Review: Final Space “The Ventrexian”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Lord Commander recalls what happened to him at the beginning of Season 2, when Nightfall mortally wounded him and he was transported away by Invictus, who healed his wounds and apparently made him a Titan (though is powers don’t seem to be any different). In the present, he interrogates Avocato and the others about where Mooncake is, which none of them know, but Lord Commander decides to reveal a new detail about Avocato’s backstory:

Once upon a time, his faction on Ventrexia was saved from an ambush by the Lord Commander, who convinced him to join his movement and take over the planet himself, even if it required betraying his closest allies, the king and queen. But even after killing them, he found their child, who would become Little Cato, and took him in as his own. This revelation is understandably a shock to Little Cato, but seems to not really impact his love for his father. Not that it matters, as they’re all on their way to see Invictus.

Meanwhile, Gary and his crew get adjusted to the Galaxy Two/Dragon Hawk Five, though he and Quinn seem to not be connecting due to Quinn hiding her potentially fatal condition. Also, Bolo and Mooncake confront Oreskis, the Titan who manipulated Sheryl to keep the dimensional keys away. Oreskis has also been working with Invictus, looking to invade regular space to enslave and rule over the universe. Luckily they’re able to finally kill Oreskis, just in time for Gary and his team to show up. There is some initial abrasiveness because Bolo told Mooncake that Gary was dead, but that passes and Bolo leaves Mooncake to continue fighting other Titans.

OUR TAKE

Boy, this episode sure dug into a lot of interesting moments, didn’t it? We get more of Avocato’s backstory, uncover a major character revelation, meet the main villain up close, and beat the villain behind the scenes of a lot of the issues of last season! So why doesn’t this feel more important? Yeah, all of those things sound really crucial on paper, but when you think about it, not a lot of them really end up being all that impactful, at least right now. Let’s start with the focus of this week’s episode, Avocato, the titular Ventrexian. The main takeawy from all of this new backstory is that, when joining the Lord Commander, he betrayed the king and queen of Ventrexia, but then adopted their son as his own because his died, meaning the Little Cato we’ve been following is not his real son. But then, that doesn’t change Little Cato’s feelings about him, at least as far as we can tell right now, and the framing device for revealing it, Lord Commander using it to find out where Mooncake is, is ultimately pointless sense they truly did not know where Mooncake was. So it feels like a very flimsy excuse to force in new backstory details that ultimately don’t add anything. Again, that may change down the road, but right now it’s very questionable as to what purpose they serve.

The other details all kinda fit together, as they’re all connected to Invictus, who is his own set of potential problems. For one, as we now know from his talk with Lord Commander, is that he just wishes to control and consume everything, which is…honestly a pretty boring motivation for a bad guy. And people like Lord Commander and Oreskis are following him because…they also want to do that. With Oreskis, it’s a little bit understandable, as he states that he wishes to reclaim the power that was taken from him and the other Titans, but what does Lord Commander want with that kind of power? Why does he want to be a Titan? Remember that he used to be a member of the Infinity Guard alongside Gary’s father, but then was impacted by the bomb that tried to close the breach. He seemed to be a normal guy up until that point (possibly not helped by Gary and his dad beating him up in the past for things he hadn’t done yet), so what changed? Who was he before and how does that guide him now? THAT’S the backstory I’m more interested in that Avocato’s at the moment. Also, I hope we take a solid break from Titan fights for awhile, since this one between Bolo and Oreskis was SUPPOSED to be more meaningful, but just ended up feeling derivative of the one before. You can’t do Episode 27 of Gurren Lagann more than a few times in the space of a few weeks before it starts to hurt the novelty.