nolite te bastardes carborundorum
"Don't let the bastards grind you down"
[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.
[7.0/10] There was no shortage of pearl-clutching and garment-rending over the tone and spirit of Star Trek Discovery in its first season (some of it from yours truly). The show’s embraced a moral ambiguity in Starfleet’s mission that every series outside of Deep Space 9 has only hinted at. Captain Lorca leaving Harry Mudd to rot in a Klingon prison cell was touted as a betrayal of Federation, and franchise principles. And Heaven help any writer who’d dare to have any character suggest that some Star Trek ideals must be bent or broken in a time of war.
But for all that folderol (or maybe because of it) Star Trek Discovery ends its season with a firm embrace of those hallowed ideals, a firm rejection of those who would eschew or ignore them when it’s inconvenience, and firm vindication of a lead character who grows enough to discover that it’s worth a mutiny to stand by those principles, not to elide them.
That’s commendable (and, in fact, most of our heroes are literally commended for it), but “Will You Take My Hand?” falls victim to the larger problem that’s plagued Discovery from the beginning -- its propensity to heavily underline all of its points, resort to overwritten dialogue to explore its ethical conflicts, and using grand speeches to announce its points.
The bookends for the episode feature Burnham giving a speech at her reinstatement/commendation/”We love you again!” ceremony at Starfleet, telling some tired, florid parable about recognizing fear that seems to point toward and ensuing battle at the beginning of the episode, only to be revealed to fit the episode’s “find another way” ethos by the time the credits roll. Burnham has ponderous back-and-forths with Georgiou, Tyler, Cornwell, and even L’Rell about What This All Means and How Far We’ve Come. And there’s plenty of dramatic moments where people take a stand and everything’s set right again.
But what I appreciate about Discovery’s first season finale is how it mainly goes for anticlimax rather than the raging finish it seemed to be setting up in the penultimate episode of the season. While there’s a few tense moments, they tend to be smaller, more interpersonal, with few explosions or bits of hand-to-hand combat or firefights that have filled the space the show’s other high stakes episodes.
Instead, “Will You Take My Hand?” centers on Burnham, Tyler, Tilly, and Mirror Georgiou infiltrating a section of Qo’noS where the Orions have set up shop, trying to gather intel to find the right spot to plant a probe (which turns out to be a weapon of mass destruction) and sniff out what information they can in the libertine environs everyone but Georgiou finds awkward to fit into.
It adds more texture to the world of Discovery than we’ve gotten so far. This part of Qo’nos feels a little more Mos Eisley Cantina that Star Trek (or at least more like the outpost from Star Trek V, speaking of locations visited by long lost Spock siblings), and it gives Discovery the chance to explore a little of the culture clash and cultural exchange that it’s been enmeshed in with the beginning.
Sure, it gets a little gratuitous at times. I don’t know that Star Trek fans ever needed to see a Klingon “crossing the streams” or even more scantily-clad Orion slave dancers, or the aftermath of a threeway with a Mirror Universe leader (though I suppose Mirror Kira says hi). But it serves the episode’s purpose of showing all these alien races as regular folks with their own customs and lives, just doing their thing, regardless of the Federation or the Klingon Empire or anyone else.
Again, the episode hits the point a little too on the nose in the dialogue, but the scenes set in that part of Qo’noS both help give Discovery a sense of place and establish a normalcy of life there that makes it more difficult to see the orc-like Klingons as faceless villains who can be wiped out without a second thought.
That forms the crux of Burnham’s second mutiny, one that mirrors her first, based on a belief that they cannot preemptively wipe out the Klingons, rather than one that they have to. The episode lays the moment on too thick, but it’s just stirring enough to pass muster when she, Saru, and the rest of Discovery’s bridge crew stand-up, literally and figuratively, to Cornwell.
Cornwell gives into Burnham’s semi-convenient plan, which involves trading Mirror Georgiou her freedom in exchange for the detonator, giving it to L’Rell as a bargaining chip for her to unite the Klingon houses through strength, and avoiding the death and destruction that would otherwise reign down as Starfleet makes moral compromises in the face of an existential threat.
It’s all a bit too neat, but it’s sound. Burnham’s perspective has been widened, both through her interactions with real live Klingons (of both the standard and Manchurian Candidate variety) and with her Mirror Universe counterparts, in a fashion that hones both her sense of humanity even in her enemies, and in what principles must be clung to even in the face of annihilation. That’s a very Star Trek tack that ought to hopefully quell some fans and critics over whether Discovery is carrying the torch Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coon, Fred Freiberger and so many others lit more than fifty years ago.
