Parents' Guide to Adventure Time: Distant Lands - Wizard City

It's surreal, whimsical, colorful, and charming like all Adventure Time narratives, but the emotional payoff is so slight that it's curious that the beloved series chose to sign off like this. With its themes of letting go and moving on, as well as a focus on main characters Jake and Finn, Together Again seems the more obvious choice to close out the series, or even Obsidian with its messages about authenticity and acceptance, but Pep's story is smaller in scope and breadth, something of a hero's quest/coming-of-age mashup that sees a well-meaning character struggling with what seems like his inevitable monstrous fate.

The story does make a decent metaphorical hook for Adventure Time's longtime fans who, if they were in Cartoon Network's target age group during the show's heyday, are now somewhere in their late teens or '20s, a time when it's easy to relate to characters struggling to find their identity and break away from others' expectations. It feels natural, too, to warm to a story in which a loyal friend is the crucial element needed to complete a dangerous mission. And yet, the smallness of Wizard City's stakes seems ironically un-magical in a story all about magic; the closing out of a series many viewers literally grew up with seems to demand more of a dramatic coda, the one viewers were handed in Together Again, in fact. No matter. Wizard City is still delightful and fun, and goes down as easy as a milkshake; fans will watch, as they should. But maybe watch Together Again after you do, to bring the whole series to an emotionally satisfying conclusion.