Reunited and it feels…perfectly fine.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Quinn’s mayday signal pings back to the Galaxy One as Gary prepares his heroic rescue, though Avocato warns him she might not remember him. Gary blows this off and manages to slow-mo grab Quinn to safety, though his worst fears are confirmed as she doesn’t know who he is at all. Pretty understandable, considering they only met once half a decade ago and it didn’t end on the best of terms. Though at least she thinks he’s cute?

One Kevin Bacon-style dance to his room later, Gary starts another video log to Quinn, despite her walking into the room as he’s recording. The emotional knife is twisted further as she has learned everyone’s names (including the individual robots), but not Gary’s. Things are made worse as an Infinity Guard override command takes control of the robots in search of Quinn. H.U.E. tries holding it off, but he won’t be able to for long. Their one hope is using a nearby dying star to restart the stopped reactor so they can get away. Gary (now seeing this as a good time to reveal his last name is Goodspeed) volunteers for the job. He flies towards the star in a very impressive visual sequence and happens upon the Scarlet Lance and the remains of its crew. Undeterred, Gary places the energy collector while Mooncake wanders off and finds the last log of the Scarlet Lance’s crew. Seems they came across a small life form of unknown origin they have designated…E351. They are immediately found by Lord Commander and destroyed, ending the transmission. A hologram of Nightfall appears to tell Mooncake that wherever he goes, death follows, including the Gary.

The bots overtake the ship, cornering Quinn, Cato, and KVN, who sneaks away to disable H.U.E. while the other two fight about who gets to save them. Gary, meanwhile, is nearly done collecting the energy when he begins hallucinating due to the intense radiation. We learn more about his backstory as he watches a shuttle launch with his father John Goodspeed (the legendary Ron Perlman), getting his first pet caterpillar Mooncake, and then reliving the tragedy of seeing his father off on his final mission, investigating a gravitational anomaly in space, just as his ship explodes in front of him. He’s soon shaken out of this just before he’s destroyed by the Supernova thanks to KVN disabling and restarting H.U.E. in the nick of time and Mooncake dragging him back, allowing them break free from the signal and an incoming Infinity Guard ship. The team celebrate their escape, with Gary reluctant to accept KVN actually helped, and starting to think maybe his dad’s death has something to do with what Quinn is looking for. Oddly enough, mentioning his dad’s name gets her to remember how they met (even though I’m almost entirely certain he never brought that up in the short time they actually talked).

On Zetakron Alpha, Lord Commander’s prison planet, Little-Cato is assisted further towards his escape by his nameless helper, getting a device and a chip to record a message for Cato.

OUR TAKE

Unlike the Nightfall reveal happening too soon and the first mention of Final Space (or Gary’s last name for that matter), I feel like bringing Quinn in now was pretty much the right time. We’ve had three episodes to get to know Gary and how he plays off Mooncake, Cato, H.U.E., and KVN, and we’ve had two to see Quinn’s investigation unfold and hint at a darker side to what’s going on. Now the two plots collide and everyone’s on the same page, meaning the story is more streamlined and we aren’t always juggling several balls and making things harder to keep up with. Not that you could ever really accuse this show of being hard to keep up with, it’s just nice to see them knowing when to have the threads converge.

As said, I haven’t been particularly excited about Gary and Quinn meeting up again, mostly because Gary’s kind of an annoying twat and Quinn’s pretty damn snippy, and I wouldn’t wish either of them on anyone for an extended period. But in terms of how they develop each other in this episode, they do alright. Seeing Gary trying to retrace his steps in interacting with another human being (after being stuck with robots and cat people) after all this time is interesting, and Quinn makes herself home pretty well in finding dynamics amongst the rest of the cast. And, of course, the deepening mystery regarding the anomaly and Infinity Guard’s involvement she brings with her. There IS the concerning matter of her being the ONLY female character in the cast thus far, as well as being Gary’s love interest, but I’m gonna let that slide till the season’s done in case we meet more.

There’s also Gary’s flashback, which comes out of a hallucination and seems more for the audience’s benefit that something diegetic, but it does help us to start connecting the dots between how this whole plot connects to him.

Overall, definitely a step up from last time, though hopefully, we’re on a consistent schedule as we wait for the next episode.

Score 7/10