Marcy & Hunson

Storyboarded by: Graham Falk and Adam Muto

Original Airdate: December 17, 2017

Review by: CedricTheOwl

If Adventure Time is dedicating its final run to giving its favorite characters one last focus episode, it couldn’t very well do so without dedicating one to Marceline, the trolling anti-villain turned reluctant ally turned beating heart of the show.  And if they’re making episodes about the theme of difficult parents, there’s no one better to revisit than Adventure Time’s original bad dad, Hunson Abadeer.  He’s been out of focus for a long time, last seen trying to trick Marcie into succeeding him as ruler of the Nightosphere nearly 200 episodes ago.  The focus of Marceline’s arc has been on her surrogate parental figure Simon Petrikov for so long, it’s almost jarring to remember that she has an actual flesh and blood (or at least flesh) parent still around.  Does this episode make the most of resummoning this embarrassing dad from the depths of Hell?  We’ll see.

Our story starts with Finn and Jake visiting Peppermint Butler, who’s hard at work forging Finn a new sword.  Our hero is fresh off of getting his hams spanked by Uncle Gumbald’s new champion Fern, so PepButs figures he needs a power-up if he’s going to be a match for his renegade double.  To give him that power, he’s calling upon a special guest:  Hunson Abadeer, deathless lord of the Nightosphere, eater of fries, and all around wad.

As always, Hunson knows how to make an entrance

Hunson agrees to empower the sword, which PepBut dubs the Night Blade, but he’s not keen on being sent back to his realm without dropping in on his daughter.  No one there is dumb enough to let him loose on Ooo without serious reservations, but he puts on such a sorry display of remorse that PepBut is forced to acquiesce, if only to save the dignity of one of his idols.  Hunson is let out of his summoning circle, magically bound to not be able to use his powers, and escorted at swordpoint by Finn to Marceline’s place.

All through this episode, I kept asking myself one question:  “Is Hunson sincere about wanting to do right by Marceline?”  He puts on a piteous display of wanting to make amends with her to be released from his summoning circle, then immediately takes advantage of his freedom to start sucking souls.  Upon arriving at Marcie’s house, he suddenly has second thoughts about intruding on her life.  He flashes back to Marcie’s post-Simon time in the wastelands of Ooo, barely managing to make shelter for herself before Hunson puts some holes in it in a blithe attempt to bond with her.  He seems vaguely aware that she did not appreciate that, but can’t fathom why.  He seems to operate on an entirely alien set of morality from humans or even half-vampires, so why would we believe this interaction would be any different?

Marcie is gracious enough to invite her dad and the boys in, but as soon as she does, Hunson starts his schmoozing routine.  He announces that he needs a place to sleep, upgrades that to taking Marcie’s bed while relegating her to the air mattress, breaks her stuff, and tries to make it up to her with the random junk in his pocket.  Finn and Jake are of little help here, accidentally letting slip that she has a concert tonight.  Hunson promptly invites himself along, much to Marcie’s consternation.

Speaking of the concert, I just want to appreciate Marcie’s performance here.  “Slow Dance” is, to my ear, the best the show has done at merging Olivia Olson’s powerhouse vocals with Marcie’s bass playing.  Many of her songs foreground Olson’s vocals and leave the bass a mere suggestion of an element to the song.  The second verse of the song adds a ghostly backup singer, almost certainly voiced by Hynden Walch, and the showrunners are clearly having fun with Marcie and PB’s voice actors singing a longing, plaintive song about wanting to share a romantic dance with an unnamed other.  Between this performance and Finn telling Hunson that Marcie may be dating someone, the crew are in DGAF mode about hinting at their romantic chemistry.

What are you gonna do about it?  Cancel us again?

As is his wont, Hunson can’t help but make Marcie’s concert about himself.  Before her performance, he lays the cheering on thick, then interrupts the song to record her performing and announce to the crowd that she’s his daughter, and thus he’s responsible for making her.  He’s all but taking credit for her accomplishments, throwing Marcie off her groove and killing the ghostly audience’s enthusiasm harder than they were killed while they were alive.  Cousin Chicle (who’s been tailing the group to ascertain Marceline’s weakness) takes the opportunity to whip up a trio of burly ghosts into a booing frenzy.  Hunson’s crowd work only escalates the hostility, until one of the ghosts covers Marcie’s bass in ectoplasm, ruining her performance and causing her to lose her composure.

