SPOILER ALERT: The next piece comprises spoilers for the collection finale of “Huge Mouth,” now streaming on Netflix.

It could shock you to be taught that “Huge Mouth,” the Netflix animated collection chronicling a bunch of youngsters’ bodily and emotional maturation, concludes its eight-season run with out one in all its protagonists having intercourse. Then once more, one in all many classes “Huge Mouth” imparted to its viewership — some effectively previous the travails of puberty, some simply on their cusp — is that intercourse is an expansive thought. With Hormone Monsters, the present’s signature metaphor and comedian creation, as their Virgils, the characters of “Huge Mouth” have explored all the things from oral intercourse to erotica to sufficient masturbation to make the whole premise a smirking play on “coming of age” even with out extra typical congress. However in the long run, all of the gleeful obscenity took a backseat to the story’s true topic: the terrifying strategy of rising up.

“Huge Mouth” finally aired for almost a decade, an eternity within the streaming age; in actual fact, the present wraps its tenure because the longest-running scripted authentic on Netflix, beating out “Grace and Frankie.” And but the artistic group — comic Nick Kroll and his childhood good friend Andrew Goldberg, working with married duo Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett — averted the frozen high quality that helps so many animated collection, whose actors don’t age on-screen, final for the lengthy haul. On “The Simpsons,” Springfield is a timeless bubble. However “Huge Mouth” is about the passage of time, and what it does to younger our bodies. (The theme tune, Charles Bradley’s “Adjustments,” couldn’t be extra apt.) Its heroes progress and evolve, graduating center faculty and shifting alongside the proverbial bases. This dynamism makes their journey’s finish each extra pure and extra significant than its medium’s typical stasis.

Kroll and Goldberg loosely modeled the leads of “Huge Mouth,” Nick (Kroll) and Andrew (John Mulaney), after youthful variations of themselves. Hormone Monsters Maury (Kroll, in one in all a number of roles), Rick (Kroll once more), Connie (Maya Rudolph) and Mona (Thandiwe Newton) are additionally drawn from actual life, albeit not directly. These creatures personify the uncontrollable urges and insatiable needs that include the primary stirrings of adolescence — the voice telling you to rub one out within the rest room or, as Mona’s cost Missy Foreman-Greenwald (Ayo Edebiri) does in Season 8, hump your robotics group’s last mission to loss of life. The Hormone Monsters have been quickly joined by a full menagerie of metaphysical beings, from the Disgrace Wizard (David Thewlis) to the Melancholy Kitty (Jean Good) to the Nervousness Mosquito (Maria Bamford). The interaction between the Monsters and their mentees nonetheless remained the core of the present; “Human Sources,” a by-product set solely within the creatures’ office, was canceled after two seasons.

The thesis of “Huge Mouth” is neatly summarized by a tune in its penultimate episode: “There’s no such factor as regular / We’re every and all uniquely unusual.” What may very well be treacly assurance á la “Our Our bodies, Ourselves” was as a substitute strengthened with gleeful profanity, like when a Miss Frizzle-esque intercourse ed instructor voiced by Natasha Lyonne takes the category on a Magic College Bus tour of a penis. But the present’s underlying sincerity by no means wavered. “Huge Mouth” was dedicated to destigmatizing essentially the most shameful and embarrassing components of getting used to a grown-up physique, whereas nonetheless acknowledging the inherent humor. In modeling candor and acceptance, the collection was additionally open to recognizing and correcting its personal errors. The biracial Missy was initially voiced by Jenny Slate, who makes a cameo within the last season as a kindly pharmacist who explains you may’t get pregnant from clothed dry-humping, earlier than Edebiri took over the function in 2020, a casting change that was written into the present as an indication of Missy’s rising self-possession.

For his or her last act of embracing maturity, the “Huge Mouth” children face their fears and stroll right into a clean, increasing void that represents the unknowable future. It’s not a refined solution to illustrate the yawning abyss of infinite potential, however “Huge Mouth” by no means bothered with subtlety when lewdly creative allegory would do. Over eight seasons, the now-15-year-olds have moved from reckoning with their first intervals and erections to their preliminary makes an attempt at wholesome, communicative relationships. “Huge Mouth” leaves them, and us, with one last lesson: Upon getting the boldness to embrace your personal messy quirks, you’re outfitted to face no matter comes your means — pun considerably supposed.