
Cartoon Networkīy the end of the show’s run, almost any side character could carry an episode of Adventure Time, a fact the show underlined with several one-off episodes about other characters and surprising groupings. In fact, it was never really about Finn and Jake at least not in the sense that the show needed them around to continue.
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Adventure Time was never a serial story with an endpoint. At any time, any of those characters could pop in without suggesting that their lives were only important when they were in the spotlight. Any time Finn and Jake were out killing monsters, Princess Bubblegum was somewhere doing science, Peppermint Butler was experimenting with dark magic, and Lumpy Space Princess was off shaking her lumps.

If a side character showed up for one episode - say, a quasi-human named Susan Strong or a guy made out of Root Beet - they would come back in unexpected ways, because they were part of the fabric of Ooo. The payoff isn’t a cataclysm, it’s that stuff just kind of kept happening, and eventually Beth and Shermy got to do their own junk.Īt every turn, Adventure Time went bigger with the world-building. That’s never really what the story was about after all, Beth and Shermy are there, in Ooo.

But everyone should know better than to take BMO at their word. (Beth, nicknamed the “Pup Princess,” is almost certainly intended to be a descendant of Jake and Lady Rainicorn.) Early in the finale, the pair meet the King of Ooo: BMO, who agrees to tell them about the end of everything. The frame device of “Come Alone With Me” puts the viewer in the paws of Beth and Shermy, two new characters in a future version of Ooo who have taken on the adventuring mantle of Finn and Jake. Some fans might feel shorted by this approach, understandably - they’ve been promised a story about the end of Ooo. The Gumball War is transitory, like the sort of plot that would come in the penultimate season before the real showdown. There’s just no way he could carry the weight of the entire show’s history, and “Come Along With Me” doesn’t ask him to. Though he’s mentioned as early as the second season, Gumbald isn’t fully introduced as an antagonist until the season eight finale, with only 15 episodes left to go. Princess Bubblegum’s war with Uncle Gumbald is a decent fantasy conflict, but it doesn’t have anything approaching the sweep of Finn’s battle with The Lich, or the apocalyptic sense of the catalyst comet.

For the most part, the finale was just another adventure.Īdventure Time showrunner doesn’t see the finale as a happy endingįrom one perspective, that story seems a bit small, especially for a goodbye. There are slightly higher stakes than normal, but Adventure Time had done a “fate of the world” type plot before. Led by BMO and the power of song, the heroes prevail and avert the apocalypse. Betty’s attempt to cure Ice King dovetails with Maja the Sky Witch to summon GOLB, the closest thing Adventure Time has to an evil god. Here’s what actually happens in “Come Along With Me”: Princess Bubblegum’s war with her Uncle Gumbald reaches a fever pitch, until some dream-based struggle allows the pair of candy people to realize they don’t need to resolve their differences through violence.

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So it makes sense that while “Come Along With Me,” the four-part series finale, engages with a few of these questions, it’s content to leave many of them unanswered, which feels like the right choice. The final season of Adventure Time does have a valedictory feeling in that it addresses a few of these running plots, but the show was never leading to a real “conclusion,” at least not narratively. Would Ice King ever find his way back to being the unmutated scientist Simon Petrikov? Would Finn and Princess Bubblegum ever get together? (Or, more importantly, would Finn ever be in a healthy relationship, period?) Was Sweet P ever going to need to do battle with The Lich dwelling inside of him? In retrospect, the thought that Adventure Time might have had an actual, definitive ending feels silly.īy its fourth season, the show had rapidly lost interest in telling a single story about its central quartet of Finn, Jake, Princess Bubblegum and Ice King, and sprawled outward to the point where no single episode could possibly wrap up every ongoing thread.
