Been thinking about Jesse Moynihan’s work. How I’d have criticised it as a fellow creator, rather than as a fan.

In my opinion, the best episode he ever worked on was The Vault, while the biggest miss was Something Big.

Yes, I have much more issues with Breezy, but that wasnt so much to do with its completeness as an episode as it was to do with whether the content belonged in the AT world. If Breezy was in Jesse’s own show, it’d be beautiful, but as an Adventure Time episode it’s plain uncomfortable. Something Big, meanwhile, is… Disappointing in general, and the easiest highlight of Jesse’s weaknesses.

So let’s first talk about why The Vault is Jesse and Ako’s best episode, and perhaps my personal favourite in the series. This ep has decent visual imagery from the start with the Magic Hexagon joke. It has a solid beginning with Finn breaking his house at the ghost vision, leaving us curious. It slowly feeds this curiosity by showing us his past lives. Then we get onto the middle section where we see what happens with Shoko, which has its own tense conclusion, hitting the climax of the ep. Then we have the end, where we are back to Finn retrieving what was lost and returning it.

The entire storyline was filled with a sense of mystery, suspense, and tragedy. Shoko’s story could have worked as a standalone by itself, making her a sympathetic, interesting character to follow, but AT took this several steps beyond… It was *jampacked* with interesting lore that the series had been building up to for years, and it executed this *perfectly*. How could we have expected The Vault to give us an important glimpse of the Candy Kingdom’s creation? To show us the younger Princess, interacting with past iterations of Finn and Jake? To give foreshadowing and hints of what was to come, from Finn’s life as a comet to PB’s amulet? The whole arm shit? It connected so many things together, leaving an overwhelming sense of payoff.

The ep, importantly, was hilarious too. Jesse and Ako’s humor is so *on point* when they work together. Finn vibrating at the beginning and breaking the floorboards at the end, PB bragging about being a technical wonderchild and wanting to do two-arm stuff, Shoko beating up that one bath boy… It made the tragic end to Shoko’s tale hit that much harder, followed by the bittersweet melancholy of Finn making amends in his new life.

Now, let’s talk about Something Big.

Unlike The Vault, where we only knew about the green ghost lady (admittably an exciting premise) and got a huge surprise, Something Big was approached with enormous expectation only to be disappointing to just about everyone. What we knew was that Maja was planning to finally attack the Candy Kingdom, using the magic from PB’s tshirt she traded for in Sky Witch. It was implied that Maja was conducting a huge plan using the enormous magical potential Peebles had given her. When Something Big finally came, the preview promised an awesome battle between Maja and the Candy Kingdom, showing off the episode’s more actionpacked moments and a bit of humor. Excitement hit the roof!!! How was the princess going to deal with this threat that she helped create, even?

Well when the episode came out, it suffered from serious structural, pacing, and tension issues. The start was promising with showing multiple casualties, and pb saying she didnt want to use her ground troops, but it’s hindered by the distracting and pathetic death of Root Beer Guy. This random execution of a character we thought to be important reeked of Homestuck level immersion-breaking insensibilities, and Jack Pendarvis’s weak justification for the decision did not help at all. I’m not sure if Jesse or Jack was responsible for how poorly it was executed though.

Then we cut to a flashback of Maja summoning Darren, and this is where the episode’s structural weaknesses start to show themselves off. The way Darren is summoned is deeply intimidating and Maja’s explanation about the shirt is interesting, but too much time and focus is drawn on Darren himself considering his role later in the episode.

Then we cut back to the candy kingdom, where Colonel Candy Corn employs his defensive strategy and does something cool. Yay, i guess? It’s funny and I enjoy seeing candy people do their thing but once again, the episode loses focus, and doesnt put enough on these guys for it to have any real stakes. Then FINALLY we cut back to Peebles, who realises the boys are gone and decides to defend the kingdom herself. The only truly tense scene in the episode occurs when PB gets knocked off her swan and nearly *erased* by Darren, but this is interrupted before it can be processed by Finn appearing straight out if nowhere with the Ancient Psychic Tandem War Elephant. Now, this is where the ep *really* gets off the rails.

