Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Season 11

At long last, I've come to the end of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. And - fuck me, this is can't possibly be true - I actually really enjoyed this season. It's almost as if knowing I was finally at the end allowed me to just breathe out, relax, and wax nostalgic about a show I long, long ago considered one of my favorites. Or maybe there was actually an uptick in quality here at the end. Who knows?

But let me go over, real quick, some of the synopses from this nine-episode final bow.

The opener's a claymation episode featuring Justin Roiland as an Abaraham Lincoln-esque hot dog arguing about his product placement contract. If that sounds absurd to you, come on, have you seen this show? I mean, yes, it is - but the claymation aspect is a very welcome change.

Another episode has the cast of a Dora the Explorer knock-off show up at the Aqua Teens' house. In short order it's made clear that they're running an amateur "barely legal" porn ring and, of course, Carl's its biggest fan.

Then there's one where Carl's mom has terminal lung cancer and needs to enter hospice care. Yeah, Aqua Teen goes there. The show with the talking cup and the 8-bit moon aliens. (She ends up turning into a hyperactive Native American. Because, of course, the show with the talking cup and the 8-bit moon aliens goes there.)

But the one I really want to spend some time pontificating on is the penultimate episode. It's twenty-two minutes long - double-length - and it's called "The Last One Forever and Ever." I remember back when I actually watched and liked this show, somewhere back in the second or third season, wanting there to be one - just one, that'd be the joke - episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force played straight. Like just, out of nowhere, an episode where Shake and Frylock and Meatwad are these badass space warrior bounty hunters like they sort of appear to be in the opening credits. And, lo and behold, that's almost exactly what this episode is! The trio journeys to a faraway planet in order to go on an undersea expedition to get a new jewel from a Mother Clam in order to save Frylock's life. It isn't played perfectly straight or anything - Shake's still an asshole, Meatwad's still an innocent child, Frylock's still over it all, Carl's still a hapless drunk loser - but they legitimately go out and have a high-stakes adventure... and die! They all die! And not in the way they die every other episode, but like, they full-on get killed during their adventure. All of them but Meatwad, who, in an epilogue, grows up and marries a woman and has hideous meat-human hybrid children with her and then grows old himself. It's... poignant? In a way Aqua Teen Hunger Force ought never to have been?

And then - psych! - the actual last episode comes on, and it's just an eleven minute standard fuck-around. Just Shake, Meatwad, and Frylock up to their same old bullshit, with Shake fucking with Meatwad and Frylock mostly staying out of it. And Carl's there, being a jackass. And they all become immortal, or something, but not really, or maybe really, but none of it matters because the show's over, folks. And not a year too soon!