Adventure Time Review: S9E12 - Fionna and Cake and Fionna

“Fionna and Cake and Fionna” was very… whatever for me. I wasn’t annoyed or put off, I wasn’t even bored, but compared to the other four episodes released in this batch, this one felt a lot like a throwaway. From the moment old Fionna first appeared, I was convinced she was either a fake or somehow crossed over from an alternate dimension – one of the many other realities out there. Due to the episode feeling so light-hearted and silly right off the bat, I’m sure most of us assumed right away th

at this old Fionna was an impersonator. [Peppermint Butler: “Was it real?” Banana Guard: “Who’s filming all that?” BMO: “Needs more hunks!” [Finn: “Excuse me, miss Fionna? Where did this video come from?”] With scenes and lines of dialogue like those, it seemed unlikely this was going to be some cosmological convergence or introduction to an interdimensional aspect of the ATverse. Although in the end, perhaps it still was? The impersonating old lady claims Fionna and Cake were a TV show from the

past, and she came to this conclusion because her gadgets intercepted a strange signal by happenchance. Now the concept that before the Mushroom War there was an actual TV show that happened to be exactly like the Land of Ooo is in the present except it’s genderbent… yeah, that’s a hard pill to swallow. This old lady is unaware of the timeline and history of the planet. She also used to be a shut-in and likely never met the characters Fionna and Cake corresponded to. Even when she saw Finn at t

he event, she probably assumed he was doing his own original genderbent cosplay of Fionna. My point is simply that it makes sense for the old lady to make the assumption she did, but for that assumption to be true is a ridiculous concept. In the end, we find out the strange signal containing the adventures of Fionna and Cake actually is beamed into Ice King’s head every night. [Banana Guard: “Where do your ideas come from?”] Ice King: “They’re beamed into my melon at night same as everybody else

. Next!"] Ice King, however, doesn’t always recall these events exactly as they happened and often throws in his own self-indulging imaginative spin on things. So the big question about this episode is of course where the hell does this laser come from? Are the events occurring in another dimension where Fionna and Cake actually exist somehow being captured and beamed into the Adventure Time dimension we’re all familiar with? Is this some kind of weird meta-level joke presenting the comical scen

ario that Fionna and Cake are the canonical show in an alternate reality of ours, like, a real-life alternate reality, which has Adventure Time with Fionna and Cake instead of with Finn and Jake, and that signal somehow traveled into the cartoon-reality of Adventure Time in our reality? Yeah, I’m not sure if that made sense (hopefully it did), but obviously, we do not know what the deal is with this strange laser, and while I wanna say it’s some kind of meta joke, I’m not really getting a good u

nderstanding of what the joke is supposed to be. While the beam in the end was the main appeal for me and probably a lot of people, I still don’t really care that much. After “Three Buckets” we have around 16 episodes left from what I understand. A mystery about the origins of Fionna and Cake doesn’t interest me all that much in the first place, but especially so when we have so little time left to explore the AT world. I’m honestly not a fan of Fionna and Cake at this point in the series anyway

. It was a fun little diversion from the main world of Adventure Time at first, but, for me, it overstayed its welcome. The gag with the mummy was pretty funny. [Ice King: “She didn’t want me to see the end of the tape because she’s not Fionna. She’s… a mummy!”] And everybody should take the motto of this “Keep it Juicy” poster to heart… but overall, the episode was on the bland side. Even if Adventure Time’s ending wasn’t in sight, and even if this episode wasn’t surrounded by really awesome ep

isodes where a lot of interesting developments occur, I would have still found “Fionna and Cake and Fionna” rather lackluster. Not bad, just sorta mediocre. Although it would be cool if the lore behind the laser is indirectly integrated into the concluding arc somehow, but I do not need more Fionna and Cake stuff.