The New Frontier

"The New Frontier" is the eighteenth episode in season three of Adventure Time.

Synopsis
Finn tries to stop Jake from embracing a dream that he believes foretells his final demise.

Plot
Jake has a Croak Dream involving a rocket ship and a Banana Man in space. He runs out of air after holding his breath too long and sees the Cosmic Owl. After he wakes up and tells Finn about the dream, they hear someone knocking on the door. Finn looks out the window and sees the Banana Man. Finn freaks out and throws Jake behind a large container, and hides there with Jake and tells him that the Banana Man is there. Finn looks outside again to see what he's doing. They decide to follow him to his house after he begins to walk away from the Tree Fort, and across the Grass Lands. They get to his house and go up to the Banana Mans window when he walks into his house. They see him turn on the T.V. and put on a helmet just like the one seen by Jake in his dream. He starts to dance along to what was on. Finn pulls out a crossbow and an arrow from his backpack, and uses some type of magic that creates fire when you rub your hands together, and blow in between your hands and small flames form. This sets the arrow on fire. After firing arrows at him to try to scare him away, the arrow that they used flies into the back of his home, and when Finn and Jake go there to get it they find his rocket ship in his backyard. Jake tries to ride it, despite Finn trying to convince him not to, because he says it's his destiny. The Banana Man walks into the backyard (holding glass, which was probably for the window) and sees them fighting on the floor. The rocket fails to launch since it didn't have enough dynamite to blast off. The Banana Men drops his plate on glass on the ground, shattering it (in its own cutaway,) which in conjunction with the windowless vessel featured in the croak dream suggests that Finn's attempt to avert Jake's fate might actually have sealed it. When the ship lands on the ground it creates a hole, which Jake, Finn, and the Banana Man fall into. They fall into a pool of water which re-creates Jake's dream, only Finn is there so the Croak Dream does not come true. They find out that the Banana Man only wanted to borrow some sugar. After that, Jake then says that his Croak Dream wasn't real; unless he didn't die since Finn was with him this time, meaning it was destined to happen again. The episode ends with Finn running after Jake, so that his Croak Dream would never come true. In the final scene, The Banana Man starts dancing along.

Characters
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Major Characters

 * Finn
 * Jake
 * Banana Man

Minor Characters

 * Beemo
 * Cosmic Owl
 * Glob (mentioned)
 * Snail

Trivia

 * Banana Man is voiced by Weird Al Yankovic.
 * This episode was originally titled "The Croak List," but apparently it was "too spoilerish" according to Adam Muto.
 * Jake is comfortable with dying while in Jake vs Me-mow he agrees to kill Wildberry Princess to save his own life.
 * The point is that Jake is comfortable with dying in this circumstance because he thinks its pre-destined due to a vision he had in his dreams. With Me-mow and other instances when his life was in danger, he didn't accept it as pre-destined so he tried to avoid it.
 * When Finn tells Jake that the person outside is the Banana Man, the ears in his hat bend down as if they were real (animal) ears.
 * The final scene of the randomly-dancing Banana Man is a possible reference to the internet phenomenon the "Dancing Banana," which involves an animation of a dancing banana set to the song "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" by the Buckwheat Boyz.
 * Jake says that rockets haven't been reinvented yet, meaning they were destroyed in the past and technology hasn't advanced far enough to rebuild them. This is likely a result of The Mushroom Wars.
 * The scene where Finn, Jake, and the Banana Man are free-falling into the water below in an open cavern could be a reference to the end of the fight scene intro between Gandalf the Grey and the Balrog from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers movie.
 * When Jake had the design of him, Banana man and Finn on his stomach, Finn's design resembled Bueno the Bear.
 * When Finn says that he needs to get the arrow that flew astray, the crossbow disappears from when it was once at his feet in the grass.
 * This episode is the first to reveal aspects of Finn and Jake's "religion", in which after dying ones soul stands before Glob while Glob tallies their deeds and decides if the soul is worthy of entering Glob World.
 * Though, it was hinted in "No One Can Hear You" when Finn screamed "IS EVERYONE AT CHURCH? WORSHIPING GLOB?"
 * Jake appears to be cross-eyed when Finn is setting the arrow on fire.
 * Finn nearly suffocates to death in this episode.
 * This is the second time Finn and Jake have combined two completely different foods, ice cream and pizza. The first was making an everything burrito.
 * This is the first episode where viewers see Finn having a weapon other than a sword. His choice of weapon in this episode was a bow and arrow.

Analysis

 * Jake's croak dream shows him floating in space near a perfectly spherical Earth, akin to the Earth prior to the Mushroom War (and not the true Earth as seen from space in The Real You). Since the "Earth" seen in Jake's dream actually turned out to be a miniature model of a planet, it's possible that the model was made before the Mushroom War. If the model was made by Banana Man or someone else in recent times, it can easily be explained that since no one has been in space since the fall of civilization due to the Mushroom War, no one would realize the planet's true shape and could imagine that Earth remains a big sphere as it always has been. Space travel was not possible because rocketships hadn't been "re-invented yet"
 * Either that, or he viewed it at a different angle were the giant crater wasn't seen.
 * Finn might have actually prevented the croak dream from happening. They could have found the banana man later and a similar sequence of events could have happened to lead to Jake dying.
 * The ending scenes have similarities to the season one episode Tree Trunks where Tree Trunks was believed to have died. In the penultimate scene Banana Man is seen to be unconscious or dead, the latter possibility supporting that Jake had cheated death.