Western Animation / Final Space

The universe is much more bigger than you think!

Lord Commander: You have no idea, do you? Mooncake is the key. That being can unlock... Final. Space.
(Beat)

Gary: What the mother-loving crap is Final Space?!

Final Space is an adult animated comedy-drama series airing on TBS created by independent film-maker and former Balloon Shop member Olan Rogers with veteran TV producer/writer David Sachs acting as the show runner and produced by ShadowMachine and Jam Filled Entertainment.

This serialized sci-fi series follows Gary Goodspeed, an astronaut with a big personality, as he waits out the last days of his five-year sentence aboard the Prison Ship Galaxy One. He soon runs across an adorable green Planet Destroyer named Mooncake and a Cat Folk bounty hunter, Avocato, and finds himself embroiled in a desperate mission to unlock the mystery of something called "Final Space" and save the universe from total annihilation... while also keeping Mooncake out of the hands of the villainous Lord Commander and his forces.

And that's just the icing on an universe-sized cake...

The show started as a small series of low-budget and roughly made YouTube videos uploaded to Rogers' channel in 2010 under the title Gary Space, but went on hiatus three episodes into its planned ten episode run, only to re-emerge six years later as a professionally produced and drama-heavy pilot which quickly went viral and caught the attention of former The Simpsons writer and TV producer Conan O'Brien, who would go on to serve as the executive producer for the show. Originally, it was going to air as part of a TBS animation block that would have featured J.G. Quintel's Close Enough and a show called The Cops created by Louis C.K.. When Louis C.K.'s sexual misconduct scandal came out, The Cops was shelved indefinitely (if not outright canceled before it could premiere) while Close Enough was shelved until 2020 (when HBO Max was released). Final Space, however, aired anyway and the fourth show in the line-up (American Dad) continued.

Featuring a star-studded cast which includes the likes of David Tennant, Ron Perlman, Gina Torres, Tom Kenny, Steven Yeun, Rogers himself and his friend Coty Galloway, the show premiered its first season on February 26, 2018. In 2019, the show was moved to [adult swim], where its second season premiered on June 24. Afterwards, each episode of the new season aired on TBS a week after its initial Adult Swim airing. A third season was confirmed a week after the Season 2 finale aired, and premiered in March 2021.

On September 10, 2021, it was announced by Olan Rogers on his Youtube channel that the series had been canceled. However, in January 10th, 2022, the announcement of a VR game taking place in the universe of the show has been made, which was released in Oculus in January 13th and later on Playstation VR & Steam.

On September 2022, due to the Warner Bros and Discovery merger, a very disappointed Olan Rodgers announced that the series will be effectively purged from all networks as a tax write-off and will no longer be available to view through copyright-respecting online means.

Despite this, in 24th of April 2023, it was announced that the series would be finished in a graphic novel called Final Space: The Final Chapter, which will be released in late 2024.

---

This show provides examples of the following tropes:

