Memories of Boom Boom Mountain aired on May 3, 2010, immediately following My Two Favorite People. It was boarded by Sean Jimenez and Bert Youn, who had previously boarded Tree Trunks and Ricardio the Heart Guy together.
Memories of Boom Boom Mountain is Adventure Time at it's goofiest and least serious. The episode appears to be largely an excuse for Sean Jimenez and Bert Youn to create images that they find inherently funny - for example, a bunch of brawlers using animals like geese and rats as boxing gloves.
That's not to say the episode doesn't have a narrative. It's just that the narrative is structured around goofy interludes. In this episode, the basic problem is that a group of brawlers in a village like to roughhouse, but the mountain overlooking the village doesn't like watching them roughhouse because it makes him sad. Finn attempts to remedy this problem through a variety of means: the aforementioned animal boxing gloves, convincing the fighters to pet one another instead of fighting, flipping the mountain 180 degrees. However, all of these schemes ultimately fail.
In this episode, we also learn Finn's traumatic backstory that explains why he's a hero. Of course, this is easily the most ridiculous part of the episode. The sequence consciously pastiches a typical tragic backstory sequence both in the narrative being told and the visuals - note Finn's dramatic separation from the crowd of onlookers:
(It's worth mentioning briefly that Finn's backstory does ultimately answer a lingering question. It's established by this point that Finn and Jake are brothers, but more specifics haven't been forthcoming. Here, it's revealed that Finn was taken in by Jake's parents at a young age.)
Most importantly, however, as a result of his past, Finn has taken a vow help anyone, no matter how small their problems may be. This episode pushes Finn and his naive idealism to the limit and he seems to be on the verge of realizing that it's impossible to help everyone all the time after being barraged with a huge array of contradictory requests for help.
However, the show doesn't follow this route. Instead, it very abruptly stops challenging Finn's desire to help everyone. Finn constructs a Rube Goldberg machine that simultaneously solves every problem. While this is a neat bit of design from Youn and Jimenez, it also opens the episode up to an enormous critique: that the episode doesn't resolve its narrative satisfactorily and it doesn't cause Finn's character to grow. To put it more bluntly, the episode feels like a cop-out.
However, there is a more generous reading. Adventure Time is a show that's very much driven by its aesthetic and philosophical concerns, which at this point I'd happily oversimplify as "active" and "optimistic" respectively. Punishing Finn for his naïveté and desire to help goes against everything Adventure Time stands for. Choosing to provide Finn with a way out can be seen as the show taking a strong philosophical stand against pessimism and cynicism.
Next time: Wizard.
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