Original Airdate: December 4, 2025
Written & Storyboarded by: Maya Petersen, Anna Syvertsson, Hanna Nyström & Charmaine Verhagen
The second I finished this episode, I knew people were gonna hate it. And lo and behold, scanning over all corners of the internet, I haven’t seen many positive things to say about it. But I dunno y’all, I actually kinda liked this one? Granted, I can see why people are becoming increasingly more frustrated. It’s episode seven and we’re taken on a huge detour that mostly centers around the aspects of this season that people, including myself, have not particularly liked. When I saw the preview images for this episode and saw that is was mostly just going to be about Fionna and Fennel, a character we barely know and one that I didn’t particularly care about, I was preparing myself to be in the same boat with everyone. Maybe episode five was the point where I just kind of surrendered projecting my expectations onto the season and just let me accept it for what it is, but I thought this one was pretty decent.
This one is mostly Fionna’s story, with a smidge of HW thrown in. Fionna tries to rescue her ex-man after he’s gone missing for several hours with the help of Fennel, who finally gets a dedicated role. I like that Fionna has evolved from “girl loser” to just straight up being an asshole for a good chunk of this one. It never feels like the character herself is malicious, she’s just kind of a dreamer that prioritizes her own needs and struggles to exit on her worldview when it comes to considering the perspective of others. A lot of the episode is challenging that perspective while showing that parts of her beliefs are yet to be shaken. She grows closer to Fennel here, realizing that she’s not the villain that Fionna painted her out to be, and becomes a bit more aware that the people around her are not exactly as put together as she initially thought. Granted, she still fails to really recognize Marshall’s wants and needs throughout the episode, putting them mostly aside because, in her mind, all of what she’s doing has been for him. Though, as it’s becoming increasingly apparent, that’s not really the case. Fionna has pretty much prioritized her own needs throughout the course of the season, chasing after Phelix and becoming buddy-buddy with Hana Abadeer because she doesn’t want to fail. Most of her actions are a result of her trying to act heroic, but it’s feeding into her own egoic desires instead of coming from a place of truly listening to what her friends want and need. As much as people have criticized the Fionna-World segments for feeling aimless and often tedious, I do think this character arc has been pretty solidly executed all season.
A lot of Fionna’s personal development in this episode is connected to her working with Fennel, who honestly has quickly become one of my favorite of the Fionna-World residents. Granted, the bar isn’t super high, and Fennel doesn’t have that much of a character to play around with, but she is quite endearing. I once again like the inverse of Finn and Fern’s dynamic, with Fionna being the one that envies and resents Fennel, while Fennel herself is mostly none-the-wiser to her turmoil. I like their little back-and-forth dealing with magic eyes, as they run rampant in the city in pretty unproductive ways. I usually don’t really like when TV shows tackle tripping on drugs, because I think they often greatly exaggerate and misinterpret what the experience of being on something like shrooms is actually like. It’s usually presented as lots of flashing colors and visual hallucinations, instead of the absolute childlike bliss of a good trip or the terrifying, dissonant experience of watching your ego dissolve in a bad trip. Here, they at least have the excuse of connecting it back to real magic in this world, so it doesn’t have to fully allude to our real world understanding of psychedelic substances. Even so, there are elements of the “trip” that feel true to life, like Fionna and Fennel’s sloppy crying and glowing admiration of one and other as they return to Earth, coupled with our first glimpse at what magic Fennel looks like! It’s really sweet to finally have actualization of these characters’ dynamic in some sense, after their resolution was cut short in Come Along With Me.
It’s nice to see wizard eyes utilized as a concept in the series once more, which goes a bit beyond the usual gaggle of demons and creatures that we’re used to accompanying this realm. We also get a bit more of an added cosmic perspective, with a trip to Venus that occurs quite similarly to Mars’ ventures in the former series. I kind of like that it’s up for debate how much of this has actually occurred, though I like to believe that Venus is a concrete destination that maybe exists beyond the multiverse? It’s kind of curious how planets really work within this series – are there multiple versions of Venus, or just one that can be potentially accessed through all corners of the multiverse? Part of me kind of wrestles on what I think works better. On the one hand, I think it makes the world a lot more massive if you have multiple versions of planets and deities and gods that exist in multiple different spectrums, but it kind of also detracts from the presence of the King of Mars and Glob is there are alternative copies of them across multiple galaxies. I guess the Lich technically does exist in several different universes, so it probably is likely that these gods have their own doppelgangers. It seems like the show has kind of ignored exploring that concept too deeply, which I don’t necessarily blame them for. It seems complicated!
Venus is a great time though. Love the designs, the color palette, and the city-like landscape that mirrors Fionna-World, equipped with several odd-looking landmarks. Also, a banger of a song! Rebecca Sugar was credited for the tune we heard previously in The Butterfly and the River, but nothing in the outro that I saw references who worked on this one. It sounds like a Sugar song at the very least, and it’s probably my favorite song from the season thus far, which isn’t saying much. Song sequences have been used pretty sparingly up to this point. Tuning into Roman mythology, the planet is based primarily on the goddess Venus, with her sensibilities being the basis for the entire ecosystem. It’s even run by Venus de Milo (referred to as Embolina in the credit), the statue, who is now equipped with mods. Granted, that part of me wondering if this is truly a real place is somewhat squandered by the fact that Phelix is apparently trapped here while actually playing a set down on Earth, but he seems like more of a manifested idea rather than an actual, living being here. I think it’s quite likely that Venus does work in mystics as well, with Phelix being a representation of love and lust instead of embodying his Fionna-Worldly counterpart. The battle sequence with the heart warrior is decent fun, once again with a pretty stellar Amanda Jones score complementing the scene. Tying back into Fionna and Fennel’s connection, I really love how much Fennel’s admiration of Fionna immediately kickstarts her transformation, while Fionna only provides half-hearted forms of praise until she digs deeper and recognizes the truth behind her resentment. Along with the funny gag of Fionna’s love for swords actually paying off, whereas Fennel’s did not.
