Come Along With Me: Adventure Time- “The Wild Hunt” and “Always BMO Closing”

The Wild Hunt
Director:
Cole Sanchez
Written & Storyboarded by:
Sam Alden, Eric Fountain, Polly Guo

Here we are, at the beginning of the end. A show that started with fart jokes and wackiness opens its tenth and final season with one of the protagonists grappling with PTSD after killing someone.

It’s fitting that the death that haunts Finn the most is the one where he murdered himself. I feel like there’s some symbolism to be mined in the fact that it’s when two of Finn’s swords clash against each other that his life seems to shatter and come apart, first when his carelessness with the Finn Sword puts it in danger, forcing him to bring the Grass Sword against it and ultimately destroying both.

Then, in Three Buckets, it’s the arm Bubblegum made him that saves him when his own nerve might very well have failed.

There’s a line I like in His Dark Materials, where Iorek Byrnison says that all tools have an intention when they are made, and that the tool will always bend towards that intention when you use it, no matter what you use it for. Bubblegum’s arm was clearly made with the intention of protecting Finn, but what of the Grass Sword? When we see the grassy wizard, he admits no actual intention, just a cool play on words. But he’s not really the Grass Sword’s creator, is he?

Anyway, I have a distinct memory of being pleased with this season premier. The show really seemed to have gotten its feet under it and know where it was going as season nine wrapped up, and this episode (plus the followup) were a perfect confirmation of that.

This episode starts with some eerie tension which is quickly undercut by the fact that the tension is happening to the banana guards, though the shot of the hot fudge gushing across the floor after the unseen monster snatches the guards away is surprisingly effective. Finn and Jake are lying in wait, Beowulf-style, to bring down a terrible monster that’s been preying on the banana guards, but Finn has finally hit something too big for his vault.

Then we get the moment that reminded me why I love this show, as Bubblegum’s somber statement about death not being a laughing matter is interrupted by some straight up 1920’s level slapstick.

Stakes established, we flash back to the present where the monster has our boys on the ropes. Finn just can’t bring himself to do the killing stroke and the monster gets away.

Finn chases it down to redeem himself but still can’t do it. The thing nearly gets the better of him before he’s saved at the last moment.

Which brings us to the REAL reason I like this episode.

Huntress Wizard is one of the quietly great characters in this show, and her relationship with Finn is one of the greatest goddamned things I’ve ever seen in animation. She can just come into the show out of nowhere and you instantly can tell the two of them are still a thing even though we haven’t seen her in, like, seasons.

The way she affectionately teases him about loving her before they have a casual kiss feels like a healthy relationship for Finn because it really clearly shows that the two of them have almost certainly just quietly been quietly seeing each other offscreen whenever it works out for them. I also like that he’s clearly a bit more of a romantic than she is, which gets explored later, when Fionna and Cake reveals the two of them basically date from here on out, and their relationship even gets a focus in season two.

I really can’t tell y’all how absurdly happy this made me. I always kinda felt for him cause I’ve also got a thing for dangerous women and occasionally fucked up a relationship entirely under my own power, so after seeing this character go through hell, it felt really nice to see m’boy be in a normal relationship with an awesome partner and in what looks like a healthy mental space.

RANDOM THOUGHTS:

