It’s always sad when your favorite show ends. And I was heartbroken when my favorite show, Adventure Time, ended. I became a fan of the show starting in Season 7, and have been a huge follower ever since. The show has been going for 8 years, and to me, it never took a noticeable drop in quality. When the show ended, I set aside my day in order to watch it. So was it up to snuff with the rest of the series? Or was it a disappointment? Let’s find out.

Well, let me start by saying that this set of episodes would most likely make little sense to any outside viewers who haven’t watched the previous seasons. That wasn’t a problem for me, but I can understand why it would be for other viewers. The lore of this show is incredibly complicated, so much in fact that Cartoon Network put obnoxious explanations that went over the meaning of everything in the episode before commercials.

Before the finale began, the main villain was hyped up to be Uncle Gumbald, Princess Bubblegum’s dictator uncle. The trailers made it appear to be some epic war between Gumbald and The Candy Kingdom. The war happened for the first half… and then stopped abruptly to make way for the real final conflict. The war felt inconsequential and unneeded like the writers had introduced a villain and completely forgot about him, only to remember and hastily insert him into the finale. Although it featured some nice visuals and had the funniest jokes in the finale, the 1st half felt pointless. Pair that with the fact that Gumbald isn’t a very interesting villain, and you have a filler first few episodes. I would have been fine if the Gumblad war was the whole finale, but ending it midway through and abandoning the story thread was disappointing, to say the least. Most of the Gumbald battle is set in a trippy dreamscape, which was a decent idea, but overall the landscape seems like a retread of the show’s previous dream episodes.

It’s important to note that the finale is book-ended by BMO telling the story to Shermy and Beth, two futuristic characters with similar designs as Finn and Jake. This was a nice way of showing the cyclical nature of the show and worked with the glimpses into the future that we see in the series. (It also gives the show room for a spin-off.)

After the Gumbald conflict ends abruptly, another villain shows up, this time an interdimensional creature known as Golb, who was teased in a few previous episodes (but never really had a full appearance). Golb was honestly a strange choice for a final enemy, as he was barely even a character. I was honestly expecting The Lich, a more major and overall more fleshed out villain, to be the big bad, but he wasn’t even brought up. This was one of the more disappointing aspects of the series ending, as The Lich could’ve been a sort of secondary assistant to Golb, and I felt like it was a bit of a missed opportunity.

Golb was eventually defeated by all the characters singing a song in unison, and while this felt a little cheesy, it actually fit well with the show, seeing as how this idea isn’t completely out of nowhere for the show. In a great sequence drawn in what appeared to be charcoal, Glob is defeated. After this, our heroes are left alone in the battlefield, reeling over the events. What follows is a montage recapping what happened to these characters after the finale, and it is definitely the best part of the episode. As this montage played out (set to the credits music heard at the end of every episode) I admit I started to cry. We see a denouement to almost every character in the show, and as someone who can name every single episode, this was great.

Overall, this finale was an excellent close to a series that has been a huge part of my life, and although it had several flaws, I felt satisfied by this finale.