"Be aware that havoc is about to become our new normal."
(NOTE: Due to how late this review is coming in—consult
this post
for why—I'll be trying to keep discussion short and
succinct. Sorry!)
With every passing episode, Season 3 opens up more and more questions. Last episode, Final Space seemed to make the bold announcement that we've hit
the point of no return, the point where serious shit starts to happen and
hearts begin to break, and "All the Moments Lost" continues its trend
with another tantalizing dose of drama and some of the season's most
challenging developments yet.
There are two major components of "All the Moments Lost," but the most
immediately striking is Quinn, whom much of the episode is devoted to.
She's an interesting character; as I've talked about in the past, for how much
Final Space is built around her, she's exercised so little agency due to the
stakes of its narrative. Season 1 was all about building trust before cruelly
snatching her away, while Season 2 stranded her, forcing her to incubate in Final Space. This
season is the first time that we can really see the character coming into her
own and getting a truly strong focus, and "All the Moments Lost" is her boldest
episode yet, placing the dark undercurrent surrounding her character to the
forefront.
The episode mainly explores her by sending her through a series of traumatic,
hallucinated flashbacks, set off by her Final Space poisoning. I can be a bit
iffy with flashbacks as a story-telling mechanic because of how forcefully they can burn through story details, but
Final Space brilliantly opts to cut back
and forth between Quinn's past and her present reality until she hallucinates
them converging. There's certainly a lot to appreciate about this sudden,
traumatic exposition for Quinn, revealing that she had a sister whom she feels
deep grief and responsibility for the death of, and the turn in her story
where she's locked in a morgue by her military commander mother to confront
the idea of her and her family's mortality is as heavy as
Final Space gets. It's the way that Quinn hallucinates a second
chance to save her sister, though, that hits the deepest, as Gary pleads for
her to stay with him so that the story of both of their lives isn't lost to
the vastness of the cosmos.
All of Quinn's story elements mingle well with the rest of the episode's
circumstances tonally, finding the Galaxy Two on a collision course with a black hole
leading to Invictus, crushing the team squad under increasing gravity as they
scramble for a means of evacuation. That half of "All The Moments Lost" is
certainly the episode's lesser half, but it's also nothing to really shrug at,
either, offering a (comparatively) lighter, character-driven plot to balance out
Quinn's tenser story elements while retaining the adrenaline. Spearheaded by the Catos and Biskit (alongside Mooncake and K.V.N. as support),
there's a good amount of fun to be had, give or take the show's penchant for an unnecessary
gross-out scene. It's a nice dose of action, and a great opportunity to
strengthen some more underutilized character pairings; Biskit is actually pretty
enjoyable here, and Avocato and Little Cato get to work alongside each other as
equals, a current rarity I hope to see more of as the season progresses.
Ash rounds out the episode, though her moment honestly resonated with me the
least out of all of this episode's material. That's not to say that her role
here is weak; as with last week, I love how much more of an effort Season 3 is
making to define Ash's relationship to her powers and how much she has to
reconcile with, what with being granted her abilities by a figure as abhorrent as Invictus
is. I just felt as if it momentarily stole away thunder from everything else
that "All the Moments Lost" had on its plate during its climactic crescendo—with
Ash's wounds magically healing, and her saving Quinn but abandoning the team
squad to confront Invictus—without a ton of narrative build-up within this episode to that moment. (While last episode fed into this outcome heavily, for as self-contained as "All The Moments Lost" is in its other plots, it feels like something of a loose end.) As with how "One of Us" treated Fox, a part of it feels a bit too calculated to
resonate super deeply, though it's hard to fault
Final Space for having
good twists.
Ending "All The Moments Lost," though, not on Ash but on the visual of Quinn,
skin and eyes glowing horrifically from her Final Space poisoning, was a
chilling way to re-center everything. There's little dialogue to be had;
amidst the silence, there's just a haunting truth that can no longer be
hidden. That's how you hit the heart.
FINAL GRADE: A.
For my last Final Space review of "One of Us," CLICK HERE.
Additionally, you can access every Final Space review I have
ever written HERE.
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