrants of Ooo.  I also can’t deny that this is another strong episode for character designs.  Gunter with the flaming bident in particular makes for a striking image.

Even Wyatt can’t fully detract from the power metal album cover energy of this shot

Notable Quotes –

• “My wolf is also a loner.  We’re both loners!”
• “Fire Wyatt is still in the game!”
• “Listen, I need this to fix Ooo.  Because Jake is slime and this place is a toxic aggro machoscape”

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Hero Heart

Storyboarded by: Somvilay Xayaphone and Seo Kim

Originally Aired: April 27, 2017

Review by: CedricTheOwl

Our episode opens on the placid Candy Kingdom, and yet a storm brews in the distance.  Flame King and her brigade of fire element followers are on the warpath, and as they march upon the unsuspecting populace, their song of battle rings throughout the air.

He’s not made of grass, but he’ll do.

Among them is Fire!Finn, bringing up the rear and intent on laying waste to the kingdom he usually protects.  Much like Flame Princess in the previous episode, this elemental distillation of Finn bears only a cursory resemblance to his normal self.  His fight junkie tendencies have lessened in the later seasons, but as LSP points out he’s always been guided by a sense of morality.  He’s never been a wandering instrument of destruction, spouting stock shonen dialog and taking swings at his friends if they get in his way.

This version of Finn is certainly a downgrade, much less interesting than his more rounded personality, but there’s something about this that feels more purposeful than Flame Princess’ elemental form.  Recent storylines have depicted Finn showing an interest in healing, culminating in him reconnecting with his doctor mother in “Islands”.  He’s also taken a chance by accepting Fern into their lives despite the violent nature of their first meeting, disregarding the circumstances of his creation and taking a chance on a peaceful resolution.  Depicting Finn as the total opposite of that, and by consequence a much flatter, less interesting character, feels like a demonstration of what Finn could be like if he didn’t change and grow as he has.

Alas, the Flame army is inexorable in their march.  LSP’s pleas to Finn fail to appease, the cavalry of Fern, Lemongrab, and NEPTR only briefly slow them down, and Ice King and Betty are swatted away after attempting to recover Gunter.  Even Marshmaline transforming into a candy dragon (S’moreg? S’maug? There’s something there.) eventually falls to the Flame King’s fire breath.  The flame elements are bent on destruction, but the candy elements seem barely capable of understanding that they’re in danger.

As LSP rushes to check on the downed Campfire Queen, she bemoans her inability to stop the carnage, albeit in a characteristically self-centered way.  Marshie responds by peeling off her own face and feeding it to her.  The sweet, toasted marshmallow skin is enough to send LSP to her happy place, giving her time to calm down and re-center herself.  Our unlikely, lumpy heroine squares up, just as Finn begins to ascend the massive tower of Princess Bubblegum, intent on her murder.

Stack it to the heavens!  Stack it to the heavens!

LSP dramatically intervenes (is there any other way she would?), trying one last time to reason with Finn.  When that fails, he pulls the same trick that worked to calm her down:  a nice, sweet treat to send him to his happy place.  Inside Finn’s head, we see a progression of scenes of him and Princess Bubblegum through the seasons:  receiving a lock of her hair, his brief time with a de-aged PB, her Lichified form, before finally settling on their hang out session in “The Pajama Wars”.  This could easily read as dredging up his old old romantic feelings for her.  I am sure there are viewers who read it that way.  But I think it’s important to note that those romantic scenes are still fraught with flame, the element they’re trying to banish.  It’s only when Finn drills down to that last core memory, just spending quality time with someone you care about, that he’s saved from the elemental spell.

With Finn back in action, he retrieves Princess Bubblegum’s gem and returns to the mission at hand.  As he departs, PB’s effervescent mood suddenly shifts.  She declares that she’s done playing peace lover and will instead become the peace maker.  She starts to sing, emitting a blanket of sugar dust that forcibly transforms anyone it touches into a candy element.  Flame King’s offensive is crushed in seconds, and even Phoebe herself is transformed into a gummy version of her humanoid form, barfing out both a stream of Red Hots and her gem in short order.  Elemental!PB may be a heightened version of her early season nice girl persona, but she’s still got a sour center, and that makes for a much more satisfying rendition of the character than Flame Princess in the past two episodes.

With all three gems secure, Finn’s mission is a success!  All that’s left is Betty’s sudden but inevitable betrayal, as she scoops up the gems and flies off on her magic carpet, a befuddled Ice King in tow.  Our episode closes out with Finn surrounded by the transformed candy elements, singing one last round of PB’s song and staring creepily at Finn.

The pupil-less eyes on the candy elements really makes the scene unsettling.

“Happy Warrior” frustrated me in how it chose to interpolate Flame King and the Fire Kingdom in general into their fire elemental forms, but this episode makes that frustration feel more like an intentional part of the experience.  Yes, Finn and Phoebe as one note fight junkies are boring, but that does appear to be the intent.  More satisfyingly, the parade of toxic aggro machismo is completely shut out by the cloying sweetness of the Candy Elemental, which nonetheless has an unsettling air of mind control to it.  The montage that turns Finn back to normal is understated but emotional in a way that the exposition-heavy episodes of the show struggle to match.  Princess Bubblegum is much more recognizable as a character than Phoebe was:  she wants to protect her people, and by her will the world will be sweet and friendly once it’s under her control.  A surprisingly strong penultimate episode that boasts some of my favorite moments of the miniseries.