A-M

• Aborted Arc: Despite being a serialized show that places story at center stage, it did leave a few arcs at the wayside.
  • Gary's conflict with Bolo over trust, starting with "Descent Into Darkness". As Gary had issues with Bolo over the sixth key revelation and the fib to Mooncake, the show does not place much importance in the conflict and it is basically dropped after "The Ventrexian".
    • On a similar note, Bolo's desire for revenge against the other titans and Invictus starts in "The Sixth Key", but it is abruptly dropped after "The Ventrexian".
  • The connection Fox had with a tiny plant that was vased in a SAMES robot head. Fox was shown to love that plant dearly but it is never elaboration upon and the plant never appeared again in "The Notorious Mrs. Goodspeed". It was not even seen or mentioned in episodes after Fox died, especially in "Forgiveness".
  • Little Cato's traumatic experience in "The Other Side" looks completely self contained in just that episode itself as it is shown that he aged 60 years in a parallel dimension and went insane from isolation there. This is not brought up in any future episode as he mentions that he is 14 in the very next episode while ignoring that that dimensional shard technically made him 74 even though he reverted back to his original physical age from returning
  • Sheryl Goodspeed's interactions with Oreskis and her obsession with finding John Goodspeed are never mentioned again once she turns to the good side in the season 2 finale. Season 3 looked to have the opposite elaborate on those things but Oreskis is slain in battle while Sheryl is imprisoned by The Lord Commander. Her desire to find John is touched upon by Gary in that season but does not gain additional focus.
• Abusive Parents: Sheryl Goodspeed is a pretty complex case; she was a pretty bad mother to Gary, as she pulled away from him when he's grieving at his own father's funeral, abandoning him shortly thereafter and manipulated him on a job in adult years to claim a dimensional key, openly telling him she can't love him after his father died. Part of the reason she hates her son is because her falling in love with John was a case of Becoming the Mask, and part of the reason John gave her a Heel–Face Door-Slam when he learned the truth was that he was disgusted she had a son with him while undercover. Luckily, she later learns to atone for her actions as a mother, helping her son.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Tom Kenny voices a character who takes care of a Gary who likes cookies. Sound familiar?
  • Some of the graffiti in the Galaxy One's elevator shaft says "It's a Monday."
• Abnormal Ammo: While we have the sci-fi staple of laser and disintegrator guns, Gary shoots Superior Stone with a black hole pistol.
• Aerith and Bob: To name but a few, humans with normal first names and badass surnames (Quinn Ergon, Gary Goodspeed), aliens with alien names and human surnames (Tribore Menendez), a catlike creature named "Avocato," and two aliens named Ash Graven and Fox who are the adoptive children of yet a third alien named Clarence Polkowicz. Plus several robot names pronounced as familiar human names (KVN / "Kevin," H.U.E. / "Hugh").
• Agony Beam: One of Avocato's guns torments a guy for a full minute before causing him to explode.
• Alien Blood: In a setting full of various alien beings in a show which isn't exactly family-friendly with the violence, this is a given. Shades of purple seems to be a popular color, and Serpentians (Ash's people) have yellowish blood. Zig-Zagged among the Titans: while Bolo and Oreskos bleed green blood, several of the Titans slaughtered by the Lord Commander have red blood.
• Alliance with an Abomination:
  • The Titan Bolo forged such an alliance with Nightfall in her past, giving her the means to time-travel so she could Set Right What Once Went Wrong. This later extends to the whole of the Team Squad when they set out to free Bolo in Season 2, although they're initially ambivalent about whether or not they want anything to do with Bolo's war against his evil brethren and Invictus beyond their own ends.
  • It's revealed in Season 2 that Sheryl Goodspeed has entered an analogous alliance with the Titan Oreskis, this time in the style of a Deal with the Devil.
  • Invictus tends to make its direct mortal allies (the Lord Commander and later Ash) think they're its partners, although in reality they're little to nothing more than Invictus' puppets or tools.
• Ancient Evil:
  • The Titans are destructive, godlike eldritch abominations from the dawn of time whom were imprisoned in Final Space eons ago. If they return to the universe, they will plunge it into chaos and destruction beyond mortals' imagination.
  • And then there's the Titans' master Invictus, the true Big Bad of the show. Whereas the Titans were created to help build the universe before they began serving Invictus, Invictus apparently pre-dates the universe and will be even more powerful than the Titans if it breaks free. Appearing almost to be a Sentient Cosmic Force of evil, Invictus' full power is imprisoned within a very special region of Final Space, but it's actively looking to break free so it can consume life across every reality.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Bolo has been imprisoned for thousands of years inside a cube only just big enough to fit his whole body, restricted to a singular curled-up position, within Inner Space. Although he seems sane enough, he drops some strong hints in Season 3 that his millennia trapped in that state have significantly traumatized the ancient Titan.
    • At the end of Season 3, Invictus seals the Lord Commander inside the same cube "to rot away for an eternity" as punishment for betraying Invictus, and the last that's seen of him is the cube falling into a dark abyss at the heart of Final Space.
  • Everyone who's consumed by Werthrent, instead of living in eternal joy as the inhabitants of Serepentis were led to believe, are reduced to putrid, disease-ridden zombies who are wailing and begging for death and retain only fragments of their psyches in Werthrent's pocket dimension.
  • When one of the undead alternate Gary's in Final Space is briefly revived by being freed of Invictus, his jittering dialogue heavily implies that he's been conscious the entire time since he entered Final Space, died in the vacuum, and got possessed by Invictus, and he's visibly traumatized above and beyond the prime Gary's own near-death experience.
• And Show It to You: This is about the only way to kill a KVN.
• Animalistic Abomination:
  • Ash's homeworld Serpentis is inhabited by a giant monster resembling a bestial, horned snake called Werthrent, who is worshipped by the natives as a god. Manifesting at a designated sanctum from the maw of an effigy and causing fire nearby to flare with its presence, Werthrent's insides are an entire pocket dimension temple where the sacrifices it devours are reduced to putrid, undying zombies as Werthrent feeds on their life forces without granting them rest. Werthrent itself only cares about feeding and sating its hunger. When Werthrent dies or departs, it causes the yellow energy ring surrounding Serpentis to literally disappear with it.
  • The Arachnitects, beings who literally created the Titans and oversaw the multiverse's construction in primordial times, look like giant, mechanical spiders and can weave glowing, golden strands of resilient webbing. They were apparently powerful and numerous enough to overpower the Titans and apparently Invictus itself in the early universe (not so much in the present), and they have enough power and mastery over the fabric of reality to wall off Final Space or rip open a pathway in if they so choose, and in Season 2, they forcibly apport Mooncake from the Crimson Light to their realm without being physically present.
• The Antichrist: It's revealed in Season 3 that both the Lord Commander's and Ash's respective powers originally come from Invictus. The resurrected Lord Commander, who was already a megalomaniacal asshole before aligning with Invictus directly, is willingly serving Invictus within Final Space (albeit as part of a bargain rather than out of true loyalty). Ash is the Anti-Anti-Christ, until she makes a Face–Heel Turn and gets further corrupted, at which point she succeeds in the goal Invictus expected of her.
• Anyone Can Die: Avocato, Earth's entire remaining populace, and the S.A.M.E.S. are gone by the end of Season One.
  • By the end of Season Two, Nightfall dies too.
  • And in Season 3, Fox, Kevin Van Newton, Clarence, and Bolo join the deceased
• Apocalypse How: In the season one finale, Earth seemingly suffers a Class X: the Final Space breach's gravity is drawing the oceans away from the planet and ripping the planet's inner-magma out through the crust, before a Titan physically drags the planet into the breach. Season 3 reveals it was more of a Class 4: although the Earth has lost its sun, its face visible from space has been scarred, almost every human who was on the planet and most of the biosphere are dead, and the planet's gravity is now been rendered very wonky; the physical planet and the rest of its surface have more or less remained intact (the continents even retain their original shape instead of being swallowed and altered by oceanic shifts or volcanism), at least one human and an army of KVNs have survived, and some of Earth's animals even mutated into monsters instead of dying from Final Space poisoning. The Earth is finally destroyed completely when the Titan incubating in the core shatters the planet like an egg.
• Badass Boast:
  Arachnitect: You know what lays between you and Invictus. An army of Titans.
  Bolo: I'm going to kill them all.
  Arachnitect: If you fail, the universe falls.
  Bolo: I'M GOING TO KILL THEM ALL!
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • At the end of Season 1, the Titans drag Earth into Final Space before the breach is closed. Season 3 reveals this was the Titans' express goal during the events of Season 1.
  • Season 3 ends on a cliffhanger with Invictus successfully freed, and it breaching into Normal Space with an army of Titans behind it.