Darren and Eli talk about the old days, which in a better episode could have been an amusing addition. Finn defeats Darren by going up his nose and punching him. Thats it. No drama, no investment, he just does that and it’s over like no big deal. Everybody EXCEPT RBG is healed by miracle juice and doesnt care anymore. Peebles doesnt give a shit either and everyone celebrates, then we go to the Elephant having some sort of breakdown over being nothing but a weapon. Finn peptalks it and he goes to help Mahja recover from a coma, saying you cant light a candle without a match. The ep ends with two cards that go “In memory of Root Beer Guy” and “Crunchy is OK”.

Jesse said that this ep was originally going to be the start of the movie. This makes sense considering how poorly structured it is, and how much content it tries to cram into a short 11 minutes.

The ep’s humor is… Decent at best, not the most lolworthy but ice seen worse. However the biggest criticism I have is, what - and who - was it *about*? It wasnt about Maja cos she just hovered in the background and had no meaningful dialogue. It wasnt about PB, even though it looked like it should have been, because despite the character study Maja gave for her, she had no development, serious dialogue, or real action in this ep. It wasnt about Darren cos he unceremoniously died. It wasnt about the Elephant cos it only appeared for the last few minutes of the ep. It wasnt about the Candy Kingdom cos Finn, Jake, and Eli withdrew any focus from them at the end.

The only theme I can identify that applies to most of these things is that it’s about old people not being able to move on. Peebles harbored the shirt and built the kingdom, empowering them with the sentimentality of her past hopes and regrets. Maja was hellbent on destroying the Candy Kingdom to use one of her dumb spells. Colonel Candy Corn was moping about his exes and not talking to girls his age. Eli and Darren explicitly felt stuck in the past and unable to veer from their original purpose, but after uhh talking to tje goddamn Sun, Eli decides to take a new path. He becomes the candle and the match, caring for the person he comatised until she heals.

This theme is so halfbaked and scattered that theres no way any person would care for it. The characters they use to express it are unimportant and get no focus throughout the episode. Was it really right to hamper the expectations fans had, also crushing many other things like poor root beer guy, just to try expressing this poor idea? Eli could have had their own episode pitched at the very least… Consequentially, Something Big fails to be anything more than a series of poorly connected events with no emotional core and not nearly enough humor to pull it off like Apple Wedding did. It wastes the potential that focusing on Maja vs the Candy Kingdom could have had. We could have seen Maja and Peebles antagonizing each other, elaboration on why the latter carries so much sentimentality into everthing she owns to the extent that it nukes Hambo in comparison… We could have seen more candy people being candy people, the gumball guardians having a non halfassed reason for fainting, Root Beer Guy having a meaningful sacrifice, Darren having a satisfying defeat… The ep wastes avenues for lore, tension, emotion, and character development, wasting it on a poirly built premise that it fails to deliver effectively. Its attempts to poke fun at itself with the cards at the end only serve to further jar the mood and insult the audience, rather than be funny.

This is why Something Big is the worst episode Jesse has ever storyboarded. Future work like Astral Plane, and the previous episode Breezy, despite also having poorly built philosophy and that general author mouthpiece vibe they had cohesive beginnings, middles, and ends, focusing on specific characters and showing at least limited growth. Astral Plane was funny and followed the adventures of numerous people, and Breezy nearly made me cry, so they definitely had some emotions in their core.

The Vault, meanwhile, highlights the best of Jesse’s potential. The philosophy presented in this ep is directly meaningful to a relationship between two major characters, and the payoff delivers perfectly for *seasons* worth of work. It is a x3 combob origin episode and one of the best Adventure Time has ever had to offer, humorously, analytically, and emotionally.