Adventure Time

Adventure Time

Episode 7: City of Thieves/The Witch's Garden

By: Carlos Uribe

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

Spoilers Ahoy!

The first segment of this episode is titled “City of Thieves”. It takes place in a city that is filled with thieves. When a little girl's basket is stolen, it's up to Finn and Jake to try and find the basket in the city. There are two major obstacles in retrieving this basket. The first obstacle is that anyone who enters the city will eventually become a thief, no matter how pure they might think they are. This means that our hero who stands for all that is right might be corrupted. The second obstacle is that the basket keeps getting stolen. In an eventful sequence, the basket is shown to be passed from one thief to yet another. Every single denizen of the city is shown to be stealing just about everything they can get their hands on. When the basket disappears from our hero's vision, the girl reveals that all treasure eventually makes it to a chest within the king of thieves. The only problem is that no thieves can enter the king's tower. This calls into question on how the king is able to enter or how any of the treasure can get into the tower.

This plot hole is easily explained with the twist. The little girl reveals that she had only tricked Finn into stealing the King's treasure chest. Her basket wasn't stolen and she was a thief this whole time. By having Finn take the chest, she made him into a thief and therefore corrupted him. This is a pretty surprising direction for the show to take. While the little girl being a thief was predictable, that our young hero would actually become a thief wasn't. The implications that a good guy can be made to commit crimes must sure come as a surprise to the youngest audiences. In the end, everything turns out fine when soap is able to purify both Finn and Jake. It doesn't seem to work on the little girl, who promptly proceeds to steal Finn's clothes as the segment comes to a close. The segment had a pretty decent storyline and it managed to surprisingly explore some moral ambiguity. The simple solution for our hero at the end is a bit silly as it seems to suggest that a clean appearance means that the person can't be a bad guy but it serves as a way to ensure our hero remains a hero.

The second segment is “The Witch's Garden”. This is an episode that has Jake lose his powers when he eats the doughnut of a witch. He's also stripped of a lot of his fur and given the body of a man baby. This is supposed to symbolize his lack of magical abilities. He has the same lazy personality that he always has and he remains as stubborn. This means that he refuses to apologize to the witch which will give him his powers back. He also refuses to do all the hard work that is necessary to find the right mud pool to get them back. He's given an easy and a hard way to do things and yet he refuses to take neither because Jake has the personality to let things slide. It's what allowed him to easily become a thief in the previous segment. The only time that Jake is finally willing to do anything is when Finn's life is put in danger.

If this involves going into the witch's garden and apologizing to her, then that's what that means. He's forgiven when the witch sees that he successfully pretends that he means it. He doesn't learn his lesson. The first segment had been about how thieving was bad, and yet this segment didn't seem to bothered by Jake eating the food of someone else? The witch might have overreacted but it's not like she was in the wrong. This conflicting message that the episode had is a bit odd. This was a good segment because while it seemed to contradict the previous segment, it was a way for the show to explore how important Jake's powers are to him.