• Beast Man: Cat Folk called Ventrexians (who like to remind you they're NOT cats) exist and have a role in the show's universe, the most prominent of which are the intergalactic bounty hunter Avocato, and his son, Little Cato. Biskit joins in Season 3 and is a part of the Ventrexian sub-species somewhat explaining his size and differing appearance. He looks like a small white tiger compared to the generically cat-like Avocato and Little Cato.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Gary and Quinn. Quinn frequently denied Gary’s advances early on and punched him a few times. However she grows to care for him and kisses him in episode 10, bringing this trope full circle.
  • H.U.E. and AVA.
• Berserk Button:
  • The Lord Commander's god complex and ambition are such a toxic mix, the suggestion that he wasn't really chosen and his powers were nothing but an accident drives him to scream in rage and fire Gary into space with a point-blank energy blast.
  • Exploited in Ash's case. Mentioning prom to her face apparently makes her go completely berserk and start trashing things with her powers — she gets Gary to deliberately push this button for her so her response will benefit them.
  • Downplayed, but talking about Oreskis is apparently such a button for Bolo, causing the normally-chill Titan to descend into a rant about Oreskis' dick move with Bolo's girl and the grief it caused before the Titans' minds were corrupted.
  • Invictus apparently doesn't take being blindsided and betrayed by those under its thrall well at all. Invictus is content to let Ash shout defiances at it because it's all according to plan while Invictus works on slowly breaking her faith in the Team Squad, but when the Lord Commander turns on Invictus so he can take a fast-track to becoming a Titan, Invictus can barely contain its rage at him whenever it sees him from then on; screaming at the Lord Commander for choosing to be a heretic over being taught by Invictus what true power looks like.
• Big Bad: The Lord Commander, the leader of a malevolent alien empire. For Season 1. At the start of Season 2, he's immediately killed by Nightfall. The true villain is an ancient, malevolent entity named Invictus, responsible for corrupting the Titans and started the Lord Commander's Start of Darkness and later resurrects him in Season 3 to serve him, up until the Commander merges with a Titan and plots to betray Invictus. When the Lord Commander tries to take over the spot from Invictus, however, the latter proves itself as the top dog of villains by defeating and imprisoning the Commander while it prepares to wreck havoc after Ash frees him, firmly placing Invictus as this for the whole series.
• Big Good:
  • The Infinity Guard and its council led by Superior Stone and the Lord Commander. Which immediately subverts it.
  • Among the Titans that rule over Final Space, Bolo definitely counts as one. Also doubles as Token Good Teammate.
  • The Arachnitects that built the Titans were created by a benevolent being of infinite light.
• Big Word Shout: Little Cato lets out a heartwrenching scream of "DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!" as Avocato runs away to sacrifice himself, preventing a sticky bomb from killing the others.
• Bizarre Alien Biology:
  • Tribore switches between "goods" every six months. Also, his species apparently gives birth through their back, are born from eggs, grow to adulthood within seconds after they hatch and can gain clothes and even weapons seemingly out of thin air as they do.
  • From what we see of Bolo, the Titans posses hundreds of "brain chambers" which seem to be entire planes of reality in their own right.
• Blade Below the Shoulder:
  • Gary's robot arm can reconfigure into a stabbing blade this.
  • After merging with a Titan, the Lord Commander can transform his arm into a stabbing blade.
• Black Comedy Burst: Season 1 sees Gary wearing a dead alien's skin as a disguise and inadvertently traumatizing her family. They return in Season 2 to avenge themselves on Gary, whom they believe to have been her murderer. They even came back in season 3 to prevent Gary from coming through the dimensional portal or at least kill him and his allies when he goes through.
• Blue Is Heroic: Some of the Infinity Guard's uniforms are blue, notably those worn by some of their heroic officers such as Quinn and John Goodspeed.
• Body Horror:
  • As a consequence of overusing his powers, the Lord Commander's body appears to be literally decaying.
  • At the end of episode 6, we're treated to an indiscreet shot of how Avocato dies from a sticky bomb to the chest, as his corpse slowly drifts out of the Galaxy One to the planet below.
  • While not as overt as the above examples. Final Space Poisoning can be pretty horrifying even if it mainly takes the form of Volcanic Veins.
• Bolivian Army Cliffhanger: Season One ends this way with the fates of Gary, Quinn, Little Cato, and Tribore ambiguous. Season 2 reveals that Gary, Little Cato And Tribore have all survived and Quinn is believed to be still alive because of the fact that Nightfall is still around.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: In episode 10, several Mooks apprehend the heroes, hold guns to their heads, and then wait and tell them to prepare to die no less than three times... which naturally allows for a rescue (as well as some touching dialogue).
• A Boy and His X: Although Gary is a physically-grown Manchild, his bond with Mooncake from when they meet in the first episode otherwise has this dynamic, putting Gary on the path to becoming leader of the Team Squad whilst actively trying to keep the Lord Commander and Invictus from using Mooncake for their own apocalyptic ends.
• Brick Joke: The officer Gary knocked out in the first episode reappears in episode 9, still unconscious in the bathroom after 5 years due to being fed an overdose.
• But Now I Must Go:
  • Little over midway through Season One, Nightfall takes her leave of the Team Squad after bringing them to Bolo, saying they don't need her anymore. She returns at the start of Season Two full-time.
  • Midway through Season Two, Tribore leaves the Team Squad so he can rebuild the resistance.
• Cat Folk: The Ventrexians are a bipedal, anthropomorphic cat people.
• Central Theme: No one is beyond redemption, and anyone can become a hero if they are willing to give it their all to overcome their personal issues for the people they care about, the universe, and their desire to be good.
• Cerebus Retcon: The Dewinters, an innocent alien family who were the subject of a brief Black Comedy Burst gag in Season 1, become recurring antagonists in Season 2, believing that Gary killed their wife and mother. And thanks to time travel, they're right ^note It's all Clarence's fault!
• Cerebus Syndrome: Immediately after Avocato dies, the humor in the show gradually dissolves. By the Season 1 finale, almost all of the humor remaining in the show comes solely from KVN. And it just keeps getting Darker as the Seasons and Episodes go by.
• Commonality Connection: Little Cato at first wants little to do with the Team Squad after his father's apparent death. The main turning point is when he learns Gary went through the same thing as a kid, and when Gary gets a time-traveling reunion with his father and a front-row seat to the man's Heroic Sacrifice.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The universe in which humanity and many other alien races now live (which is already a Crapsack World in its own right) was once ruled by chaotic, monstrous eldritch abominations of god-tier physical power, and only a rapidly-thinning dimensional barrier is holding these abominations (called the Titans) back from returning to the universe and tearing down reality as we know it. What's worse, the Titans themselves answer to an even older and more powerful cosmic evil imprisoned within Final Space, whose expressed end goal is to devastate the whole of reality while enjoying it immensely. Even while the Titans and Invictus remain imprisoned in Final Space, the universe isn't free of much lesser cosmic monsters and demons — the serpent god Werthrent whom Ash's people worship and feed themselves to is proof of that. And despite the show's colorful appearance, it is not adverse to Downer Endings or a pessimistic tone at all — at times, the best the heroes can do instead of triumphing over the villains is ensure that the villains lose too.
• Crapsack World: The whole universe shown to be a dark and brutal setting. There are rampant murders, several corrupt governments, a gladiator pit, a televised death race and a religion where people sacrifice themselves to a snake god, and an evil tyrant is selfishly obsessed with becoming a god. We've also seen that slavery apparently isn't something that's really gawked at, and bloody wars on both Earth and alien worlds appear to be a frequent occurrence in the big picture. It's apparently bad enough that the Infinity Guard on Earth is described by Quinn in the first season as the last beacon of hope in the universe, before it's revealed the entire Guard except Quinn has turned to the Lord Commander. Even worse is that there is another dimension filled with demonic god-like beings trying to break into the material universe.
• Cruel Twist Ending: Several episodes in season 3 have very nasty and harsh endings, which all range from Fox being murdered, The Lord Commander destroying the KVN weapon on Earth and becoming a Titan, and then Ash betraying the Team Squad by abducting Little Cato and Mooncake and using the latter to free Invictus and allow it to start ruining the universe.
• Cut Short: The show abruptly ends on a cliffhanger with Invictus being freed and fully prepared to ravage the universe. It also ends with several crucial plot threads left dangling and unresolved such as the new strain on Avocato and Little Cato’s relationship and Mooncake’s fate.
• Cyclops:
  • Downplayed with Ash, who seems to have been born with only one eye and has nothing but bare skin where a right eye would be. At least, until Invictus changes that. Ironically, Ash gaining a second eye symbolizes her worldview being narrowed and corrupted instead of being broadened.
  • KVN and all the other KVN units whom are dreaded for their universal obnoxiousness are Cyber Cyclopes.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Compared to the show’s character-heavy and drama-driven approach to the original Gary Space miniseries, things got much darker as the concept grew and expanded.
  • Or compare the Lord Commander’s more Laughably Evil portrayal in the pilot, where he drops down celebratory balloons at the thought of defeating Gary, to the person we see in the show who holds an actual child hostage and has no quarrels with brutally murdering people who fail him.
