When Dark and Troubled Past hits closer to home.
As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Sometimes, being a hero hurts.
open/close all folders
Season 1
- Kid repeatedly trying to get the green ring to work and failing, eventually having a minor tantrum out of sheer frustration.
- Poor Rosa in "Kid Cosmic and y La Nina Gigantica". She's only 4 years old and honestly doesn't understand the ramifications of Chuck being an evil alien, so when she accidentally lets him go, Kid snaps at her, causing her to cry.
- Tuna Sandwich passing out in the middle of the road in “Kid Cosmic And The Precognitive Cat”.
- What's more is Tuna's vision afterwards; Kid Cosmic gets caught in the alien ship’s explosion as showed previously... and then it shows Tuna standing in the rain next to Kid's lifeless body. It then switches to Tuna Sandwich sitting at the diner which is clearly holding a funeral while it’s raining outside, making it look like Tuna Sandwich is crying. Tuna understandably freaks out upon seeing this, and becomes firmly resolved to stop the vision from becoming reality.
- As Kid is desperately begging to read "The Sacred Scroll of the Stones", Jo and everyone else is literally dangling hundreds of feet in the air. Jo has to tell Kid that sometimes life isn't fair and that it never comes with an instruction manual, but he has to just put his faith in his friends and just see what the future has in store for them.
- Kid progressively getting sadder with each invasion in Episode 4, doubting himself more and more as everyone got medals except for him. He tried to hold himself up in front of the others, but by the end he couldn't even do that. Even worse was the private session he recorded where he goes from fine, disappointed, to not even able to say anything, all the while Chuck was taunting him in the background. It was clear that without Papa G's intervention he was reaching his breaking point very soon.
- Episode 5 has everyone in the diner laugh at Kid being the Plucky Comic Relief, unaware of how being treated as a joke is crushing Kid's spirit.
- In episode 6, Chuck taps into Kid's inner trauma by bringing up the fact that his parents died in a head-on collision with a semi-truck on Route 70- and pausing on the newspaper clipping Kid keeps on his wall (and that Chuck shows him) reveals he was five years old when it happened.
- In Episode 10, the Biker in Black triggers Kid's memory of the accident when he tries to run the Local Heroes and Sole Survivors over with his own semi-truck- and the flash we see reveals Kid was in the car with them.
- All Papa G wants is to give his grandson a "Hero Medal" by faking a robot army invasion because he deserved a bit of happiness in his life. But what he accidentally did was cause a chain of events that made Kid so broken that he brought about an Alien Invasion just to prove he truly was a hero and inadvertently causes even more damage to Kid's psyche.Papa G: I didn't want to embarrass you. I just... I wanted to make you happy. I've been trying to keep you happy ever since you suffered the, the sadness of losing your folks.
Kid: (starts tearing up; sniffs and wipes his eyes) I know, Papa G. Just promise me one thing.
Papa G: Whatever you want, Kid.
Kid: Just stop saying you don't want to ever hurt anybody. - Chuck being cruelly abandoned by his "Great Leader". Despite seeing his leader retreat, Chuck still wants to go home with him, and grabs onto a platform taking him back to the spaceship. The Leader grabs his hands and just shoves him off.
- A rather subtle one with Chuck. When he uses his translator he's shown to be rather talkative, even philosophical at times, but after he gives the translator to Tuna Sandwich, he's forced to speak in a much slower, harsher voice with broken vocabulary. There's just something tragic about someone that used to be rather eloquent losing the ability to speak the way they used to.
- The worst part? He believes that he deserves the pain of speaking English manually because of how he treated the others previously, especially Kid.
- The reveal that the stones aren't just sources of power, but the fragments of destroyed worlds.
- For the aliens and the Local Heroes at the beginning of episode 10. Where they've lost the battle and are about to be locked up (and in the Local Heroes' case, possibly arrested), and the Earth Force Enforcement Force plus Biker in Black celebrate their victory in their faces.
- At the end of the season we have a wounded Queen Xhan revealing that the rest of the survivors were killed by Erodius, when their nemesis and destroyer of their homes came back, after bonding with the townsfolk and seemingly getting to live in peace, they get their happy endings torn out cruelly taken and then killed with Xhan barely being able to get away with her life and being forced to seek out Kid and his team to stop the Planet Destroyer.
