Get Out Of My Life, Tiffany: My Two Favorite People

My Two Favorite People aired on May 3, 2010.  It was storyboarded by Pen Ward and Kent Osborne.
This episode starts off in pretty typical Adventure Time fashion - Finn and Jake are fighting a science cat and a sword shark and having a great time.  Then something happens that, as of yet, hasn't happened in Adventure Time.  Jake leaves to go see Lady Rainicorn and we follow him, leaving Finn behind.

This is more important than it seems.  Despite receiving basically equal billing with Finn in the title sequence, so far the series has been much more Finn-heavy than Jake-heavy, and this is the first episode that focuses squarely on Jake's character.  Finn, on the other hand, has had several episodes of this nature, with Slumber Party Panic, the Enchiridion, and Ricardio the Heart Guy making one third of the show thus far about Finn specifically.

On the one hand, this episode is strategically necessary.  When writing a show, you've got to prove eventually that all of your primary characters are capable of supporting independent plots on their own.  Here, Ward and Osborne do that with Jake.

Despite the fact that Jake has never been the main focus of an episode before, his personality is pretty well-known by regular viewers of the show by this point.  Jake tends to be much more laid-back than the comparatively high-energy Finn, and more prone to simple actions and passivity.  In this episode, all of these qualities work together to create the worst version of Jake possible before he is ultimately redeemed at the end of the episode.  Jake's simplicity of thought causes him to fail to anticipate any negative consequences of bringing Finn and Lady together, and then his passivity becomes passive-aggressiveness as he is bothered by Finn and Lady's behavior but is not able to deal with it in a healthy way, coming to a head in his plan to make both Lady and Finn jealous by hanging out with Tiffany.

This episode is also the first substantial look at Lady as a character.  While she'd been onscreen before, it was typically with very little context.  In this episode, however, she's shown as an adventurer who can hold her own with Finn and Jake, even if her personality is at this point somewhat thinly sketched.

Next Time:  Memories of Boom Boom Mountain.