Adventure Time

Adventure Time

Episode 2: Prisoners of Love/Tree Trunks

By: Carlos Uribe

Adventure Time is about the adventures of Finn and his dog Jake

Spoilers Ahoy!

The first episode of Adventure Time to air on television used two genre spoofs to introduce the series. This is the second episode of the show and it does two things to many first-time viewers: it introduces the Ice King and it gives us some actual adventures. The first segment is “Prisoners of Love” and it's about the Ice King. If the series has an antagonist, then the Ice King fits the role. When Finn and Jake trespass into the Ice Kingdom, or whatever it's called, they get captured by the Ice King and thrown into jail. It's while they're in jail that they discover that the Ice King is holding a bunch of princesses hostage. He plans to marry one of them, but he wants to ensure that he picks the best princess out there. He's looking for love in the wrong way. It's up to Finn and Jake to escape and save the princesses and they end up doing this by using psychology. Finn realizes the Ice King's weakness and doesn't hesitate to use it against him.

The Ice King is not a flat villain. He believes himself to be cool and he desperately wants to be liked. He constantly threatens the princesses to claim that they are having fun even when they're not. He may think highly of himself, but he's very insecure when it comes to what other people think of him. When people tell them what they really think of him, he replies with insults rather than listening to their complaints. He might tell himself that he's fun, but he has very low self-esteem. It's interesting that the show doesn't just have a bad guy who has bad intentions: this is a bad guy who has good intentions. He manages to become more human and even more relatable in the process. This is a strength for the segment, which was otherwise weak. It's not that it was bad-so far I haven't seen a bad Adventure Time segment-it's just that it felt to be as ordinary as this show can get. It had it's absurd moments but the plot felt familiar.

The second segment is “Tree Trunks” and it has a basic idea for an adventure: Finn and Jake must take their friend, Tree Trunks, to go eat some legendary apple in the Dark Forest. The major obstacle isn't the bad guys in the Dark Forest, but Tree Trunks. She's old and she isn't cut out for any adventuring. She'll put stickers on the bad guy and try to have tea parties with evil signs. It's a bit surprising that the show didn't go with what I'm sure other cartoons would have gone with: the bad guys being redeemed by Tree Trunks good-nature. It just puts Finn and Jake in even more pressure to keep her safe. The episode ends when in order to get the apple, Finn and Jake must destroy a crystal guardian that mimics them. It's only then that Tree Trunks becomes useful because the guardian starts to dance like Tree Trunks. Tree Trunks gets to eat the apple but then she poofs away and appears to now be inside some kind of crystal.

That ending really has me scratching my head. What just happened? It would have been one thing to end the show with Tree Trunks just exploding. That would have been morbid and tragic. It would have also been funny in a really dark way. The episode then proceeded to show a scene where Tree Trunks is prancing around in what appears to be either the apple or some kind of crystal. It then abruptly ends, leaving me with a whole bunch of questions-the biggest one questioning what just happened. My research (which I try to include with as little spoilers as possible, so please no spoiling) indicates that this final scene was included because Cartoon Network wanted to show that Tree Trunks was okay so as not to scare young viewers. This makes sense, except it probably left those young viewers much more confused. This is apparently going to be explained in a future episode, so that'll be interesting to watch.

The second Adventure Time episode was pretty good but it wasn't as good as the first episode. These two episodes simply felt a bit more standard up until that confusing end-that end definably felt like something this show would do. There were some funny moments, but not as many as in the first episode and while it did some surprising things it didn't feel as unpredictable. These episodes were solid Adventure Time episodes that were still a good time. The second segment was a bit stronger this time, due it's unpredictability.