Review: Final Space “The Other Side”

AVA has Kenny Loggins’ entire catalog… in covers?

Overview (Spoilers Below)

After a bit of levity and a lot of “Footloose,” Little Cato maneuvers the Crimson Light through a field of space debris. However, his cockiness results in a massive shard of time colliding with the ship and trapping it inside an inexplicable space anomaly.

Cut to sixty years in the future, the ship is still trapped and Little Cato has been working nonstop to free the surviving crew. Unfortunately, he believes Gary was killed in the initial accident. Losing his captain and good friend deeply affected Little Cato because he blames himself, not just for Gary but for everyone’s misfortune. The guilt drives him a little mad, to the point where he uses the ship’s tech to fabricate conversations with his dead father, Avocato. But you know what they say about people who know they’re crazy. There’s usually more to the story.

The rest of the survivors—which doesn’t include Ash or Fox who allegedly died eating something Clarence prepared—have gone through many changes in the decades they’ve been trapped in space. HUE and AVA, who once despised one another, are now an insufferable couple. Mooncake has a voice modulator that allows him to speak in a booming baritone register. Clarence, who’s also having trouble holding it together, dresses in a fake Gary-skin suit and refers to himself as Glarence. And Nightfall is old and blind but she doesn’t have any heightened warrior senses as one might expect.

When the anomaly produces a titan through a crack between their world and Final Space, Little Cato is prepared to protect his ship and crew regardless of the consequences. The others beg him to reconsider since he doesn’t have the proper Omni-directional mobility gear to fight a titan, but the small cat-like creature persists. He wins the battle but is heavily gored in the process. Lying there, bleeding, he welcomes death’s embrace.

Except, Gary isn’t dead and the rest of the crew is actually on the other side of the ship which exists sixty years in the past, behind the time anomaly. The crew in Little Cato’s reality were all figments of his imagination, and he never fought or nearly got killed by a titan. He’d simply spent sixty years in solitary confinement and had gone crazier than he envisioned. Gary and the crew finally breakthrough and transport a younger Cato back to the present. But the little guy is changed and must carry around sixty years of harrowing memories. Pretty dark, no?

 

Our Take

This is the type of episode Final Space should do more often. The show works as a decent, half-hour comedy, but it has the potential to be a legit comedic space program with outstanding characters. This outing was akin to the classic Deep Space Nine episode “Hard Time” where Miles O’Brien is virtually imprisoned for what felt like years but was only a short time for everybody else. At the end of both shows, after the affected parties underwent a terrible, yet imagined the event, they were forever changed. Powerful stuff, man.

While this episode had a “twist” ending because of Little Cato’s mental break, there were enough clues throughout for the reveal not to feel like a cheat. Viewers might’ve wondered how Little Cato’s squad believed Fox and Ash were killed by Glarence’s cooking, or why AVA’s voice was omnipresent on both sides of the time anomaly. However, in the thick of things, those little inconsistencies weren’t necessarily enough to create an “ah-hah!” moment because the Crimson Light’s crew often makes mistakes and are known to share unverified information.

Now that we’re in the second season, it’s great to see that the creative team is comfortable doing almost an entire episode that isn’t from Gary’s POV. Ever since he was rescued and lost his father, Little Cato has been an invaluable character that the audience can relate to. The return of Avocato this week would’ve been appreciated even if it amounted to little more than fan service. But that’s not what happened here. By including this fan-favorite character, we were given an extra layer to Little Cato’s sadness and his growing sense of futility. I don’t think too many people would complain if there are more Little Cato-centric episodes—especially if they pull on the heartstrings like this one.

It’s funny, I thought Clarence was much more bearable in this episode, but then he turned out to be a figment of Little Cato’s imagination. We’ll have to wait until next week to see if he has truly improved. Aside from that, the aging of the characters was well done and felt authentic in this semi-futuristic world filled with androids and alien species. The changes to the robots were particularly intriguing. For example, Mooncake’s modulated voice was provided by John DiMaggio and sounded a lot like Url, the sarcastic, robot police officer he voiced in Futurama.