Sarah Lynn has always been a source more of humor than of drama on BoJack Horseman. Sure, there's always been a dark edge to the jokes made about her drug-induced lifestyle and the ways in which she was doomed from a young age, but for the most part, it was part and parcel with the satire of Hollywood and its dark side that stretches throughout this series. And yet, in this episode, that humor is brought down to Earth. It's not that there's no ridiculousness here, but suddenly the show starts taking that part of Sarah Lynn's background seriously.
And the tragedy of it becomes much more clear. Both BoJack and Sarah Lynn have been harmed by this lifestyle, bereft of empathy and only seeking thrills and substances to try to fill that hole in their lives. But the difference is that BoJack came to acting as an adult. Sarah Lynn was forced into it as a child, she never had a choice, and she never had a chance, and that's tragic. That's what makes something truly tragedy -- not just that it's sad, not just that it's unfair, but that it's the horrible result of forces beyond a person's control.
There's a Trainspotting vibe to this episode, a sense in which both BoJack and Sarah are letting go of whatever control they have as they take a feverish jaunt across L.A. and eventually across the country. That leads to the episode feeling somewhat shaggy in places, but it works with the rambling, unfocused, black out experience of the main characters, and so it works. That tack gives the story momentum even when it's rolling all over the place.
That spree takes BoJack (repeatedly) to the door of Ana Spanakopita, where she delivers an assessment of BoJack that is possibly even more harsh than Todd's. When BoJack asks why she abandoned him when he needed her the most, she basically tells him that he is not only unsaveable, but that he brings down anyone who would try to help him. He doesn't quite understand it, but there's a cold truth to those words, especially as they come to fruition in the rest of the episode, as BoJack brings down two young women.
The first of these is Penny. After a frantic, misguided attempt to make amends to all of the people BoJack's hurt (which leads it a hilarious "Dianne is just Asian Daria" routine), BoJack stalks Penny at Oberlin. In the process, he discovers something surprising -- she's just fine. She seems happy; she has friends, and she seems cool and comfortable where she is. That is, until BoJack shows up to mess that up. His presence reminds her of what happened and rattles her in what seemed like a safe environment. As Sarah Lynn points out, she was good until he showed up.
Sarah Lynn doesn't have the same kind of self-awareness about the way in which BoJack brought her down as well. It's hard to say that BoJack is truly the cause of Sarah Lynn's downfall. After all, in the past there were her parents and the other parts of the Hollywood machine that helped turn her into the person she became, and in the present, the very fact that Sarah Lynn was only engaging with sobriety so that she could get a really good high later suggests this would have happened eventually regardless of what BoJack did. (And, true to life, people who relapse often overdose, because their tolerance has diminished but they still consume their drug of choice in the quantities they used to, which overwhelms their systems.) To a degree, there was an inevitability to this.
But BoJack could have been there, could have eased her away from it, could have been a voice of experience and an angel on her shoulder rather than someone who brought her into his desperate race away from his own misery. Instead, BoJack was feeling bad for himself, and had managed to alienate literally everyone else important in his life. So he resorted to his old co-star, the one he was a father figure to, and jumpstarted the process that led to her demise. Maybe this would have happened eventually anyway, but BoJack was there, he hastened it, and took part in it, and managed to lose one of the last people who'd bother speaking to him in the process.
BoJack has his own damage to deal with, and much of it isn't his fault. He has an emptiness and a selfishness that he inherited, both through nature and nurture. The problem is that he prioritizes his own pain over everyone and everything else, and doesn't care about what his means of trying to feel better, or at least feel less, does to anyone close to him. That's what makes Ana's words so vital here -- BoJack really is drowning, he really is thrashing and kicking and trying to keep his head above water. He has legitimate problems, and sometimes he even makes legitimate attempts to fix them, but he's oblivious to those connections to others in this terrifying world, and that's his greatest sin.
So we feel for him when he loses out on that Oscar. It represents something important for him -- a signifier that his life and his work meant something. And we sympathize when he wants to do anything but face reality when that falls apart. But then Sarah Lynn wins an Oscar, and we see how meaningless it is for her. All she can do in that moment is think about what it should mean, what it would have meant to her, before she went down this path. BoJack is a victim, but also a perpetrator. As far as we see, Sarah is just a victim, someone who was poisoned before she even really knew how to read. And BoJack could have done something to stop it, to help it, then and now, but didn't.
Because BoJack just wants to try to anesthetize himself from his own pain, to hold himself back from his own damage. That's why when he looks into the projected stars of the planetarium, he absolves himself. BoJack never accepts blame, never takes the fault. He looks at the vastness of the universe and the eons that pass in a blink when pulled out to that scale, and declares that he need not feel bad for anything he does because nothing he does matters. To put it in Brothers Karamazov terms, anything is permitted. BoJack takes it to the self-serving extreme, to ignore his fractured attempts at making good so that he needn't feel guilt.
There is, however, a catch the nihilist's way out. Try as he might, BoJack still feels a connection to Sarah Lynn. As they sit on that bench together, gazing at the sunset as they've done in the past, he realizes that she is one of the few people equipped to understand him. They may have come to it on different terms, but they've been through the same thing. He cares about her. He may not want to care about anyone. It's easier to justify your own bad actions, to compartmentalize all the terrible things you've done, if you don't care about anyone.
But he does. And Sarah Lynn dies. And he was there for it all.
That's the kicker. Maybe your choices don't matter on a cosmic scale, but they matter on a personal one. You can hurt the people you care about, and no matter how many beers you drink, how many drugs you take, how many false amends you yell into the night, you will still feel that. BoJack will still feel that. All of his attempts to run away from his pain have only caused more pain, for many innocent people whom he's dragged beneath the waves with him, and for himself.
Who knows if Sarah Lynn would ever have become an architect. Maybe she would, as Tony Soprano once put it, ended up selling lawn furniture on Route 9. But maybe she would have been happy. Maybe BoJack could have helped her be happy, made himself happy, or at least avoided letting one more lost soul into his morass of discontent. Instead, a young woman dies, and for all his attempts to avoid his own hurt, to avoid the results of his bad acts, they finally catch up to him, and to those unfortunate enough to be in his wake when that reckoning comes.
[8.1/10] I’m a believer in the idea that television shows should die the way they lived. And “Come Along With Me” pretty much does that. Sure, there’s some special things that Adventure Time pulls out of its hat to signify that this is its series finale, but this show was never shy about having climactic battles and bouts of elliptical symbolism and poignant bits to tug at your heartstrings. Putting a capstone on a series this wide in scope, this versatile in terms of tone, this...well...adventurous, is a big task, but for the most part “Come Along With Me” rises to the challenge in a way that feels true to the spirit of the show.
The episode begins with Shermy and Beth, a pair of Finn and Jake-like adventurers in some distant future, tracking down the fabled King of Ooo about Finn’s robot arm. The King of Ooo turns out to be BMO, and the explosive events of the series finale are mostly told through his eyes, as he recounts the Great Gum War and the fight with Golb to the pair of adventurers. This frame story is packed with easter eggs and teases, but mostly serves as a nice way to bookend the episode and deliver some exposition in a cute and unobtrusive way.
When we get to actually live through those events, the show occasionally tries to pack too much in, but still manages to hit the major themes of the show and the characters, which is ultimately satisfying, if not jaw-dropping.
“Come Along With Me” puts a capstone on Finn the pacifist. From the moment that young Finn refused to destroy an “unaligned” ant, he’s been on a journey of learning that there’s more to heroing than just puncha-ing yo buns. Now, on the brink of war, he does everything in his power to keep the forces of Princess Bubblegum and the Uncle Gumbald from coming to blows. He enveigels them into a dreamland, forcing to confront their common ground. And he does the same for himself and Fern, trying to show them as two sides of the same coin, and refusing to fight.
