I Think He's Trying to Tell Us Something: The Jiggler

The Jiggler aired on April 19, 2010, immediately following the Enchiridion.  It was boarded by Luther McLaurin and Armen Mirzaian and was the debut storyboard for both artists.

Something interesting to note about this episode is that Finn and Jake are the only characters who speak the entire time.  This episode is also the first episode to not introduce or return to any major recurring characters.  Because of this, the episode puts a lot of weight on Finn and Jake.

In order to balance out the Finn/Jake dynamic, the status quo is interrupted by the appearance of the Jiggler, a small dancing creature who doesn't speak.  Finn and Jake quickly adopt it and take it back to the treehouse so it can perform for them whenever they want.  However, things go awry.

In case you're thinking that this sounds like a moral message episode, you're absolutely right,  but there's one important thing to get out of the way first:  the body horror.  McLaurin and Mirzaian go for the total decontextualization of human faces by having Finn and Jake stick eyeballs and eyepatches into the Jiggler's eyes.

Though Adventure Time hinted towards body horror before – Slumber Party Panic in particular - this was the first time that it really went all-out to the extent that it does.  The jiggler's spraying pseudo-blood across Finn and Jake's floor before it accidentally bursts and gets its body everwhere is deeply unpleasant.

This body horror ties perfectly into the moral message of the episode.  At a kind of crude level, it appears to be some kind of updated version of the myth that baby birds' mothers will push them out of the nest if they've touched any humans.  However, a deeper examination of the episode reveals layers about exploitation, friendship, and selfishness.  In particular, these flaws belong to Finn.

Throughout the episode, Finn repeatedly either denies that there are any problems or gives in completely to defeatism and despair.  A lot of this comes from confusion, which the Jiggler's body horror communicates so effectively.  All Finn wanted was essentially a dancing robot, and instead he ended up with a being that has needs which he can't even begin to comprehend.  In this episode, Finn, though somewhat well-intentioned, comes our looking much worse than Jake.

Jake, on other hand, successfully keeps a cool head throughout and is the source of every good action he and Finn take.  For the first time, we see Jake as the primary hero instead of Finn.  This is an interesting way to keep the show fresh, particularly when compared with the last episode, which was all about Finn's heroics.  Here, the show is much more concerned with Jake's calm demeanor and wise actions.

But all of this contradicts another quite recent episode.  Tree Trunks had a moral message, but it was extremely clear how ambivalent the show felt about pushing that moral judgment.  However, these storyboarders appear to have no qualms about putting the moral message directly in the show with no qualifications at all.

This can easily explained by the fact that different storyboarding teams interpret Pen Ward's land of Ooo very differently.  Youn and Jimenez see Pen Ward's vision as fundamentally chaotic, while McLaurin and Mirzaian view appears to bet that of a world getting on with stuff in a pretty mechanical way.

So, despite the theoretical aesthetic unification of the whole series, it's very much possible for things to slip through the cracks.  All in all, this makes for a more interesting show.  Next Time:  Ricardio the Heart Guy.