SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched Adventure Time’s series finale, I’d strongly advise to check this one after you do.

“Come along with me
And the butterflies and bees
We can wander through the forest
And do so as we please…”

For the past eight years, those words signalled the close of an Adventure Time episode, being the ones that open its ending theme song. Therefore, there’s nothing more fitting than Cartoon Network’s hit series concluding its run with the tune, presented in its entirety for the first time onscreen – one of the bittersweet moments that its four-part 40-minute epic finale delivered in spades.

Looking for it online once the episode finished, I was surprised to find out that it’s not titled after its first line (it’s actually called “Island Song”). Instead, “Come Along with Me” became the title of the conclusion of a show whose funny and inventive approach set a high bar for the mainstream animation of the decade and of which – full disclaimer – yours truly is an outspoken fan.

And what a conclusion that was: we got the high-stakes go-for-broke battle sequence that the whole last season was setting up, appearances of characters from all over the Adventure Time universe, true developments of every major player in the proceedings and the show’s creators delivering core messages of the show underlining it all. I was ready to cry, alright, but this was something else.

This is not necessarily an expression. It was “something else” in that everything that I just described occurred in completely different way that would normally be expected, but which fell very much in line with the subversion of tropes the series got famous for.

After a gradual build up, the big battle between Princess Bubblegum and her creation, Gumbald, proved to be a red herring and not the grand apocalyptic event promised for the finale. That turned out to be the appearance of Golb, an evil deity bent on total destruction, spearheaded by Betty, a powerful wizard (and Ice King’s former girlfriend).

In the course of those two back-to-back conflicts, a lot happens in terms of dramatic pay-off to the protagonist duo. Finn, who started the series as a fiery kid always up for combat, gets to end being the major voice against all the battles. Jake, an adult dog that insists in living a teenage life, has to confront his own family issues and the fear of losing his wife and kids in a nightmare sequence. However, it’s in its thematic pathos that “Come Along with Me” truly shines.

What always drove me towards Adventure Time was its ability to be disarmingly bittersweet and always carry darker undertones that one wouldn’t expect from a bright-coloured Cartoon Network production full of princesses, unicorns and wizards.

During its run, characters were traumatised, cursed, mutilated (Finn ended the episode without an arm) and even killed. Some relationships between them never healed. Despite being a show populated by magical and, to a point, even silly-looking creatures, we cared a lot about them because they were flawed in a way they can rarely be on children-aimed television.

If you never watched the series, stuck to this spoiler-full article nonetheless and are finding the above description rather bleak, don’t get me wrong: the real magic of Adventure Time is showing young audiences that your journey is worth making regardless of the flaws and obstacles. That’s why so much of the finale wasn’t dedicated to the battles themselves, but rather to the characters’ experience in them.

Complementing this lesson on the value of the quest is BMO, who stars in one of the most heart-touching moments of the show. When all seems lost, he sings the song “Time Adventure” to calm Jake, whose chorus goes:

“Will happen, happening, happened?
“Will happen, happening, happened?
And we will happen again and again
‘Cause you and I will always be back then”

It’s a tune about endings, fitting for a series finale, but also one about the lack thereof, about life perennially in the present and about how the universe’s tendency for repetition means that the moments we treasure never truly end and we will always have the chance of living them again.

While we never find out what caused the destruction of Earth a thousand years before it became the Land of Ooo nor what eventually ended that world and started something else, we discover that this is going to keep happening forever, because that’s the way it is… and it’s alright.

In the flash-forward that frames the story, Finn and Jake are not alive anymore, but are spiritually survived in Shermy and Beth – another kids’ duo with a penchant for adventure and magic. BMO, as a robot, is intact albeit world-weary, but all around him, lots of characters we knew live on as different versions of themselves, proving that life, in the grand scheme of things, is not a composer as much as a remixer, so to speak.

So when we say there’s a side of us that never stopped being a child, for instance, that might actually be the case. We might still be children watching cartoons on Saturday mornings. We might also be people who endured battles and learned that the real world always come with a bit of pain. In its disguised simplicity, Adventure Time was a show made for these both versions of us and it was wise enough to leave us knowing that, in fact, it never really “was”. It keeps on being, in a different form, and we go along with it.