I like that Finn’s final adventure in this show is one to stop violence and foster understanding, even when he has every opportunity to thrive in glorious battle. For a sometimes wacky cartoon show, Finn has grown a great deal over the course of ten seasons, and his noble commitment to stopping his misunderstood foes without resorting to violence, to ending a war before it stops, and to loving his enemy as much as himself are a tribute to the laudable place that Finn has reached at the end of the series.
There’s also a sense of empathy to all of his, another trademark of the show. After some characteristically loopy and engaging dream scenes, Jake retrieves Finn’s vault, which is enough to show both him and Fern that they’re fighting the same fears, having to confront the darkness head-on, and it’s only then that they can free Fern of the grass curse. It united the two of them, even if leads to a tragic but poignant departure for Fern.
At the same time, Princess Bubblegum, who’s pragmatic to a fault, develops some empathy too. She gets to experience what it was like for Gumbald to be reduced to a brainless candy person, while Gumbald experiences PB’s anxieties over protecting her kingdom. Sure, Gumbald seems poised to doublecross her anyway, but it’s enough to convince the war-hungry PB to stand down after understanding where her opponents were coming from. It’s the sort of war-averting swerve, founded on pacifism and empathy, that feels true to form and to the values of the show.
But it wouldn’t be a series finale if there were no fireworks, so we get the surprise appearance of Golb, the god of chaos whom we saw for the first time (I think) in the Pillow World episode. A combination of Betty, Normal (nee Magic) Man, and Maja the Sky Witch have summoned him to Ooo, and he creates a pair of eldritch monsters who have the creative, colorful, and mildly disturbing designs that you would expect for this show and its climactic battle between the good guys and bad guys.
“Come Along With Me” uses Golb to tie up a few loose ends that have been running through the show for a long time. A close call with one of Golb’s minions makes it seem like Princess Bubblegum has been crushed to death, causing Marceline to spring into action and defeat the creature in a fit of fury. When PB recovers (thanks to some magic/scientific armor), Marceline expresses her concern and feelings for Bubblegum, and the two of them kiss on screen for the first time in the series. (Rejoice Bubbleline fans!) It’s all kind of rushed, but the dynamic is right, and the moment is earned after all we’ve seen previously, so it’s a nice sop to the fans at the end of the series.
It also uses Finn, Ice King, and Betty being swallowed up by Golb (after a failed attempted by Ice King to use fan fiction to reach Betty’s heart and snap her out of her trance) to turn Ice King back into Simon. It has something to do with Golb “digesting” them, by peeling away their layers. As with PB and Marcy, it’s all a little quick and a little convenient, but developments always did come fast and furiously on this show, and having a brief moment of lucidity between Betty and Simon, plus the neat claustrophobic design of the trio being caught in an ever-shrinking cube which creates a sense of urgency to thing, helps cover for some of the rapidity of all of this.
After all, Adventure Time is a show that has always run on its out of the box creativity and heart more than any consistent logic. Sure, there’s continuity nods and character development, but even its more byzantine and intricate plots have the flavor of an eleven-year-old’s playtime imagination, even when suffused with far deeper and more adult themes.
But one of the core themes of Adventure Time has been harmony -- of these disparate and often weird individuals coming together to do things both great and silly (and sometimes both at the same time). It’s fitting then that the show literalizes that idea, with BMO’s stirring song, meant to comfort Jake, becoming a weapon against the discord of Golb, especially when all of our favorite characters join in the melody, and free the heroes trapped inside his belly.
It’s the content of the song, however, that poses the most potent theme in “Come Along With Me.” While the series finale is certainly about tying up all those loose ends and putting a semicolon, if not quite a period on the adventures of Finn and Jake and all their pals, it’s just as much about coming to terms with the end of things.
That is, in the great Adventure Time fashion, literal, meta, and more than a little philosophical. The episode has both Finn and Jake fearing that this will be the end of the road for them in the midst of Golb’s attack. Finn believes his capture in Golb’s gullet to mean curtains for him, remarking that he envisioned himself dying in the process of saving someone. Simon reassures him that no one gets to choose how things end, and it’s a small moment of shared comfort in the face of tragedy, of a piece with Toy Story 3, in wrestling something deep and affecting out of what is nominally children’s entertainment.
Naturally, there’s a last minute reprieve for everyone but Betty. She remains behind to use the crown’s power to try to defeat Golb, and when that’s beyond its capabilities, she asks for the power to keep Simon safe. The result is that she melds with Golb, becoming a part of him and losing herself in the process. There’s the sense that Betty couldn’t accept that her time with Simon had ended, couldn’t accept that there would never be a permanent end to those threats, and couldn’t accept that it wouldn’t erase the time they’d shared together, becoming part of a monster in her denial.
BMO -- ironically the one character we know survives until the unspecified future that makes up the episode’s frame story -- does accept that though. Her song is an effort to comfort Jake, to remind him that even though something ends, that doesn't mean it goes away. Their “happening happened.” Their piece of the timeline will always be there.
That lesson fits for a series finale. There may be no more new Adventure Time episodes to come, but we’ll always have these 283 stories, etched in ones and zeroes if not quite etched in stone. In a way, “Come Along With Me” is meant as a gentle easing into that, a reassurance that it’s okay for one of your favorite shows to come to an end. All the old stories will still be there, and they still mean just as much, even after they’ve come to an end.
There is a force to that beyond the meta-notion of a television series playing its final episode. Adventure Time’s finale contemplates, without seeing through, the notion of all of our heroes dying. But it offers the same comfort to them that it does to us -- that the relationships we make, the friendships we build, the experiences we have, are still sewn into the fabric of the universe.
The opening lines of BMO’s song, suggesting that time is just an illusion to help us make sense of things, and that the whole of our existence is all still there, can’t help but call to mind similar ideas posited in Slaughterhouse 5. There is reassurance in it, in the very notion of endings, that the marks we have left, the lives we have touched and that have touched ours, cannot and will not be erased, no matter what happens after.
That’s the trick. There are no endings. This may be the last episode of Adventure Time, but there is a startling but refreshing lack of finality. Sure, the show loops back around to its closing theme, given new poignance by the episode’s demonstration of the literal power of music. And there’s a montage full of hints about where our heroes’ lives lead them in the future. But that’s all we get -- hints and suggestions, more to show us that the story continues than to put a firm “The End” on one.
To put it differently, everything stays, but it still changes. There’s reassurance in that too, in the frame story that tells us that Finn and Jake and PB and Marceline and more simply “lived their lives” after the curtain falls on our glimpse into Ooo. And the adventure continues. We know, from the remade treehouse born of Fern, from a lumbering Sweetpea, from a denizen who looks a lot like a rainicorn pup, that the characters we’ve come to know and love over the course of Adventure Time have left a legacy, echoes that still reverberate a millennium later.
The episode ends with that sense of cotninuity and continuation, with Shermy and Beth following in the footsteps of Finn and Jake in a world still rife with adventures, striking a familiar pose in a fashion that suggests their spirit lives on. Television shows should die as they lived, and this finale accomplishes that.
Adventure Time is a show that became so much broader in scope than a story about a boy and his dog rescuing a princess from an evil wizard. It expanded to cover trauma, parenthood, growing up, politics, community, spirituality, horror, music, and straight up goofy humor. It had a soul that could not be contained, by the bounds of expected children’s television or even the bounds of time. This finale is just as ambitious in scope, expanding to fill the space, and reassuring its fans that Finn and Jake may depart, the show may leave the airwaves, but what it accomplished, the ways it touched us, moved us, and surprised us, never will, even if it has to come to an end.
Trivia
+Near the end, Stanley delivers a soliloquy about losing seven pounds and then bows his head and raises his right fist. This scene is a homage to two black American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who won gold and bronze medals in the 1968 Olympics. They generated controversy by raising their fists while on the medal stand as the national anthem was being played.
+We find out Pam's weight in this episode. According to the scale calculations, the entire team weighed 2,336 lbs when Pam was on the scale and 2,210 lbs when she got off. So Pam weighs 126 lbs.
