Hi, I’m Joey. Starting this week, I’ll be your guide to the best series on television.
I’ve been a fan of Adventure Time since seeing its glorious pilot on YouTube, but it wasn’t until my dream came true, a series was announced, and I started looking at the developer blog that I started to see the potential.
As with inspiration Dungeons & Dragons, the show’s biggest appeal was its limitless possibilities. The magical land of Ooo had no rules. Finn and Jake could travel to another dimension via a magical frog to a land where everyone is lumpy and vain, and the weirdness unfolding in front of us would be business as usual to our heroes.
What began as a series that thumbed its nose at children’s show tropes while exploring a Seuss-esque universe amassed a cast of characters worthy of The Simpsons itself. Just last week, Lemongrab saw a vision he yearned to be reality: Princess Bubblegum, his creator, finally understanding him and asking for a game of catch. Despite the show’s vast universe and mythology, it still dedicates more energy to giving each character a soul than any cartoon since Recess.
But the show’s grandest undertaking has been the implicit storyline of what may be the last human on earth, Finn Mertens. His adolescence, his heartache, his growing understanding of what it means to be a hero, and his frustration surrounding his father have all made for some of the show’s most compelling episodes. But here we are at perhaps the show’s longest-untouched arc. Two 2011 episodes, “Susan Strong” and “Beautopia,” featured Susan Strong and the hyoomans (a very humanlike people whose main difference is the gills and fins on their heads). They remain the most direct looks into Finn through the lens of being the last human on earth.
But despite a mysterious product from Marceline’s pre-Mushroom War childhood and the appearance of Susan Strong, this episode gives us little in the way of answers about the past. When it seems like Finn and friends are bound to investigate the mysterious thousand year legacy of Super Porp, a soda delivered monthly via drone, Jake insists that it may be wiser not to question a good thing.
Instead, we get to spend time with the mysterious Susan Strong as she takes Finn’s role, bringing down a factory maintained by syrupy purple people. At the factory’s heart is one of them posing as Super Porp mascot Cheryl, who has kidnapped a baby hyooman to become the next Cheryl. Her focus on brand recognition and the repetition of Super Porp’s jingle throughout the episode give us a strange look as to how today’s corporate culture has hauntingly found influence in some corners of Ooo.
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This was a fun but mostly inessential episode, but there is one moment that matters as Adventure Time slowly reveals its secrets: Susan peels sticky Super Porp from her face, and when her hat comes off, she doesn’t have the gills or fins on her head that the hyoomans do. She has long and flowing human hair. And a sort of small robotic plate on the side of her head.
We now know that Finn isn’t so alone. We know of his father, Martin, and now, in all probability, Susan. But the key to Adventure Time‘s success is that even as we keep unlocking its universe, it always raises more questions than it answers.
Score: 7/10
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