With Adventure Time officially ending with Come Along With Me, the series has been the subject of a lot of touching explorations – which is fitting, seeing how it’s arguably one of the best animated series ever. The power of the lessons of the finale and the series as a whole can’t be understated.

That Beemo is the true savior of the finale speaks volumes about the importance of love to the overall arc of the series. Everything that’s come to define the world of Ooo has always been best interpreted by the little robot built to find and understand love. And by being the narrator of the finale, Beemo shows us that even thousands of years later, the connections we form still hold true in our hearts. The one weapon the heroes discover stops the monsters caused by the chaos god Golb is music. Declaring “My art is a weapon!”, Beemo saves everything by leading everyone in the song “Time Adventure” in the face of nothingness.

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The song is soft and bittersweet. “Time Adventure” isn’t triumphant, but assured; not bellowing, but loving. It’s a song of sorrow about the passage of time and the end of things, but never about defeat. It accepts pain into itself, and makes it vital to the whole. It’s a testament to friendship and memories, and how what we love never goes away, even as life continues on. It’s the message of the whole series, turned into a weapon against the dark.

Beemo’s imagination has been the forefront of his arc, as he’s spent his existence trying to think of exciting dramas and adventures -- lives -- he could experience. But here, he was able to use the life he has to fuel his song. It was the love he had been taught, by his friends and family, that let him try to protect Jake for once and find the way to bring down Golb.

The series has always explored the idea that chaos is the result of nothingness, that the only way to beat that is to find something. Whether it’s a lover, a friend, a song, or just an adventure. Through our connections and our stories, we find order to the discord, crafting a song from the heart that unites us and can save us. Finn codifies this at the end, reflecting that it was hearing his best friend/brother’s voice that helped get him literally out of the belly of the beast.

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For the past week, I've written numerous articles that have essentially formed an extended retrospective of Adventure Time. Many of the elements that played major roles in the finale were the same subjects as those the written observations.

The war gave way to an ethereal retrospective on life, leading a chaos god to show up and bringing about the kind of epic ending we can only hope we get with Game of Thrones. Bonnibel and her uncle Gumbalt learnt how to see everything through one another’s eyes, but he still proved a treacherous backstabber, just another in a series of bad father figures. The happiness she found instead in Marceline was codified with one of the most rewarding kisses in television history. Jake proved that while he has his self-doubts and pains about his children, his empathy and understanding of himself and others let him help bridge the gap between Finn and Fern. All this chaos started when Betty couldn’t deal with Ice King not being Simon anymore, and begun the cycle of pain anew by leaving Simon to try to restore her. And in the end, it was music that saved the world.

Basically, I was right about a lot.

Adventure Time is very special. More than almost any show in show in television history, Adventure Time was able to explore an impossibly wide spectrum of emotion; some episodes were happy, silly, tragic, heart-warming, confusing, everything. Entire episodes would be dedicated to characters we’d never met before, or see again.

RELATED: Adventure Time Producer Addresses Finale’s Bubblegum-Marceline Moment

A snow golem learnt to love a fire pup. A death king was reborn anew, and chose to live his life instead of fulfilling his destiny. A failing marriage got a second chance after the husband died and got to come back (literally) a new man. Families repaired the rifts that broke them, and others learnt to move past that resentment. It’s a world with lost romances and alien alliances, cosmic beings going to war while a sad clown performs a underseen show.

The world of Ooo offered the creators and artists behind the scenes a place where every story could happen. Any story with any character felt right, so long as it reflected the joy and melancholy of existence with pure emotional honesty. On this show, anything could happen, just like in real life.

It’s a hack thing to say the series “was about life, man,” but it’s genuinely difficult to describe Adventure Time in other words. That’s why it mattered. It explored questions about ourselves and the universe. It had a dense lore that was mined for good and evil. It was strangely beautiful, often tragic, but romantic and funny to keep us invested. It was about all our emotions, presented by a magic talking dog with a doofy smile.

RELATED: Adventure Time Revolutionized Fantasy Cartoons With Heart & Humor

Now that it’s gone, it helps to know, as the series chose to remind us in the finale, that the adventure continues. Not just within the world of Ooo - although showing us how our favorite characters lived their lives and how the world later continues on centuries later with a new pair of adventurers was a brilliant touch of finality while keeping with the themes of the show - but in the real world as well.

Adventure Time is a modern classic, its influence already felt. Without it, we don’t get shows like Steven Universe or Star Butterfly. We don’t get the future generations of animation inspired by this series and it’s lessons. It showed us that all stories matter. And while this adventure may be done, another is just beginning...


Adventure Time: The Final Seasons four-DVD collection, which includes the series finale, is on sale now from Cartoon Network. The Adventure Time "Come Along With Me" original soundtrack is available for digital download and streaming on all major platforms.