#I like it more than the happy place but less than the toro regatta

[chookity-dookity]

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN...

Can I really say that this episode was a disappointment when I wasn’t expecting it to be that great in the first place?

Listen. I’ve been here since S1. I remember the way Olan hyped up Chapter 8, an episode I don’t actually like all that much. And I remember all the promises of improvement and course-correction that were made during the hiatus, only to be disappointed by a relatively mediocre S2. So I’m not at all surprised that this episode didn’t live up to some people’s expectations. Swept up in the fervor of the moment, the showrunners and the fandom set the bar unrealistically high.

This is Final Space. It’s dumb, it’s zany, it makes absolutely no goddamn sense. It’s always been a bit hit-or-miss, with more misses in the early season and more hits towards the end. And it’s a show that wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s earnest in a way that so few works of fiction are. That raw emotional honesty is what makes its best episodes so great, achieving heights that are rarely reached by other shows. But on the flip side, some episodes are just cringe-inducing hot messes.

This is an episode that falls into the latter category.

THE PACING The pacing is by far the biggest problem with this episode. Too many things happen too quickly, with no time to process them in-between. AVA dies before the opening credits even roll and then is promptly forgotten about. Nightfall’s sacrifice, so crucial to the S2 finale, is never even mentioned at all. Half a dozen new plot threads are introduced and then immediately dropped.

In all fairness, I fully expect that these plotlines will be picked up again in later episodes. And I can appreciate the impulse to lay out the foundations for the rest of the season in the premiere. But it’s just too much. Cramming so much stuff into a 21-minute episode robbed everything of the emotional weight it deserved.

THE JOKES Tonally, they just didn’t work. This is supposed to be the super-serious horror season, but here we are getting hit with S2-style grossout humor. It’s not even that they’re terrible as jokes. They just don’t fit in with the atmosphere of the rest of the episode.

And then, of course, there’s the whole “feel the friendship” bit. It felt like it came straight outta one of Olan’s old YouTube videos. Out-of-context, it’s hilarious. In-context, it’s excruciating. To start with, the whole telepathy thing feels like an unnecessary addition to an already complicated mythology. How seriously were we supposed to take this bit? In the future, should we expect more communication to be happening telepathically? Or was this like... a one-off funny thing we’re not supposed to read too much into?

It also plays into some, dare I say, misogynistic tropes. I’m a little sick of media telling me that the bond between bros (no homo) is closer and more intimate than the relationship between a man and his romantic partner. The writers tried hanging a lampshade on it with a few funny lines from Quinn, but that doesn’t really make it better. It would be one thing if this was building up to a Gary/Quinn breakup further down the line, or if I thought polyspace was seriously on the table, but everything Olan has been saying outside of canon seems to indicate that’s not the case. So this joke is just left feeling awkward and uncomfortable.

THE ANIMATION Would you believe, I even found things to dislike about the animation. The direction in this episode just felt a little bit off. There were some moments where the lipsyncing was a bit weird, one moment where the lighting was very weird, and a particularly interesting cut from a shot of Bolo punching a planet to... very nearly the same shot of Bolo punching a planet. It makes me wonder if this episode went through some major changes in post-production.

All that being said--that Titan fight was cool as hell and one of the highlights not just of this episode, but the entire show. The imagery was spectacular. The Lovecraftian cosmic horror stuff has always been one of my favorite things about Final Space, and it looks like S3 is really going to lean in on that. Despite everything, I’m still excited to see where this season will go.

Overall, I felt this was a weak episode but not a totally awful one. It reminded me of The Toro Regatta in a lot of ways. I’m beginning to sense that premieres are a distinct weakness for the writers, who seem to start out seasons with a really spectacular finale in mind, but have no real idea of how to get there. S1 suffered from having too few episodes to get to its designated endpoint; S2 had far too many for its relatively meager plot. Here’s to hoping that S3 manages to strike a better balance.