Season 2
- In "The Soul Kroshing Loss", Jo, believing that the team doesn't have what it takes to beat Fantos and Erodius, decides to join Krosh. When Kid demands to know why, Jo ends up blurting out that he sucks to his face. This unimaginably crushes Kid.
- In "Kid Cosmic and the Fallen Hero", Fantos defeats Jo, steals all the stones, and strands Jo in the middle of a desert planet. She starts to realize that her insults are likely the last things she'll have ever said to her loved ones, and the shot holds on Queen Xhan's rules to being a leader. Jo has no way of escaping and all she can think about are the impending doom of her friends and mother, and the pain she's caused them.
Season 3
- Papa G realizing on day one that he and the Local Heroes are stuck in a Lotus-Eater Machine. Why doesn’t he immediately tell everyone? Because he sees how happy the Kid is to finally be the hero he wants to be and have the adventures he wished to have. But he also realizes that if the lie continues, sooner or later the world will create fake versions of the Kid’s parents and if nothing is done before then, the Kid won’t want to leave.
- Not to mention, another reason why he's holding off and convinces Jo to hold off telling Kid about it all not being real. He too wants to see Kid's parents, seeing how at least one of them is his own kid. It's clear that he's been given a Sadistic Choice to either let his grandson live a lie and keep him and the others trapped for who knows how long, or tell him the truth and risk crushing his spirit.
- In ''Kid Cosmic and the Global Conspiracy", the moment Kid is told everything is fake by Papa G. Why did he decide to tell him? When the fake versions of his parents told him the reason they didn't find him immediately was because he had to be worthy, something Papa G wasn't going to accept, since his parents would never say such a thing. Kid is absolutely distraught, and it didn't help when his fake parents hug him, and he only felt nothing.
- Just about everyone in the group's reaction to seeing Kid face the reality of the situation, including Jo. It had to be done, but witnessing him rejecting what he wanted most, his parents, was incredibly hard on them.
- Kid rejecting his fake dream world parents is sad in itself, with his reasoning for it.
Kid: "Because right now I feel... nothing. My real parents would never make me feel that way." - In "Kid Cosmic and the Planet Killer", Papa G is crushed by a lot boulders, leaving Kid to try and, tearfully, dig him out. We get a flashback of how things were when Papa G and Kid both dealing with the loss of Kid's parents, and how it took some time for them to heal together. Kid really doesn't want to lose Papa G, as he's his last living relative left and he deeply cares for him.
- Fantos is thrown into the same Lotus-Eater Machine that he threw the Local Heroes into and the first thing that happens is his mom coming back. He’s overjoyed that his mom came back for him (even if he ends up treating her the same as he did before) but then he has a realization. His mom hates him so he must be stuck in a Lotus-Eater Machine. Granted he did treat her terribly but it’s a bit sad that Fantos knows without a doubt that his own mother hates him so much that she wouldn’t come back for him.
- As with many series finales, "Kid Cosmic and the Grand Opening of Planet Earth" is chock full of these:
- The episode begins with Kid waking up in his trailer, dressed in funeral clothes, with Papa G nowhere to be seen. He meets up with the other Local Heroes, also dressed in similar clothes, standing where Mo's Oasis once stood... with Papa G, age having caught up with him following the destruction of the fourteenth stone, arriving in a wheelchair. No matter how relieving it may be to see that he's alive, it's hard to forget that Kid's last remaining relative doesn't have a lot of time left.
- The Local Heroes agree to keep their adventures in space a secret, but Kid is still looking for a workaround, writing their adventures into a comic series with the names changed. He's rejected by every publisher he submitted to, then mistakenly believes this is another alternate reality. The others reassure him that they miss being heroes too, and they're sorry they couldn't become world-famous, but:Kid: "Famous"? This isn't about me being a stupid hero! It's about the truth! That the universe is filled with life. Just like this diner, Earth is stuck in the middle of nowhere, cut off from the rest of the universe. A universe that we know is filled with all kinds of unique beings who, despite their differences, are just the same as us. They all want to be happy, safe, and not feel...so alone. The people of Earth need to know that. How dare you all keep it a secret?
