Adventure Time will always have a place in my heart, if only because it was the subject of my inaugural post for this column. But it’s also beautiful, fun and ever so quirky. Throw in a stellar cast including Tom Kenny and John DiMaggio and how could I not love it? Most episodes of Adventure Time are split between two unconnected stories, but on some rare occasions there’s a single two-act story. This past week’s episode is one of the later and it’s one of their best executed.
“Return to the Nightosphere” starts with Finn and Jake waking up on bananas in a prison cell in the middle of the Nightosphere without a clue of how they got there. They get out only to go through days and days of mind-numbing lines that take up most of this half of the episode until they finally reach the leader, Marceline’s dad. But when they finally escape, the leader follows them, only to be revealed as Marceline herself. End of part one. “Daddy’s Little Monster” starts with Finn trying desperately to figure out what happened to them using Jake’s now charged camera — Marceline invited the pair to the other universe and her father gave her a cursed amulet that turned her into the new Lord of Evil. After sneaking their way back into the Nightosphere, Jake and Finn save Marceline from her father’s curse … while also causing Finn to go into shock thanks to sacrificing his own body and becoming the Lord of Evil for a short time.
While the description above is what actually happens in the episode, the summary above doesn’t really give the episode justice. I love the middle of the story storytelling. I love how we were kept wondering what the bananas were about (and I love the reveal that they’re actually demon ear wax). I love the demon characters that are so accepting of that universe’s torturous rules … and their hatred of those who cut in line. I love the weird surrealism and the allusions to Dante’s Inferno.
While the series often teeters on the line between for kids and for adults, this episode in particular has extremely dark humor that even I found a bit chilling. Actually, most of my own worst nightmares are comprised of waiting for something I can’t understand or trying desperately to find my first class in a labyrinth version of my old high school, so the bureaucracy theme of this hell made total sense from a torture point of view. This episode pushed boundaries in a way most cartoons don’t, which again is why I like Adventure Time in general. It was also a lot of fun to see Martin Olsen back as Hunson Abadeer, Lord of Evil/Marceline’s dad (fun fact: in real life, Olsen is the father of Olivia Olsen, who plays Marceline).
Adventure Time also has a habit of ending episodes with a heart-breaking cliffhanger to torture fans — the loss of Tree Trunks for example. In “Daddy’s Little Monster,” Marceline nonchallantly tells Finn that she doesn’t want to hang out with him anymore because her dad likes him. Now, I really like Marceline as a character and while it doesn’t surprise me that she did that, it does disappoint me. Here’s hoping that was a one-time joke or that Marceline will forget that she doesn’t like Finn anymore.
Clacked by Katie Schenkel 
on May 07, 2012 @ 13:00 EST5EDT