  • As for the series itself, Season 3 is far more darker than its preceding seasons. The violence and frightening imagery has increased, there are more character deaths (like Fox for example), the characters start showing signs of mental instability as a result of the trauma they endure, and the tone overall is more bleak.
• Darkest Hour: Season 3, Episode 11 really puts the team in a nasty situation for a huge number of things:
  • Bolo is easily murdered by the now-Titan Lord Commander, who goes on to murder an entire army of Invictus' Titans without looking worse for wear.
  • The whole team, except Quinn, suffers from Final Space poisoning. This is one major reason Avocato blames Quinn for dooming them all just to get her back.
  • The group learns that all the Garys that have been pulled from their dimensions were an indirect effect of bringing dozens of their own Earths into Final Space, all of which are cultivating Titans to amass an army of Titans.
  • The group almost unanimously decide to forget about standing against Invictus by escaping back to their dimension, as there isn't anything better they can do for the time being.
• Dark Is Evil: The Lord Commander, the initial main antagonist of the series, wears black clothing, has dark-gray flesh and even black blood, and he's a thoroughly nasty piece of work with a black heart to match it. Gary's cruel and manipulative Missing Mom Sheryl, introduced in Season 2, also wears a black bodysuit. A couple of the Invictus-serving Titans within Final Space have notably darker and grungier color schemes than their light-colored, heroic brethren Bolo does. Ash for most of the series is Dark Is Not Evil with her mostly-dark color scheme, morbid tendencies and her destructive psychokinetic powers, but at the end of Season 3, she wholly becomes this trope when she sides with Invictus and becomes completely psychotic, selling out the whole of the universe to Invictus' omnicidal rampage.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Among the Team Squad, Ash dresses in dark clothes, she has some really unnerving hobbies and tendencies, she hails from a world with really morbid and macabre societal norms, and she has violent psychokinetic powers married to her emotional instability, but she's still a kind and awkward young girl who's on the good guys' side, until Invictus corrupts her and she chooses to join it. In Season 2, one-time character Phil is an outright devilish and creepy-sounding entity with charcoal-colored skin, who has all the hallmarks of a sinister deal-making trickster demon, but he proves to be just as sincere, helpful and good on his word as he claims to be.
• Deal with the Devil:
  • It's eventually revealed that when Sheryl was at her lowest, she was contacted by a Titan named Oreskis from Final Space. Unaware that he's evil (though she likely wouldn't care either way), and blind to the consequences if Oreskis' side wins, Sheryl accepted his bargain: gather the Dimensional Keys and prevent Bolo from being freed, and in exchange, Oreskis will bring Sheryl's husband back.
  • It's revealed in Season 3 that this is how the Lord Commander came back from the dead: in exchange for the Lord Commander's servitude, Invictus has resurrected him, restored his powers, and has promised to fulfil his driving dream of becoming a Titan at the end of it. Ironically, Invictus isn't the one who betrays their bargain with Loophole Abuse: it's the Lord Commander, the mortal rather than the devil in this arrangement, who turns on and betrays Invictus the moment he detects a fast-track to becoming a Titan on his own terms, with Invictus' dialogue towards him in the Season 3 finale implying that it had no intention of betraying him if he'd stuck to their deal.
• Defector from Decadence: At least one of the Titans were the reason for closing Final Space, in retaliation, the others sealed him forever.
• Demoted to Dragon: The Lord Commander takes the role of Invictus’ second in command upon being revived with the promise that he’ll finally be made a Titan if he succeeds. Though the Lord Commander attempts to avert this by merging with an incubating Titan and slaughtering many of Invictus' forces, he ultimately is unable to actually overcome Invictus and gets imprisoned in a cube prison for his troubles.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Nightfall is not a thin-skinned person, but in Season 2, it's implied she's just about hit her breaking point when she realizes that Gary (the first version of Gary she's managed to save after twenty years of watching him die in hundreds of alternate realities) doesn't want her the way he wants his timeline's Quinn nor the way that his counterpart in Nightfall's original life fell in love with her. It explains why she uses the Crimson Light's Virtualasium to construct a digital copy of her Gary from memory despite it putting everyone's lives including her own at risk, and she has a definite breakdown at the episode's end. For a straighter example in Nightfall's backstory, she used to be just like the main Quinn, but after losing her Gary, she was about to kill herself when Bolo first contacted her and gave her purpose again.
  • Towards the end of Season 3, more or less the entire Team Squad hit this point after the crippling losses they've suffered. Having watched the Lord Commander become a Titan, what was left of the Earth after Season 1 get destroyed for good, and both Bolo and the KVN Net (which were their only two realistic chances of combating Invictus and the Titans) perish spectacularly on top of most of them contracting deadly Final Space poisoning; the straw that breaks the camel's back is the discovery that Invictus has hundreds of alternate Earths hatching an entire army of Titans. At that point, everyone except Ash is ready to call it quits and run in order to keep the Team Squad alive, even if that means letting Invictus win.
    • Ash crosses the event horizon horrifically at the season's end after she overhears Gary and Avocato discussing the latter's dark secret (that Avocato isn't Little Cato's birth father and that he killed the kid's biological parents). Having endured a season's worth of systematic psychological manipulation and the loss of Fox, on top of her Dark and Troubled Past of being betrayed by her parental figures, Ash completely breaks in that moment: jumping to the rash conclusion that the entire Team Squad sans Little Cato are just more future betrayers of her trust, gleefully attempting to MURDER Gary and Avocato in the process of kidnapping Little Cato, and worst of all deciding Invictus was right and selling out the whole of reality to it.
• Doomed Hometown: The team, especially Gary and Quinn, set out to avert this for Earth. Sadly, they fail.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The Earth is completely destroyed in Season 3 when the Lord Commander, having merged with the Titan incubating within its core, breaks it apart from the inside out.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Titans are primordial, planet-sized cosmic beings trapped in a region of reality that's been walled off from normal space, and the brief glimpses of them shows them to be horrifically alien and unnatural-looking humanoid abominations. One of them even bears a striking resemblance to Cthulhu. The Team Squad's trips into Bolo's mindscape show that the inside of a Titan's brain alone consists of entire pocket dimensions stacked together.
  • The Titans' master Invictus is even more powerful than them: an enigmatic but utterly malicious and demonic cosmic being of "inconquerable evil", who emerged violently at the beginning of reality when the Arachnitects expanded too far out into the pre-universe void and disturbed it. Invictus' true form is imprisoned within a special cage at the heart of Final Space, and in the meantime it roams by manifesting as a fiery, demonic astral face with a telepathic voice that can reach across stars and dimensions. Invictus has the abilities to corrupt other beings into believing they want to serve it if it gets a foothold on them, forcibly possess others even while its true form is imprisoned, and it's said that if Invictus gets freed in its true form upon the universe again, it both can and will consume and destroy everything. Word of God describes it as being close to a god at full power, and its true form is a solar system-sized demonic figure that seems to be made of pure shadow and purple light.
  • See above for Animalistic Abomination.
• The Empire: The Lord Commander's forces, including most of the Infinity Guard.
• Equivalent Exchange: Part of how time travel functions in-universe. In order for someone who died in the past to be saved, someone else must remain in the past. Additionally, the show follows the only timeline in which Gary hasn't died or been lost in the breach, and he's only still around in this one because his universe's Quinn sacrificed herself instead.
• Everybody Cries: Played for Laughs in chapter 7. It happens after KVN turns on super sad music. Gary tries to hold back his tears until KVN mentions Avocato and Mooncake cries moments later for some reason. It’s ambiguous if Little Cato was crying or not in that scene because he was wearing his father’s helmet and KVN was heard sobbing.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Lord Commander.
• Evil Sounds Deep:
  • The Titans all seem to speak in deep, powerful voices, and all of them except Bolo are omnicidal creatures of destruction because Invictus corrupted their minds long ago.
  • The Lord Commander is an utterly vile, megalomaniacal being and a mortal enemy of the heroes; and whilst his natural voice is very raspy, his otherworldly powers cause it to distort into a Voice of the Legion often when he's expressing malicious intent or exercising his powers a lot.
  • Werthrent, the malevolent snake god on Ash's homeworld, speaks with a deep, hissing voice, and he actively consumes human and animal sacrifices and keeps them alive forever in eternal agony as putrid ghouls inside him so that he can feed on their life energy.
• Evil Sounds Raspy: The Lord Commander has a very raspy voice, and he's a thoroughly vile little monster of a despot and god-wannabe who has caused a lot of suffering. His right hand Viro also has a hoarse voice and is a cruel, repulsive being himself. But both of them pale next to Invictus: an omnicidal and sadistic Eldritch Abomination who wants to consume all life and enjoys every second that it's making others suffer, Invictus has such a guttural and low voice that one can only imagine how much "Gollum juice" was consumed to keep up those vocals, making the fact that it's a female voice actor providing the vocals all the more impressive.
