Jake awakens from a prophetic croak dream involving a space shuttle, a banana man, and death via asphyxiation. While Jake calmly accepts his mortality, Finn begins to worry for his safety when elements of the dream start appearing in real life. Finn will do anything to prevent the dream from coming to pass, even if it involves hurting their peculiar new neighbor.
This week's episode is certainly on the odder side of the Adventure Time spectrum of weirdness, starting off with an bizarre dream sequence and going off on disquietingly calm tangent about death. Jake's placid acceptance of his fate leads to a big stack of great lines from an incredulous Finn, and it's fun to watch Jake's dream slowly unfold into reality through unexpected ways. While the episode disappointingly didn't go in the most interesting direction it could have gone, I still can't say it was a predictable or unfunny way to go.
The only major disappointment in the episode for me was the appearance of Weird Al Yankovic, or rather, the lack thereof. Yankovic plays the banana man, an aspiring astronaut and Finn and Jake's new neighbor. While the episode revolves around the banana man, his presence, and his hobbies, he feels like a bystander in his own episode. Aside from two or three lines, the most we ever see him do in the episode is work out to a fitness tape and provide the set-up to a really visually striking moment involving broken glass (and seizure-inducing flashing lights). It's almost criminal to see Weird Al so underused, and it's a huge missed opportunity that hurts the episode as a whole. "The New Frontier" is a good episode that represents everything offbeat and wonderful about Adventure Time that you rarely see on other shows today, but I can't help but think about what could have been.
