Headscratchers / Final Space

In Final Space, no one can hear you say "Huh?"

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Season 1

• Why doesn’t Avocato just throw the bomb of the ship? With the amount of time he speaks to Gary and him saying “No!”, he probably had enough time to realize the giant metal bomb sticking to Little Cato’s back, and quickly chuck it outside, instead of covering and dying from the explosion for a designated Tear Jerker.
  • The bomb was a sticky bomb stuck to Little Cato's clothing. If it stuck to clothing, most likely it would've been stuck to fur. Thus, Avocato couldn't have thrown it out and he would have died regardless.
  • Also the door was already closed before he blew up; the reason they couldn't even retrieve his body is they were just about to light fold when he blew up, so the only exit was already blocked, and given the size of the explosion, no where in the room could he have tossed it without killing everyone.
• So, Mooncake came into existance when John Goodspeed closed the first rift to Final Space, back when Gary was still a child. Then what has Mooncake been doing all the years between then and him meeting Gary? Sure, he must have run into other people that befriended him rathar than trying to use his powers for their own?
  • He did. We see at least once they come across a destroyed space ship that Mooncake recognised. But everyone who's shown him kindness have been slaughtered by the Lord Commander and/or others who wanted to use him for their own ends.
• Why was Gary the only human on the Galaxy One? The ship is clearly capable of housing a much larger crew than just 1 man, and sure he couldn't have been the only convict sentenced to doing time on a spaceship? Seems like a waste of resources to spend an entire ship on just a single prisoner.
  • That's part of his punishment: no human contact. It's cruel but not entirely inhumane. They gave him an "anti-insanity" robot and several robots to keep him with minimal company. They also gave him a super nice and cool A.I. friend named Hue.

Season 2

• What exactly did John Goodspeed see in Sheryl? Given how he treats Gary, who would want to have kid with someone like her?
  • It's stated she didn't become neglectful until after his death.
  • Well, that seems like a bit of a stretch. It’s been revealed that she’s always low-key despised her own son and blames him on John rejecting her. This really comes out when she actively menaced Gary and the entire crew in service of Todd Watson, in S2 EP 12. Who’s to say that she just became even more resentful when she was left alone with Gary?
  • I always read the flashback scene as her not resenting Gary until his crying while she was talking to her boss cost her both the mission and her marriage, given that she seemed happy at first when she told John about her pregnancy. Had she either forfeited her mission or told the truth, things might have turned out differently.
  • My reading of their situation is John didn't know what a piece of work she was until after she made Gary cry, as we see she was very good at seducing people and hiding her true nature. I assume after this point, since we never see them together, John had thrown her out and raised Gary himself, but upon his death she was granted custody of him despite not wanting anything to do with him.
  • He only tells her to get out when she yells at Gary to stop crying; he thought she didn't care about their son (which at the time was not entirely wrong) and that's what ended it for him. Given how she was trying to steal government secrets, he could've just had her arrested, but the fact that he didn't showed that he still cared about her even after the truth came out. If she hadn't snapped at Gary and actually talked to John about the whole thing, they could've worked though it.