• Evil Versus Evil: By Season 3, Invictus versus the Lord Commander after becoming a Titan. It's ultimately Invictus who wins.
• Excrement Statement: Little Cato reclaims the Crimson Light, the ship they won in a race the previous episode, from Clarence, the "Ventrexian way"—that is, peeing all over the ship. This results in an all-out pee battle between the people on the ship (except Nightfall, who just sits and watches), and ends with Ash getting a urinary tract infection.
• Eyeless Face: The Order of the Twelve lack eyes on their faces and instead have them floating around their heads, and they also exist as an example of The Blank.
• Face–Heel Turn:
  • It's revealed in Season 1 that pretty much everyone in the Infinity Guard except Quinn have made one, joining the Lord Commander.
  • Ash makes one at the end of Season 3, betraying the entire Team Squad and siding with Invictus, even viciously attacking Mooncake to that end.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: The show has a lot of it going around. A good example of this is in episode 6, where Avocato takes the brunt of a bomb's explosion on the Galaxy One and gets blown apart. We then see his broken corpse falling through space, guts on full display, as his son and the whole crew watches on.
• The Federation: The Infinity Guard or so we are initially led to believe. They're corrupt and those in charge actually work for the Lord Commander. Them being corrupt was so obvious, even Gary say it coming.
• Forgotten First Meeting: Quinn doesn't remember Gary when they meet again in episode 4, and takes the entire episode to remember. The trope happens again with Kevin Van Newton in Season 3, although it's given a twist in that Kevin actually met Nightfall instead of the current Quinn. Thus explaining why she doesn't remember meeting him.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: A couple.
  • The terms of Gary's sentence that HUE pulls up include not only "Time Related Disruptions" but also "Bathroom Related Disruptions".
  • In the background of the Infinity Guard test facility, there is a banner wishing happy birthday to all the July babies.
• From Bad to Worse: The last leg of season 3 sees everything tumble more and more downhill for our heroes. In order:
  • The Lord Commander ascends to Titanhood, destroying the Earth and the KVN Net in the process and rendering Kevin Van Newton's death meaningless. He then christens his newly-acquired status by killing Bolo.
  • As the Galaxy Two gets invaded by a swarm of Zombie Garys, we find out from an angry Avocato most of the surviving crew has contracted Final Space poisoning.
  • The revelation that the Titans have been pulling one Earth - and with it, an incubating Titan for the sake of wreaking Havoc - into Final Space for every timeline where Gary closed the breach horrifies the crew into abandoning their plan to fight off Invictus' forces, instead prioritizing just staying alive and escaping.
  • The trans-dimensional bridge is found, only to overheat from Mooncake's blast charging it up and breaking down, costing everyone their only way back to Normal Space.
  • Ash accidentally walks in on Avocato reminding Gary that he killed Little Cato's biological parents and, thanks in part to Invictus' deep-reaching influence, betrays the whole squad out of anger and disillusionment in favor of the horrid entity grooming her to be its servant, kidnapping LC along the way.
  • Little Cato receives confirmation from Avocato that yes, his real parents are long dead, and completely falls to pieces at the fact that his whole life was basically a lie.
  • Right as the crew get Little Cato back and re-activate the bridge so they can leave, Ash intercepts the ship and holds it in place. Mooncake comes out to try and fight her off, only to be tortured and see his powers drained and repurposed for the sake of releasing Invictus from its prison and unto the universe at large.
• From Zero to Hero: Gary starts out as a loser and eventually goes on a mission to save the entire universe.
• Furry Reminder: Despite what Avocato says, he is still a cat. Episode 2 has two instances of this, one where he lands on a catwalk in the classic "Scared cat" pose (all on all fours with his back arched) and the other where, after Gary slaps him with his dismembered arm, he lets out a pained meow.
  • In episode 12, Little Cato reclaims their new ship, the Crimson Light, the Ventrexian way—peeing all over the ship.
• Future Self Reveal: Halfway the first season, Nightfall is revealed to be none other than an older version of Quinn Ergon. In her timeline, Gary ended up dying plugging the hole to Final Space, so as to avoid this, Nightfall kept traveling back in an attempt to change history. However, due to her constant changes, the present timeline has become to divorced from her own time, meaning that she's no longer Quinn's future, merely her from a possible time line.
• Genuine Human Hide: Or alien hide rather, which Gary wears in episode 2 to blend into the world of Tera Con Prime.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Characters with supernatural powers display this, including most of the Titans, the Lord Commander's yellow eye-glow when he uses his power, the purple eyes which signify possession by Invictus, and the glowing Red Eyes, Take Warning of Werthrent. Subverted with Phil.
• Go Mad from the Apocalypse: Kevin Van Newton, the survivor of Earth's destruction introduced in Season 3, having been living underground on the planet's devastated shell ever since it was dragged into Final Space. Being all alone for months on a dying Earth dragged into another dimension, with only a horde of KVN units for company, Van Newton unsurprisingly has a few screws loose when he's first introduced; chiding himself to remember that his regular hallucinations aren't real, having apparently passed his time making a "turd museum" offscreen, and loudly ordering Gary and Quinn to "REST!" in his own bed (and even climbing in next to them, to their discomfort) when he first meets them.
• Go Mad from the Isolation:
  • During his sentence Gary was provided with KVN specifically to avert this, but after spending five years with an entirely artificial crew he's still crazed and desperate for organic companionship, to the point of reacting to an intruder by tying him up and forcing him to play cards for hours.
  • Little Cato in "The Other Side," hallucinating the presence of the other crew members in order to cope with being totally alone for sixty years.
  • And then Season 3 introduces Kevin Van Newton the creator of the KVNs whom ironically enough also went through this despite having a multitude of KVNs giving him company. It's somewhat comical that the creator of the thing Gary despises the most is almost similar to him.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: Bolo, aided by Nightfall AKA a Quinn from an Alternate Universe, along with the Arachnitects.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Titans; Invictus serves as this for the whole series, as it was the one who corrupted the Titans and is behind Lord Commander's corruption.
• Hand-or-Object Underwear: In Chapter 7 Gary's prison sentence is up and he is changing out of his prison uniform into his civilian clothes then Nightfall walks in on him nude and Gary uses Mooncake to cover his shame.
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • Sometimes life sucks, and sometimes you can't save the day — but no matter how dire things get and no matter how low your luck runs, you have to keep hoping for a better tomorrow.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Avocato takes a blast that was intended to kill Little Cato during the first season. Thanks to some Time Travel shenanigans, he's ultimately saved in the second season.
  • It's revealed that John Goodspeed didn't die in the explosion of his ship — on the contrary, he died whilst time around him was frozen by willingly detonating an anti-matter bomb to close the original breach to Final Space.
    • It's also revealed in Season 2 that in the hundreds of other Alternate Timelines that preceded the current one, if Gary didn't die leaving the mission, then he died the same way as his father during the Season 1 finale's events.
  • The first season finale features more than one such sacrifice by main characters: KVN and Quinn both seemingly give their lives fighting to stop the Lord Commander and close the breach to Final Space, although Season 2 reveals that KVN repaired himself while Quinn is alive but trapped in Final Space.
  • Downplayed by Gary in Season 2, when he remains trapped several months in the past so that the rest of the Team Squad can save Avocato, taking The Slow Path to get back to them.
  • In the Season 2 finale, Nightfall willingly gives her life to free Bolo so that the others can open Final Space and rescue Quinn.
• Hope Spot: In Chapter 6, Little Cato is rescued by his father, the Lord Commander gets Curb-Stomped by Mooncake, the team manages to get rescued in time... then the Lord Commander wakes up, uses his powers to attach a bomb to Little Cato, leading to Avocato's Heroic Sacrifice and kickstarts the show's Cerebus Syndrome.
  • Another major case in "Until the Sky Falls" : Avocato and Sheryl successfully attached a bomb to the Lord Commander's ship before making their escape, Gary and Quinn manage to activate the KVN Net in Wisconsin and Kevin Van Newton performs a Heroic Sacrifice to make sure the Net is properly deployed while the entire Team Squad evacuates Earth and regroups aboard the Galaxy II. Gary and Quinn hold hands, looking on as the Net is being deployed, everyone is happy, the good guys have won... And then, the Lord Commander, having merged with the incubating Titan at the center of the Earth, emerges from the planet's mantle, completely destroying it in the process and destroys the KVN Net before it can be fully operational.
• How We Got Here: Every episode of Season 1 begins with a cold open of Gary drifting alone in space with HUE as his only companion and ten minutes of oxygen left. The rest of each episode expands on the events that led to this scenario.
