Review: Adventure Time “Preboot”

Coming Soon: Andrew Garfield as Finn!

Spoilers Below

Adventure Time returns from a long break to bring its seventh season finale. With the news that the show will be ending at its ninth season, nothing makes this more frighteningly apparent than the end of its current chapter. But with a title like “Reboot”, it raises some eyebrows and tightens some sphincters. Though before we get to the reboot, we have to go through the preboot.

Finn and Jake enter an abandoned arcade looking for artifacts of ancient human civilization, along with recurring character Susan and her devolved human-ish friends. Susan goes back all the way to the second season, in the episode aptly titled “Susan Strong”, giving Finn hope some humans like him had survived the “Mushroom War” (as in the apocalypse) that led the world to being like it is now. She’d make a second appearance in the following season helping Finn and Jake conquer monsters fighting her tribe, which was then revealed to be morphed human hybrids, though Susan’s species was left ambiguous. Her last major appearance was in the sixth season, instead saving everyone else from purple soda addiction. Now it seems she and Finn have resumed their quest to learn more about human life before the apocalypse, while Jake tags along in hopes of getting cursed.

Their first big find is a collapsed Merry-Go-Round, which Finn hilarious misinterprets. Jake pulls on a floatie, which seems to make the place start to shake, but it turns out to be done by a Narwal/Squid themed drill appearing from out of the ground. The pilot is none other than TIFFANY, another early but seldom used character whose main characteristic is that he is a boy, despite his name, and is constantly trying to get Jake’s attention…oh, and he has a metal arm now. He leads the three inside the drill, telling them he was avoided being eaten by a monster in a previous episode and got his metal arm from a man known as “the Doctor”. Suddenly, Susan starts speaking in static, which allows her to open the doors in front of her to everyone’s surprise. This leads to a room with a blue lotus, which Susan forces to open, revealing the aforementioned doctor, Dr. Gross, who looks heavily cyberized and seems to have the rest under surveillance.

Finn asks what she’s been up to, leading to a musical number about evolution and genetic modification. Gross shows her many specimens that have been “leveled up”. Finn and Jake seem fine with this, but Susan is disturbed. Gross brings them to the “examination room” and offers them lollipops, which Susan is heavily suspect about, especially since Finn gave her a warning about this exact situation. Gross then decides to take off what seemed to be her skin, revealing herself to be a human…plus, as in basically a cyborg. She proposes they work for her, and the more they work, the more she’ll mod them, just like what she’s done with Tiffany. As they think it over, they realize that their lollipops were laced with paralyzing juice, holding them in place and effectively making them prisoners. She then reveals her true plan, to change every remaining human into beings like her. This finally reveals where Susan’s tribe of hybrids came from, as they all seemed human in shape aside from their heads, as well as explain Susan’s implant in her head that was first seen in her previous appearance.

Seems Susan was wise to this anyway, as she never ate the candy, and so can move to free Finn and Jake. Gross activates her hybrid cyborg pets to chase after them, which won’t be easy as Susan seems to know exactly how to get out…until Tiffany captures them in a net. Gross seems ready to slice them for insubordination, but Tiffany, with his infatuation for Jake, saves them at the last minute and holds off Gross while they flee. They make it out of the drill as it prepares to submerge again, then vanishes in an explosion. But since this is a two-parter, I can’t imagine that being it. No time to think about that now, though, since the giant electric eel is on its way to the Candy Kingdom!

Wow, what a rush! Two old characters coming back into play and the mystery of Susan mostly revealed, with a big fight on the way. But what will the ominous reboot entail, and who will be left standing? Find out in the very next review!