Review: Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake “Cake the Cat; Prismo the Wishmaker”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Cake emerges in Simon’s room, much to his surprise, and flees into Ooo, gaining the ability to talk from the same kind of collar that Lady Rainicorn briefly used. Simon tries opening a portal once more, which allows Fionna to enter Ooo as well, and she and Cake are soon reunited by Astrid, a fan of the Fionna and Cake stories Ice King used to write. Then they are taken to Prismo the Wishmaker, who reveals that he actually put the ideas for Fionna and Cake into Ice King’s mind, but when Ice King became Simon, Fionna’s world lost its magic and became ordinary. This meeting is interrupted by the arrival of Scarab, a being which wishes to take Prismo’s powers and title. Fionna, Cake, and Simon are all taken to Farmworld, another alternate universe created in a previous Adventure Time episode, and Simon determines his next step must be to become the Ice King again.

OUR TAKE

Before we get into things, I just wanted to point out that due to some unfortunate agent shenanigans, we were deprived of getting Kumail Nanjiani back as Prismo, which hopefully gets rectified if Prismo gets a future appearance.

Onto the episodes themselves, we finally complete the passing the threshold and get Fionna to join Cake outside of her humdrum world, which we now know used to be the world of Ice King’s fanfictions but became more normal once he lost his magic. Incidentally, a lot of that first episode reminded me of Bee and Puppycat, another show about a 20-something woman who can’t hold down a job and has a magic pet (and created by Natasha Allegri, who also made the designs for Fionna and Cake!). But while that focused on traveling to and from magical worlds to come back to the normal, it seems the goal here is to restore the magic within the seemingly normal world, as well as running from a weird beetle man. It’s still actually hard to tell where this show is going for any of its major characters, which does keep me interested, though I am wary of where it might lead as one could argue that this sequel/spin-off might not have needed to be made.

Also definitely feeling the current obsession with multiverse stories all around this. Multiple universes is certainly something Adventure Time dabbled in, specifically with the introduction of Prismo and the brief use of Farmworld (that came about when Finn wished the Lich never existed), but the use of the word “crossover” feels like just another word for the more often used “doppelganger” or “variant” when referring to an alternate version of a character appearing in a different universe than they should be. That said, I would definitely be down for this Fionna to meet Finn, especially since this version of Fionna doesn’t really have much experience adventuring (though she has the instincts for it) and has had a very different life than Finn, so the two would probably bounce off each other pretty well. As for Simon, his story continues to be one of tragedy as his fate seems to put him on a crash course with the crown once again. Hard to believe we’re almost halfway through the season already but that’s what happens when you go to two episodes a week for some reason. See ya then!