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • The Titans, with a couple exceptions, have a basically humanoid body-plan, sometimes with several extra limbs or eyes attached and some animalistic features like horns or squid tentacles, and they're reality-bending cosmic monstrosities from the dawn of the universe whom are larger than planets and contain entire pocket dimensions inside their brains. Despite what the Titans physically are, they're only evil and omnicidal in the present because of Invictus' power over them, and it turns out that Titans can act surprisingly human-like: Bolo and Oreskis are both Sophisticated as Hell and all round act like a pair of cool guys (particularly the former), Bolo is pissed that Oreskis seduced another Titan named Jill who Bolo was in love with (something Oreskis acts very snide about when it comes up), and Bolo's recollections of the time before the Titans went bad also reveal that they had STDs which made them piss lava and that he experimented with stars as hallucinogens when he was younger.
  • One-scene character Phil in Season 2 is a really creepy entity, residing on an astral plane that has a plateau of corpses which Gary accesses to try and communicate with Final Space. Phil looks like a pure-black skeletal figure with some demonic motifs, and a bunch of tiny black baby hands writhing around in his pocket. Despite appearances, he's ultimately a sincere and helpful guide who helps Gary out of generosity.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Everyone who's not a main character. Even if they're shooting at people who are standing still and are in the same room.
• Improvised Weapon:
  HUE: Gary, the SAMES have retrofitted the plasma torches, rail guns, and other sundry maintenance equipment into heinous super weapons.
  Gary: YES, HUE! Good Lord, yes!
• Incredible Shrinking Man: The "butterflies" in episode 5 zap prey and make them shrink to bite-size. Avocato temporarily falls victim to one.
• Interface Spoiler: On Netflix, one of the stills displayed as a banner for the show depicts Bolo being impaled by Titan!Lord Commander in Season 3.
• It's All My Fault: Little Cato blames himself for his father's death, since Avocato died trying to rescue him.
• It Tastes Like Feet: Gary says as much about the smiley-faced regenerating worms he's forced to eat on a planet in Final Space — apparently their cute little heads taste like someone's poop-chute.
• Jerkass:
  • Clarence. He's a selfish, greedy and racist little man who places Gary in indentured servitude and creates numerous scams. He even uses his adoptive children Ash and Fox as gadgets for the crimes he commits. It ends with him getting abandoned by the Team Squad after he betrays them and he injures Fox in a way which almost kills him, and the next time we see him in Season 3, he's at the bottom of a bottle and filled with regret.
  • The Lord Commander is such a huge, sociopathic asshole that merely calling him a Jerkass would be a huge understatement. Gary even calls him a jerk face in an episode recap.
  • The Lord Commander's henchman Viro. He treats Little Cato terribly as his prisoner and mocks him about his father.
  • Superior Stone among the Infinity Guard. His first appearance has him being needlessly abrasive to Quinn, refusing her evidence out of hand and refusing her request to investigate the danger to the universe. His next appearance reveals him to be Evil All Along.
  • According to Bolo, Oreskis was a "frickin' dickbag" even before Invictus poisoned his mind — he used to be Bolo's friend but he seduced Bolo's first love Jill and gave her a Titan STD.
  • Quinn's little sister Avery. Quinn's memories in Season 3 indicate Avery was bratty, immature and reckless with a superiority complex to hide feelings of inadequacy in her attempts to match up to Quinn's performance, and she didn't mature out of this at all as an adult. What really makes Avery this trope is that after she almost drowned as a child as a direct result of her own actions in her attempt to outdo Quinn at an exercise amid a storm, she was completely baleful to Quinn as if it was Quinn's fault when Quinn was being nothing but concerned and relieved that Avery was alright. All Tear Jerker from Quinn's voice actress's excellent performance aside, it's easy to feel when Avery's death is shown that it's something of a Karmic Death.
• Jumping on a Grenade: Avocato jumps on a sticky bomb to save his son and the rest of the crew.
• Killer Rabbit: Mooncake, a round green plushy ball of cuteness, who doubles up as a planet-destroying hyper-weapon, and murders an untold number of creatures in the Colosseum during episode 3.
• Knight of Cerebus: The Lord Commander. Things tend to get significantly more serious whenever he shows up. Even moreso with Invictus, who is way more powerful and terrifying than him while having zero comedic moments.
• Lame Last Words: Infinity Guard member Chuck would have had a heroic death if he didn't go out on "I am not a douche-canoe!"
• Laser Blade: Gary discovers in Season 3 that he can transform his robot arm into a laser blade for combative purposes. The zombified alternate Gary's that have robot arms can also do this, as demonstrated when one of them tries to knife Sheryl. The main Gary stops using his robot arm's blade after Invictus possesses it and uses it to kill Fox.
• Light Is Not Good: Seems to be a subtle motif. The Watchers from "Chapter 3" refer to the Lord Commander's power as "light", the light of the dying star triggers Gary's bad memories and the Galactic Garrison's reason to help Lord Commander tear open a hole to Final Space is because it will flood the universe with light and peace... because, as Quinn points out, the light will kill everyone.
• Limited Wardrobe: Zig-Zagged. Many of the characters on the show wear the same outfit for several episodes but sometimes swap out their clothes or modify them permanently whenever the plot demands it. Given that they are in space with not much clothes to choose from, this makes sense. However characters such as Little Cato play it straight.
• The Lost Lenore:
  • Deconstructed with the late John Goodspeed. His widow Sheryl was heartbroken after his death, unfortunately this made her neglect their son Gary (who she was already resentful of due to him unwittingly instigating John kicking her out previously) due to focusing on her own grief, and then she abandoned Gary, citing that her reason was because John's death wiped out any part that could love. However, instead of portraying her as sympathetic, it only reinforces how horribly she's treated her son, who was also grieving John's death.
  • Nightfall began time-traveling and creating alternate realities after she lost her original universe's Gary (who she was engaged to) when he sacrificed himself closing the breach to Final Space. She spent the next twenty years traveling through hundreds of alternate realities trying to create a timeline where Gary's life is saved, but she always failed until she reached the prime timeline.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Avocato and Gary both experience this in episode 3 with the Lazarus trap.
• Luke Nounverber: Gary Goodspeed and Quinn Airgone. Amusingly, many of the aliens in the show have much more mundane names, like Clarence and Jack.
• Made of Explodium: Ships and other hardware are rather fragile in this series.
• Magnetic Weapons: During the assault on New York, some of the S.A.M.Es use the ship's equipment to make Railguns.
• Marrying the Mark: Sheryl Goodspeed is a member of an anti-Infinity Guard faction who seduced and later married John Goodspeed, a member of the Infinity Guard, in order to learn about an anti-matter bomb that the Infinity Guard were building. Unfortunately, despite eventually growing to love him (and even having a child with him), he eventually learned of her true alliance and forced her to leave.
• Mecha-Mooks: The S.A.M.E.s serve as the crew/prison guards on the Galaxy one.
• Mind-Control Eyes: Anyone who's being possessed by Invictus gains glowing purple Monochromatic Eyes.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal:
  • It's revealed in Season 2 that part of the precedent to Avocato turning against the Lord Commander was learning from a time-traveling Little Cato that the Lord Commander was going to kill him in the future. To say nothing of the moment further down the line when the Lord Commander ordered Avocato to murder his own son as a test of loyalty, an order which Avocato couldn't follow through on.
  • In Season 3, it's implied that Invictus' Bad Boss tendencies towards the Lord Commander for performing ineptly are another big reason why the Lord Commander betrays Invictus the moment that he finds another route to becoming a Titan.
• Monochromatic Eyes: Invictus (and those it's openly possessing with Mind-Control Eyes), seemingly most of the Titans, Werthrent and Phil all have these kinds of eyes overlapping with Glowing Eyes of Doom.
• Monumental Damage: When Gary, Quinn, HUE and KVN find Earth in Final Space at the beginning of Season 3, they get across a few iconic monuments that didn't fare well following the fall of Earth:
  • When they land in Paris, they find the broken Eiffel Tower.
  • When they travel to Belgium in order to acquire a new ship, the shape of the Belfry of Brussels can be spotted in the background.
  • And then there's London, where we can see a ruined Big Ben and the remains of the London Eye.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The end of Episode 6 interrupts a heartwarming victory for the team with Avocato's Heroic Sacrifice.
  • "The Other Side" opens with a pumped-up post-victory Gary blaring "Footloose" over the ship's speakers and the rest of the crew reacting with everything between horror and delight until all of them gradually end up joining his impromptu dance party in the hallway. The song is interrupted by the ship crashing into a space-time anomaly in which Little Cato and most of the crew (as hallucinated by Little Cato upon finding himself alone) end up trapped for sixty years, believing Gary to be dead.
• More than Mind Control: Seems to be how Invictus's possession works. When possessing Gary he attempts to convince him that his friends don't care about him, and he turns Avocato against Gary and Little Cato by playing on his jealousy of the father-son relationship that has developed between them in his absence.
• Multiple Gunshot Death: Tribore likes inflicting these.
  Gary: Hey guy! I don't know who you are, but I like how you keep shooting people even after they're dead.

