Trapped in Final Space, the Team Squad pins all their hopes on the only guy they know in regular space to activate a gateway to get them home. Meanwhile, Tribore does stuff.
While I think that the ideas behind this episode were great, they were not given the love and attention they deserve… for some reason squished between unessessary Tribore silliness and then abruptly abandoned for another sideplot.
Of course, I’m referring to the Clarence story which had the potential to become truly remarkable and was honestly almost there.
I was a huge fan of Clarence’s final episode last season, how he made a huge mistake, was double crossed, and then was left behind by the only prior he valued and I was really looking forward to seeing him redeem himself.
The bones were there, but the guts weren’t supplied and, what should have been the climax of the episode occurred way too early, making everything that happened afterward seem like an overextended epilogue, and stealing importance from Clarence’s sacrifice.
“Hyper-Transdimensional Bridge Rising” desperately needed focus, but rather it comes off as an attention deficit hodgepodge and, in my opinion, that didn’t need to happen. Tribore stuff is much more entertaining when it happens off screen, the Team Squad’s actions could have been a solid bookend, and Clarence’s story could have been given the development it deserved. His fate could have been given the weight that it needed.
I know that I am, essentially, armchair quarterbacking here and there are a multitude of reasons why “Hyper-Transdimensional Bridge Rising” was overstuffed and rushed, especially with the season finale right around the corner, but I just look at the potential here and it makes me sad.
Final Space has proven time and time again that it can handle heavy drama extremely well. I do not understand why Clarence’s story was unceremoniously brushed aside like it was nothing.
The result is an episode that never congeals… aptly jerking is from sideplot to sideplot and throwing everything out has to do out onto the screen so quickly and haphazardly that it all but sidesteps simple plot structure, events you should care about bouncing off your first forehead without time to adequately process them. It’s a combination of poorly planned plot, pacing, and poignancy.
Speaking of being brushed aside like he’s nothing, uh… what happened to Biskit? He disappeared a couple of episodes ago and I didn’t even notice!
It’s quite jarring going from the best episode of the season to one of the weakest, but I sincerely hope that the purpose of this unfortunate installment was to put the chess pieces on the board for what is to come later on so that the aspects that crippled, “Hyper-Transdimensional Bridge Rising” won’t happen again.
Jason Gaston 