Final Space
“The Devil's Den”, Season 3 Episode 13
Requested By
.· Ben ⬩ Salvidrim! ·. on our Discord server. Thank you for supporting the Substack!
What do I know about this series going into it?
I’d never heard of it prior to the request. I know only that it was extremely difficult to find, that it’s a non-children’s1 animated series that takes place in space, and there’s a character called “Invictus”.
Previously On
A rapid-fire sequence of quotes:
“Invictus is where I should’ve been all along,” says Ash2.
“Little Cato!” cries Avocato.
“Lord Commander is now a Titan,” says Sheryl.
“The hyper-[something] bridge is now lost in space,” says Biskit.
Well, that didn’t provide much to start off with…
Recap
A blond man with yellow lightning bolts on his neck is sitting in a spaceship, despondent. Suddenly he gets up with a look of determination and, accompanied by other crewmen, heads out into a hangar.
They are greeted by a small white catman, who calls two of them “Gary” (I assume the blond human) and “Avocato” (I assume the larger black catman). He’s prepared a new ship for them to use, whose design is reminiscent of a fighter plane.
Before boarding the fighter, Gary orders a floating green blob to help “Quinn” get the “bridge” back online; it’s unclear if he’s referring to the bridge of the spaceship they’re in, or the hypersomething bridge that was lost in space during the Previously. Quinn is the woman standing next to him; he embraces her, then boards the fighter with Avocato. They soon discover that White Catman has loaded an AI named “H.U.E.” onto the fighter as a pleasant surprise for them.
The opening sequence shows Gary, sans spaceship, tumbling through a wormhole.
Reaching the bridge of the main vessel, Quinn asks another woman if she’s “ready to do this”. Other Woman is decidedly not ready, but tosses Quinn “Nightfall’s helmet” anyway.
(Running underneath this scene are the opening credits, from which I recognize Fred Armisen and David Tennant.)
It seems, however, that whatever they’re trying to do is impossible. White Catman complains that Green Alien Blob overloaded something and something else doesn’t work and so on; I was able to absorb none of this.
Quinn hangs her head. “There’s no hope,” she says. But that statement activates something in the helmet: a projection of a recording from someone named “Nightfall”, who says they can extract the thermogenic power core that’s inside the helmet’s eye. Quinn can release it using a retinal scan.
But Quinn doesn’t want to put the helmet on, because it’ll turn her into Nightfall. I think Nightfall is a future version of herself, whom Quinn dislikes.
They have no choice, however, and the recording and Other Woman convince Quinn to do it anyway. You won’t become somebody else, they say; who you are in the future is just the result of the decisions you make.
Elsewhere, a woman and a small orange catman (what’s with all the catmen?) are diving headfirst into a purple expanse. When they land, they are confronted by an enormous eye:
Orangecat is, understandably, freaked out at the arrival of Sauron and begs the woman (whom he calls Ash) to let him leave. But Ash reacts with fury: “Avocato killed your real parents! Nightfall is a shell of her former self!”
Outside the purple expanse, Gary and Avocato have arrived; these are “Little Cato’s” - I assume Orangecat’s - last known coordinates. They conclude that Ash must have taken Little Cato into the black hole, so they tell H.U.E. to dive right into it. They recognize the eye as “Invictus”, and H.U.E. detects Little Cato. Gary and Avocato eject and, using rocket boots, dive down to the rescue.
They land on the other side of Little Cato, Ash having moved toward the eye.
Ash tells Little Cato: “They don’t deserve you and never will”.
Little Cato turns to Avocato and pleads: “Did you do it? Did you kill my parents?!”
Avocato lowers his head and softly admits, “Yes.”
Ash: “I told you. They don’t deserve you.”
Gary tries to convince Cato otherwise, but Cato ignores him and addresses Avocato directly. “Why did you do it?” “Because I’m a killer.” “Why didn’t you kill me?” “Because when I saw you, you gave me purpose.3”
Avocato throws down his guns and approaches Little Cato. “Being your father is the only thing I want to be.”
Ash starts to panic that Cato might actually change his mind, so she unleashes a sort of windstorm to keep Avocato and Gary from getting any closer. But when Gary apologizes to Ash for failing her, that breaks through her anger and she pauses.
Meanwhile, on board the fighter, H.U.E. receives a message from White Catman: Surprise #2! He’s built H.U.E. a robot body. H.U.E. leaps out of the ship and interposes himself between Ash and the heroes, just before she recovers from the shock and resumes her windstorm.
Invictus, however, is tired of this. “I’ll take care of them,” he says, and unleashes a horde of zombies from his pupil. Then he fires an energy beam that destroys all the zombies but one. What? I’m not following this at all.