• Todd doesn’t make a shred of sense. First of all, he’s so ungrateful to the point where he overlooks the notion that Gary and the crew gave were HEROES that gave it their all to stop the Lord Commander from opening the breach to Final Space. He should be mad at HIM, not Gary. He watched the whole thing through his transmission, right? Second, how he’s able to go insane, assemble a large ship and army in just a week’s time after Chapter 10 is beyond me. Lastly, even if it is Gary’s fault, he is certainly no better. He wants justice for his family, but has no remorse in killing millions of innocent people to serve as fuel? I think it’s safe to say he is the weakest villain in the show. He’s a hypocritical moron, and not even an entertaining or fleshed-out one at that. It seems the writers rushed this one, wanting just another generic obstacle for the heroes to defeat.
  • I’d chalk this one up to Executive Meddling and the fact that the plot of “The Happy Place” wasn’t what Olan had originally envisioned. (See the Trivia page)
  • Firstly, Todd clearly doesn't know the full story. He said himself all he got was a transmission from Quinn telling Gary that they lost the Earth but she could at least save him; as far as he knows, whatever they were doing is what lost the earth, and even if he does know it was Lord Commander, LC is dead now and Gary isn't, so his grief-distorted brain is blaming Gary. Secondly, I'm pretty sure they never mention the space of time between Chapter 10 and his introduction, so we don't know exactly how long he had, but even there, given how many crews they'd already captured and drained, its likely that they were in operation BEFORE Gary lost the earth; nothing indicates losing his family was his Start of Darkness, its just what made him target Gary. Most likely, he was a Punch-Clock Villain with a wife and family on earth he cared for, and with their deaths he's decided to target Gary.
• So, when she officially met the whole team in Season 1, Nightfall's story about the future was that in every timeline, Quinn tries to stop the breach in space on her own, Gary gets killed by the Lord Commander, and his death sends Mooncake into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge in which he accidentally frees the Titans from Final Space. But in Season 2, her story suddenly changes to how Gary always sacrifices himself to detonate the anti-matter bomb and close the breach, with the current timeline being the only one in which Quinn made that sacrifice instead. This second version is further proven by Gary encountering the dead bodies of dozens of alternate versions of himself when they finally enter Final Space in the last episode. But that still makes me wonder how much is true of the first story.
  • She has seen hundreds of timelines where these events happen, to the point where her hair has a grey streak in it. More likely than not some of them were killed off by the Lord Commander and the titan's escaped like in her original timeline.
  • She said she had gone back at least 100 times, but there are way more than 100 undead Garys in Final Space. Given the amount of times Gary almost died if not for luck even before the fight to close the breach, there are many ways he could die without ever reaching the point when the breach consumes the Earth. It's stated that "Every timeline flows into Final Space", even the ones without Nightfall. Undead Gary said that every Gary sacrificed their lives, but even if that happened outside of Final Space, Invictus would still claim them when he breaches the universe.
    • From "The First Times They Met": "Sometime you leave the mission, but in every variation, you die." So either he closes the breach and dies in Final Space, or leaves the mission and dies by Lord Commander's hand.
• So, in "The Notorious Mrs. Goodspeed", why did Mooncake get jealous of Gary spending time with his mother? In Season 1, Gary was constantly trying to woo Quinn, devoting more time to her than to Mooncake, and that never upset him.
  • Mooncake still had his powers then. Since he lost them he's kinda just there and doesn't have any real way to help, which I guess was eating at him.
• What was Sheryl's plan when Gary was born? How long was she going to keep up her ruse? It's really confusing!

