On the Other Hand ... (regarding Adventure Time 515) ...

Since posting my review, it’s occurred to me that I could have completely missed the point.  This could all be a huge Mind Screw by Pen & Company, deliberately writing the episode as if it were a bad fan-fiction to cover up the implications of Simon’s behavior Out of Character.

Very frequently, OOC Is Serious Business – and the Ice King was acting more than a bit OOC in “A Glitch Is A Glitch.”  Specifically, he was acting like an Omnicidal Maniac.

And who do we know in the series who is an Omnicidal Maniac?

….?

What if he’s been possessed, or (more likely, given the power of the Ice Crown) tricked … by the Lich?

The notion of deleting the Universe is very much OOC for Simon Petrikov, who even as the Ice King puts limits on his own actions.  Even the Ice Crown wants to freeze – not destroy – the Earth (and given the preservative qualities of the default ice it generates, it might be argued that   But destroying all life is the specific goal of the Lich King – as it is not of any other villain in the series (for instance, Hunson Abadeer wants to harvest souls, the Fire King wants to burn up the world and colonize it with his own fire elementals).  Thinking about it, I find it more than a little bit suspicious that the Ice King attempted a plan which would have achieved the Lich King’s goals.

Furthermore, the Ice King has never shown any capability to alter the fundamentals of space and time.  At most, he’s aware of and able to peer into other dimensions with his “wizard eyes,” but not to change them.  (We know this because he couldn’t even force the spirits haunting his castle back into the Spirit World on his own – he had to recruit Finn to help him).

The Lich, on the other hand, knew how the Crowns and the Enchiridion might be used to reach Prismo and edit the Universe by wishing.  When we last saw him, he was outside of our spacetime, in the middle of the multiverse, a place from which he might have reached anywhere.

And he just might understand the dimensional connections well enough to move to a position dimensionally-adjacent to the Ice King’s castle.  From there, he might have whispered his lies into Simon’s confused mind, moving him to do something profoundly OOC by using Simon’s known weaknesses (loneliness, and attraction to Princess Bubblegum).

If the Ice King’s plan had worked, the ones to suffer the most would have been the Ice King and Princess Bubblegum, who would have been trapped, alone with each other, in an eternal Void.  As the Lich would surely have known, Bubblegum would have hated the Ice King for destroying everything (including her friends and her people).  Given their respective natures (empowered by the Ice Crown and a sapient biomass of bubblegum) they could have fought for a very long time without conclusion, and then the victor would have died alone in the Void – a truly terrible fate, far worse than mere deletion.

Would the Lich have had a special reason to wish such a fate upon Bubblegum and the Ice King?  Yes – he has a personal score to settle with them.  Bubblegum was one of his gaolers after Billy captured him, and the Ice King defeated the Lich when he possessed Bubblegum.

But the Lich King failed completely.

Or did he?

If we take this episode seriously, the Ice King has just shown himself (in the eyes of Bubblegum, Finn, Jake and pretty much anyone who realizes what just almost happened) to be incredibly untrustworthy and dangerous.  And this, after several previous episodes in which they were coming to trust and like him more.

The Lich is Genre Savvy.  He learns from his defeats.  When Billy defeated him with the Gauntlet, the Lich first destroyed the Gauntlet and then destroyed Billy, to ensure that he might never be defeated in this manner again.  Recently, he’s been defeated three times:  twice by Finn and the Ice King, and once by Finn and Jake.

Between Finn, Jake and the Ice King, who’s the weakest link?  Weakest from the viewpoint of being the easiest to detach from the alliance?

Why, the Ice King.  Whom Finn and Jake now distrust, and Bubblegum probably hates, at present.

Also notice that this would drive a further wedge between Bubblegum and Marceline.

I’m suggesting that this was a Xanatos Gambit – the Lich set things up so that, no matter who won, the Lich would get something.  Either the Universe would be destroyed, or his enemies would be divided – just so long as said enemies never realized who was really behind it all.

And from where I’m sitting, it looks like the Xanatos Gambit worked.

Oh … one last thing.

A glitch is a glitch.

And a Lich is a Lich.

"A Glitch Is A Glitch" (s5 e15) Is the Worst Episode of Adventure Time

Introduction

Adventure Time is one of my all-time favorite animated TV shows.  It's about the adventures of a heroic human boy named Finn and his adoptive brother, a superpowered sapient dog named Jake, in a world a thousand years after an atomic war in which The Magic Returned, with disastrous consequences to Mankind (Finn may be the last, and is certainly one of the last surviving humans).  Among the major recurring characters are Princess Bubblegum, a sapient humanoid being made of living candy biomass; Marceline the Vampire Queen, an immortal half-demon half-human vampire girl born before the war; and (Simon Petrikov, though he rarely remembers that name) the Ice King, who was a normal human Adventurer Archaeologist Antiquarian before the Mushroom War but was empowered, transformed, and ultimately driven mad by the power of the Ice Crown, the Artifact of Doom he discovered.

