10x13 Come Along With Me

[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.

Look, in all honesty the first half or so of this finale is a bit messy. Gumbald just doesn’t hack it as either an engaging or intimidating villain. The dreams, while effective in furthering PB’s, Finn’s, and Fern’s arcs, is undercut by Gumbald being the same as me ever was- a prat with no real reason for the way he is. He’s here to fill the Lich void. And on one hand it’s subversive for him to reject redemption and remain that way, but it doesn’t make Lolly stepping in in any way earned. She’s been plotting right alongside him and been developed even less than him or their cousin I can’t even remember the name of. Like Gumbald and Golb, she’s a function more than a character. And while the peace theme works to show Finn’s growth, beyond that it feels a bit obligatory and shoved in.

But all that’s the set up. Everything from the Bubbline kiss on is the pay off, and that hits. Golb may be an antagonistic force of nature without the charisma and character of the Lich, but it works well enough to put the characters where they need to be. BMO’s song wrecks me everytime, and even more so with all the AT we’ve gotten since. AT has reached the status of legend, where it never truly ends, where tiu can pick it up at anywhere in its chronology and tell a story with a wealth of in and out of universe context. They live their lives.

It’s just another ending of one phase of their lives. That bittersweet, whimsically melancholic tone is what carries this finale. Bonnie’s last words in the show acknowledging Finn’s growth, the little brother she’s watched grow, with the friendship she’s always wanted between them. The theme reprise montage of everybody just continuing their lives. Bonnie and Marcy pushing through centuries of hurt and the fear of losing the solid ground they’ve gotten back to reach for the higher heights of intimacy, admitting just how much they mean to each other. The tears BMO’s song gets from me every time. Those are the things I’ll remember, more than the flaws.