Season Review: Final Space Season Three
In its four year ongoing journey on television, Final Space has been a show that has become many things and gone through many stages of evolution. It was an unfinished series of low budget shorts, a viral pilot, the spearhead to an animation block that never came to be, and, most consistently, the vision of Olan Rogers. Rogers got his start on Youtube and made the jump to TV, a success story for all aspiring animators and showrunners who hope to have one of their passion projects airing on a major channel or streaming service. After a successful first season, the series moved its premieres over to Adult Swim, through which it had shown to preform better, but this came at the cost of being swarmed with network notes and executive meddling. And yet the second season proved to be an even bigger ratings hit than the first, which then seemed to allow Rogers and his team to regain more creative control over the third. Now we find ourselves at the end of that third season, with the series’ fate mirroring the iconic cold opens of Season 1, protagonist Gary Goodspeed floating in the cold vacuum of space with only minutes of life remaining. We can only speculate whether the show will be renewed or not, but we can look back on this past season and what it might tell us on where things may go from here.
Season 3 finally brings the members of Gary’s Team Squad into the titular dimension of Final Space, after hanging the threat of its terrors over our heads for dozens of episodes. Last season mainly focused on finding a way into Final Space to save present day Gwen, and requiring the sacrifice of her bad future counterpart Nightfall in order to get them through. But almost immediately, the squad are attacked by agents of the malicious energy entity Invictus, who has control over the Titans and a plethora of alternate timeline corpses of Gary. On top of that, the Lord Commander, the antagonist of Season 1, returns under Invictus’ thrall to strike at the heart of Avocato and his son, Invictus tries to sway the allegiance of Ash, and a creeping sickness threatens to kill the team before they can get back to their own dimension.
With the aforementioned network leash loosened a bit, you would expect this season to bring the series back to the core of its appeal from the beginning. However, I’m sad to say this season was not Final Space at its best. It does maintain a lot of what both previous seasons brought to the table that was the show’s unique charm, which if I had to hazard a guess, would be epic cosmic wonder visuals and conflict surrounding incredibly down to earth characters. You could have a planet sized giants plotting universal conquest while also having a loving interspecies bro-mance developing at its own pace. And while this has helped the show stand out amongst other adult animated peers, it’s also something I’ve yet to see it master. Most pervasive is its confusion with tone, where a dead serious moment has or is occurring but then feels it is also appropriate to cut a joke into…and then that joke goes on way too long, utterly destroying any chance to take the situation seriously. And this happens WAYYYYY too often to not be noticeable. It eases up near the end of the season, but by then the damage is done. And even then, that gives way to a different issue.
The just about all of the character drama this season is completely irrational from top to bottom. The impetus for the season, rescuing Quinn, is plenty understandable, but its most of what comes up later that isn’t. Avocato, who was previous brought back from death last season, now has to grapple with newly uncovered murders from his past to slowly dredge up drama between him and Little Cato that only has the purpose of leading to a rather predictable comment about found families. Quinn has to come to grips with her possibly turning into Nightfall, despite this not really being the case and the story not really going into what implications it’s trying to say about this (I guess that it’s a destiny she’s avoiding? But then what is she avoiding and why?). And probably the most glaring one is Invictus rather easily manipulating Ash into thinking Gary will kill her brother Fox, which conveniently requires her to forget that he is an evil space demon who can possess bodies and so is responsible for all of her problems, not Gary. We are sure putting a lot of importance on Gary despite him…not really having any.
As much as I have torn into these issues, I bring them up in hopes they can be used to a potential next season’s advantage. Season 3 has ended on a pretty grim cliffhanger, with Rogers supposedly only being halfway through his planned six season plotline. This is certainly an ambitious plan, but six seasons is pretty steep order. Most shows are lucky to get two or three seasons to create a complete story, let alone six. I’m not saying it’s impossible for Final Space to reach some version of its planned conclusion, but with the ratings taking a nose dive this go around, and this season ending pretty climatically, you could easily be led to think the next season would be the one to wrap things up. And I have to be honest, I don’t really see more than two more seasons of story to tell with this specific conflict. Here’s hoping for a fourth season, but please get rid of Tribore.
"There are also other characters that come and go (also owned by the Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate media company)."
Huh. Is that just referring to other characters from the show itself, or is this implying that the new season is going to have cameos from other WBD IPs