But that’s not really what the episodes were about.
The series finale was billed by Cartoon Network as a war between our heroes, including Finn the Human, Jake the Dog, Princess Bubblegum, Marceline, Lumpy Space Princess, Lemongrab, and Flame Princess, among others, against the evil Gumbald. That’s how Adventure Time’s tenth and final season was stretched out, with Monday night’s four-part “Come Along with Me” bringing an end to Jake and Finn’s adventures in the Land of Ooo. It’s easy to forget things when you get four episodes in September 2017, four episodes in December 2017, four episodes in March 2018, and four episodes in September 2018. This was a series ostensibly for children, but it also had the most complex mythology of any show on television, with an in-universe history that stretched back thousands of years (also, the characters routinely went into space - take that, Game of Thrones) literally hundreds of characters and an airdate schedule with months between new episodes. That should have been the case with Adventure Time, but it wasn’t. You’re either all in, or you get left behind and feel lost.
Facts are important, and it’s much easier to remember Daryl and Carol’s relationship on The Walking Dead than, say, how to not kill someone while performing open-heart surgery, but for certain (most often genre) shows, there’s no such thing as an average fan.
Take it from me, Someone Who Occasionally Gets a Minor Detail About Game of Thrones Wrong: if you’re not familiar with every Targaryen who’s been mentioned on the show AND in the books, you’re going to hear about it. That may sound like an obvious point, but it goes beyond knowing what blocking is, or how to read Live-plus-7 ratings, or even seeing all the shows you’re “supposed” to have seen, like The Wire (OMG YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE WIRE? YOU HAVE TO SEE THE WIRE) - it’s increasingly important to know every single detail about every single character in every single episode. To talk about television, you need to be an expert in television.