+When Jim visits Pam at her Residential Advisor room, Jim misdirects the cameraman away and closes the door. This is the only time where you hear the "documentary" camera crew, namely a sigh.
+Holly's real first name is Hollis.
+When Holly is shown at her desk, right before she finds Kelly making her juice, you can see her name plate revealing her real first name to be Hollis.
+There is a point where Jim is talking about having to spend his lunch with different people while Pam is away, during this time Michael is shown without a goatee, which he has had the entire episode because Ryan has one. Michael is shown afterwards leading a meeting with his goatee still there.
+It is revealed via Holly's whiteboard that the remaining Dunder Mifflin branches in operation are: 1) Scranton, PA; 2) Nashua, NH; 3) Camden, NJ; 4) Utica, NY; 5) Buffalo, NY; 6) Albany, NY; 7) Yonkers, NY; 8) New York City Corporate Center.
+As Pam is running over to Jim at the gas station, she comments that "Montclair would have been closer" (as in, to meet halfway). Montclair is a real city in northern New Jersey popular for its arts centers and restaurants.
Goofs
Continuity
+Michael's goatee disappears in a lunchroom scene and returns for a weigh in. He later shaves it off.
+Pam comments to Jim at the gas station that: "Montclair would have been closer, so you have to buy lunch". This is untrue. Montclair, NJ, is 1 hour/ 50 minutes away from Scranton, PA (Jim) - but only 55 minutes from midtown Manhattan (Pam). That is not at all halfway between the two locations. Newton, NJ, would have been a better compromise.
Spoilers
Jenna Fischer actually kept the engagement ring that her future husband, Jim, gave to her in this episode. She has been seen wearing it sometimes in public and in interviews.
I absolutely did not understand this episode but...I still liked it? Does that make any sense?
I often find myself tempted to delve into symbol hunting and interpretation when trying to unravel Adventure Time's headier episodes, but that can leave me removed from how an episode made me feel. And that, after all, is the ultimate goal of art, right? To provoke some kind of response, some sort of emotion in the watcher?
So here's what I got. The entire episode, Finn is trying to find a way out, to hang onto something, "breadcrumb" style to where he can go back the way he came. This whole dungeon is a puzzle that he keeps trying to figure out, and every time he thinks he's got it, every time he believes that he has an exit, it sucks him back in.
So after dozens of different methods, he eventually stops trying to backtrack and just lets go. He kisses Jake goodbye. He gets a thread caught, a way to go back the way he came, and he gets rid of it; he gets rid of all his clothes and says "no egress."
There's a big part of me that wants to compare it to Sartre's No Exit, another instance where the main characters were trapped with no escape. And I'd bet dollars to donuts there's some connection there. But more than anything, there's a firmly present idea that it's only when Finn is able to let go, to stop trying to find a way back from what brought him to where he is, that he's able to move forward.
As I recall, there was a similar message in the doom train episode, that the adventure was a way for Finn to avoid confronting his feelings. This seemed to be a different shade of existentialism, some kind of idea about blocking it all out, and then finding some kind of enlightenment at the end (a place that matches up with Finn's map), before finding oneself again.
The episode made me feel Finn's loss, his sense of inevitably, that no matter what he did, he could either keep his eyes closed forever or let go of his attachments until he found his way back for real. Again, there's a lot to unpack, but there was something tragic about Finn's wandering and something unbelievably joyous when he breaks through. I'm sure it's a metaphor for something, but more than that, it was an interesting, mind-bending episode that has hints of inscrutability, but also of profundity, and I found myself captivated even when I wasn't entirely sure what was going on.
Trivias
+One of the excuses Michael gives Pam to use as a reason he can't come to the phone is "I'm trapped in a oil painting". This is something that happens in "The Witches", a book by Roald Dahl who also authored "Charlie And The Chocolate Factory".
+Episode having the ever so popular Steve Carell 'Thank You' GIF that became viral.
+When Michael asks Dwight why he has a diary, Dwight tells him it's "to keep secrets from my computer". This is a callback to the episode "Launch Party", when Jim and Pam pull a prank on Dwight, making him believe the Dunder Mifflin website had achieved sentience through his computer.
+After disposing of his Willy Wonka costume, Michael wears Andy's blazer for the remainder of the day.
Goofs
Miscellaneous
When Pam, Dwight, and David are on the speaker phone in the conference room with the marketing people in New York, Michael rushes in and is irate saying that it was his idea for giving a discount to companies who get a "Golden Ticket", not Dwight's. As Michael announces that it was his idea and yelling at Dwight, David leans in to the phone and says loudly, "We're gonna call you back, guys" to the marketing people. But David, nor anyone else in the room, hangs up the phone.
Trivias
+While arguing with Andy, Dwight mentions Dartmouth. Actress Mindy Kaling, who plays Kelly Kapoor, graduated from Dartmouth College in 2001.
+Michael's favorite song is Tom Cochrane's "Life Is a Highway".
+Michaels says corporate decided to transfer Holly back to her old branch in Nashua however holly previously states she is from Des Moine Iowa and when she started Toby trained her in "the ways of the company" indicating she did not formerly work for Dunder Mifflin.
Goofs
Continuity
+Due to her relationship with Michael, Holly is transferred back to her old branch in Nashua, NH. Yet, in episode 4.14 when Holly first arrived at the Scranton office, she stated she was from Des Moines, IA and had been working for an entirely different company.
+When Darryl and Michael are supposedly driving back to Scranton, PA from Nashua, NH after a long day, the sun is setting on the driver's (Darryl's) side of the truck. If they were indeed traveling south, the setting sun would be in the Western sky and on the passenger's (Michael's) side of the truck.
Soundtrack Credits
Life Is a Highway
Written by Tom Cochrane
Performed by Tom Cochrane
Sung by Steve Carell, Craig Robinson, and Amy Ryan
Trivias
+This episode is B.J Novak's (who plays Ryan, and is a writer and producer for the show) favourite episode of The Office.
+Jim has a framed picture of himself holding a baby on his desk
+Dwight's middle name is Kurt.
Character error
+Stanley declares that he has no disabilities to speak of, but several later plot-threads reveal that he actually suffers from diabetes.
Continuity
+During the scene in which Dwight comforts Michael's burned foot with a hand-held electric fan, Michael's crutches are leaning against the wall behind Pam. At first, they are overlapped. In the next shot, they are apart. In the following shot, they are overlapped, once again.
+In the opening scene, the wallpaper on Pam's computer changes from the standard Windows XP background to a Dunder-Mifflin background, and then back again.
+Billy Merchant says someone took the handicapped parking spot, and the camera pans to Michael making an uncomfortable face, implying that Michael was the one who took the handicapped parking spot. However, it is indicated that Dwight picked up Michael from his house to bring him to the office. Also, Michael later on says he is unable to drive, and that Jim has to drive.
+When Jim, Dwight, and Michael are loading into Meredith's minivan to take Dwight to the hospital, Michael wants to know why Meredith drives a minivan. Jim says, "She has a kid," and Michael follows with "She has one kid and no husband and she's not going to get one driving this thing." From Episode #1.4, "The Alliance", we already know that Meredith has "two kids" according to Dwight's brief biography on Meredith as Michael tries to write something witty in her birthday card.
Factual errors
In the hospital the ER doctor orders Dwight a CT. Later the nurse advises that all metal needs to be removed and won't allow Michael in the CT room until he looses all metal on his personage. This wouldn't be necessary for a CT which uses X-Rays and is not magnetic. The only metal that would hinder the procedure is metal that would show in the actual image. For the example of a head scan, earrings would need to be removed. Furthermore, the actual procedure done on Dwight is in an MRI machine which would react with metal.
[8.6/10] It's amazing how an episode about a hot-button issue like homosexuality from ~25 years ago can still feel so well-done and relevant today, without ever seeming overly preachy. The gist of how "Homer's Phobia" accomplishes this is simple -- it delves into Homer's fears about gay people but (a.) always depicts John as a decent, charming, and endlessly patient guy, and (b.) depicts Homer's anxieties as ridiculous and harsh but also realistic for someone of his age and upbringing. It makes Homer seem believably boorish and overblown about the whole thing, while John is consistently delightful, making Homer's rudeness toward him and homophobia seem all the more misguided.
