This is the first story to air on April 12, 2010. It's called Prisoners of Love and was boarded by Adam Muto and Pendleton Ward.
This itself is interesting. So far, Muto has been a co-boarder in every Adventure Time episode we've seen. This has the odd effect of making Muto's contributions to the show very hard to determine at this point, but we'll look into that more later.
The most significant thing about Prisoners of Love is the degree to which it's a reconfiguration of the original pilot. Both the snow golem and the Iceclops from the pilot make brief cameos here, as does a sequence in which Finn and Jake sled down a snowy hill accompanied by penguins. The plot follows a similar trajectory - Finn and Jake rescue princesses from the Ice King.
The major difference, however, is that the story is restructured to put the Ice King in the spotlight. He is no longer the mustache-twirling fantasy pastiche of the pilot; instead, he's given a very substantial character overhaul. Crucial to this is the casting of a new voice actor. Tom Kenny, most famous as the voice of Spongebob, lends the Ice King a sort of pathetic likability. Despite the fact that he is, as the Cosmic Owl at the end of this episode puts it, a psychopath, Kenny's performance draws out the most sympathetic aspects of the Ice King right from the beginning – something very valuable in a primary antagonist.
The overhaul is not just limited to the voice, however. In the pilot, the main joke about the Ice King was that he was a campy and overplayed fantasy villain, speaking in faux-medieval style and being directly and knowingly malevolent. Here, the joke about the Ice King becomes the juxtaposition between his melodramatic fantasy role as an evil ice sorcerer and the banal reality of his personality and actions. Despite the fact that he rules over an icy kingdom and kidnaps princesses, the Ice King is the kind of guy who fishes through trail mix for yogurt chips and complains about his bad back. In fact, he seems completely unable to comprehend the idea that he's done anything wrong in kidnapping the princesses in the first place.
This leads to the most straightforward critique of the episode – its casual sexism. While typically I think Adventure Time does interesting stuff politically (moreso in the later seasons), this is a major problem here. All the princesses are portrayed as helpless and incapable of doing anything, and it takes the masculine heroes Finn & Jake to rescue them. One of the only significant lines from this episode's large list of female characters is Slime Princess asking Finn to marry her. At this point, the show is still only reiterating and pastiching concepts from genre fiction and not yet critiquing them.
To move away from negativity, however, this episode's narrative is played out in a vastly different way than in the previous two episodes we've seen. While both of those stories had breakneck paces and thrilling adventure, the vast majority of this episode involves out heroes trapped in an icy prison cell. In other words, the show completely abandons narrative compression here, instead just choosing a very simple and basic story that is capable of working a framework for character building. This is the first suggestion that Adventure Time has other things in its narrative toolbox than compression, and also proves that a character piece can be fit into an 11 minute runtime.
Ultimately, this is a flawed episode, but an extremely ambitious and important one. Next Time: Tree Trunks.
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