At first, it feels like just another episode of Adventure Time, with the old opening credits and title cards making a return, the opening five or 10 minutes going back to a much older status quo where Finn still has both arms and his old yellow sword. Together Again is somewhat surprising in its immediate nostalgia, which at first separates it from the other vignettes of Distant Lands. The third special, Together Again, recently released on HBO Max, doesn’t quite seek to fill in the gaps as it does look to provide one last bit of emotional closure for the series and its fans, and miraculously manages to do so without stepping on the satisfying ambiguity and room for imagination left by Season 10’s ending. But his circumstances were left unclear, and Jake conspicuously absent, with one of his daughters appearing in his place.

In terms of the other main players, our most recent glimpse of Finn came at the tail end of Obsidian-having clearly aged a lot since the show’s end, in a striking emphasis of Princess Bubblegum and Marceline’s longevity-sporting a beard and a glorious chest tattoo of Jake.

Distant Lands as a whole does give the show's beloved supporting cast some charming postscript, briefly checking in on some fan favorites: Peppermint Butler is still a creepy weirdo, Choose Goose is carting around illegal moisturizer, later found judged for rhyme crimes.

Obsidian, the second, gave Princess Bubblegum and Marceline’s complicated, often painful, and eons-spanning romantic relationship the kind of elaboration that the original show never did, even when it wanted to. BMO is still the star of their own show, tumbling into weird adventures by accident in the first of these new elongated episodes, simply titled BMO. Little epilogues for each set of characters feel like legends being passed down about beloved characters, imagining what they were up to between their time and the far future we saw at the show’s conclusion. So it doesn’t feel like a disservice or an undermining of closure for HBO Max's three-part special Distant Lands to reopen the book-even the framing feels like it matches the perspective of that ending. By handing off the torch to new characters living hundreds of years after the time of Finn and Jake, the story felt open-ended but complete: Adventure Time is, effectively, forever. Adventure Time’s bittersweet 2018 ending, 'Come Along With Me,' was perfect, an ode to the act of storytelling as it passed the tales of the Land of Ooo's heroes onto a generation untold years into the future.

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