Beyond that, it's a really funny episode. John Waters is a natural as a voice actor, and he brings John to life while giving him a rhythm of speech that makes him engaging and immediately sets him apart from the rest of Spingfield. The steel mill is an all-time great sequence. And the show pokes such fun at the idiocy of Moe, Barney, and Homer trying to "stop" Bart from turning gay that it manages to make their concerns seem hopelessly backward but also wrings comedy from it.
Again, it's so impressive that an episode that tackled an issue that's changed a lot in the public consciousness over the past couple of decades still manages to thread the needle to where it seems sensitive and still funny.
[8.7/10] One of the defining Finn moments for me will always be his refusal to kill an “unaligned ant.” Finn’s not above kicking butt when necessary, but killing, particularly someone who has at least some good in them, is the sort of thing that understandably rocks him to his core. So accidentally killing not only someone who means well, in his own twisted sort of way, but who is a reflection of him, is an understandable heavy thing for him to confront.
There’s a mournfulness, a regret that hangs in the air as Finn makes his way back to the treehouse. Jake immediately knows something’s wrong. BMO recognizes that Finn has killed someone (maybe from her experiences with AMO?). And it’s the perfect sort of shock to keep the show’s main character in after such a harrowing, soul-straining experience.
It reaches that point after Fern tricks Finn into entering some old ruins, and then aims to trap him there so that he can take over as the “real Finn” (having mastered his shapeshifting ability to pull off the impersonation). It’s a nice touch for Finn to get so frustrated so quickly and admit he has abandonment issues that exacerbate his problems. And as I mentioned in my write-up for the last episode, there’s something understandable, if terrifying, about Fern’s pretzel logic here and attempt to take over Finn’s life to try to self-actualize.
Finn manages to solve his problem via his PB-constructed robot arm. In the bit that brings most of the episode’s comedy, Bubblegum’s little voice message to Finn (particularly her little hand-puppet bit) and deadpan responses to Finn’s unrelated questions (“what are you doing?” “I’m a weedwacker!”) brought the laughs in an otherwise heavy episode.
It’s heavy because Finn gets out of sorts enough to attack Fern, because his great goal in life is to make everyone happy and see the best in people, and having to see a version of himself that would not only lock him away but try to take over his life has to be an unmooring experience for the young hero. His pleas that it doesn’t have to be this way resonate, and add another level of tragedy when his hope to avoid such “finality” is interpreted as “fatality” and obliterates his doppelganger. The mysterious wizard who collects the remnants of Fern suggests there’s more to come, but the power of the episode comes from Finn crossing a line he’s never crossed in this way before, even accidentally, and the magnitude of force that event has on this kind, decent kid.
[7.4/10] So here’s the big problem. BoJack is a show that revels in building things up just to tear them down. Sure, it has people making slow but steady progress, Todd in particular, but it’s also a show that relishes in gut punches. That makes you (or at least me) brace for them, and gives them less impact. Things were going too well for Princess Carolyn -- that means things had to predictably fall apart, and the parade of horribles that happen to her just starts to feel inevitable and almost indulgent in how things pile up.
It also doesn’t help that the shocking twist of the conceit is basically a repeat of something How I Met Your Mother pulled not that long ago. I still really enjoy the frame story, which has plenty of great riffs on “the future” and storytelling machinery that brings the comedy in an otherwise harrowing plot. And Amy Sedaris delivers her last lines about “what I do when I’m feeling down” so well. But again, the way this all felt telegraphed weakens the force of what could otherwise be a knife-twisting moment.
Still, Princess Carolyn losing her biggest client, her baby, her boyfriend, and even the sense of place and history that came from the necklace her mother gave her is genuinely harrowing. Her reasons for pushing Ralph away feel simultaneously a bit unfair but also understandable. It’s a scene that feels very real, even if it starts with a wild array of dentist clowns.
Overall, it’s a creative episode, but one whose misery seems too preordained to land as well as it needs to.
Trivias
+Ed Helms was included for the first time on the opening credits. He would be the first actor since the beginning of the show and after 6 seasons to be included on the opening credits. Until then, only Steve Carell, Rainn Wilson, John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer and B.J. Novak appeared on the intro.
+One of three episodes John Krasinski directed in the series. The two others are S8E3, "Lotto", and S9E6, "The Boat".
+The scissors Erin throws Michael during the cold open are made of rubber.
+Owen Daniels, Greg Daniels' son, reprises his role as David Wallace's son Teddy in this episode.
+While singing the Party in the U.S.A., Erin sings "look to my right and I see the Electric City sign" while she looks to her left.
+When Michael and David are in the hot tub, David is drinking a Yuengling beer. Yuengling was started in Pottsville, PA, just an hour away from Scranton.
Goofs
Continuity
When Michael goes to David Wallace's house and asks if he can come in, David says "Yeah, we're just finishing lunch". Later in the scene, David's wife is in front of the microwave which says it is 9:25.
Soundtrack Credits
Party In The U.S.A.
(uncredited)
Written by Jessie J, Lukasz Gottwald and Claude Kelly
Performed by Ed Helms and Ellie Kemper
Sabre
(uncredited)
Performed by Ed Helms and Ellie Kemper
Suck It
(uncredited)
Performed by Andy Buckley and Owen Daniels
Jim Halpert: [to Pam] I'm in love with you.
Trivias
+In this episode, Michael says he's donating his money to Comic Relief, even though it no longer exists. This was an homage to the original British series, where an entire episode (#2.5) was devoted to raising money for Comic Relief.
+In "Casino Night" Creed is shown stealing from a vending machine. He holds up a candy bar. This a bar made by Gertrude Hawk Chocolates, a company founded in Scranton.
+Creed mentions the excellent pea soup at the soup kitchen. He would be referring to the St. Francis of Assisi Soup Kitchen at 500 Penn Ave. in Scranton (right across the street from the Penn Paper building shown in the opening credits of the show). The soup kitchen is for the homeless.
+In his beginning monologue to the camera, Michael states that he considers himself to be an accomplished "philanderer." This word is often applied to men who engage in sexual relationships with multiple women simultaneously. The word he should have used is "philanthropist," which is more aligned with people who support charities.
+Michael's line, "Jan Levinson, I presume", is a reference to Journalist Henry Morton Stanley's reported first words to adventurer Dr. David Livingstone, "Dr. Livingstone, I Presume", when the former found the latter in Africa.
+After Michael makes his speech to get casino night started, he says "let's get it started--- black eyed crows". He is referencing to the song by the Black Eyed PEAS "Let's Get It Started" but has the group name wrong. This was a deliberate but subtle joke.
+In this scene where Michael and all the others are playing poker, Michael goes all in on the first hand and Toby calls his bet but Michael folds his cards berfore there is a flop. It is never shown what Michael's losing had was.
Spoilers
In "Casino Night" Dwight tells Pam & Jim his tux belonged to his grandfather & that he was buried in it. He again wears it in the beginning of the episode "The Farm", when announcing the death of his Aunt Shirley. However, according to Schrute tradition, they shoot their dead before burial to make sure they are "completely dead". If his grandfather had been buried in this tux, there should've been bullet holes.
Trivias
In the final shot, the actor playing the sensei who judges Michael and Dwight's fight can be seen breaking character and struggling to hide laughter.
When everyone gets off the elevator after the fight, Rainn Wilson struggles not to smile after running into the door.
When Dwight calls his sensei, Ira, He gets cut off before saying "Arigato Goazai Mashta" which is an incorrect pronouncation. The correct form for what he is meaning to say is "Arigatou gozaimashita" which is a thanks to something that has been done to you. For instance you could say it to a teacher after a lesson. Along with "Sempai" which should be "Senpai" and Michael falsely identifying a Kanji as "California Roll" are just a few of the moments satirizing Dwight and Michaels "fighting knowledge".
