*The only real way I can talk about this episode at all is by including a major spoiler for the end of episode 8. Consider yourself warned.*
It’s the penultimate episode of the season! The middle of the season, while exciting and entertaining, has fallen into a routine of “travel to new world, search for the crown, get entangled in an adventure, repeat.” Here, though, the different threads start coming together in a big way before we head into the finale.
At the end of episode 8 (which I didn’t review,) Fionna and Cake just barely managed to escape the Scarab. They’re now back in their own world in Simon’s mind, but although they finally found a version of the Ice King crown they could use, the world isn’t yet magical. As Fionna meets up with Gary and Marshall, catching them up on her adventures, she starts to wonder whether their world should change.
When Fionna and Cake first get back to their world, they have a shared dream that its magic has been restored but that it’s gone horribly wrong. This greatly informs Fionna’s doubts, along with her growing understanding of what wearing the cursed crown will do to Simon. But Cake, who’s retained her voice and abilities from the Land of Ooo, is all in on bringing the magic back.
From inside Simon’s head, though, there’s not much they can do about it. Whether or not their world becomes magical, it depends on his choice with the crown. But while he’s eager to do his part, he very much has his own thing going on right now. It involves the physical embodiment of Chaos, which is also the lost lover he’s been mourning throughout the series—I’m still a bit sketchy on these details, and I assume there’s a lot more backstory between Simon and Betty in the original series. Standing before this immense being, Simon softly asks, “Betty, are you in there, even a little?”
Even though this episode features a fair amount of both Gary and Marshall, neither Andrew Rannells nor Donald Glover have that much to really do. They’re mainly just there to react to what Fionna and Cake are telling them, trying to wrap their heads around it. “So you’re not a robot; you’re a magic cat?” Gary asks Cake. And as things inevitably go sideways, they pitch in to help, more or less as a unit.
Fionna and Cake’s opening shared dream gives us a look at alternate versions of Gary and Marshall, but this doesn’t give the actors much to do either, since it leans more on the animation than the dialogue. Rannells only has a few lines as the alternate Gary.
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