HW’s segment is small but effective, having her search for Fionna, Fennel, and Phelix in an effort to continue to pinpoint the heart of this world, as she recruits Hunter. As much shit as this one is already getting for not progressing the plot, it is quietly moving things forward, just not in such a grand way. Huntress Wizard has been shown to reject opening up to others as a way to maintain her mystique, but we see her development in not only accepting help from others, but directly asking for it. I think a lot of this is in part due to the fact that HW is practically an alien in this world and is somewhat forced to develop these skills in order to survive, which is kind of a neat little tie-in to what makes this world human. Huntress Wizard comes from a mystical world where she can survive off of her own skills and magic as a means to get what she needs, but she’s completely out of practice here. Nothing that she has is helping her get any closer to what she needs, so she really has no choice but to depend on others to help see her plight through. It is somewhat of a fish out of water story in that regard, but I do once again appreciate all of the little bits of her character growth that are sprinkled in subtly. I do think she’s kind of gotten the short end of the stick compared to all we went through with Simon last season, but I will say there may be a bit more nuance to what we’re watching here? Simon’s story was great but it was admittedly heavy-handed. We had an episode like The Star that was pretty much devoted to reinstating in a million different ways how much Simon needed Marceline and vice versa. We really haven’t gotten a dedicated exploration of Huntress Wizard’s journey, which is kind of a qualm I have on some degree, but having HW intertwined with Fionna and Cake’s story this season, while last season had the duo more involved in Simon’s story is a nice reversal, albeit one that I’m not fully enamored by. I also actually have kind of grown on Hunter a bit! I’m probably not gonna go back and change all the times I referred to them as “him” throughout the past two seasons, so please accept my retroactive apology for misgendering you, Hunter. It’s cool once again to have a character backstory that actively distances itself from the original counterpart’s. HW can be seen as quite arrogant and untrusting, though I wouldn’t refer to her as particularly angry. So giving Hunter anger issues, alluding to a side we’ve really never seen from them, was a really nice character touch. It’s additionally cool to see expansion from a character that has kind of outgrown their counterpart? Like, we watch Gary and Marshall planting the seeds for their relationship last season, while we watch the inverse of Finn and Fern’s connection throughout this season. Hunter has had their own character journey and identified aspects of their life that they wanted to improve, while HW has really not been forced to have that level of introspection until now. It’s a neat touch that once again adds a little bit more depth to this world that can bounce back and forth between feeling expansive and completely hollow.
Other shtuff: Cake is, as usual, delightful and provides for some of the episode’s funniest moments. I especially like her one response to Fionna about dreams that is clearly just an outtake from Roz Ryan that they chose to use in the episode itself. Her obsession with M-Cron continues to be quite funny and sweet, and I especially got a kick out of his little horse-like leg shake after being envisioned as his magical counterpart. We do get to see more magical versions of these characters, as well as a return of the timeline expanding trees, which makes me ultimately wonder if we are going to see some kind of reverse in the matrix of this world, returning everyone into their magical counterparts. The return of “what the Björk” was a welcomed surprise. Ellis P’s little opening that appears to be a sign of more mystics to come was fun, with Pendleton Ward continuing to boast the most comedically obnoxious inflections for this character. We also get some moments with Gary and Marshall, which are fiiine. I like how this bakes into Fionna’s central story (no pun intended), but I still don’t really care about Marshall’s story or his connection to Simone. I’m being a bit snide here, but I think the connection they’ve built up with Simone is a little unbelievable. Aside from my feelings of this relationship already retreading the emotional beats from Marceline and Simon’s connection, I think it’s kind of laughable how it’s played up that Hana Abadeer is a villain for interfering with Marshall and Simone’s relationship when he is a child interacting with a adult. Like yeah, within the context of this story, Hana is horrible. But I dunno, I’d probably be fuckin’ pissed if I saw my child hugging a random stranger in the park too! This season has really tried to nail down the fundamental human nature of the world, but I think this is kind of an outlandish situation that they’re trying to convince us is endearing only because we know this relationship from the original series. I just don’t think it really works for several reasons, but I guess I’ll be prepared to eat my words when Rebecca Sugar eventually shows up and writes a song with them that will make everyone cry.
As is, this one is pretty alright! I understand everyone’s criticisms and complaints with it, but like last week, I had a decent bit of fun watching the otherworldly elements play out in relation to the Fionna-World dynamics, so I don’t think it was a complete loss. It was also refreshing to not have an obligated visit to Ooo in this episode and just let the main dynamics play out as is. It’s been brought up again and again, so I’ll once again reinstate that I don’t really think the pacing is that egregious in relation to the Fionna-World segments. I think development has been kind of carefully sprinkled across each episode in favor of exploring the characters in Fionna-World a bit more methodically and building on why we should care about these characters. Does it always work? Definitely not, but I think the people who claim that “nothing has happened” are being a bit hyperbolic. Do I wish that there was more action and comedy packed into each episode? For sure, but I do think there’s a bit more of a calculated approach to the Fionna-World segments than people give them credit for. I see the vision more and more with each episode, and even if it’s a direction I’m still a little wary on, I can at least start to say that I understand what this season is looking to accomplish and why it’s doing what it’s doing.
Not an artist shoutout this week, but if you guys are into the AT comics, you should definitely check out this video by NICKtendo. As someone who has selective experience with them, it was neat to get an all-encompassing look at the various series and arcs they tackled, so even if you haven’t read and you just like the series, I would definitely recommend checking this out!
Adventure Time Reviewed 