Final Space Review: The Other Side

"Yeah. It's about time."

While the first three episodes of the past season have been alright, they've suffered from issues of being somewhat scattershot, unable to balance the season's cast in fulfilling ways that leave them feeling a touch sub-par. A lot of those issues, I felt, stemmed partially from the series taking a few steps back from the straight-shooting serialization of its last season, with the extra breathing room provided this time around meaning that episodes tend to feel a lot more loose and, occasionally, most of their events can seem inconsequential. But that's changing now.

 "The Other Side" is Final Space proving that, even with the more episodic nature of its second season, it can still create a work of emotional magnitude. Even if, by its end, there's a feeling that nothing too paradigm-shifting happened, and that its narrative was a mere pit stop in Gary's quest to collect the Dimensional Keys, it works by means of its intrinsic significance as a heart-wrenching tale of loneliness, isolation, and grief. This isn't an episode that has to exist, but I'm glad that it does.

There's a fairly basic premise at play: Lil Cato, in trying to navigate the Crimson Light through a field of sonic shards of time, accidentally hits one, sending half of the ship (separated by a near-indestructible wall of crystals) sixty years into the future. That's where most of the narrative settles: Lil Cato, six decades later, is working hard to piece together a plan to rescue himself and the other crewmates, and it's a daunting, ambitious flash-forward that lends itself well to both comedy and drama in equal parts.

Unsurprisingly, Final Space takes advantage of the shift in time to modify all of its characters as necessary: Mooncake now has a voicebox, allowing him to speak with an unnervingly-sultry voice, Tribor is demented, and Nightfall is blind. (The others—Clarence, K.V.N., H.U.E., and A.V.A.—are constants, though the latter two have since gotten married.) Even so, their place in the show is largely the same, chiefly in having Nightfall be a voice of reassurance to Lil Cato, whose attempts to be level-headed teeter with his self-doubt.

That self-doubt manifests itself, most curiously, in his Avocato hologram (Avocatogram?), typing into a projection of his late father to make it say what he needs to hear. Without Gary, he has no parental figure to look up to, and it's a depressing way to demonstrate his insecurities and fears: even with a ship of six others, he's never felt so alone, and that comes around in an even more devastating way later. Showing him using Avocato as not just a coping mechanism, but a way to talk down to himself and cement his own personal failures, though, is utterly brutal. The tides are all against Lil Cato—the rest of the crew refuses to allow him to send out a distress beacon in hopes of being saved, he constantly grieves his perceived loss of Gary, and he's utterly depressed—but Nightfall is out for his best interests.

Unfortunately, those interests of sending out an aggressive distress beacon end up opening a rift in space that unleashes a Titan intent on destroying the ship, all while Gary, on the other side (alongside Ash and Fox), fights to break down the wall and save him in the present. Gary's side of the narrative is a lot smaller and more reserved, but it's all for dramatic effect, allowing suspense to mount up to the episode's greatest revelation. What follows, on Lil Cato's end, is a cool but short action sequence, with he, Nightfall, and Mooncake obliterating the Titan, but it all ends with a ray of Mooncake's power blasting straight through Lil Cato's chest... just like his father.

It's a horrifying moment in an episode filled with them. Death in Final Space is a scary thing, and one that comes so abruptly, with the power to radically transform its narrative. To see Lil Cato become the newest martyr, let alone to be injured similarly to Avocato, is devastating, but his main mission was a success: the beacon was heard, and the Crimson Light is going to be saved. Suddenly, though, the crew wrapped around Lil Cato in a loving embrace starts to fade away, leaving nothing but him, laughing pitifully and talking to himself while leaning against the wall, his chest suddenly unscathed: none of it ever happened. The entirety of Lil Cato's story arc was a massive hallucination, and he was alone for all sixty years of it.

Having hallucinations and imagined events being integral to a narrative is always a risky maneuver in that the reveal has the potential to immediately undo all of a show's progress, draining every event of their potency, and I'm sure there will be some arguments made of "The Other Side" that accuse it of diluting its emotional force in the reveal, but I disagree with such accusations entirely. Lil Cato's hallucinations show the sheer extent of his loneliness and despair: he's gone completely insane. He has nobody to talk to and nobody to have a human connection to, besides that puppet hologram of his father. Even Gary, when he was a prisoner aboard the Galaxy One, had K.V.N., his deep-space-insanity-avoider companion, and H.U.E., and the robots inhabiting the ship—Lil Cato had nobody. The entirety of the episode's events, on his side of the shard, paints a rich, psychological portrait of Lil Cato at his most troubled, and it's heart-shattering.

Suddenly, the lessened emphasis on Gary's half of the ship makes sense: it exists for the episode to stealthily reveal Lil Cato's fabrications, first with Fox and Ash (who Lil Cato imagines to have died early on in his half of the Crimson Light), and once it's established that none of the events sixty years in the future were real, everyone is shown shooting at the shard alongside Gary, trying to free the episode's sole victim on the other side. They do manage to rescue him eventually, using Ash's powers to redirect force at the barrier and rip it open, and while Lil Cato is saved, it's not without sixty years worth of scars, none of which the rest of the crew will ever understand.

There's just a lot with "The Other Side" that has to sink in. It's hard to say how much of it will have an impact on the future of Final Space, as its a mix of reality and fiction within the universe of the show. At the same time, the crew is no more closer than before, and while they unify to save Lil Cato, it's more a demonstration of their utilities than anything more eventful. But this is the first episode that I'd consider a masterpiece of this season; it's a reminder that Final Space hasn't lost its magic, all without having to put anything too game-changing or drastic on the line. In other words, Final Space has never been more comfortable with doing what it does best, and thank goodness for that.

Notes and Quotes:
-The episode kicks of with a phenomenal Footloose-centered dance number, cementing Kenny Loggins into Final Space lore. For anyone more curious about Olan's infatuation with the song, check out his "Popcorn King" video for undeniable proof that it's the greatest earworm ever written.
-Mooncake, as imagined sixty years in the future, is hilariously abrasive: "Ay, Little Avocato, you gonna be talking to your dead dad all day long?" "Were you always this mean? 'Cuz that one hurt."
-I apologize if this review isn't as intensive as some of my others; I had a busy weekend in terms of moving into my new apartment which definitely halved the amount of time I would spend freaking out over every word otherwise. I still gave it my all, though.

FINAL GRADE: A+. "The Other Side" is Season 2's first instant classic episode. What else is there to even say about it? While it doesn't absolve me of any of my earlier fears regarding the second season, it's good to know that a Final Space episode's quality is never bound to that of the episodes preceding it (remember how "Chapter Six's" emotional grenade came out of nowhere?), and that there's always surprises to be had, meaningful things to be said, and hearts to be destroyed. "The Other Side" might not be a shift in the tides, but it's no less compelling of a story.

This, without a doubt, is the one that'll be sent off for Emmy nominations.

For my last Final Space review of "The Grand Surrender," CLICK HERE.

Additionally, you can access every Final Space review I have ever written HERE.

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