N-Z

• Naked People Are Funny: Gary boasts this trope two times, thus far.
  • In Chapter 3, his new arm tears off his clothing. When he is given a towel, it falls off.
  • In Chapter 7, he is disturbed by Nightfall, who sees him naked.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • Stevil. Gary immediately lampshades that someone having "evil" right in there name is a red-flag and refuses to hand Mooncake over to him. Even Avocato admits he has a point.
  • Also Deathcropolis.
  • Despite his small stature (which a prisoner even teases him about in the first episode), the Lord Commander is also one for both his cruel dominance over his lackeys and his powerful telepathic abilities.
• The Namesake: Final Space is the area where the Titans are sealed away, and where Mooncake was created.
• Nightmare Face: Gary gives a pretty good one after being possessed by Invictus.
• Nobody Poops: Averted in a Season 2 episode—after Clarence swallows a dimensional key, he is seen going to the bathroom to pass it.
• No Ending: The series and it’s overall story ends abruptly with Invictus breaking free from its prison. This is due to Warner Bros deciding to suddenly pull the plug on the show and leaving several plot lines unresolved.
• No Eye in Magic: The Lord Commander's powers seem to work this way, given that blood splashed in his eyes temporarily disables him in episode 1.
• Noodle Incident: According to the Lord Commander in episode 2, this isn't the first time that Avocato has failed to deliver Mooncake. It's possible he's referring to Mooncake's previous owner who was captured in episode 1, though without securing Mooncake itself.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • The alternate Gary's, oh so very much. They all wound up in Final Space by sacrificing themselves closing the universe-threatening breach in their respective timelines, and what was their reward? Dying far away from all their loved ones followed by their corpses getting possessed by Invictus as its puppets, with "The Dead Speak" confirming that the undead Gary's' souls are still trapped in there and likely still aware of what's happening.
  • Because he broke Time Swap laws in helping the Team Squad save Avocato, Time Swap Sammy has lost his job when he reappears in Season 3. He's grown to resent the Team Squad and returns to kill them as vengeance. Good intentions or no, Time Swap Sammy still broke the law and suffered the consequences for it.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: At the beginning, it looks like Gary and the rest of the main characters might go through various, quirky mini-adventures through the galaxy despite being pursued by the Lord Commander. Avocato's death in Chapter 6 not only all but completely throws the "quirky" part out the window, it also drives home the fact that the Lord Commander is an actual threat to the heroes and the universe as a whole.
  • In Chapter 10, a Titan drags Earth out of the universe and into Final Space; Quinn, Little Cato and Gary face an Uncertain Doom, with the two former missing and the last one out of oxygen; the Lord Commander is on the brink of death and all his forces have been eradicated along with the Infinity Guard and (presumably) the Infinity Resistance... and Mooncake is still his prisoner.
• Not So Stoic:
  • Avocato. He's one of the tougher and more serious members of the Team Squad, but he has his emotional spots when it comes to his son Little Cato. He'll freak when his son is in danger, his Heel–Face Turn away from willingly serving the Lord Commander was even jump-started by him refusing to kill his own son to prove his loyalty, and the truth about Little Cato's parentage and the deaths of his birth-parents is implied to be one of Avocato's greatest, if not his single greatest shame. Darkly enough, Invictus exploits Avocato's weak spots for Little Cato to make him go psycho when Invictus possesses him.
  • Nightfall ultimately turns out to be this in "The First Times They Met". She's been presented throughout most of the series as a Stoic Woobie, hardened by twenty years of traveling through hundreds of Alternate Timelines and watching Gary and all her friends die in every one, but in this episode, she implicitly hits the Despair Event Horizon when she uses the ship's virtual simulator to create a duplicate of her world's Gary from her memories, even though this is heavily draining the ship's power and will likely kill her and the rest of the squad.
• Oh Look, More Rooms!: The Team Squad's Season 2 ship, the Crimson Light, apparently has several luxurious facilities tucked away onboard which Gary alone didn't know about, including a bowling alley, an arcade and a soda parlor. This trope happens again with the Galaxy Two in Season 3, when Gary discovers the ship has a gift shop, of all things, onboard.
• Only Sane Woman: Quinn seems to be the only member of the Infinity Guards with the competence to recognize the threat approaching. Subverted in some ways: the first episode that features her as part of the main conflict shows her punching Gary repeatedly for giving her a series of slightly insulting, but also fairly tame nicknames and breaking one of his fingers with a smile on her face when he tries to flirt with her again. In another way this is averted; certain portions of the Infinity Guard are on the Lord Commander's payroll and are helping him reach Final Space, and she remains in an absurd amount of denial over it despite the abundance of evidence until she actually sees the laser cannon blasting open the breach into Final Space.
  • Justified as of Season 3 : Quinn is the daughter of the Infinity Guard's former leader, so of course she'd hold the Infinity Guard in high regard and be competent, because she was basically raised from birth to become a worthy successor to her mother. At the same time, Quinn's ruthlessness can be attributed to her mother's... less than ideal parenting.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • A big one with Gary during Season 3, after Fox's death. HUE offers Gary a cookie in consolation. The same guy whose biggest dream short of seeing Quinn again in Season 1 was pretty much getting to eat as many of the ship's cookies as he wanted responds by smashing the cookie machine in anger.
  • The dead alternate Gary whose consciousness gets to speak with the Team Squad is thoroughly traumatized by his And I Must Scream experience whilst his corpse was possessed; displaying none of the main Gary's humor or bravado, regularly shuddering spasmodically and overall needing the biggest hug in the universe plus a fricking therapist.
• Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: When Gary's arm is ripped off in episode 2 the wound left behind gushes a literal fountain of blood that lasts for several minutes.
• Papa Wolf: Avocato, who's main goal is to rescue his son and will do absolutely anything to achieve this goal.
• Parental Abandonment: Not only did Gary lose his father at a young age and even had a front seat to John's sacrifice on Episode 8 of Season 1, his mother walked out on him not long after the funeral because she felt as though she couldn't love anyone after John's death and that included their son.
• Platonic Co-Parenting: Following Avocato's death midway through the first season Gary Goodspeed takes to looking after his son Little Cato, even officially adopting him in season two. Towards the end of the same season, following Avocato's return due to a temporal loophole the two settle into this sort of relationship, Little Cato even takes to calling them both his dad.
• Plot Coupon: The keys to Bolo's prison that will allow Gary to enter 'Final Space'.
• Portal Crossroad World: Inverted with Final Space: "All timelines flow into Final Space." What these words mean is that there's only one version of Final Space which transcends all Alternate Timeline versions of the main universe, and all the flotsam and jetsam from these timelines which get transported to Final Space — most prominently the alternate Gary's and alternate Earths whom entered the breach — all end up in the same dimension, as shown in Seasons 2 and 3.
• Punny Name: Avocato. Geddit? Avocado? According to Olan Rogers, all Ventrexian names are food puns, and every single Ventrexian seen so far does indeed seem to follow that Fantastic Naming Convention. Little Cato appears to be an exception, but it's more likely that "Little Cato" is just a nickname, with his actual name being the same as his father. Indeed, in The Other Side, Future!Mooncake calls him "Little Avocato", and since the whole episode is actually a hallucination on LC's part, it can safely be assumed that Little Cato's real name is actually "Avocato" too.
• Purple Is Powerful: Some of the most powerful entities in the series produce purple light or energy with their powers. Ash's psychokinetic powers produce a purple glow, and not only do they make her one of the Team Squad's most supernaturally powerful members alongside Mooncake, but they're powerful and intense enough to intimidate Bolo in Season 3. Invictus, who eclipses the Titans as just about the most powerful and dangerous entity in the setting with the possible exception of the Beings of Unimaginable Light, produces a pinkish-purple light. The Season 3 opening also features a corrupted Titan attacking Bolo and Mooncake who has a partly dark-purple color scheme and glowing purple eyes. Season 3 reveals that the aforementioned Ash's powers actually come from Invictus, making her The Antichrist and cementing purple as a color associated with powerful forces of evil.
• Reckless Gun Usage: Gary seems to like scratching his face with gun barrels. Mind you, this is Gary we're talking about.
• Redemption Equals Death: Avocato is killed moments after rescuing the son who paid the price for his own evil deeds and vowing that their future will be better.
  • As of Season 3's ninth episode, Clarence suffers a similar fate: after betraying the team in Season 2, he activates the dimensional bridge leading out of Final Space at the cost of his own life. His final moments have him fondly looking at a picture of him alongside Fox and Ash.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Characters with red-colored Glowing Eyes of Doom who are definitively evil include Werthrent, the Titan Oreskis, and the horde of virus-corrupted evil KVNs. It's also worth noting, the Lord Commander's yellow Glowing Eyes of Doom have a red hue in Season 1. This is part of Phil's entire Obviously Evil subversion.
• Reluctant Warrior: We can see in episode 3 that Mooncake seems reluctant and then saddened over his killing spree in the Colosseum, despite his status as a dangerous planet killer.
• Rescue Arc: The primary arc mission of Season 2 is reaching Final Space in order to rescue one of the Team Squad's own from there (Quinn). It's revealed later into the season that Quinn is being kept alive by Invictus as bait to lure the main Gary in.
• Rewatch Bonus: Avocato’s death caught many viewers off guard because there seemed to be little to no Foreshadowing of it beforehand but if one cared to rewatch chapter 2, it turns out that Avocato’s death was foreshadowed by Clarence but it’s extremely subtle. It comes when Clarence says that he will be helping out Avocato’s for the last time when having to deal with concealing Gary’s identity. Four episodes later, it’s revealed that this was actually the last time. The cold opening for episode 6 also foreshadowed it; when Gary is drifting in space and losing oxygen, he wishes for Avocato to appear and scoop him up, only for HUE to remind Gary that Avocato is not coming with the rest of the episode revealing why. It turns out that Gary was in grief over losing Avocato and still in denial over it due to being close friends with him, so his wish of Avocato saving him was just wishful thinking.
• Robosexual: Inverted as two of the SAMES robots are aroused when they walk in on Nightfall and Gary, and at one point a captured Quinn successfully seduces KVN into untying her.
• Running Gag: A very dark one with Gary repeatedly traumatizing the Dewinter family.
• "Save the World" Climax: Deconstructed, with the first season leading up to a classic world-saving only for Gary to lose the Earth.
• The Scream: While we don't hear it over the music, it's quite clear that Little Cato is letting one of these out at the end of Episode 6 as Avocato's dead body is drifting into space following his Heroic Sacrifice.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Titans, who are imprisoned in Final Space.
• Serious Business: Invoked with Gary and Little Cato's "This Is Serious" game, which seems to consist of them taking turns dramatically announcing how serious something is.
• Shout-Out:
  • An energetic blonde dude with a metallic arm... are we talking about Gary, Edward, or Finn?
  • HUE, the Galaxy One's AI, sounds almost exactly like HAL.
  • The looping asteroid sequence in episode 1 resembles a condensed version of the plot of Gravity.
  • When Gary and Avocato are searching for an escape ship in episode 2 we briefly see the space cruiser from Rick and Morty before it flies away.
  • In Episode 2, HUE injecting Gary with a substance that will cause his brain to explode if he doesn't come back from his mission in five hours reminds of Snake Plissken having explosives implanted in his body that will blow up in 24 hours. Though it's all a joke on HUE's part.