• Huntress declares that the beast is named the Grumbo, which she makes up on the spot because you can’t hunt what you can’t name. Her name game is so strong that at the end, we can see that Gumbald has crossed out his own incredibly lame name for the monster and accepted that it’s the Grumbo now. There’s something about this that I like, cause being able to make a name stick to something always felt like a special kind of magic to me.
• I love little details, like how Gumbald drinks Turkish coffee.
• “Cool. I’m gonna lay here and make peace with my aging bod.” That line sure hits me different ten years later.
• Huntress shows up as the Hanged Man tarot, which is fun. The Hanged Man himself is supposed to be enlightened, more like Odin hanging himself from the World Tree for knowledge than someone being martyred upside-down like St. Peter. When you pull it, it can signify needing repentance, or a change in perspective.
• “Duck, I guess!” Seriously, I love her.
• The banana guard statues outside the barracks are the old green banana guards we see in one of the flashbacks.
• I wanna point out some stuff about the Bayeuax tapestry title card, too: You can see Jake and PB, she’s lying mid-pratfall, and above the central pair of Finn and Huntress is the specter of Fern, floating amidst the stars.
• The Wild Hunt is a reference to a widespread European religious belief that probably is some proto-Germanic pre-Norse type stuff, given its widespread recurrence. In it, some mythological figure leads a horde of ghosts/fay/demons/spirits/etc on a hunt for some other mythological creature, or on their way to a battle against a great evil (In some places the name translates more as “wild host/horde”) and seeing it was considered bad luck. People could get conscripted into it, and there’s a related myth about people’s spirits getting swept up into them in their dreams, where, say, women’s spirits would join a goddess on a great night hunt and which eventually shows back up as the “witches sabbath” type stuff, where inquisitors accused women of flying around at night.

Always BMO Closing
Director:
Diana Lafyatis

Written & Storyboarded by:
Graham Falk
Kent Osborne

There’s an alternate world where we got like, three seasons of nonsense like this, where Uncle Gumbald would be the smirking, mustache twirling antagonist who crops up out of nowhere after an endearingly half-assed A plot to make the second half a threat.

Now, none of that is to say I don’t like this episode. Heck no, it’s a favorite. Ice King and BMO are great together, the tons of little visual details that remind you that the IK can’t actually see what he’s doing, even in little moments of character action, Tree Trunks’ action erotica novel work in progress, it’s all great. Hell, I’d watch like a three episode arc just of BMO and IK as door to door salesmen man.

But it’s exactly that greatness that makes me wonder for the universe where the network didn’t piss this show down its leg with reschedules and the weird ass bomb formats, which always felt like they were just in a hurry to stop having to air the show so they could just close up shop.

There might be one where we got a solid few great years, maybe saw more of the stuff that ended up in Distant Lands and Fionna and Cake, and then that was it. Just a few years of really solid material that explores the universe a bit more, without the gap in continuity or cast of the followup series, with great promotional and financial support from the network.

Or one where studio meddling forced the show to shamble onward well past when the writers were creatively bankrupt, where all the talent bails so nobody even remembers how the story was supposed to end anymore, until the network wrung out every last dollar they could, churning out episodes about whatever they could.

I wonder which one it would have been.

Stray Thoughts:

• This episode, where the light-hearted antics of the A plot end up leading directly to the long-term arc relevant happenings of the B plot in the back half of the episode, is crazy formulaic television writing. I have to think it’s on purpose, because they even have the “villain looks on from afar” coda.
• “Chinese food is on me!” BMO’s weird anachronistic language fills me with joy.
• “Hello mysterious sentinel, you have a lovely home.”
• Gumbald slowly pulling out an axe and getting in position as BMO continues his sales pitch is great.
• “He wasn’t a mad scientist, was he?”
  “… Well…” Also, I knew Graham Falk was on the storyboard from the shot in this scene when Jake talks about how the guy must regret buying the teeth, because there’s a specific way he likes to make Jake go off-model and he does it here.
• There’s a missing poster for Crunchy on Tree Trunks’ place. I remembered seeing it when this show first aired and not knowing what it was about.
• Crazy enough this is the second direct reference to Glengarry Glen Ross in this show, after the Root Beer Guy episode where two day player extra coworkers are basically doing dialogue from the movie between each other in the background.
• “Yeah you’re not doing this tomorrow.”
• The obsessive cataloguing of nerds when I was doing background research led me to the incredibly hilarious entry for this episode in the Adventure Time wiki, where one of the minor characters listed is “Baby Tooth Finns (debut/death)”
• “Tree Trunks, you’re a financial genius!”
• This is the first time we’ve seen one of the “Blank Time!” interstitial cards since like season two.