Come on grab your friends. Adventure Time is finally back, kicking off its eighth season with a double-header premier. The fun will never end. (Or it’s still kinda far from ending. Either way.) Spoilers, probably.
1.) Weird Days, Man. Give Me a Minute to Catch Up
It always seems too much time has passed between episodes of Adventure Time. And while it’s easy to complain that the people programming Cartoon Network don’t seem to have any idea about what they’re doing anymore (and I mean, they are a subsidiary of Time Warner, so…), at least we still have the show and at least it’s going out on its own terms. While it’s still cool. While it still has something relevant to say.
Last night brought gave us a two-episode premiere, with “Two Swords” and “Do No Harm.” The first episode recapped a lot of what happened in the season finale (“Reboot”), while also reassuring us our favorite characters didn’t end up six feet under. Wisely though, Tom Herpich and Steve Wolfhard spend only precious seconds reviewing what happened in “Reboot,” when the grass sword became corporeal and turned to face down Finn, before launching off into the rest of the scene.
2.) Nobody Really Knows Anything
While “Two Swords” sets up a lot of the new material, it’s in “Do No Harm” that the show truly settles into its groove. Laura Knetzger and Emily Partridge turn in a fairly complicated script, splitting the story into two Adventure Time stalwarts: the gag-filled hijinks-stuffed story where Finn becomes a doctor as well as a dungeon crawling quest as Grass Finn goes off to try to figure out what he’s doing here.
Knetzger and Partridge draw some interesting parallels between the two Finns. “This feels right,” Finn smiles to himself after he’s successfully helped Mr. Fox and Ice King with their ailments. Grass Finn says the same thing to Jake when they approach the Grass Wizard’s hut. The two Finns’ narratives essentially mirror each other at first, diverging significantly in how they handle their situations and obstacles. Where Finn contemplates for a minute, then acts brashly — plucking out infected thorns and breaking Ice King’s back in the opposite direction — Grass Finn foregoes any riddles and slices his way through this grassy labyrinth.
3.) He’s Not Going to Merge with the Treehouse or Anything Mythological Like That, Right?
Adventure Time, like a lot of shows aimed for younger audiences, deals fairly openly with finding your identity. It probably explores stuff like developing sexuality, gender politics, and cultural distinctions with more openness and honesty than most shows on TV. Yet, one of the elements that makes it all the more spectacular is how it stresses identities can be changed, how your definition of you isn’t a concrete structure, but something more flowing and cosmic.
We learn that Grass Finn, for instance, comes from a curse inflicted by a donk wizard. Herpich and Wolfhard offer up this wonderfully creepy sequence in “Two Swords” where the Finn Sword is pierced by the Grass Sword, which dissipates within the Finn Sword, leaving this squid thing to crawl around and start taking possession of the surroundings, including the alternate dimension Finn whose being was captured in the sword. Both Herpich and Wolfhard and Knetzger and Partridge spend a lot of time having Grass Finn try to figure out his exact purpose. Is he another version of Finn? A cool pun? By the end of the premiere, Grass Finn has found a new way to define himself, asking to be called Fern instead as he races off to explore all sorts of new wonders or whatever.
Also, consider how Finn has embraced being Finn Mertens, doing what he can to carve a name for himself and not let it be tarnished by his father.
4.) Socks. Trash. Butt. All the Stinks of Home.
There’s a wide breadth of great jokes and gags throughout both these episodes. Adventure Time continually balances their big cosmic questions with just plain out cartoon humor. Some of the sight gags and visual jokes where I laughed the hardest: the toast bridge collapsing because it was too heavy. Finn’s doctoral foibles. The bacon on everything, including meatloaf. (Though even in cartoon form, meatloaf is friggin gross.) Jake busting through the wall of the castle infirmary. Fern’s epic hair. The Ice King cracking in half. Doctor Princess’s sunglasses. The trash pile.
Continued belowI do think we should also take a moment to applaud just how perfect the animators’ timing remains, especially when it comes to jokes you know are coming from a million miles away. When Jake launches the giant anchor off himself, we all know it’s going to come crashing back down eventually. And they just keep holding it and holding it, and then dropping it right when you start forgetting about it. If you can make a well worn joke still work and still be surprising, that’s a significant achievement.
Anyway, leave your favorite jokes and gags in the comments.
5.) No, Let’s See Where This Goes. I Want to See Brains.
One of the things I love about Adventure Time is how it balances both the individual episode and the overall arc. You could watch either “Do No Harm” or “Two Swords” on their own and find a lot to enjoy in each. Both set up a problem for the characters and chart their progress in dealing with them. At the same time, they both contribute significantly to the wider narrative. In a time where a lot of TV seems to forget the episode in favor of running a season-long narrative (making stuff like Game of Thrones or Westworld or Daredevil aggravating to watch on a week-by-week basis, but fairly rewarding when you binge the whole thing), this balance of the bigger picture and the immediate story make Adventure Time all the more compelling. There’s probably a bunch of stuff offered in these episodes that’re contributing to the larger mythology, but that crypticness and mysteriousness never comes at the expense of the story itself. Adventure Time does all this in 11 minutes bursts.
Cartoon Network decided to broadcast this batch of episodes in one of their bomb-format, where they air an episode or two each night. This week’s slew lead up to the Islands miniseries, which is supposedly going to answer questions about what happened to the rest of the humans. After that, it’ll probably disappear again, because animation is intensive, yo. So let’s enjoy this while we still can!