Amid the sight of his daughter in tears as the audience laughs, something snaps in Hunson.  He leaps off the stage to attack the three ghostly hecklers, but with his powers sealed away he’s struggling against three foes he would normally crush like ants.  Even while outmatched, he refuses to back down, his only reason being that they sassed Marceline.  Chicle knocks out ol’ Glass Jaw Peppermint Butler with a thrown peanut, and Marcie proves no more effective against the ghosts than her dad.  Finn manages to make the save, cutting Marcy and Hunson clear of the ghosts’ tentacles with his Night Sword and giving Marcie an opening to airlift them all out.

Fig. 3: Deadbeat Dad Beat by Dead

Amid a pizza dinner/debriefing with Princess Bubblegum, Marceline and Hunson seem to have made amends.  Hunson is gracious enough to give Marcie credit for handling the concert situation, and even got her a gift that required more than a nanosecond of forethought.  He’s still an overbearing dad and a self-titled bad guy, but he claims he’s not that bad of a guy.  I can’t argue with that (Martin is far worse of a person than Hunson, even if they’re similarly jovial in their self-absorbed exploitation of their children), but he’s still barely changed from how he saw him at the start of the episode.

I remember finding this episode frustratingly underwhelming when it first aired, and while I appreciate it more on the rewatch, it’s still the least compelling of season 10’s wrap-up episodes thus far.  Marcie and Hunson don’t really change their relationship toward one another.  We just see yet another cycle of them fighting, then Marcie forgiving him for being the way he is.  It’s the exact same conclusion as Hunson’s previous appearances, with none of the catharsis of Flame Princess showing her character growth or learning more of PB’s backstory.  We see the barest hints of Hunson seeing Marcie as something more than just an extension of his own will and accomplishments, but for what could have been the last time we saw the character, it’s frustratingly little.

Notable Quotes –

• “This sword is also cursed, but it has a compass in the hilt.”
• “Do you hear, like, a really stupid-sounding laugh?”  “Yes.”  “I have a nice laugh.”

Stray Observations –

• Completely tangential, but Marceline’s name is spelled “Maeceline” in the credits
• Given how powerful ghosts have been presented in Adventure Time thus far, the Night Sword being able to harm them at all establishes it as having some serious horsepower

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Marcy & Hunson

Air Date: December 17, 2017 | Written & Storyboarded by Graham Falk and Adam Muto | Story by Kent Osborne, Jack Pendarvis, Julia Pott, Ashly Burch, and Adam Muto | Directed by Cole Sanchez | Reviewed by Malcolm Rambert

Something you might have noticed with this review series overall is that sometimes a review or overview of a certain episode might not be as long and/or in-depth as you expected or even wanted. Sometimes you might even notice that it IS in-depth, but they never touch on anything in the episode that made an impression on you.

Obviously this is the nature of making a collaborative recap series that is both loose and voluntary. Even if one signs up to write for even one episode in advance, it might not pan out how they envision it; maybe they lost track of time, or even realized that upon revisiting the episode, they actually have quite little to say about it personally. I recall ChicaDeBiblioteca feeling down that their write-up on “The Time Hole” was shorter to my write-up on “Five Short Tables”.

I say all this because of two things: the first is that I too have been slumming my latest contributions, particularly for “Islands” and “Elements”. Something I’ve come to realize as a writer is that good writing takes longer and probably costs more time than you initially think (This is something former director of the anime distributor Central Park Media John O’Donnell learned from Ted Turner). Even though I want to, I haven’t been commenting on any of the write-ups since then either (I want them to be well thought out).

The second reason I bring this up is because the way this recap series has been going lately sort of mirrors how this final season has been shaping out to be. What do I mean by this? Well let me start off with a statement: Writing finales for serialized TV shows is hard.

I don’t mean in the sense of pleasing people, but just the fact that in the entertainment business, it’s not going to be as perfectly envisioned as say a singular author writing a story themselves with a goal in mind, especially when it comes to a show as scattershot and layered as Adventure Time.

This year alone we had The Boys on Amazon Prime officially end, and even if the finale contained all the things people wanted out of a show like this, the buildup to it didn’t feel earned, possibly because it had to pushed aside to make room for context for a prequel series and a spin-off that don’t even fully exist yet (meanwhile the one connected spinoff that mattered Gen V gets cynically included for two episodes).

There are times I have seen series get another, possibly final season, with a full order of episodes, only to then have that episode count slashed during the making of it, thus the creators and everyone else on board have to pick and choose what episodes will stay in and how the series will end. You can see this happen in various ways with stuff like the 2003 Teen Titans series, Moral Orel, or O.K. K.O. Let’s Be Heroes.

