Bad Timing (Adventure Time)

Background

Adventure Time follows the adventures of principal characters Finn the Human, aged 16, and Jake the Dog. Recurring characters featured in "Bad Timing" include Princess Bubblegum and Lumpy Space Princess. As she governs her kingdom of candy people, Bubblegum works as a scientist on varying experiments. Meanwhile, Lumpy (Pendleton Ward), portrayed as a valley girl, is the source of drama due to her arrogant personality and shallow relationships with others.

Plot

Princess Bubblegum demonstrates to company a device capable of time travel. Lumpy Space Princess comes in and demands Bubblegum transport Lumpy back to when she and her ex were still in love. Bubblegum explains that the machine is only capable of logging molecules of a given entity. Lumpy attacks her, and Bubblegum forces her to leave.

Lamenting at a bar, she meets Johnnie (Mark Proksch), a former mate at their secondary school. Johnnie confesses his anxiety regarding a scheduled interview with Bubblegum for a business venture. Lumpy advises that he fix his posture as to appear more confident. Johnnie thanks Lumpy for her advice and invites her to his complex. There, the two fall in love and share good nights. When Lumpy finds Johnnie absent in the morning, she suspects that he, like her ex, has abandoned her. Much to her relief, she finds him cooking breakfast in his kitchen. When he returns from the interview, he reveals he has been invited to a separate meeting with Bubblegum at her castle. Lumpy asks that she appear with him, but Johnnie says the meeting is private. Supposing Bubblegum has stolen his heart, Lumpy leaves in a fit of rage.

Delivering a monologue on the passion necessary for love, Lumpy hurls a Molotov cocktail and hot-wiring a gas truck into the castle. Bubblegum considers its impact an attack on her kingdom and tells Johnnie to hide at the foot of their desk. When Lumpy finds Johnnie, she uses the device on him, attempting to revert him to when he loved her. Johnnie disappears; when Bubblegum figures out what has happened, she informs Lumpy that by failing to log his molecules, he no longer exists as part of their universe. To avoid having to grieve, Lumpy asks Bubblegum to use the device, properly, on her. Erased of her memory past her attacking Bubblegum, Lumpy storms out. Bubblegum pours herself a drink.

Production

This episode is the forty-ninth from the fifth season of Adventure Time. Visually, the episode is framed having the important events of the story occur in its center, bordered circularly. Small polygonal creatures appear in the margins of the outer frame. Film and television critic Eric Kohn, in IndieWire, dubbed the inner frame a time bubble, absorbing the creatures Bubblegum experiments on with the time travel device. Following Lumpy having her memory erased in the episode, Johnnie appears in the outer frame.

"Bad Timing" was written by Pendleton Ward and Kent Osborne. They previously collaborated with Jack Pendarvis and Adam Muto to come up with the idea for the episode, with the former duo adapting that to a storyboard. The creator of Adventure Time, Ward resigned from his occupation as its runner during production of the season. Osborne is the head of story. Alluding to the episode, for Hulu, Muto and Osborne summarized it as Lumpy confounding the concept of time travel. The writers related the episode to "one of those situations where you run into someone from high school and you're like, 'Woah, why didn't I ever notice you before?'" Alluded to in this episode, the one it precedes involves time travel as well.

Release and reception

Cartoon Network originally aired "Bad Timing" on March 3, 2014. Over a million and a half people saw the episode live on broadcast. Television critic Emily Nussbaum gave this episode praise in The New Yorker, comparing it to a fairy tale characterized by laughter and sorrow. Kohn called its mood happy yet miserable the same, evoking more emotions as a whole than even the preceding episode. The A.V. Club writer Oliver Sava gave it an A grade, finding it, like Kohn, emotionally intense. Kohn praised the episode for supplying Lumpy, a usually arrogant character, with a tragic circumstance. Sava saw the character as more explored that way. Nussbaum, who considered the episode proof of her intricacy as a character, wrote that Lumpy appropriately shows pathos.

Sava specifically lauded the monologue delivered by Lumpy for showing her consistent strength that makes her so admirable. He further praised how the episode was capable of condensing mature topics for children the show is aimed at in a humorous way. Kohn opined the episode helms the "waters of eroticism" responsibly. In the Adventure Time–dedicated podcast Conversation Parade, hosted by John Moe and Open Mike Eagle, Moe found Johnnie written so "incredibly complicated, whimsy, and sad" that he performed – with the direction of guest Osborne – some of his lines on the podcast.

Kohn regarded its visuals as the pinnacle of the show. Sava wrote that the notion of time being a flat circle could have inspired the circular shape of the inner frame. He noted the use of color beyond the circle as a way to convey the many emotions evoked for the whole of the episode. Ignoring this device, Sava saw its use as humorous diversions while it contributed to the splendor. Nussbaum described the creatures appearing in the outer frame as annotative and a mute chorus, suggesting they live in a parallel universe of both connection and isolation. The episode was later released on DVD twice, first in the year of that broadcast, as part of the Princess Day box set, and later in 2015, as part of a box set for the complete fifth season. Home video critic Justin Remer called "Bad Timing" "surprisingly devastating" in DVD Talk. Kohn summed up the episode's climax as the pièce de résistance of Adventure Time.