Season 3

• Does anyone still care about Clarence? No one even bothers to forgive or even mention him since his betrayal, despite the very person who manipulated him into turning on the team now being on Gary’s side. Family aside, we have yet to see any indication that Clarence is worse than Sheryl.
  • To be fair, Conan O’Brien might get a little expensive sometimes, so the crew needed to write him out somehow, at least for a while.
  • That, and the Team Squad kinda has bigger fish to fry now that they're sealed inside Final Space, trapped with planet-sized hostile Titans and hunted down by Invictus and a literal army of zombie Garys.
  • Nobody likes Clarence.
  • In their defense, while Sheryll is not much better than Clarence, she never tries to convince anyone she's less terrible than she is. In contrast, Clarence not only does awful things, but expects absolute devotion for doing the bare minimum, given that he made an entire holiday purely for Ash and Fox to worship him and gets mad when they compliment other people. Sheryll is an awful person, but she's not a liability by the end of Season Two (as far as we've seen, as that could change) and, as the first few episodes of Season Three has demonstrated, she can be plenty helpful. Clarence, by contrast, has too much of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder to be worth the effort of keeping around. Even when he worked with the Team Squad, he had a tendency to be distracted by his greed, even when it puts his own children, the rest of the team, and himself in danger, for something as petty as money or even just attention, and his escapades often blow up in his face, making them pointless. Given how unreliable he is, whose to even say that he'd stick around with Sheryll if he ever got bored of her, considering he abandoned his children to be with her in the first place?
  • Also, if we were to apply the same logic of whose a worse person, Sheryll is on a similar level of badness as Avocato, who worked with Lord Commander and has a Dark and Troubled Past as well.
• Tribore's son, Quatronostro. While him growing to adulthood and already being able to fight and talk seconds after hatching can be handwaved as Bizarre Alien Biology, how the Hell does he also manage to literally grow clothes AND a pair of guns out of nowhere ??!
  • While there is no canon explanation, it's quite possible whatever species Tribore is supposed to be is somehow engineered to adapt to whatever environment they are born into. According to Tribore himself, he was born "under the three full moons during the feast of the Seven Wonders," and while this could just be Tribore being Tribore, if this story is true, than it would explain why Quatronostro is far more badass and why Tribore was glad for him to be born where he was; Quatronostro was literally born into violence, while Tribore was born during a feast (which is probably why he's so picky and hard to please). Not to mention, for all of his Cold Ham behavior, Tribore is certainly no slack when it comes to fighting himself, never seems to panic very much, and even in the depths of Final Space, he is so completely confident in him and his son's survival that they separate from the others willingly. Being able to adapt to any scenario to survive may genuinely be engineered into his species in some way, including the fact that they are also apparently self-reproducing, meaning that Tribore's species doesn't even need two partners to populate.
• How did Little Cato survive the explosion of the royal escape pod, and the fall that followed ? Avocato finds him among the debris from the wreck and he doesn't even have a scratch, despite everyone else dying in the blast.
  • Improbable Infant Survival
• In "Change is Gonna Come", Quinn receives the same implant as Nightfall in order to save her from dying to her Final Space poisoning, with the Team Squad noting that things have now come "full circle"... However, in Nightfall's timeline, Gary was the one who detonated the antimatter bomb, not Quinn. So, assuming that Nightfall's chip had the same purpose, why exactly did she need it in the first place?
  • Maybe Final Space had spilled into the universe when Invictus broke through, which meant that Final Space poisoning would be a hazard there.
• Final Space poisoning seems wildly inconsistent. Quinn spent several months within the Final Space before she finally began showing severe signs of poisoning. Gary was in Final Space for only a month and his symptoms were already like Quinn's after several months of exposure. How come no one else in Team Squad shows any symptoms yet? Also, Kevin mentioned that the only way to render yourself immune to the poisoning is to inject yourself with Celenium, which is apparently the rarest substance in entire universe...which begs the question how come there are thriving colonies of various beings in Final Space, if this substance is so rare and hard to come by? As we've seen earlier in the season even the aliens aren't immune to the poisoning yet several episodes later, Tribore and Quatronostro reach a thriving marketplace and even fight armies of marauders, with implication being that these people have been stuck in Final Space for many years. In general, Final Space poisoning just comes off as a cheap and inconsistent source of drama.
  • Maybe it doesn't affect humans and aliens the same way ? Maybe it can even vary between individuals of a single species ? But yeah, it's very inconsistent.
    • As of now, everyone except the robots and Biskit is infected.
  • It's described like how still water is a breeding ground for diseases, but with space and time instead of germs. Just because a disease is present doesn't mean you automatically get it, there are lots of factors, and probably even more so when talking about corrupted metaphysical substances. As for the civilizations, they probably relied on Celenium at first, which might be why it's so rare now if they used it all up, until they developed resistances.
    • It's stated on the Final Space wiki that the poisoning goes faster if the victim is experiencing extreme stress. That might not be accurate, because Wikipedia, but it would make sense that the Team Squad gets it faster given everything they go through, including Quinn until she becomes immune.
• Bolo’s statement to Mooncake that Gary is dead was stated to be a lie by the showrunners yet they never elaborated on it and instead only features Gary and Mooncake being mad at Bolo. It’s never stated how Bolo knew Gary was alive given the circumstances as Bolo last saw Gary on a planet that got blown to bits when a lizard titan threw Bolo onto the planet and Bolo landed head first. The team squad got completely scattered all over final space because of this and Bolo went into a huge fit of rage towards the lizard titan, giving off vibes that he thought Gary was killed. I feel like Bolo claim was deemed a lie just so tension between Gary and bolo would happen but it all just feels forced. How did Bolo know Gary was alive in the ending to “And Into The Fire”?

• Ash learned from Invictus that Gary was fated to kill Fox. It happens in the next episode and Ash had the opportunity to warn Gary about this between that and after she gained her new form. However, Ash chose not to warn Gary about Invictus’ “prophecy” about him and Fox, causing Gary to fall right into Invictus’ trap. Why didn’t Ash warn Gary about killing Fox?

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