Ryan has a different phone in this episode (a flip phone) than he did in the episode, "The Fire," in which he has a Palm Treo 650 smartphone.
Spoilers
When Michael gives his reasons for beating up Dwight, he says that Dwight lied about going to a dentist appointment. In the season 3 episode, the coup, Dwight uses the excuse of a dentist appointment to go meet Jan in order to take Michael's job. ¡
8.5/10. I have to admit, I'm a sucker for the Banana Guards, and they brought a lot of laughs here. The "infiltration" by Finn and Jake during the changing of the guard (replete with Banana cream pies!) was a Three Stooges-esque delight, and their affable, loving stupidity tickles my funny bone every time.
But what I really loved about this episode was how it played on the way different people see Princess Bubblegum. Finn sees her as "cool," and can't shake that image of her, which is why he's kind of upset when he originally sees the graffiti. Jake sees her as just a part of the continuum, which is why he appreciates the art and is able to look past who it's representing. The Banana Guards in general look at her as an object of worship, as a benevolent if frightening persona whom, as PB herself points out, they both love and fear. Banana Guard 16 in particular sees her as a cold and unknowable deity, with the way she destroyed candy people and tampers with their minds and their very beings. And Princess Bubblegum sees herself as "just a person." The leader of Ooo has had a lot of shades added to her over the years, and her acceptance, or at least attempt to vindicate the idea that she's no longer a god on high, but a part of the community, on the same level as her creations, is a nice grace note to the opening of the season where we see her bitter and disappointed at having been ousted by the candy people.
Because at the end of the day, she accepts and loves them. She's not the same PB who would mess with Banana Guard 16's brain; she's the one who recognizes that these big yellow dopes she's been frustrated by and indifferent to have special talents that she may never have imagined (and which, in a kind of weird sequence, drive Jake crazy). The idea that Finn and Bubblegum see that in them, that but for a few genetic bumps in the road, they can be different and unique and just as valid, thinking and feeling being as anyone else in Ooo, is a nice little breakthrough for the show. It's wonderful to see Adventure Time still adding wrinkles to its characters and its world as it closes out the show's seventh season.
(Also, Banana Guard 16 was giving me mild flashbacks to "Princess Cookie.")
7.4/10. Again, I'm appreciating this show delving into some more complex emotional material here rather than writing it all on the screen. I particularly liked the subtext here that BoJack engages in a certain amount of self-sabotage, that as much as he dislikes being defined by Horsin' Around, he's worried about anything that redefines him for fear that it will leave him in a lesser light, or worse than that, expose him as a failure or empty as both. It also gives shading to his Oscar efforts in the present, where he's torn between doing the awards junket and doing a bold play with Jill Pill with how his attempt to do something bold and avant garde previously, something he put his name on no less, completely crashed and burned and scared him off from trying anything like that again. It's an interesting emotional story, and his pair up with Mr. Curly Whiskers led to some good places.
The other stories were good, but not as good, in this prequel-esque ep. The story of how Princess Carolyn got to where she is now is an interesting one, and of course the BoJack relationship part of it gives shading to the both of them (BoJack is unbelievably ugly to PC here). There's a quiet tragedy to PC's statement that she wants to have more in her life by the time she's forty given the events we saw last season.
The other stories are a bit weaker. Todd's unease with his girlfriend is funny enough because the characters are (as are the Sopranos riffs), but it's pretty minor stuff. Mr. Peanutbutter being married to Jessica Biel and then meeting Diane was a little convenient in a "small universe" sort of way, but the "Biel with it" humor were enough to keep me going. And Dianne's writer pals hating on everything was well-observed but also felt kind of slight.
But for the most part, the episode was kept humming with all the great 2007 fad-based humor. It's funny how references to a time that recent can still seem to amusingly dated, but damn if it didn't work really well. (I also liked that the show kept up the running gag of year-based music.) Plus the self-referential time jump humor was clever as well. (I especially enjoyed the Radio DJ who said "two months later" and then thought he might be having a stroke.)
Overall, it's not quite at the heights of the last episode, but still very solid.
8.4/10. One of the things I love about Adventure Time is it does a really good job of capturing things that feel very human, even within its fantastical setting. We've all played a game, or engaged in some activity with someone who's way more invested in it than us. We've all come up against someone who is both a sore winner and a sore loser. "Card Wars" does a great job at taking the show's two lovable characters and throwing them into those scenarios, where you get Jake excitedly and haughtily telling Finn about the game, and Finn struggling to walk the line between standing up to Jake and setting him off.
It's relatable but also has enough of *Adventure Time*s whimsical flair to keep things breezy. Card Wars itself has the perfect blend of feeling just real enough to be a futuristic version of Magic the Gathering or something, but just goofy enough to feel like a parody and not something you can actually try to nitpick the rules of. B-Mo is adorable, from her line about not wanting to play such games with Jake to the immortal "B-Mo" chop. And Finn's "dweeb" vs. "cool guy" drink switcheroo is the perfect way to defuse the situation with Jake winning. Overall, it's a nice little look at a minor but recognizable moment most everyone has experienced at some point.
Trivias
+Phyllis says the same twelve cliches every time it rains. According to Jim's list, they are:
The plants are going to love this.
I sure don't want to get stuck in this on the way home.
It's raining cats and dogs.
The humidity is going to make my hair freak.
The roads are slickest in the first half hour.
I actually sleep better in the rain.
We're paying for all the sun we got this year.
This weather just makes me want to stay at home, curled up with a good book.
If we lived in Seattle, every day would be like this.
I wish I were allowed one rain check a year.
I love the smell after it rains.
*Nobody knows how to drive in the rain.
+Dwight says Captain Mutato is half man half mermaid. Rainn Wilson's character "Bill Hudley" in the movie House of 1000 Corpses was made into a half man half mermaid.
+This is the second time Andy punches a hole in the wall.
Spoilers
Pam and Jim finally read Ryan's much-discussed love poem on the sly and actually find it heartrending and an impressive piece of verse. Ryan must have assuredly improved his poetry, because in "The Office":#6:17:The Office: The Delivery: Part 1 (2010), Ryan's poem lurches Pam into hysterics due to its poor content.
Trivias
+Michael meets Rashida Jones' character for the first time and awkwardly comments, "Oh, you're exotic looking, was your father a G.I.?" (Jones is biracial.) Years later, life would imitate art when TNT correspondent Danielle Demski interviewed Jones on the red carpet at the 2015 SAG awards. The reporter commented to Jones that she looked "very tan" adding, "You look like you've just come off an island or something. You're very tan. Very tropical." Not wishing to embarrass Demski, Jones graciously accepted the compliment, but pointed out she was "ethnic".
+Dwight is wearing a Rock 107 t-shirt in his and Michael's music video "Lazy Scranton". Rock 107 is a local classic rock station for the area.
+In the epilogue scene, Dwight mentions to Andy that his car is an '87 Pontiac Trans Am. However, in the pilot episode, Dwight brags to the new hire, Ryan Howard, that he drives a '78 (Datsun) 280Z
+Jim mentions that the orientation video Michael made for him when he started was based on The Blair Witch Project (1999). The new orientation video, "Lazy Scranton," is a parody of a Saturday Night Live sketch called "Lazy Sunday."
+Dwight claims to know a lot about animals and nature through out the series. Yet in this episode says he "outran" a black pepper snake. Which is not only commonly docile but is also nonvenomus.
Spoilers
During part of Michaels Integration Celebration he & Andy are singing and dancing to "What Is Love". This is a reference to Night At The Roxbury which stars Will Ferrell, who is hired at Dunder Mifflin in season 7.
[8.3/10] Holy Guardians of the Galaxy, this was a pretty momentous episode! Adventure Time continues its parade of questionable father figures when Jake meets Walter Ampersand, his “bio dad”, a term which clues the audience in to the idea that this is an episode centered around the thorny space between the people who raised you and the people who contributed to your genetic makeup.