Notable Quotes –

• “I’m more of an aspiring hero than a real one.  I got like, the morals, the charisma, and the good looks, but I lack the experience!”
• “Your face tastes like my happy place.”
• “Purple clump, you are a sour anomaly.”

Stray Observations –

• LSP’s happy place is her home in Lumpy Space, a place she hasn’t lived in since at least season 2.  Interesting, and a good parallel to Finn’s happy place being a person he ultimately has a complicated relationship with.
• This is another fantastic showcase of Hynden Walch’s singing voice.  “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” was originally published in 1910 by Leo Friedman and Beth Slater Whitson and has been covered dozens of times and appeared in many shows.  The comments on this cover by Bing Crosby are 50% people reminiscing, 40% Adventure Time references, and 10% befuddlement at the Adventure Time references.

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Skyhooks II

Air Date: April 27, 2017 | Written & Storyboarded by Steve Wolfhard | Story by Kent Osborne, Jack Pendarvis, Julia Pott, and Adam Muto | Directed by Cole Sanchez | Reviewed by Malcolm Rambert

First off, great episode title card.

If not for the Adventure Time Wiki, I wouldn’t have realized that maybe Betty wasn’t always planning on double-crossing Finn. In the last episode I covered for this miniseries, Betty was looking through the Enchiridion and the Elemental symbol is seen implying that she was intending to save Ooo from the Elemental spell, maybe during “Slime Central” Betty was looking through the Enchirdion and found out that she can time travel; finally in “Happy Warrior”, Betty is suspiciously hyper and excited as the pages of the Enchiridion show an hourglass implying she was going to cast a spell related to time.

Look at their faces. They were not expecting this at all.

Betty’s comment about looking at the Ice King is like “looking at her past life through a funhouse mirror” cuts deep. I know it’s sort of typical to make the allusion to the effects on the crown on Simon as being something akin to Alzheimer’s disease, but it’s such an interesting play by play to do in a show like this. This person you knew is nothing like you once knew them, and you hate the fact that they exist, which hurts you. But like Ice King says here, he’s a “very special person”, one that is still deserving of respect. Don’t know how related this can be, but I recently watched this video essay by a person I follow, “lines in motion” is what they go by; it’s about the film Nimona:

Basically they come to a thesis about how people are deserving of respect, even if they can’t describe themselves in a way people understand or is convenient. For Ice King here, we’ve come a long way from kidnapping princesses and hypnotizing people into marrying you. The Ice King is just another weird guy in a world filled with weird guys (and gals). Magic Betty may also be weird, but she came from a time that for the most part, had structure and rules and certain normalities. She came from the past to fix the man she loved, and when she realizes the process is too far, she’s going as far to reverse everything that has happened and been developed, which even if it works, could have some disastrous consequences regardless. She has seen or read time travel stories right?

As for Finn and Lumpy Space Princess, the former realizes that LSP’s cattiness is basically the cure for everyone to go back to normal, thanks to being from another dimension. It’s actually kind of funny seeing her lump molecules basically “Karen”-out the other molecules into being normal.

Depending on who you ask, some might take issue with the series trying to turn LSP into something she’s not; a hero. I get the feeling, especially since I can pinpoint the exact episode when I recall people finally being fed up with her bullshit.

But you know what? Nothing has really changed. Lumpy Space Princess has always been an outsider in this show. From her very first appearance, she was incredibly difficult to talk to and work with on a number of levels. It really is just who she is as an individual (and her species as well, though as we’ve seen, even SHE can be too much for them). Maybe sticking her butt into the ground and doing a reverse Third Impact is not as satisfying as maybe giving an impassioned speech to all the princesses that knock them back to their senses (I think of Reigen Arataka’s speech against the Esper leader in Mob Psycho 100 Season 1), but it gets the job done for now.

Being a storyboard artist on this show must rock. You can draw any random character that’s appeared in the show for an event like this and nothing would be out of place.

By the way Jake is big and blue now. Wonder what that’s about.

It’s kind of hard to pinpoint what this miniseries was about besides doing a bunch of plot beats, and I get why many would consider “Elements” to be the weakest of the bunch. “Stakes” explored Marceline’s life of immortality and what she learned along the way and “Islands” looked at the leftovers of human civilization after the Mushroom War, while also seeing what Finn gained being away from all that bizz. If I could parse something, it’s that being our best self is not something that should be defined by what powers we have or our place in society, but how we treat the people around us and what we do to make the world a better place. OR something like that.

Take these reviews from Oliver Sava (The A.V. Club) and Adventure Time Reviewed as well.

Additional Comments:

• I can see why Cedric tasked me with this episode. A number of pivotal things happen in it that not only wrap up this miniseries, but also set up future stuff for the remainder of the show. I’m not sure I’m well equipped to explain it all eloquently (maybe if I planned ahead with these write-ups and just sat down to meditate on it). Hopefully people here are satisfied with my thoughts.
• Something on my mind, but I think about this quote from a video about Storm Hawks by Wyatt Phillips of all things whenever I think of Adventure Time: “My hardline stance is if you’re going to make a fantasy world, especially one FOR kids, populate that cast with fucking freaks! Don’t be like Final Fantasy 12 and have half a dozen worlds with cool creatures and then the only non-human you get on your team is some fat-ass bunny girl.”
• It’s not much, but considering how much fantasy stuff now, especially in anime, is super Dungeons & Dragons focused when it comes to their main characters, I just think it’s nice Adventure Time stayed true to itself; Lumpy Space Princess is a reminder of that.