13 Darkest Episodes of Adventure Time

Though its colors are bright, and its mood is trippy, some of the themes Adventure Time tackles are a little too heavy for children

Created by Pendleton Ward and directed by Larry Leichliter for Cartoon Network, the surreal animated fantasy series Adventure Time is set in the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo, and revolves around two best friends: Jake the Dog (voiced by John DiMaggio) and his adoptive teenage human, Finn the Human (Jeremy Shada). The first is a multilingual and multi-skilled bulldog, with the ability to cook, overstretch, and shape-shift, while the latter is kind, brave, moody, and enjoys going on noble quests.

Other characters include Princess Bubblegum (Hynden Walch), the ruler of the Candy Kingdom; Ice King (Tom Kenny), a demented wizard; Marceline (Olivia Olson), the vampiric rock guitarist; BMO (Niki Yang), the video game console that lives with the two leads; the melodramatic and bratty Lumpy Space Princess (Pendleton Ward); Lady Rainicorn (Yang), Jake's Korean half-rainbow, half-unicorn partner; and Flame Princess (Jessica DiCicco), of the Fire Kingdom.

The show ran for 10 seasons from 2010 till 2018, and was created using hand-drawn animation. Though its colors are bright, and its mood is trippy, some of the themes it tackles are a little too heavy for children; just as well, because its target audiences are teenagers and young adults. Some of the show's least comedic episodes cover mental health, phobias, breakups, war, greed, cruelty, existentialism, dictatorship, and ambition.

Here is a selection of rather unsettling Adventure Time episodes.

Learning about the food chain at school is not unusual, but becoming the food chain during a field trip to the Candy Kingdom Museum of Natural History is less pleasant. Finn and Jake are transformed by the Magic Man into birds, flowers, caterpillars, and bacteria, becoming either predator or prey, depending on the situation.

PB is shocked when she finds out that the Earl of Lemongrab (voiced by Justin Roiland) is watching her subjects in their sleep, arguing that he lacks people of his own to govern. So, she sends him the Pup Gang, but after he electrocutes and injures them, she travels to the Earldom with Finn and Jake to bring them back. He refuses, and locks the Gang, Finn, and Jake, in his "reconditioning room." PB has no choice but to create a clone for the Earl, Lemongrab 2, to ease his loneliness.

Inspired by Princess Bubblegum's statement about possibly dating him if he were the last person in Ooo, Ice King creates a computer virus with the intention of deleting everyone except the two of them. When Finn and Jake open the floppy disk he sends them, a creepy girl pops on the screen, gagging herself with her long, black hair. Jake attempts to exit, but a glitch comes out of the computer and starts destroying their tree-house. No matter what they do and whom they try to save in the Kingdom, people keep getting destroyed or their body parts deleted. When Jake and Finn are finally able to enter the universal source code, Jake combines a spider and a snake into one creature.

Meanwhile, Princess Bubblegum tries to shoot Ice King with her Candy Horse Tranquilizer, but the latter and its darts keep getting deleted. Jake and Finn then decide to imitate the girl who was eating her hair by chomping on Finn's own mane. Ironically, the virus has a gag reflex and throws up all the elements he has consumed. Everyone is back in full form, and Princess Bubblegum destroys Ice King's computer with a bat. The episode ends with the spider-snake biting off Ice King's head.

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This episode explores the themes of mortality, harsh parenting, and dictatorship. In need of an heir who will succeed her on the throne, Princess Bubblegum engineers an immortal pink sphinx using her DNA, whom she names Goliad. She soon becomes a control freak. No matter how many times PB tries to teach her moderation and wisdom, she grows even more ruthless. The only recourse is to create another child, using both PB's and Finn's DNA: Stormo, a male sphinx with an eagle's head. In the end, the two creatures are locked in a mental/spiritual deadlock.

In this Halloween whodunnit special, Jake, Finn, PB, and other Candy People are mysteriously invited to a creepy masquerade dinner at a castle. The host is revealed to be a bloodthirsty ghost who has possessed one of the guests. But which one, exactly? It doesn't take long for them to get paranoid and turn on each other. The mood is pretty spooky, featuring characters that are dismembered, trapped in a painting, or melting...Not to mention the Green Lady, whose image would traumatize Finn for a long time.

The Candy People are sick of being randomly licked and kicked by a wandering stag, but as Finn and Jake attempt to get rid of him, he breaks the former's legs and kicks the latter in the head. When Finn comes to, he finds himself in hospital. Using a wheelchair, he manages to go outside. The Kingdom looks empty at first, until he stumbles upon Jake digging for food in a dumpster. The dog seems oblivious, and keeps on rambling about his birthday surprise; he looks unstable and doesn't recognize him. When bugs start crawling out of Jake's ears, Finn tries to flee, but his friend destroys his wheelchair and knocks him out. Finn wakes up and is able to walk again, and he finds the Candy People taped with orange goo in the sewer. When Jake arrives and gets excited for his "birthday party," Finn punches him in the face and restores him back to sanity. It turns out the stag was behind it all, and Princess Bubblegum and Finn push the creepy animal in the sewer's dirty water.