  • Chuck's virus in episode 3 references Jurassic Park.
  • Episode 3 has the Lazarus Trap which is visually based on M.C. Escher's "Relativity" (the picture with stairs going in all directions).
  • Episode 4 shows Gary dancing in a clear homage to Footloose.
  • Episode 5's arena sequence and monsters resemble the climax of Attack of the Clones, complete with The Cavalry air-dropping in.
  • In episode 7, Little Cato's den in the air ducts resembles Newt's.
  • One of the Titans revealed in episode 8 bears a distinct resemblance to Cthulhu.
  • One of the alternate Garys shown in episode 8 looks like Neo. Gets better in episode 9, where the storming of an Infinity Guard base is a parody of Neo and Trinity's rescue of Morpheus.
  • Several to Warhammer 40,000 - in episode 5, Avocato loads up with what appear to be Tau pulse rifles. And in 7, there's a chainsword propped up against the wall of his room.
  • Mooncake is pretty similar to Kirby.
  • When Clarence introduces Ash and Fox to Gary, they can be seen doing the Fusion Dance.
  • When Ash joins Fox and Clarence's side in claiming the Crimson Light for themselves, she echoes the first line of Galadriel's dark queen speech.
  • The KVNs have square pupils in their eyes, like Bender and all the robots in Futurama.
  • Before becoming the Lord Commander, Jack wore an eyepiece similar to the scouters from Dragon Ball Z. His design is also similar to those little bald round-headed alien species that Akira Toriyama sometimes uses as extras and comic relief.
  • Bit of an odd one in Season 2: After KVN loses a vital circuit board that keeps him from going insane in order to save Fox’s life, he starts chewing on Ash’s hair in a way similar to the infamously recalled Cabbage Patch Kids Snacktime Kid doll.
• Single-Target Sexuality: Gary only has his eyes on Quinn, and has had for the past five years. He even turns down Nightfall, a Future Quinn from an alternate timeline, to stay loyal to "his" Quinn, even though he finds Nightfall to be smokin' hot regardless.
  • Tribore only has eyes for himself.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Gary has a disproportionately one-sided resentment of KVN, berating the robot even as he rescues him in episode 3. KVN does not share these feelings and continues to rescue and praise Gary at every opportunity.
• Slasher Smile: Grinning from ear-to-ear with a malevolent look in one's eyes and brows is a telltale sign of Demonic Possession by Invictus. Invictus' little Antichrist the Lord Commander himself sports a grin that would almost make Invictus proud when he's doing something really nasty or devious.
• Sliding Scale of Continuity: For a show that is ostensibly a sci-fi animated sitcom, this one is at level 5 full lockout. Each episode has a full impact on the next and each one has a cold opening that takes place in the present with Gary in a hopeless life-threatening predicament and the episodes explain how he got there. the show does recap previous episodes but Gary as the narrator of them, is sometimes unreliable due to his eccentric personality. Word of God states that whatever changes the characters go through are permanent and cannot be reversed, using Gary’s robot arm as an example.
• The Slow Path: How Gary returns to the present in "The Remembered" after going back to the events of Chapter 6, which fortunately occurred only a few months prior.
• The Smurfette Principle: The only female in the main cast is Quinn, discounting Nightfall, her future self. Everyone else is a male of various species (or a robot voiced by a male actor).
  • In the Infinity Resistance itself, Shannon Thunder is the only female character we get to see.
  • Averted by Season 2, which introduces Ash, Clarence's adopted daughter, and AVA.
• Space Madness: KVN units exist specifically to prevent this. Whether Gary's KVN helped him or made him worse is debatable.
• Space Whale: The temporal worm in episode 3, which sends anyone it eats into an indeterminable amount of time in the past or future.
• Spell My Name with a "The": Inverted. The Lord Commander keeps referring to Gary as "the Gary" despite Gary's repeated insistence that it's just Gary.
  Lord Commander: Just The Gary.
• Spikes of Villainy: All over the Lord Commander's ships.
• Stable Time Loop: How time travel by temporal worm works, usually. During a brief trip a few years into the past in "The Remembered," we find out that a time-traveling Gary was the one who originally freed Mooncake from the Lord Commander's prison, and that this was why Mooncake attached himself to him in the first place. Additionally, it's implied that Avocato made his Heel–Face Turn at least in part due to having been told by Little Cato that he would one day die at the Lord Commander's hands, and Gary and Clarence were accidentally responsible for the death of Melanie Dewinter and for her corpse ending up in Clarence's hands to begin with.
• Standard Post-Apocalyptic Setting: Earth in Season 3 is a barren and muddy-brown wasteland after it was dragged into Final Space. The only sapient survivors are an army of KVNs and Kevin van Newton, all of whom dress in a fairly scavenger-like manner and live in a bunker, and mutated beasts roam the otherwise-lifeless planet's surface.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Nightfall, an Alternate Self of Quinn, thinks she and Gary are this after she's spent twenty years traveling through hundreds of Alternate Timelines where Gary universally dies, only to find that in the one timeline where Gary lives, he doesn't want her because she's not the Quinn he knows in his timeline. As she puts it:
  "Always meant to be together, but never meant to be."
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: Avocato, The Lancer, is killed by an explosion in the last minute of episode 6, we and the crew get very little time to prepare for this.
• Take Care of the Kids: Avocato's last words to Gary are "Take care of my boy."
• Take Up My Sword: After Avocato's death, his son Little Cato decides to take his place on the Galaxy One Crew in order to avenge his death.
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: In "The Lost Spy," when Gary and Nightfall listen to Little Cato's transmission.
  Little Cato: I'm going as far away as I can, and please...don't come after me.
  Gary: We're going after him.
  (Second transmission pops up.)
  Little Cato: I knew you'd say that, so I recorded a second message to say: for REAL, do not come after me!
  Gary: We're going after him.
• Too Dumb to Live: The Infinity Guard in general have no sense of self-preservation. Let's see... in episode 4 they try to apprehend the Galaxy One while a supernova bears down on them. In episode 10, they continue to man the spire in New York while the Earth is being ripped apart. And then of course there's throwing in their lot with the Lord Commander...
• Uncertain Doom:
  • Throughout the Season 1 finale, the majority of the main characters all have their fates classified as unknown. Tribore's ship gets shot and goes out of control but is never seen exploding, Little Cato kills Bhero and confronts the Lord Commander only to get accidentally blown into space by Gary and knocked unconscious and drifting, Quinn detonates the bomb but not before going inside the breach completely. To top that all off Gary runs out of oxygen and seemingly dies and goes to the afterlife to find his father’s spirit and he asks whether Little Cato and Quinn are dead or alive with Gary's dad not answering that question. The first season ends with a beam of light opening up which indicates that Gary could possibly be saved. Only Mooncake and the Lord Commander are shown to be alive while KVN dies during the battle. Subverted at the start of Season 2: they all survive, with even KVN turning out to be Not Quite Dead^note Although Nightfall kills the Lord Commander soon after.
  • The Gatekeeper of Bolo's mind. What happens to him following Bolo's death in Season 3 is unclear.
  • Mooncake in the cliffhanger ending of Season 3. He's violently drained of his powers by a corrupted Ash whilst the rest of the Team Squad reluctantly escape, and it's unknown as of this edit whether he's dead or he's merely de-powered and marooned in Final Space.
• Undignified Death: Sort of a running theme in this show.
  • Gary's father, John Goodspeed, whose spaceship is blown apart in the middle of a heroic mission. Subverted, since he actually died blowing up a bomb to close the rift in Final Space.
  • The Lord Commander also has a habit of making his subjects beg for forgiveness before killing them.
  • Avocato's death in episode 6 is all sorts of undignified and unfair. Right after reconnecting with his son and promising to be there in the future he takes a bomb to the chest and gets sucked out of the spaceship, his broken body on full display as the crew watches on.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The breach couldn't have been possible if Quinn hadn't drawn on a certain bar napkin. She is understandably horrified to learn this.
• Villainous Legacy:
  • Although the Lord Commander is killed by Nightfall, his actions during the first season have a lasting impact before his resurrection: the destruction he's caused is what's set off Todd's vendetta against Gary, and his actions also led to Quinn getting trapped in Final Space, with reaching Final Space to get her back being the Team Squad's primary mission throughout Season 2.
  • Although the evil Titan Oreskis is killed in Season 3 after only a couple appearances, before his death, he deals a wound to Bolo that infects him with Invictus and enables the latter to break his mind later on. This in turn enables Invictus' scheme to push Ash down a Start of Darkness to progress further.
• Walking Disaster Area: The heroes rival Rick and Morty for collateral damage done to any location they visit.
• Wall of Weapons: Avocato's cabin on the Galaxy One has a fair number of weapons on the walls, and even more behind hidden panels retracted by touching the bonsai.
• Wham Episode:
  • Episode 6 is a doozie. Not only do we find out that Avocato potentially committed genocide under the Lord Commander, not only do we get to watch actual children being shot by their own parents, but then we have to watch Avo himself get blown to pieces by a bomb right after reconnecting with Little Cato. It's particularly jarring since it seemed like Avocato would be part of the main cast but nope.
  • Episode 8 reveals that The Lord Commander used to be an Infinity Guard member named Jack who was friends with Gary's father for 29 years. It even goes into explaining how he acquired his telepathic powers: Jack was in the proximity of the blast that was caused by the anti-matter bomb that John used to seal the breach. In addition, this episode reveals that there is a good Titan, Bolo, who's assisting Nightfall and the heroes, and that Mooncake is actually comprised of particles from Final Space.
  • Episode 10 is such an episode where the fates of most of the main cast are unknown, if not confirmed dead.
  • "The Remembered": Gary and Little Cato manage to use time travel to bring Avocato Back from the Dead, but he's now suffering from severe memory loss.
  • "Until the Sky Falls": The Lord Commander betrays Invictus, merges with a Titan, destroys the Earth and goes after the heroes.
  • "The Leaving": Ash learns the truth about Little Cato's parents, which results in her pulling a Face–Heel Turn out of anger, betraying the Team Squad and kidnapping Little Cato to "protect him" after telling him that Avocato killed his true parents.
  • "The Devil's Den": Ash defeats Mooncake and uses his powers to free Invictus.
• Wretched Hive:
  • Tera Con Prime, a planet ruled by the Lord Commander and festering with black market dealers, bounty hunters and corrupt police.
  • Yarnum could be classified as this too, considering its main draw is a giant Colosseum where beautiful creatures fight to the death. And also because it’s overseen by the eyes of the universe, who prove themselves loyal to the Lord Commander, and almost as bloodthirsty.
  • One of the two main planets on Zetakron Prime presumably housed one in a prison as well, until the Lord Commander massacred all of the inmates.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Constantly. Every time something good happens to the Team Squad, you can bet something will come along to take away their victory, or cause something even worse to happen. Usually involving the Lord Commander. Little Cato is rescued? The Lord Commander kills Avocato with a grenade. The Infinity Guard is defeated? A Titan drags the entire Earth into Final Space. Avacato is rescued via time travel? Invictus possesses him. Clarence sacrifices his life to get the gang back to normal space? They decide to remain in Final Space. KVN is part of a giant network that can protect the Earth and kill Titans? The Lord Commander becomes a Titan and destroyed the network before it can be initialized. Ash forgives Gary for his role in Fox's death? She later learns that Avocato killed Little Cato's birth parents, which makes her snap, betray the crew and kidnap Little Cato "for his own good". Gary and Avocato rescue Little Cato? Ash drains and leaves Mooncake severely weakened and frees Invictus.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: The space-time breach in which half the ship is caught in "The Other Side."

---