There’s actually a whole list of finales for different media, including TV shows, where the finale FEELS like an ending, but the story keeps continuing on. A number of serialized shows now pivot to doing this just in case the show gets cancelled. One could say making a TV show with an ongoing story is extremely difficult, period.

This fits perfectly with the episode I decided to do, because it contains the physical return of Marceline’s estranged birth father, Hunson Abadeer.

This guy hasn’t been seen since Season 4 in 2012 with “Daddy’s Little Monster”. That was the 84th episode overall, and now he’s come back in the last month of 2017 with what is the 273rd episode. I remember when I decided to binge the whole series (rewatching the episodes I’ve seen and also the ones I missed out on because I dropped the show initially), and finding this episode this late in the game to be a strange pick.

The excuse they give is decent enough: Peppermint Butler summons the Lord of the Nightosphere so he can power up a sword to be used in battle with Princess Bubblegum’s family, but the real meat of the episode appears to be Hudson attempting to rekindle with his daughter. Which is… interesting.

See, the dude has been absent from not just Marceline’s life, but the show’s and the audience’s as well; in a way, Simon Petrikov has demonstrated to be Marceline’s TRUE father, even if he is a surrogate one. Like a certain blue-skinned scavenger once said:

Obviously someone on the team wanted to remind the audience that even in a very weird way, Hudson still cared about Marceline and wants to be in her life, even if she didn’t want it. I mean he is a demon after all. Also, probably because he was one of the earliest characters that made this show so fun and interesting to begin with.

When approaching the finale of a show you’ve worked on, a lot of things you want to do start circling in your mind; all the unwritten or planned stuff you wanted to do comes to the forefront, and you want to include all of it, even if it ends up being clunky. Heck, Chicle is in this.

When Ian-Jones Quartey and Toby Jones were on the What a Cartoon! Podcast to talk about the O.K. K.O. finale, the former said something that I think about a lot, specifically that if there’s something you want to do towards the end of the show, you need to do it right that moment. In his own words: “We didn’t want to be like Hey Arnold! where we’re making the Jungle Movie years after the original show already ended”. That is certainly the attitude you see going forward with this season and ESPECIALLY the series finale. As far as the crew knew, with the dropping ratings, this was the last Adventure Time ANYTHING that was going to be made.

Fun lines:

• “Do you guys hear a really annoying laugh?”

Some notes:

• I don’t think it gets discussed enough that Marceline’s parents are an interspecies relationship. Like they don’t even explain what they did was magic, it’s assumed that Elise and Hudson had sex and made a half-demon half-human kid. Because of this I wanted to make a “black female characters’ relationships with demons” version of this meme below, but I ran out of time. (it was gonna include characters like Kit from Wendell & Wild and Drolta from Castlevania Nocturne, it would’ve been cool)

• Things I’ve been up to recently is starting my own blog at Substack, specially to get any writing that’s on my mind but can’t get published any. If you liked any of my writing here, I humbly request a subscription. My first actual write-up will be on The Proud Family: Louder & Prouder, but don’t worry, I have some Adventure Time write-ups planned as well.
• I also started uploading stuff to the Internet Archive, specifically a lot of fanzines for the time being. I have some AT fanzines on the way. I bring this up because one I haven’t uploaded yet (and might not) is this beautiful one made for the finale. Every single piece was clearly made with love for the show, but it’s recommended you check it out once you finish the series. Like the crew, these people thought this would be the end forever, and it shows in their work.

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The First Investigation

Storyboarded by: Hanna K. Nystrom and Alecks Sennwald

Original Airdate: December 17, 2017

Review by: CedricTheOwl

As Adventure Time marches inevitably towards its series finale, the episodes are working hard to give closure to as many of its characters as possible.  While Marceline reconciling with her dad is at least tangentially tied into the ongoing plot with Uncle Gumbald, “The First Investigation” is one of relatively few episodes this season that doesn’t tie into that narrative arc.  However, it does strike home with the season’s thematic arc of making peace with difficult family relationships.

Our episode opens with Kim Kil Whan (poster boy for dealing with strained parental relations poorly) enlisting Finn and Jake to look into a possible paranormal occurrence at one of his properties:  the shuttered Joshua and Margaret Investigations office.  As they speculate on what kind of monstrous being has taken up residence at their old house, their thoughts quickly turn to ghosts.  And if they’re ghosts, what more appropriate ghosts to haunt the place than Joshua and Margaret?  Excited at the prospect of meeting their parents one last time, Finn and Jake spruce up and set off.