But it’s all in the confines of another cool and zany adventure. Again, the Guardians parallels are eerie, with Jake going to a far off planet that happens to be made entirely of his dad, who’s trying to use him as a battery after burning through any number of other “sons” from seeds he planted throughout the galaxy. Jake is amusing, and the fact that he’s able to use his stretchy powers in interesting ways (while Walter is basically conning him) leads to some neat obstacles.
Where the episode stands out is where it departs from Guardians Vol. 2, with Jake using the grifting skills he learned from Joshua to switch the power-sucking belts on Walter to regenerate himself, showing how Joshua is his real dad, and Jake then allowing himself to be marooned on the planet to stop Walter from trying the same thing out on his children, showing that he learned that type of selflessness from his real dad too. It’s a nice vindication of Jake as a father and a character, while running through a nice adventure in ten minutes, and earning some great laughs too. (“I never even got a pretzel” is an amusingly mundane line to go out on.)
Overall, a nice little myth arc episode that shows Finn’s not alone in having bad bio dad issues.
[6.3/10] Ehhhhh. I used to really look forward to Fionna and Cake episodes, because they gave us a fun spin on the familiar, but now they just feel tired, and it seems like the show has run out of gas on the concept. I liked Finn’s resignation to the weirdness that Ice King basically writes fan fiction about them, and seeing the gender-flipped versions of characters like Abra-Ca-Danielle and [spoiler]The Queen of Ooo[/spoiler] is pretty fun, but the main story didn’t really work for me.
I have to admit, I raised an eyebrow when “real Fionna” showed up. [spoiler]I kind of like the reveal that she’s basically a cosplayer, and dressing up like her hero gave her confidence -- a sweet story. But all the references to Fionna and Cake being a TV show or something, making them real in some way, just feels like too much for something that should stay a fun lark for the show rather than something to try to fold into the mythos somehow.
Overall, the episode is mainly fine, and there’s some amusing enough Ice King antics, but I’m just kind of done with Fionna and Cake concept, and I think this development is a sign that the show doesn’t have much further to go with the idea.
9.1/10. Leave it to Paul Dini to write a Christmas episode featuring superheroes that not only feel natural to the setting and universe, but manages to be just a little bit heartwarming all the same. He takes the three stories route here, giving the audience a trio of vignettes to show how the various members of the League process the holiday season.
There’s no weak link here, but the mildest of them is the Green Lantern/Hawkgirl adventure. It doesn’t have the emotional punch of the other two, but seeing the pair have a superpowered snowball fight and then get into an alien bar brawl is lots of fun and a creative use of the pair’s powers in a wintery (and cantina) setting. Much of it is meant as a setup for the romantic relationship between the pair, which works well. The little kiss at the end is sweet, and the story does a nice job at showing that despite the way Jon is a little old fashioned and Hawkgirl is a little rough-and-tumble, they complement each other well.
My favorite was The Flash’s story, if only because it packs the most fun into seven minutes of any of the vignettes, while still managing to have some emotional heft to it as well. Flash’s adventures trying to find DJ Rubber Duck for the orphans, eventually resorting to going all the way to Asia when he can’t find it here. But the story really picks up when he runs into the Ultra-Humanite, who has a Frasier-esque vibe as he jousts with Flash. It’s funny and just the right amount of heartwarming when the Ultra-Humanite decides to repair (whilst “improving”) the toy, and going along with Flash as “Freaky the Snowman” to deliver it. And the aluminum X-mas tree at the end, with Ultra-Humanite’s reaction and Flash’s peek, is the perfect button.
But the best done of the stories is Martian Manhunter going home with Superman to visit Ma and Pa Kent in Kansas. There’s an understatedness to the vignette that really helps, with no grand statements about Superman feeling like a kid again when he’s at home or Martian Manhunter learning to appreciate the spirit of the season. Instead, you see these things in their actions. Superman smarting at his parents using lead foil again, or racing out of bed on X-mas morning is a nice way of demonstrating the “different side of him” that Jonn speaks of.
And Jonn’s staid demeanor makes little things like his “growing” into the sweater Ma Kent gives him, or using his powers to make a little girl believe in Santa Claus (and presumably confuse her parents?) all the more meaningful. Even the call and response, where initially the Kents’ cat hisses at Jonn, until at the end he’s in his native form, stroking the feline and singing a Christmas carol is a great way to dramatize the change in his understanding and appreciation for a season that once “h[eld] no meaning” for him.
It’s a spectacular episode, that goes small in all the places it go big, mixing romance, humor, and heart, in that great way Dini does. An X-mas classic to be sure.
Trivias
+In order to get permission to use the song "Your Body is a Wonderland" in this episode, John Mayer asked that he be given a Dundie.
In this episode, Creed is singing "Spinnin N' Reelin", a song that he wrote himself. Creed Bratton is a musician as well as an actor, and has released some albums.
+Angela sings "Little Drummer Boy" on the karaoke machine, which is her favorite song. In the pilot episode, Dwight is seen singing that song.
+This episode is the first double-length episode of the series. In The Netherlands, it was aired as two separate episodes.
+Carol (Nancy Walls), Michaels (Steve Carell) girlfriend who breaks up with him at the beginning of the episode, is actually the real life wife of Carell. Known for her mid '90s stint on SNL, Walls and Carell have been married since 1995.
+Before Jim creates The Committee To Determine The Validity Of The Two Committees, Dwight demands that Pam and Karen turn over all party supplies that they gathered to throw a rival office Christmas party opposite Angelas. Dwight tells them that the supplies would be returned on January 4, which also happens to be the same day that the next episode would be aired.
+The closest Benihana to Scranton, PA is actually nearly 2 hours away in Plymouth Meeting, PA.
+The Benihana restaurant that Michael, Dwight, Jim and Andy go to is the same one featured in the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), also starring Steve Carell.
+Pam said that for the last few months she's been sending Dwight letters from the CIA, and Jim's Christmas gift is to decide what his top secret mission is. In the "Branch Closing" episode, Jim revealed that he'd been sending faxes to Dwight from future Dwight.
+When the two waitresses first arrive at the office they are wearing make-up. In the next scene when Michael Scott offers his date the bike, both girls are no longer wearing any make-up.
+The movie that Jim and Karen give to each other is "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason." It came out in 2004, two years before this episode aired, two years before Jim and Karen started dating, and about a year and a half before they ever even met.
+Dwight wears the same orange beanie as he does in The Office: The Merger (2006).
+The Benihana restaurant that Michael, Jim, Andy, and Dwight go to is the same one featured in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), also starring Steve Carell.
Goofs
Anachronisms
In the photo of Carol's family on their ski trip, she mentions that the trip was "two years ago" placing it at 2004 / 2005. The snowboard that Carol's son is holding is a 2007 model Burton Custom, which was the current model year when the episode aired... thus did not exist when Carol's family were on their ski trip.
Character error
The "missing" cable for the karaoke machine is an IEC cable, which could be found on the back of any computer monitor or any computer desktop.
Spoilers
The two actresses who play the waitresses at Benihana are not the same actresses who arrive with Michael and Andy to the Christmas Party.
[7.4/10 on a post-classic Simpsons episode] Boy does this episode feel dated. I don’t think anything tells the tale of how different this one feels in 2019 vs. how it felt in 1999 than the fact that it depicts Mel Gibson as an all-loved dose of Hollywood royalty and Robert Downey Jr. as a pariah having troubling interactions with the police. Some of that dissonance is inevitable when you anchor an episode around a celebrity playing themselves, but some of it is the episode’s cringey references to Ellen Degeneres, Judge Judy, and John Travolta with weak gags and impressions that have aged like fruit on a radiator.
And yet, this is a damn funny episode for most of its run. I rag on showrunner Mike Scully a decent amount, but one thing the guy was good at was high-risk/high-reward comedy, with lots of wild misses but also a lot of direct hits on the funny bone. Bits like the shifty-eyed dog or the action movie ending to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington revel in the absurd tone that Scully seems to love, and wring plenty of good gags out of it.