This episode contains elements reminiscent of Alien, 28 Days Later, It, and Forrest Gump, and was censored in Australia, the UK, Spain, and Italy.

Adventure Time is filled with magical objects, and one of them is the Spoon of Prosperity, which sustains anyone who is able to balance it on their nose. Jake, Finn, and Marceline find the Spoon in a crumbling underground sand city that is filled with the sandy corpses of its former inhabitants. When Jake falls into quicksand and tries to free himself, he accidentally seals them all in. Marceline becomes furious, especially after finding out that the dog ate the red erasers she's brought along (she usually prefers feeding on red-colored objects). Finn leaves the two of them together to go search for potential nourishment, before she goes feral and kills them.

Tension grows as Marceline tells Jake she can already smell his insides, while the dog, who is hungry, too, decides to surround her with underground lava and cook her. Finn gets back right on time, holding a giant "red ruby", but Jake informs him it is actually an emerald, which reveals the boy as mildly colorblind. As Marceline becomes rabid and attacks them, Princess Bubblegum arrives through the ceiling, mounting a giant worm. The vampire drains her of blood, but PB uses the Spoon to nurse herself back to health.

There are many malevolent characters in Adventure Time, but the sorcerer Lich is the embodiment of pure evil and wants complete annihilation. When he escapes his amber prison that is set deep within PB's castle, the princess gives Jake and Finn a magical gauntlet, so they can smack him with it before he replenishes himself from the Well of Power. While they’re on this mission, following the trail of destruction left by the creature, Ice King kidnaps PB. Unfortunately, the Lich is able to reach his lair, free many evil souls, and unleash his skeletal guards on the duo. Army of Darkness and Jason and the Argonauts, anyone? After being briefly possessed by the creature, Finn is finally able to defeat him.

While trying to defeat the Lich once again, Finn and Jake meet Prismo the Wishmaster. After the teenager wishes the Lich "never even ever existed," he finds himself in an alternate universe called Farmworld, where he has a prosthetic arm and loses an eye; his home is burnt down by a gang; Marceline is an old mortal woman; and the Earth gets trapped in a 400-year Ice Age.

In this story exploring nightmares, parental abuse, PTSD, and past lives, Finn is still terrified of the Green Lady who appeared in an earlier episode. He finds out it's the ghost of a girl called Shoko (voiced by Isabelle Fuhrman), who stole an amulet from Princess Bubblegum centuries ago (PB is pretty old but has the body of a teenager). As she was fleeing the Guardians, she fell into radioactive sewage, and crawled out horribly mutated. She died exactly where Finn and Jake's treehouse now stands, and her ghost remained in that neon tentacled shape. Now that he knows her story, Finn frantically digs underneath the kitchen, and finds her skeleton still holding the amulet, which he then returns to PB. This episode's most shocking moments include Shoko's parents cutting off her arm and trading it for a computer.

This story focuses on the suffering of the masses under the new Lemon Earldom's totalitarian regime. When PB receives a message from the Earl and Lemongrab 2 asking for more candy, she sends Finn and Jake over with candy seeds, so they can grow their own. The duo is greeted by hundreds of deformed and starving Lemon people. Then, a giant creature, called Lemonjon, appears and leads them to the dungeon where the two Lemongrabs have locked themselves safely from their citizens; they’ve been using PB's seeds to create more Lemon people, instead of actual food. They take the new seeds from Finn and Jake and still refuse to make candy and feed the starving citizens outside. When they ask Lemonjon to travel to the Candy Kingdom and destroy it once and for all, he refuses, and dissolves himself into a huge lump of candy, so the people may finally find sustenance.

This is a sad episode shedding light on Ice King's backstory. When Finn and Jake ask Marceline why she hangs out with him so often, she reveals it's out of gratitude. About 1000 years ago, right after the Great Mushroom War had wiped out most of humanity, seven-year-old Marcy set out to explore the desolate ruins with the antiquarian Simon Petrikov. They found useless things, like a mailbox with a dead rat and a VHS tape, but not food. When they went into the woods and heard a disturbing noise, Simon wore a mysterious, magical crown he had previously purchased, in an attempt to protect them. By doing so, he suddenly became aggressive, and when the source of the noise turned out to be just a deer, he blasted it with ice. He then took the crown off and made snow for Marcy to play with, and she begged him not to wear it again. The pair kept each other company.

Because he had to wear the crown multiple times again to protect her from malevolent mutated creatures, he transformed into Ice King, and became the antagonist they know today.

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This list concludes with cannibalism. After Flame Princess and Finn breakup, he accompanies PB to the Earldom of Lemongrab. There, they find a now-obese Lemongrab sitting with a miserable Lemongrab 2, who is missing his legs and half his face. One of the show's most disturbing scenes is when The Earl finally proceeds to eat the rest of Lemongrab 2. This dreadful regime can only fall with the help of Lemonhope, a talented young harpist whom Lemongrab keeps locked in a bathroom.

Adventure Timewon eight Primetime Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, three Annie Awards, and two British Academy Children's Awards, to name a few. It spawned two spinoffs: Adventure Time: Distant Lands and Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake.

Lebanese multilingual voice-over artist, copywriter, author/poet, and TV director.