Meet the Parents(‘ restless immortal souls)

Being excited to meet your dead parents is a classic Adventure Time twist on reacting to a possible haunting, but it also made me reflect upon the many ways Adventure Time has depicted ghosts throughout its run.  For one thing, ghosts are demonstrably real.  There’s no episode of arbitrary skepticism about their existence, like PB with magic.  The previous episode reminded us that they have a rock-paper-scissors advantage over vampires, and in “The Creeps” Shoko’s restless spirit could warp the very reality of the house she haunted.  The eponymous fly in “Ghost Fly” sent the Candy Kingdom’s resident dabbler in the dark arts packing.  So in general, while they’re extremely powerful, they’re also an accepted part of the physical world, as mundane in Ooo as sentient breakfast food and wizards from Mars.

“The First Investigation” ends up taking a slightly different turn.  After finding a video tape of Joshua and Margaret experiencing what appear to be ghosts, Finn and Jake stake out the old office, then begin to experience similar phenomena.  However, these aren’t truly ghosts; they are instead temporal echoes of people and events that occupied the space the office exists in, both before and after the current time they’re observed in.  These echoes are being created by Clock Bear, one of the Moreau-esque animal hybrids created by Dr. Gross in the run-up to “Islands”, as a side effect of his damaged clockwork parts.  Our boys have found themselves in a place where cause and effect are negotiable.

The apparitions here broadly reflect a paranormal theory known as “place memory”, or the Stone Tape Theory.  Place memory is a pseudoscientific explanation for paranormal activity theorizing that ghosts are repeating actions they took in life, like a visual record of the past imprinted upon a location like audio or video onto a magnetic tape.  Place memory as a concept dates back to the 19th century’s explosion in spiritualism, with the “Stone Tape” nickname being popularized by the Nigel Kneale play of the same name in the 1970s.

Stone tape or magnetic tape, Jake is still a big ol’ chicken

Place memory is of course just pseudoscience (with its critics pointedly noting that there is no method of quantifying how an event is stored onto a physical object), but it reflects one of the reasons I find ghost stories (at least in Western tradition) fascinating:  ghosts are history.  Rumors of hauntings represent an oral tradition of preserving the memory of past tragedies and crimes dating back to “The Haunting of Athenodorus”, a ghost story recorded in the 1st century AD by Roman author Pliny the Younger.  In it, a specter bound in chains torments the occupant of a house until the remains of its murdered former self are found and given proper burial.  Of course, oral tradition is just as prone to being exaggerated, misconstrued, or made up as any other form of storytelling, but it gives ghost stories a valuable place in storytelling tradition that explains their ubiquity and popularity.

This episode isn’t just a story about weird time ghosts; it’s also a story about family.  Joshua and Margaret are far from the worst parental figures in Adventure Time; just contrast them with Hunson Abadeer in the previous episode.  Finn and Jake value their memory and are excited by the prospect of meeting them in spirit form.  But “Dad’s Dungeon”, “Jake the Dad”, and “Jermaine” showed how their imperfect parenting had repercussions on all their children, intended or not.  The boys’ desire to speak with their parents one more time seems like a way of reaffirming their love for them despite becoming aware of their shortcomings as parents since their deaths.

But Joshua and Margaret aren’t the only parents in play here.  With Clock Bear successfully repaired and the temporal anomaly fixed, who should appear but the Shapeshifter, the being that gave Jake his stretchy powers.  He implores Jake to leave with him, and Jake accepts with the nonchalance we expect from the big goof.  With a simple “BRB” note left for Finn, Jake departs to discover the origins of his powers, and at least a part of his heritage.

If Finn gets to meet both of his biological parents, it’s only fair Jake does too.

Notable Quotes –

• “This griz is poltergeist biz.”  “But I don’t want that.”
• “Bathroom’s a lot scarier than I was expecting.”
• “Ghosts, quit freeloadin’ off my son!  That’s a father’s job!”
• “I’m no melon baby!  I’m a majestic womb baby!”
• “He’s sucking up all the spilt time!”  “That doesn’t sound scientific!”

Stray Observations –

• The rant Jake delivers after armoring himself with pots and pans is based on a viral Alex Jones rant.  This was probably funnier when psychopaths like him weren’t in charge of all levels of the US government.