But this is also an episode with cartoony gags like Homer driving and electric car underwater, and the high concept premise of him being plucked from obscurity to make a movie with a big celebrity. Still, Scully (who penned the episode in addition to his showrunning duties) does a surprisingly good job of motivating the characters. Homer is jealous of Marge’s celebrity crush, and Mel is worried that his new stab at prestige is leaving him out of touch with truth-telling everymen (“you know, morons”) like Homer. It’s basic, but it helps ground the utter zaniness in which this episode lives.
All the while, there’s some hit-or-miss riffs on the excesses of the movie-making business and Hollywood in general (as both an institution and a locale). Sometimes, the episode includes hilarious bits like the new ending, which work as a satire of over the top action films, and the executives here are sketched much better than the ones in season 12’s “Day of the Jackanapes”, but then you have “Saving Irene Ryan” and the whole ridiculous car chase at the end that just feel strained and fall flat.
Overall, if you can get past how the public’s perception of Mel Gibson has changed over the past 20 years (and hey, I’m Jewish, so no judgment if you can’t), this is still a mostly-funny, if insubstantial series of riffs on the movie business), even if it goes off the rails in story, reality, and characterization, as all Scully episodes are destined to do eventually.
[7.7/10] A weird but satisfying finale to the “Elements” mini-series. There’s something compelling about Betty doing all of this and working so hard with the goal of going back in time and preventing Simon from ever becoming Ice King. By the same token, there’s poetry in her ending up on Mars with Normal (nee) Magic Man. Ice King declaring that he’s special and deserving of respect is heartening in its own fashion, an affirmation that this guy who’s not all there is still worth something even if he’s not the person he used to be.
Once again, LSP’s immunity becomes a mechanism to transform everything backk to normal. There’s still a bit too much LSP for my tastes, as her antics are best in small doses, but it works for what they’re going for. There’s some interesting stuff from her making everything “normal.” For one thing, sweetpea’s other horn growing back is, uh, concerning to say the least.
More importantly, Jake coming back looking more like his alien sire is concerning in its way, but it’s sweet the way that as strange as things seem, Finn is just happy to have his brother back. Jake just telling Finn “I love you” is a heartwarming way to end the arc.
Overall, I enjoyed this latest bit of longform storytelling from the show. Most of the stories work well enough in chunks, and seeing the whole thing come together among the four kingdoms and LSP was satisfying. As always, there’s some potent emotional material underlying it all, and some interesting bits of mythos as well. Another success, albeit one that felt a little jumbled in the finish.
[7.6/10] I don’t know if Justice League has a “save the best for last” mentality or what, but this is yet another episode where I liked the second half better than the first. Don’t get me wrong, pt. 1 was plenty good, but pt. 2 takes it to another level in terms of tricks, resolutions, and emotion.
The tricks are all fairly entertaining. Superman uppercutting Ten into the air just long enough for him to disarm a nearby bomb is a fun stunt. The same goes for Joker trying to confuse Flash over which wires to cut, resulting in the speedster just racing the bomb to the edge of town. These are smaller plot obstacles, but the show finds good ways to show our heroes thinking their way out of the situations in clever wars.
I also enjoy the big twist here. It turns out that Joker wasn’t just trying to kill the Justice League or bomb The Strip, but instead he was trying to create conflict so as to get as many eyeballs as possible on his “show” so he could use Ace’s powers to make every viewer go insane. There’s a real meta quality to the whole routine, with Joker himself talking directly to the viewers both in-universe and out about how they can’t manage to peel their eyes away. It definitely adds something to the proceedings.
Likewise, I like how Batman beats The Clown Prince of Crime, not by brute force or gadgets, but through psychology. For one, he plants notions in Harley’s head that Joker is two-timing her with Ace (yick), which makes it possible for Batman to tail her back to Joker’s hideout. Likewise, he defeats Joker by pulling a government mind control device (not unlike the ones that protected Flash et al. from Gorilla Grodd) from the clown’s pocket in view of Ace. It’s a nice way to show that Joker’s not really on her side and turn the godchild against him.
There’s also some nice work from the animation team. Imagery of technicians melting into their consoles, Batman crawling over impossible stretches of tiles, or Joker swirling away into nothing are pretty damn cool. Ace’s backstory is riddled with pathos, and she brings a nice creepiness to the turn of the story, with there being particular force in her ability to turn Joker of all people into a frightened little puddle.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the Hawkgirl/Green Lantern material, which I loved. It’s nice to see the show finally pulling the trigger on those two, after teasing them for so long. Shayera going wild trying to revive John after the explosion in the pt. 1’s cliffhanger ending, and regretting what she “never told him” when she thought she was dying is a touch cliché, but it works based on the characters’ histories. Her leaving the battle to get John medical attention speaks to the intensity of their connection. Most of all, the closing scene where we see the intimacy of her removing her mask, with John expressing the notion that they can’t ignore their feelings anymore, makes the long-awaited kiss all the more satisfying.
Overall, this is a strong finish to the two-parter and a nice semi-DCAU finale for Joker. On to the season finale for the show!
[8.8/10] The best DCAU episodes give me stories I didn’t even realize I wanted. I don’t think I ever would have asked for a Superman tale where he’s a gritty survivalist in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I don’t think I ever would have asked for a story where Vandal Savage is a mournful and penitent survivor of that very apocalypse (which he happened to cause). But damn if I didn’t love the story we got out of both of those ideas.
One of the little things I love about “Hereafter pt. 2” is that, for once, it feels like a different episode than pt. 2. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Justice League’s duologiest, but so often they just feel like one story chopped in half. This, for once, feels like two distinct stories -- what the league does without superman and what SUperman does without the League -- which are obviously connected but which operate independently from one another. They share a resolution, but I appreciate how the structure of this one gives both narratives time to breathe and to be fleshed out.
There’s also a pure cool factor to this one. I like Superman, but sometimes he can be a little dull. Watching him load up an old convertible with scavenged supplies, grow scraggly and forge makeshift weapons and attire, and form his own ragtag sled dog team in search of his friends is anything but dull. We’ve never seen Superman more resourceful, more improvisational, and more downright cool than he is here.
This is also a series-best outing for Vandal Savage. I’ll admit, I haven’t really cared for the character in his prior outings. He’s mostly been a somewhat generic megalomaniac type, which doesn't do much for me. But the notion of a man who’s been alone for 30,000 years, changed by all the time he’s had to reflect on his life and deeds, makes for a far more interesting character. His friendly dynamic with Superman, his low key self-blame and self-loathing over the harm he caused, and the existentialist zen he’s reached in his millennia of self-reflection makes him a far more compelling presence than in any of his prior stories.
(As an aside, I was vaguely hyped by his shout out to Ray Palmer! I remember him showing up in later episodes, but I can’t recall how soon that happens.)
The convergence of the two characters is strong too. There’s some nice world-building and design work as Savage explains the far flung future to Superman. The mutant dogs, crumbling Metropolis, and Savage’s beautiful tower help give this broken down future a real sense of place. The show comes up with good emotional excuses for why Savage never left the planet and why it’s in the state it’s in. Likewise, the prospect of a time machine requiring the very device that Savage used to destroy the world in order to function not only makes for a nice action-y adventure for he and Superman to go on, but it adds a certain poetry to the thing that destroyed the world being necessary to save it.
Watching the two of them fly on giant dragonflies and fight massive cockroaches makes for some solid set pieces. More to the point, a depowered Superman falling to his apparent doom in a bit of yellow light, only to float back up with his powers restored to save the day, is appropriately triumphant. This episode is nicely lighter on the de jure action than others, but when they go there, it works.
