A TV masterpiece has come to an end
For all its fantasies and hallucinogenic inventions, Adventure Time was one of the most emotionally real shows of our time
“Adventure Time” doesn’t come up often in discussions about the 21st-century TV canon. (I’m as guilty of this as any critic; it is easily my favourite show that I’ve never written about.) Maybe because it commits the sin of being fun and kaleidoscopic rather than grim and dark.
But this animated epic, which aired its final new episode on Labour Day after 10 seasons (reruns continue on the Cartoon Network), is one of the visual and artistic wonders of the last decade, a gorgeously lacquered jawbreaker with a bittersweet centre.
For the unfamiliar, “Adventure Time” is a story of a boy and his dog. A boy and his shape-shifting dog. A boy and his shapeshifting dog, and his doppelgänger made out of grass, and a post-apocalyptic kingdom, and a bass-playing vampire and a wicked ice king and a Martian Abraham Lincoln and a sentient, gender-fluid video game controller and ——
What I’m getting at is that no one has ever accused “Adventure Time” of excessive realism. But for all its flights and fantasies and hallucinogenic inventions, “Adventure Time” is one of the most emotionally real shows on TV.
The series, created by Pendleton Ward, began in 2010 with 12-year-old Finn cutting a swordswinging
swath across the Land of Ooo with Jake, a stretchy-bodied canine whose family found baby Finn abandoned in the forest. (Really, Finn is as much Jake’s human as Jake is his dog.) Their
patron and ally is Princess Bubblegum of the Candy Kingdom, a beneficent ruler with a mad-scientist streak, whose deliciously polymorphous subjects include gumdrops, banana guards and a cinnamon bun.
It was whimsy and buddy com-
edy and monster-hunting in a land of junk food, rendered in a relentlessly imaginative esthetic that stirred together Hayao Miyazaki and “Yellow Submarine” with a drop or two of Hieronymus Bosch. What more could a kid — or a pleasure-minded adult — want?
But like many of its epic popculture contemporaries (“Lost,” the Harry Potter series), “Adventure Time” broadened and deepened and unfolded. Ooo, it revealed, is the world that emerged after the Mushroom War, a holocaust hinted at by the half-buried bombs in the opening credits. It’s a Willy Wonka dream world that grew out of a nightmare.
The typical “Adventure Time” episode is about 11 minutes long, but its ambition is boundless. Ooo developed a history and a trippy cosmology that you can find analyzed in dozens of hours of “lore” explainer videos on YouTube.
But above all, the series committed to building out its characters. Its roster runs into the hundreds; guest voices have included Marc Maron as a talking squirrel and Maria Bamford as a slime princess and a piñata. “Adventure Time” shares with “Orange Is the New Black” and “The Simpsons” the belief that any character, however minor, should be well-imagined enough to be the star of their own story.
This is especially true of the show’s villains, who tend to have sympathetic, even tragic back stories. The Ice King, one of the series’ first adversaries, was once a kindly antiquarian, driven insane by a magic crown he used to try to protect 7-year-old Marceline (the aforementioned vampire) amid the ruins of the Mushroom War.
Evil, in “Adventure Time,” doesn’t just exist. It comes from somewhere, often from good people and good intentions. The Earl of Lemongrab (a shrieking, citrus-headed cannibal) was a Princess Bubblegum experiment gone wrong. In one of the most weirdly affecting episodes, “You Made Me,” he confronts her (“I am alone! And you made me like this!”), and she realizes that she has a responsibility to help him rather than simply destroy him.
The princess also created the show’s final big bad, her uncle Gumbald, in an effort to give herself a family. Families, especially absent or estranged ones, are a big theme of “Adventure Time.” In one extended miniseries, Finn sails off to finally discover the secrets of humankind’s fate and his missing parents. In another storyline, Marceline tries to patch things up with her own dad, an irresponsible demon-king addicted to sucking souls.
This is heavy stuff for a young audience, which is to say, it’s perfect stuff for a young audience. “Adventure Time” exists in a kind of liminal zone between the poptimistic thrills of “The Powerpuff Girls” and the phantasmagoria of late-night Adult Swim.
And it’s a story of transition, too — orphans and foundlings trying out independence, building surrogate families, growing up.
Often, cartoons and comics deny change and deny time. Bart Simpson and Eric Cartman are essentially the same as they were decades ago; Lucy van Pelt spent nearly half a century yanking the football away from Charlie Brown.
Finn, on the other hand, ages from 12 to 17 over the course of the series. Jeremy Shada, who voices Finn, was 13 himself when the show first aired, and you can hear his voice deepen and mellow as Finn himself becomes more mature and philosophical with age. (This “Boyhood”-like effect is especially pronounced for binge viewers like me.)
Finn’s experience deepens with his voice. He finds his father, a con artist, and loses his arm trying to keep him from leaving Finn again. He develops a crush on Princess Bubblegum and has his heart broken. (Bubblegum, the show gradually hints, has a history with Marceline, an advance in same-sexrelationship representation that “Steven Universe,” from former “Adventure Time” writer Rebecca Sugar, built on recently with a lesbian wedding.)
As in “Harry Potter,” that other magical coming-of-age fantasy, “Adventure Time” matures as Finn discovers that life is not so simple. Early on, he’s a gung-ho kid, thrilled to swashbuckle his way out of any tough situation. By the end of the series, he’s much more ambivalent about violence, a conflict “Adventure Time” externalizes by giving him a clone, Fern, who is literally created from the merger of two magical swords.
For a while, Finn has a kind of big-brother relationship with Fern, but by the final season, Fern has become his rival — the adolescent, aggressive version of himself that he has to master and grow beyond.
“Adventure Time” is one of the best representations I’ve seen on TV of this aspect of growing up — at once being excited about what you’re becoming and mourning what you were. And it’s not only Finn and his sword-brother who have to deal with this doubleedged (so to speak) issue.
In a late episode, for instance, Jake is disturbed to learn that his brother Jermaine, a landscape painter, has inexplicably begun painting abstracts. Jake assumes foul play — sorcery? mind control? — so Jake sets off on a “rescue” mission.
But Jermaine explains that he’s just different now, and he sees things differently. “I painted so many landscapes that the shapes of the land began to lose their meaning,” he says. “The shapes broke apart for me, so I painted them like that. And it’s not like my new paintings replace my old paintings. They’re both me.”
Monday’s quadruple-length finale was full of this kind of tender insight — not to mention curtain calls for dozens of characters and a climactic battle that’s half Armageddon, half family-therapy session. It’s thrilling and sweet and a little bit tearful.
But like the goodbyes of childhood — graduation, moving away — the end of “Adventure Time” feels both poignant and right, the kind of ending that’s necessary to make new beginnings possible. The adventures have been unforgettable. But what really made this show special was the time.