But so much of the struggle of Discovery in this finale and in the season as a whole is the same struggle that all late-coming Star Trek works face: how to both honor the franchise and its hallowed past, but also to modernize it for the present day. Lord knows Captains Kirk and Picard provided no shortage of sweeping oratories, but that kind of lofty rhetoric lands with more of a thud in 2018 than in the more colorful confines of the 1960s or 1980s where it fits better. Dark takes on everything from the intricacies of war to questionable affections sometimes give Discovery a sense of maturity, but sometimes give it a sense of grimdark adolescence.
Star Trek Discovery ends much as it began, as a mixed bag. It’s a show that diversified the world of the franchise in multiple laudable ways, that presented a vision of the world of the Starfleet that looks as good as it ever has on the small screen, and which tied the grand ethos that that the franchise forefathers would approve of to complex and colorful individuals. But it also often gave way to empty action, never quite found the balance between serialization and standalone outings, and couldn’t help but wear its points on its sleeve through innumerable overblown colloquies.
And yet, as “Will You Take My Hand?” demonstrates, the show’s heart is in the right place. Any number of other Star Trek series (and arguably all of them) started out shaky before finding their footing. Though a bit misaimed at times, Discovery is confident and self-assured out of the gate, and even as it works out the kinks and offers a fanservice-y tease as it signs off, gets the spirit of Star Trek right, which gives us reason to be excited for what new frontiers the show will explore next.
I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON BUT I LOVE THIS!
[8.1/10] A very nice way to end the season. Let’s take thing story by store.
I loved the Diane-Mr. Peanutbutter story, because (a.) it felt so real and (b.) it really captured the best and the worst of them as a couple. Everything from little arguments in traffic, to nice gestures that don’t quite connect, to big gestures that lead to misunderstandings and emotional realizations. It feels like BoJack had been setting up Diane and Mr. PB to fail as a couple from the beginning, but credit where it’s due, they’ve soft-pedaled their falling apart nicely, to where it feels like the accumulation of a lot of little things, rather than some big blow up. Very well done, and lots of truth to how things seem headed for a split.
I also enjoyed the resolution to Todd’s crazy storyline with the rabid dentist clowns. Turning it into a way to motivate people to run is the sort of zany business idea he would come up with, and turning the fish from the Better Business Bureau into an asexual love interest for him is a nice place to end his arc for the season.
Princess Carolyn has a nice capper to her arc too. Her opening, Draper-esque monologue about how stories were great, but it’s important not to mistake storytelling for real life hits home. And I love the fact that after all her cajoling and manipulating, BoJack is good enough to do the Philbert show just because she tells him that she really needs him for it. It’s a subtle but effective sign of growth for him.
Last, but certainly not least, I love the resolution of the BoJack/Hollyhock saga. The lengths that he was willing to go to in order to help Hollyhock, with no desire for credit or expectation of reward, is such a sincere sign of change and an effort to do right by someone else. They did a great deal in S4 to show BoJack’s change through actions and showing, not just words and telling, and I really appreciate it.
At the same time, it’s great to use the Schindler’s List “done all I could” as a throughline. Seeing how far BoJack is willing to go, and using the same animation style for his “Piece of Shit” internal dialogue to illustrate it is a wonderful way to convey his learning to do and be something more selfless and empathetic than it was before.
His bonding with Hollyhock about the crappiness of honeydew, and the fact that his gesture breaks through is a really sweet moment. And the “but I’ve never had a brother” line, followed by BoJack’s little smile and the music playing over the end is just a perfect, heartwarming bit.
Overall, a nice capper to a stupendous season, full of creative risks, emotional moments, and inventive storytelling. For whatever reason, this show never fully worms it’s way into my heart when it’s not on the air (so to speak) but I always find myself appreciating it and admiring it when I watch it. I might need to go back and revisit earlier episodes more often, because there’s a lot there.
I love when shows manage to leave me with my mouth agape -- Are you KIDDING me?? -- by dropping a cliffhanger bombshell I never saw coming. Nice job, BBT! See you next season!
THAT CAN'T BE THE ENDING!!!!!! OMG!!!!! This was by far the worst season of the show and yet it had very good episodes (particularly when it let itself be deep and emotional). The ending was...beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. Everything is open to changes now.