Meanwhile, Quinn and Green Alien Blob (“Mooncake”?) are conducting a spacewalk, fixing the ship according to instructions provided by White Catman (“Bizkit”?) over the radio. Mooncake fires an energy beam to charge up the capacitor (or something) but is a bit of an idiot, charging it up way too much, forcing Quinn’s sidekick robot KVN4 to throw himself into the beam before it overloads. KVN’s not dead - I don’t think - and the enormous Stargate that the ship is attached to powers up.
There’s just one problem: there’s nobody to activate the other end of the Stargate. Quinn sends out a message in desperation but nobody answers.
Back inside the black hole, it turns out I got it wrong before; the zombies hadn’t come out of Invictus’s pupil but rather another portal that opened up. All of them died to Invictus’s eyebeam save for a giant-brained (and evil-looking) creature named Lord Commander. He and Ash have a history: he broke her hands, and she wants to return the favor. They fight, and H.U.E. takes advantage of the distraction to grab Gary and the Catos5.
They flee in the fighter craft, forgetting to ask Little Cato first if he even wants to go with them.
Gary calls up Quinn: Is the bridge active? Quinn says yes, but without anybody to turn on the stargate at the other end they’re not “getting out”.
There’s an odd intonation on the way she says that phrase; she’s not using it to mean “getting out of here” but rather “getting out of the place we’re trapped in”. Almost as though, even though Gary et al have just escaped one black hole, they’re still trapped inside a higher-level black hole.
While I’m pondering this, Gary admits he loves Quinn, upending what I was so far assuming was his relationship with Avocato.
That’s when a six-eyed alien appears next to Quinn. “I’m always listening,” he says (she clearly knows him). “In fact, I wish I could stop listening.” But he’s turned on the other end of the bridge for them.
Gary lands the ship in the hangar. “Let’s get out of Final Space!” he declares, and the ship races for the portal. Too late, though: Ash appears behind them and grabs their ship in a tractor beam.
Mooncake decides to sacrifice himself. He (she? it?) flies through the hangar forcefield and fires a laser beam at Ash, distracting her enough that the ship can continue moving.
Ash turns her rage towards Mooncake.
“He never hurt you, please!” pleads Gary6.
“You took so many things from me,” rages Ash, “And I’m going to return the favor.” She grabs Mooncake and absorbs his power - which somehow frees Invictus from the black hole. Green tendrils emerge from it, while inside Invictus seals Lord Commander inside a crystal cube.
The good guys have no choice but to leave Mooncake behind. The ship makes it through the portal just before Invictus blasts it to smithereens.
Gary is despondent: He left Mooncake behind to die. But he doesn’t get a chance to mourn for very long, because a rift has opened in space. “My God, what have we done?” he asks, as a Galactus-style monster appears outside of the rift, and tendrils of power begin tearing apart the planets. The end credits roll, with no “To Be Continued” in sight…
Lingering questions
Did Ash already have the ability to release Invictus or was she able to do so only because of the power she drew from Mooncake? If the latter, why did Mooncake bring himself within her grasp?
How, if at all, can Invictus be stopped?
If I’m right about my guess that Nightfall is a future version of Quinn - presumably one that dies and bequeaths her the helmet in a stable time loop - how much has she told her younger self about the timeline? Has she left more hidden messages that will guide her at exactly the right moment?
Why does Quinn so strongly fear becoming Nightfall? Given the discussion of how they create their own future, is it yet possible for Quinn to avoid that fate? If so, will that unravel this timeline?
Gary and Avocato kinda rushed Little Cato out of the black hole without ever really getting his approval that he wanted to return to them. And he doesn’t have any lines in the rest of the episode. Does he hate them now? Does he want to return to Ash and Invictus? Will he flee both, and just step out on his own with somebody, anybody else?
How did Lord Commander and the zombies know where and when Gary and Avocato needed them? Were they attacking Invictus anyway by coincidence, or did they hear Quinn’s call for help?
Is Mooncake dead? Is Lord Commander?
Ratings
I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.
Story: 8/10. An impressive amount of plot for a 21-minute episode, and most of it was of good quality. In the A plot, you had the emotional story of Avocato and Little Cato, set against the backdrop of Ash’s attempt to release Invictus. In the B plot, you had Quinn trying to reactivate the intergalactic bridge, set against her own emotional story of whatever precisely her misgivings are about Nightfall. Then there was a sprinkling of the overarching “we have to escape Final Space” plot (whatever that meant); Mooncake’s self-sacrifice; H.U.E. getting his (presumably) first body; and whatever the heck was going on with Lord Commander.
The last few storylines received only the briefest of attention, but fit organically with the rest of the story being told. This was, in some ways, the best kind of plot: chock-full of actual events taking place, but driven by interactions between characters.
