That Actually Hurt: Evicted

Evicted aired on May 17, 2010.  It was boarded by Bert Youn and Sean Jimenez, who had previously boarded Tree Trunks, Ricardio the Heart Guy, and Memories of Boom Boom Mountain together.  Youn had also previously co-boarded Wizard.

Evicted, like Prisoners of Love before it, is largely a setup to introduce a major new recurring character who serves as an antagonist.  Unlike Prisoners of Love, however, Evicted doesn't do this by giving the new character a lot of screentime, it does it by making what screentime the character has extremely memorable.

It's quite interesting to compare Marceline and Ice King at this juncture.  Both are basically antagonists we're supposed to feel some degree of sympathy for, but for vastly different reasons.  Ice King routinely does horrible things and feels no remorse, but he's easy to like because he's so clueless and pathetic.  Marceline, however, does horrible things (specifically stealing Finn and Jake's treehouse), but her motivation is unclear - the whole thing may even be an elaborate practical joke.  The audience also doesn't like her out of sympathy.  The audience likes her because she's cool.

This is established very quickly.  She's clearly much more powerful than Finn an Jake, and she's lived a very exciting life full of adventures.  She's also visually framed in really powerful ways.

Here, she's in the exact center of the frame towering over F&J and exuding calm confidence.

However, Marceline isn't the only interesting aspect of this episode.  This episode is the first Adventure Time episode to figure a song as prominent as this one does.  As Adventure Time would later become very well known for its music, it's tempting to look at this episode as the beginning point of all that, but for reasons that will be discussed down the line, this episode is more of an outlier before the trend starts.

The House Hunting Song is very interesting.  On the one hand, it's the classic trick of narrative compression that the show has been using from its first episode; it enables Finn and Jake to go on a long, epic journey and explore six separate potential houses in the space of a minute an a half.  This narrative convenience also allows Adventure Time to use the advantages of music, such as successful tell-don't-show storytelling.  We get a very clear look at Marceline's psyche through the line "I'm not mean, I'm a thousand years old/and I just lost track of my moral code."  This brief duet also allows the show to absorb the use of nested panels from comics, advancing the narrative in two separate ways simultaneously.

All in all, this is a very important episode, both on its own artistic merits and for the season as a whole.  Next time:  City of Thieves.