In this episode and many others, Ice King’s bumbling largely stems from the way he feels slightly out of sync with the rest of the world. Ice King’s creepy spying was a sort of rudimentary attempt at self-help, at learning the secret of happiness. The reason? Because Ice King is miserable and Finn and Jake always seem to be so effortlessly happy. In season two’s “The Eyes,” Finn and Jake spend a sleepless night haunted by a creepy-looking horse staring into their souls - only to discover that the observer is actually Ice King in an inflatable horse costume. But as Adventure Time went on, it became clear that Ice King wasn’t just, or even mostly, malicious. They were living in a cartoonish version of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, so there had to be an evil wizard. In those early episodes, Finn and Jake were trying their hardest to be adventurers, righting wrongs and saving princesses. Even Ice King’s organs were evil: After a failed experiment, his heart gained sentience, left his body, and became a villain of its own known as Ricardio the Heart Guy, voiced by George Takei. As a recurring villain, Ice King could be menacing when he tried, but there was never any doubt that Finn and Jake would take him down. An old, blue-skinned man with a magic crown and a mean streak, he spent most of his time flying around the Land of Ooo trying to kidnap one of the other main characters, Candy Kingdom ruler Princess Bubblegum - or failing that, any of the many, many other princesses in the show’s world. When the show began in 2010, Ice King was a comically exaggerated kids’ TV antagonist. But Adventure Time’s best character was the one who seemingly had the least depth, at least at first: Ice King. Episodes focused on everyone from the too-cool Marceline the Vampire Queen and the scientifically gifted, ethically confused Princess Bubblegum, to largely one-off goof characters, like aspiring mystery writer Root Beer Guy and unlucky criminal Princess Cookies.
The Cartoon Network show - which airs its final episode Monday night - got a lot of mileage out of its central duo of Finn and Jake, of course, but one of its central strengths was the way that it didn’t really need them to keep things moving. Adventure Time was never at a loss for memorable characters.
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