Superman’s return is likewise triumpahtn. The show overdoes it a little bit in terms of the dialogue from the other Leaguers about their emotional responset o his return, but it’s still a nice moment. (Especially Flash’s tears of joy.) Superman telling Lobo off and the continued sarcastic responses to The Main Man’s grousing continues to be a laugh. And the crowning emotional moment of the episode is Vandal Savage gaining his redemption, thanking Superman for doing what he does best -- asve the world -- even and perhaps especially when it means his own non-existence.
All-in-all, “Hereafter” may be my overall favorite Superman story. I don’t make that proclamation lightly, but it shows us both what Superman means to the world and the people around him via his absence, and creates a strong journey for him to go on apart from all of that, rife with character and poetry. A real stand out.
[7.1/10] The initial problem with this episode is the very one that Shade points out to Gorilla Grodd -- we’ve already done the “Team of Supervillains” bit on this show. We’ve seen the Injustice Gang try and fail on a couple of occasions. Just a couple episodes ago we saw a cadre of Superman villains team up with one another. There’s plenty of stories you can tell with a collection of baddies working together, but there’s not much novelty to it at this point. You need a new wrinkle.
The titular “Secret Society” tries to offer two. The first is that we know most of these guys already. Gorilla Grodd’s fought the league before. The aforementioned Shade’s a known quantity. Parasite’s making his first appearance post S:TAS which has a little juice. The same goes for SInestro, who’s cool to see as GL’s traditional arch-enemy. And as new additions go, the ladylike Giganta and feisty Killer Frost add something unique to the mix. It’s not a bad line-up.
But the broader thematic wrinkle is supposed to be that these villains are different because, unlike most bad guy groups, they know how to work as a team. They have non-mercenary goals that make it more possible to work together, and Grodd’s smart enough to train and/or manipulate them to operate as one. It’s not a bad throughline.
The problem is that for it to work, the episode wants to show the members of the Justice League out of sorts and not on the same page with one another, and it comes out of nowhere. There’s been friction on the team before, but it’s never really felt like a group of individuals who couldn't set their own goals aside to work as a team or who couldn’t use their powers to compliment one another’s efforts rather than step on each other’s toe.
Suddenly, everyone is at odds, both on the battlefield, the practice field, and in their interpersonal relationships with one another. That’s not a bad notion, but you have to build to it in other episodes, rather than just decide by fiat in a single twenty minute installment that the Leaguers don’t know how to work together. Superman in particular feels really out of character here, and the eventual group break-up ends up feeling undermotivated, especially for something that’s such a big deal.
As I said for “Hereafter,” any smart fan knows that this thing isn’t permanent, because if it were, there wouldn’t be a show. But the series could still make it meaningful if it earned the emotional reactions before and after. Instead, we get a bunch of surface-level disagreements and discord that seem totally random.
There’s a few small wrinkles to like here. First and foremost, it’s a treat to have Clayface back. While the animators don’t use him to his full potential in this episode, I consider him the signature villain of B:TAS, and it’s cool to have Grodd manipulating him too by suggesting that he could offer a cure. There’s also something existentially terrifying about Clayface being kept by a private collector in four separate drums, which adds something to the episode.
While no one else does, Batman feels true to character here, already a non-joiner to begin with who feels like teamwork-focused practice is a waste of time. The show at least gets that part right. What’s more, it looks like the League is practicing on a bunch of proto-Zeta robots, which is a neat throw-in.
Overall, the prospect of yet another bad guy group needs a lot of work to be compelling given what we’ve already seen of that trope. The show tries admirably, but it requires a hasty character change and break-up of the League which just isn’t convincing.
[7.7/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] This episode is extraordinarily stupid but also extraordinarily funny, and it’s hard to know how to square that. But ultimately, I still liked it quite a bit, and I can appreciate it as a dose of solid comedy (at least until the abbreviated third act), even if the storytelling gets way too cartoony for this series.
The first act is mostly about Homer winning the loyalty of a murder of crows. The gags that ensue are dumb but funny. The crows fetching him donuts and other sundries, Moe’s painting of a “crow bar”, and Homer gently reassuring a freaked out Marge that a group of crowds is called a murder are all solid, albeit loony laughs. But this is also an episode where Homer’s avian allies can understand english, tuck themselves into bed, and fly Maggie from her window, so the whole thing is kind of bonkers.
The highlight of the episode is its second act, where Homer starts using medical marajuana to treat his eye pain after a betrayal from the crows. Let’s be real, most of these are just standard pothead jokes. But man, Jon Vitti and company write them well, and Dan Castelanetta delivers them even better. Just the way he says the word “Wow” in response to Ned’s reading of the Bible, or his mindless THC-infused laughs are infectiously funny. A fun cameo from Phish, and the absurdity of an increasingly disheveled Homer trying and failing to stop medical Mary Jane from being outlawed again won me over. Most Homer humor is founded on him being a big dope anyway, so leaning into that via him partaking in pot is a pretty natural comic move that pays dividends.
Things only come crashing down from there, though. There’s a solid concept to it at first, with a reefer-ruffled Homer stumbling into Burns’ good graces by laughing at his boss’s weak jokes, only to struggle with what got him the job when he can no longer rely on pot. But from there, it turns into an insane Weekend at Bernies homage with a fluid-dripping Burns being controlled by Smithers like a marionette for the plant’s investors. This one’s already pretty wacky, but for some reason, that’s a bridge too far, and not terribly funny.
Still, enough in “Weekend at Burnsies” is to make this one of the humorous highlights of season 13. It’s just a big gag-fest, one that seems to give up all pretense of The Simpsons taking place in reality. But it brings enough laughs to the table to earn a partial pass for it.
[9.6/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] These are the episode that make me wonder if the funniest writers devoted most of their time to specific episodes and scraped by on others. This episode’s humor isn’t perfect, but it’s got a better laugh-per-minute ratio than just about any other episode in season 12, which makes it stand out in a dull field.
The story isn’t bad either! The idea of Homer being inspired to help the little guy in the first act, making misaimed efforts to do just that in the second act, and then stumbling on a hunger strike to save the local baseball team as the ultimate way to achieve that end works for what the episode’s going for. It gives Homer a motivation, has him see it through in predictably misguided fashion, and then runs into an obstacle that he can’t just blunder his way through. That’s a solid formula, and makes for a good spine for the humor.
But the humor is where this one really shines. The “Blocko Land” jokes are silly, but still very effective with all the square plastic-based humor. All the baseball-related gags are, if not quite at “Homer at the Bat” levels, then at least good enough to poke fun at the three-ring circus of minor league baseball. And Homer’s general overzealous efforts to stand up for people are funny from start to finish.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t note that this is, possibly, the best Duffman episode ever! He thrusts in the direction of the problem! He represents the “Newsly Times.” And he declares himself a “cautious cat!” It’s utter silliness, but I love it! And Stacy Keach is good as Howard K. Duff too. He brings a mundane malevolence to this silly conspiracy.
Overall, this is a double-digit season Simpsons episode that will keep you laughing throughout, and even rooting for humble Homer. Those two facts alone are a minor miracle, and mark this episode as one of the high marks of the series’s post-golden year period.
Trivias
+The genesis for the episode came from an idea Angela Kinsey (Angela Martin) and Jenna Fischer (Pam Beesly) had while spending time together on the set of the series.
+The math problem Michael gives, 13579 divided by 8724, equates to 1.56.
+Pam's monologue on reading about a girl who lived in a house with a terrace was based on a real book from the Choose Your Own Adventure series, although not specifically identified as such in the episode, read by Jenna Fischer when she was a child.
+Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey came to Greg Daniels with the basic idea for this episode: Jan would hold a seminar with the Dunder-Mifflin women as a cover to see if any of them had management/executive abilities, and Michael would get jealous. Daniels like the idea and asked them what came next in the story, and Fischer admitted they didn't have more of a plot to outline. Daniels then called BJ Novak into his office and assigned him to write the script from their original idea.
+Scenes were filmed where Dwight brought his "spud gun" to the men's meeting and wreaked havoc, but they were cut from the original broadcast because they upstaged the other parts of the story.
