He does look like Glenn Branca, come to think of it…

I was kinda sad they gave Lou Avery a weird appearance in this half-season but never explained what happened to Jim Cutler.

If they'd made the scrapped movie it could've been AT's "Space Seed".

My assumption was that this episode indicated that there was more going on with Gunter than we first thought: ie, she wasn't always a penguin, and all the penguin-ness is just the result of a sort of involuntary behavioral curse like whatever drives the Ice King to kidnap princesses.

I think Gunter and the Ice King are probably a lot more alike than most people guessed.

I have a feeling this episode is supposed to tie into the miniseries that's coming up, solely because I notice that Andy & Cole have tended to get the occasional backstory / mythos eps for the most part this season.

I think it's pretty self-contained.

In fairness, given what I'd heard about the cast and departure of Cary Fukunaga, I was mostly just hoping that they'd double down on the occult stuff and swing for pure camp.

President Porpoise actually has an episode queued up in Season 7.

Oh my god, of course, how could I have missed it? They explicitly mentioned self-actualization!

Yeah, that creepy Gumball Guardian stasis chamber was terrifying.

and KKW's magic teleport sparkles, I think.

This episode was really manic and had a lot of fun puncturing the cutesy absurdism of the Grayble stories with something more bizarre and twisted (Gunter just dropping a brick after the Ice King discovers his broken leg was hilarious and ridiculous). But I still felt a bit let down by the Cuber sections, mostly…

Speculatively calling that the Ice King seen in the far future is actually the Ancient Life-Giving Magi.

I love the line delivery for that one.

The stuff with Diana's ex felt weirdly reminiscent of True Detective.

Roger Sterling is the spitting image of Maurice Ravel.

I think if "Connie putting herself in danger" becomes a big theme (which it likely will, although probably not in this episode) the conflict will come from her parents.

I have to wonder a bit about that episode. It feels weird to totally subvert an episode premise into something silly and poignant (in "Steven the Sword Fighter") and then play something very similar straight. I dunno how they're going to tie the episode back into Steven: they obviously wouldn't have him be jealous,…

It's weird. Even though Steven is supposedly putting his life in danger on every mission, the show exists in a sort of videogame-y unreality where you have infinite lives and you can't just game over from falling off the edge of the stage.