9x14 Three Buckets

[8.7/10] One of the defining Finn moments for me will always be his refusal to kill an “unaligned ant.” Finn’s not above kicking butt when necessary, but killing, particularly someone who has at least some good in them, is the sort of thing that understandably rocks him to his core. So accidentally killing not only someone who means well, in his own twisted sort of way, but who is a reflection of him, is an understandable heavy thing for him to confront.

There’s a mournfulness, a regret that hangs in the air as Finn makes his way back to the treehouse. Jake immediately knows something’s wrong. BMO recognizes that Finn has killed someone (maybe from her experiences with AMO?). And it’s the perfect sort of shock to keep the show’s main character in after such a harrowing, soul-straining experience.

It reaches that point after Fern tricks Finn into entering some old ruins, and then aims to trap him there so that he can take over as the “real Finn” (having mastered his shapeshifting ability to pull off the impersonation). It’s a nice touch for Finn to get so frustrated so quickly and admit he has abandonment issues that exacerbate his problems. And as I mentioned in my write-up for the last episode, there’s something understandable, if terrifying, about Fern’s pretzel logic here and attempt to take over Finn’s life to try to self-actualize.

Finn manages to solve his problem via his PB-constructed robot arm. In the bit that brings most of the episode’s comedy, Bubblegum’s little voice message to Finn (particularly her little hand-puppet bit) and deadpan responses to Finn’s unrelated questions (“what are you doing?” “I’m a weedwacker!”) brought the laughs in an otherwise heavy episode.

It’s heavy because Finn gets out of sorts enough to attack Fern, because his great goal in life is to make everyone happy and see the best in people, and having to see a version of himself that would not only lock him away but try to take over his life has to be an unmooring experience for the young hero. His pleas that it doesn’t have to be this way resonate, and add another level of tragedy when his hope to avoid such “finality” is interpreted as “fatality” and obliterates his doppelganger. The mysterious wizard who collects the remnants of Fern suggests there’s more to come, but the power of the episode comes from Finn crossing a line he’s never crossed in this way before, even accidentally, and the magnitude of force that event has on this kind, decent kid.