Writing: 6/10. There wasn’t too much special about the dialogue. I’m ranking it slightly higher than average because it made an effort to change up the standard phrasing in most circumstances: Avocato and Gary’s declarations of love for Little Cato, for example, weren’t word-for-word what I’ve heard in 1,090 other television shows. Avocato’s description of how he adopted Cato was a remarkably efficient way of getting a nearly-complete backstory across in the fewest words possible.
I also particularly liked the dialogue given to Ash, which gave voice and purpose and depth to her raw fury.
There were a couple of clunkers. Gary’s “we’re going to die anyway” declaration of love for Quinn made me groan a bit; it was probably more cathartic for longtime fans, but viewed in isolation it was just a cliche played straight. And the attempt to convince Quinn to put on the helmet was a little bit too effective: “I don’t want to do this.” “If you do this, you’re choosing to do this.” “Okay!”
Production: 7/10. In most cases the voice acting was very effective, especially from Ash and Mooncake (yes, Mooncake!). The only real exception was Bizkit, who seemed to be doing a silly voice from a completely different television show.
The background music was also effective, driving drama and tension and pathos exactly where it needed to do so. The editing was fine, with one or two questionable scene transitions, particularly surrounding Invictus.
The color palette was very effective: muted ominous purples for Invictus’s lair, starkly contrasting bright colors among the heroes. Beyond that, the animation is standard quality for the last decade.
Characterization: 5/10. It’s really hard assigning this rating sometimes, and I agonized over this one quite a bit - in both directions. Twenty minutes is nowhere near enough to learn the personalities of a dozen characters I’ve never met before, so I have to try to detect layered meanings and draw out meaning from the tiniest clues.
What speaks strongly in favor of this finale is the fact that it wasn’t merely a giant climactic space battle, but rather character-driven interactions between different people who wanted different things. There’s clearly a lot going on with Ash: that moment of hesitation during Gary’s apology spoke volumes, and she has an interesting tendency to allow what’s right in front of her to distract her from her ultimate goals.
But on the other hand, the leads (Gary, Quinn, and Avocato) are fairly generic7, and gave few indications of depth or three-dimensionality.
Accessibility: 7/10. The distinctive character designs helped me tell them apart much better than on most animated shows, and their penchant for using each other’s names was very convenient. While I’m clearly missing a lot on the subject of character motivations, the plots themselves were easy to grasp. I’ve still got a lot of questions (the biggest of which is: what’s with the yellow lightning bolts on everybody’s necks?) but only once did I truly feel confused.
Closure: 3/10. Ouch. Dear God. I can see why the subreddit is so broken up about the show ending (well, most fan subreddits are, but this one’s shone through particularly strongly when I searched it for legal sources for watching the episode). Never getting to know Mooncake’s fate, or what happens to Quinn to turn her into Nightfall, or what happens after Invictus escapes his black hole prison and tears apart the cosmos?
Yes, there’s some closure here: I assume, based on the title, that the characters’ escape from “Final Space” is the end of an arc that goes back to Season 1 Episode 1. But damn, that was one hell of a cliffhanger to hit the fans with at the very end.
I hear there’s a graphic novel continuation, at least.
Do I want to watch the series now?
I’m not entirely sure that it’s for me - the generic characters are a bit worrying - but I’m willing to give it a try. In particular some of my kids would probably like it a great deal, and I’ll be happy to watch it with them.
Is there a series finale you’d like me to try? Join our Discord or leave a comment below.
Normally the term is “adult”, but that can also be used to mean “contains sexual content”, which I don’t think will be the case here.
All names in the opening come from the captions.
From these few lines, the backstory here is pretty clear. It’s the clasic trope: hitman (of some sort) kills couple, then discovers his soft heart when he finds and adopts their surviving child. But what confuses me is the kid’s name.
Cato’s strong emotional reaction suggests that he remembers his original parents; he simply doesn’t know that Avocato was the one that killed them. If so, he is almost certainly old enough that he’d retain his birth name. But that makes the names ‘Little Cato’ and ‘Avocato’ a huge coincidence8.
On the other hand, it’s far more likely that Avocato named Cato after himself, which implies he was adopted too young to remember his birth parents at all. Not impossible. But killing a kid’s parents, then adopting the kid and naming it after yourself? Either Avocato is extremely narcissistic or even more exremely unimaginative.
Pronounced '“Kevin”
AGNFARB
This is of course a lie. Mooncake hit her with an energy beam literally four seconds ago.
I heaped praise on the four lines that so efficiently gave me Avocato’s backstory - but that cuts in the other direction here.
Unless all cat-aliens have ‘cat’ in their name.