Review: Adventure Time ”Hoots”

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Spoilers Below

There are themes and subplots in Adventure Time that I love and hate. Learning about the Mushroom War is great. Watching Finn deal with girlfriends and breakups, not so much. After last week’s well-crafted Graybles 1000+, we have Hoots, an episode that shows us that that post-post-post apocalyptic Ooo might not be so far off, and the almost mundane cause behind it. And here I thought we’d have to watch Cosmic Owl go on a totes awkward date for 12 minutes. Instead what we have here is a good look into the terrible world of cosmic Adventure Time.
If there’s any lesson this episode, its this: don’t abuse your powers to impress chicks. I feel like I should at least state this, because even if it seemed obvious this episode, just wait until the events of this episode come to pass. Its difficult to gauge how effective a message like that can be in a children’s show where the person you think should be learning the lesson doesn’t. I guess Adventure Time skews too young for this, but kiddies, you’ve just learned what happens when you fall for the honey trap. Equally important, is that you must realize that YOU have learned that lesson, because the gods, if they exist, are like Cosmic Owl, and will unapologetically ruin your life to meet chicks if need be.
This episode spotlights, you guessed it, Cosmic Owl. It turns out appearing in croak dreams all day isn’t as glamorous as it seems. The lives of the Adventure Time pantheon are dreadfully boring. He returns to his apartment, puts on some light music, and looks for dreams to come true, via arcade machine. Normally in an episode featuring one of the setting’s gods, you’d expect someone to be learning a salutatory lesson. Instead, we get something out of Greek Mythology or Shakespeare.
While spying in on Finn’s dream (aww, Martin and Sweet P are there), a girl bird sneaks into Finn’s dream to steal a disco light. After he steps in, she leaves, and Finns dream goes all Twin Peaks. Finn reminds us that Cosmic Owl’s appearances are prophetic. We’ve been told that Cosmic Owl is important to Ooo, and here you can see, in a painful way, why. After chasing her through several dreams, Cosmic Owl finally catches her, and well… there’s a reason you don’t abuse your powers to impress chicks. When you’re a god, you especially don’t do it. Poor Peebles. Mercifully, we don’t go into Ice King’s dreams. I don’t think we’d have enough episode time left for that.
Perhaps the most soul-crushing thing is that Cosmic Owl displays the flippant disregard for his victims that you’d expect of a classical god. Finn is fated to chase after Sweet P and Martin endlessly while Jake watches (scarier if it turns out this was a croak dream). Ice King’s dreams are just sad to him. Even the gods take pity on Simon. He gets Peebles straight-out killed. And. Does. Not. Care. Gods got god problems. The pantheon of Adventure Time are just as careless as the people of Ooo. If Graybles 1000+ was anything to go on, the consequences of this are going to suck for Ooo. Does Finn end up on a never-ending quest abandoning Ooo? Is Peebles going to be killed by a jealous Gunter-maybe-Lich-possessed-thing? The stark future that Cuber showed us last week might be closer than we thought. If the world we saw in last week’s Graybles is going to happen, we may be seeing the seeds sown here.
All because someone wanted to score a date. When you see Cosmic Owl and it could be the most important thing in your life. For Cosmic Owl its Tuesday, and woe be upon you if its Friday.
Cosmic Owl’s crush turns out to be Gunter. Well, a Gunter, anyway. I’m pretty sure whichever one he (she?) calls Gunter is Gunter until the next one is. It was a suitably trippy ending. Gunter is undeniably the villain here, but Cosmic Owl is to blame. Neither may have any role in the events that come to pass, and those that suffer won’t know they caused it. Gunter at least learned to stay off the sauce, which is also a lesson that Adventure Time viewers might appreciate later in life.
Hoots hides a deeper message within an equal, albeit shallower one, while flipping the perspective on the Adventure Time cosmology. The lesson on the surface is do not abuse your power, as others will soon abuse them and you with them. Cosmic Owl didn’t even need to learn this lesson. Prismo lays it out early on, and he ignores it. The second moral is much more nuanced: the gods are capricious, and will wreck your life for no reason. Life sucks, and the helmet won’t keep fate from finding you.

Clever and just a little soul crushing. My favorite kind of Adventure Time.

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