It's had some great episodes, and unlike many shows of its type (Thundarr the Barbarian particularly comes to mind) has had real character development.  Of particular relevance here is that the Ice King started as a fairly standard villain (his obsession was with capturing Princesses in the hopes that they would come to love him), quickly-revealed a pitiful and eventually a sympathetic side, and as of "Simon and Marcy," the episode immediately before this one, had essentially become an (annoying) friend of Finn and Jake.  This was due largely to the fact that Marceline loves him for sacrificing his own sanity by using the Ice Crown to keep her (at that time a little girl) alive in the chaotic and dangerous conditions right after the Mushroom War.

This episode, "A Glitch Is A Glitch," was the worst episode of the show that I've ever seen, and here's why.

Synopsis

Someone throws a brick with a disk on it through Finn's window.  Finn runs the contents of the disk and it first shows a raven-haired woman with long hair (who looks vaguely like Marceline) eating her own hair.  The computer then glitches -- it was a dangeorus virus -- and then starts physically morphing.  The virus has somehow accessed the fundamental nature of reality and is warping and deleting real objects.

It turns out that the Ice King, hearing Princess Bubblegum say "I wouldn't date you unless you were the last man in Ooo" mis-heard this as "I would date you if, and only if, you were the last man in Ooo."  So he has decided to delete everything in the world save for himself and Bubblegum.  This approach predictably fails:  Bubblegum just beats him up, which however doesn't solve the more fundamental problem.

Finn and Jake travel to the fundamental level of reality, through the glitch, and fight the malevolent virus.  They eventually get it to cough up all the reality it's been consuming and everything is set right again, save for the Ice King who finds himself splined into an object with a monster Jake accidentally created attacking him.  Finn and Jake get a victory hug from Bubblegum.  THE END.

 Flaws

I honestly don't know where to begin here.

The first thing is that the Ice King is behaving greatly and Bubblegum slightly Out Of Character.  Bubblegum is OOC in that she would normally deal with a situation like this by doing something "science-y" -- she logically should have been the one making the portal for Finn and Jake to travel to the fundamental level of reality, if she could do it (and she's the most likely character in that universe to be able to do it.

As for the Ice King, it's been established throughout the series that the reason he's a (mostly) Harmless Villain is that he actually doesn't want to hurt anyone.  His original personality, Simon Petrikov, is a profoundly good man, and he's kept the Ice Crown in rein for centuries. The Ice Crown wants to cover the world with eternal ice:  any time that Simon wanted to destroy the world, all he would need to do is give the Crown what it wants.  Instead, the Ice King has covered just one land with ice, where he reigns over penguins whom he loves like his pets and occasionally kidnaps some princesses to (mostly) just bore them with his insane fanfics and other social diversions, until they either escape or someone (both Finn and Marceline have played this role at times) rescues them.  (Yes, I do know about the several times we know of before this that he did something worse, but it was never on the scale of mass murder.  Or even murder).

To suddenly cast him as an Omnicidal Maniac is just plain wrong.  That's not his character motivation.

There's another problem, which is that it's never been established that the Ice King has the power to do anything of this sort.  His powers are all centered on cold and ice and derivations thereof (such as flying by summoning ice winds and using his prehensile beard as an airfoil).  True, he's part of a Wizarding subculture that trades magic items (which is presumably how he got a Charm Person cursed ring to use on Old Lady Princess in one episode) but I don't see how he could get anything of a sufficient level of power to destroy the world.  Aside from the one item he already has which has that power, the Ice Crown.

Dramatically, this totally went against the theme of the character arc they've been doing with the Ice King, namely that he's been becoming saner since Marceline's resumed her friendship with him.  The Ice King commits his worst crimes out of loneliness, so the less lonely he is, the more nicely he behaves.  That's been his character since the beginning.  If he currently has an obsession, it's with making Fionna and Cake (the gender-flipped versions of Finn and Jake) become "really real" and in love with him; if he was going to do something wicked, it should have been pursuit of that obsession.

What I greatly fear is this:

Rebecca Sugar, one of the best writers/storyboarders for that show, did her last episode with "Simon and Marcy."  She has always done the best epsiodes with the Ice King and Marceline the Vampire Queen, and it was largely her writing which established the characters of Simon Petrikov and Marceline Abadeer as people (rather than mere antagonists or allies).

Maybe they're doing a Take That to Rebecca Sugar.  And if they are, I hope it doesn't ruin the series.

Conclusion

"A Glitch Is A Glitch" sucked.  It really really really REALLY sucked.  I hope this is an aberration, rather than some new and sucky direction for the whole series.