![]() There is an island of humans hooked up to pods, living through a “Better Reality” virtual reality game, as tiny sweet-faced drones tenderly care for their atrophying bodies. There is the gentle, lone survivor living in a hollow tree. Each island offers a different variation of a dystopian human future. Finn, Jake the dog, Susan, and stowaway BMO then leave Ooo, hoping to discover the aircraft’s place of origin and encountering a series of the eponymous islands. The action starts with a mysterious aircraft landing on the beach in search of Finn. ![]() Islands does a dizzying amount of plot development in 80-something minutes. Islands, the 8-part miniseries running today until February 2, takes a big step in addressing one of the show’s central mysteries-what happened to the human population in the aftermath of the nuclear Mushroom War, and if any other humans besides Finn (and maybe-cyborg Susan) remain alive. As the show nears its end, and as its protagonist, Finn, comes of age, it seems committed to bringing its plot promises to fruition, at the expense of some of its freeform, child-like silliness. The show has cemented its core audience through longer-term constructs-the deepening development of its characters and the incremental revelations about the transformation of our Earth into Adventure Time’s Land of Ooo, by means of a long-ago nuclear war that wiped out civilization but unleashed magic back into the world. It has been a beautifully managed balancing act, but, as the show begins its seventh year and penultimate season, the scales are beginning to tip. In Cartoon Network’s lineup, it sits precariously in the 7:45 pm slot-the lone, 15-minute buffer between We Bare Bears and Adult Swim reruns of King of the Hill. While it shares DNA with beloved adult cartoons like Futurama and BoJack Horseman, it is not fully inside that tradition. As creator Pendleton Ward has said of his fictive universe, “It’s candyland on the surface and dark underneath, and that’s why it’s compelling, I think.”Īdventure Time has always been a thing of many pleasurable contradictions: it is silly but profound it is free-associative in form but intricately plotted it’s mature, but kind of innocent. But the “trippy” label is one of the great short sells of the show, rendering it as flat as its pastel landscapes. Google the show, and you’ll find no shortage of professional TV criticism focusing on Adventure Time’s technicolor aesthetic, which, to be fair, does make liberal use of rainbows. It was that association with psychedelia that very likely got the show from children to stoners, and from stoners to the broader audience of teens and young adults it now enjoys. When Adventure Time premiered in 2010, I was sixteen, and the first episode was widely sent around my high school with some variation on the line: Can you believe this kid’s show? It’s so *trippy*.
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