Gary Goodspeed

Gary Goodspeed is the main protagonist of the Sci-Fi animated TV series Final Space. He is a prisoner of a prison ship named the Galaxy One, and he has a sidekick named Mooncake (also known as Specimen E-351) and tries to protect him from Lord Commander. What Gary does not realize that Mooncake is used as a planet killing weapon.

He is voiced by Olan Rogers, who also voiced Mooncake.

Description
Gary has blonde hair and wears a red space suit with teal gloves, boots and a belt. He wears a triangular white collar with an orange Infinity Guard symbol. His left arm was ripped off in Chapter 2 by the Lord Commander and was replaced by a robot arm from an S.A.M.E in a surgical procedure by Avocato. Once his sentence is over, he changes into his clothing he was wearing the day he was arrested. It is a red shirt with a blue circle in the centre. It is paired with a stylish brown leather jacket and blue jeans.

Final Space
Gary is in prison for five years, having been arrested for impersonating a pilot to impress Quinn, and destroying 92 Imperium cruises and a small family-owned Mexican restaurant. In Chapter 1, while he was watching a movie, he meets Mooncake (Gary named him after his caterpillar that he had as a child) and tries to protect him from Lord Commander. Bounty hunters invaded the prison ship, and some bounty hunters were sucked out to space (except Avocato). The ship then speeds up, asteroids were about to hit the ship, and Gary has no oxygen left. Mooncake destroys all the asteroids with a large laser beam. Gary then goes back to his ship and befriends Avocato and plays cards with him. Avocato tells Gary that Mooncake is actually a Planet Killer, but Gary doesn't believe him. He tells Gary that Lord Commander will find him no matter where he hides.

In Chapter 2, Gary and Avocato go to Tera Con Prime to track down an evil bounty hunter named Terk. They go to an alien shop owner named Clarence to have Gary disguise himself as the deceased mother of an alien family by wearing her skin. Then, Terk arrives, and Gary gets knocked over a fence as a result of his and Avocato's fight, landing on the production line of a factory and getting sucked through a pipe to the home of the alien he's disguised as. There, the alien's children and husband are at first convinced that Gary is really their mother and wife respectively until the children accidentally tear apart the skin he's wearing, at which point the husband kicks him out of their house. When Avocato goes to rescue his son Little Cato, who is being held hostage by Lord Commander and gets captured by Lord Commander's guards, Gary goes to rescue him. Meanwhile, Lord Commander tells off Avocato for failing to capture Specimen E-351 and tells him that Gary has it. Gary arrives, but Lord Commander uses his telekinesis to torture Gary. Avocato tries to break him free, but Lord Commander rips off his arm. Gary and Avocato escape, and back on the Galaxy One, Avocato surgically replaces the arm Gary lost with a robot arm.

In Chapter 3, Gary and Avocato go to Planet Yarno to give Mooncake to Stevil to hide him from Lord Commander, but Stevil imprisons Mooncake instead and puts Gary and Avocato in a "Lazarus trap", which makes anything they think of become reality, and they are attacked by mutant cookies because Gary thought of them. Avocato tells Gary to get them out of the trap by closing his eyes, but it doesn't work. Then a fake Quinn appears and tells him to come to her. Avocato tries to stop him, but Gary shoves him aside. Avocato warns him that it's a trap and then punches him, waking them both up. Gary and Avocato go to save Mooncake, and Avocato points out to Gary that Mooncake is on a TV screen fighting monsters. Gary and Avocato go to the arena Mooncake is in, where they encounter Lord Commander. Lord Commander tells them that he needs Mooncake to unlock Final Space. When Gary asks him what Final Space is, he responds that it is his business. Gary tries to shoot Lord Commander but misses. He then shoots the locks of the doors surrounding the arena, unleashing monsters on Lord Commander, but he kills them easily. KVN then arrives on the Galaxy One to save Gary and Avocato. On the Galaxy One, Gary comforts Mooncake, who is feeling bad about his destructive abilities. The episode ends with Gary receiving an emergency call from Quinn.

In Chapter 4, Gary rescues Quinn from her broken escape pod, but upon trying to reconnect with her, realizes that she doesn't remember their first meeting at all and that she hasn't been receiving the messages he's sent her over the past five years, which hurts his feelings. He goes to record a new message for Quinn in which he tells her that she should have faked amnesia, as according to him, no decent relationship is built on honesty. While he's recording, Quinn walks in and ask him who he was recording for, and he replies that it was someone who meant a lot to him. Quinn tells him he hopes that whoever he was recording for gets to see his message, as most messages get lost that far in space. She also thanks him for saving her life. Then H.U.E. gets hacked by the Infinity Guard and the ship's security robots start attacking Quinn, Avocato and KVN. While they fight off the robots, Gary goes to harness the power of a dying star in order to restart the Galaxy One's engines. When he starts feeling hot because of the star's radiation, he tries to contact H.U.E., but he is offline due to the Infinity Guard's control over him. Gary is about to head back but then sees a caterpillar floating in space that calls out his name because of the delirium caused by the star's radiation. When he touches it, it shows him flashbacks of himself as a child and his father, John Goodspeed. The first one shows him watching the launch of a rocket with his father, the second one shows his father telling him that he has to go on a mission in space without him, and the third and last one shows him watching a news report that announces that his father is on a mission to investigate a shift in the gravitational constant that is creating an anomaly in space, before showing the rocket he was in exploding, killing him. Meanwhile, KVN has managed to restore H.U.E. to normal using a reboot chip that a bounty hunter named Nightfall gave him earlier. H.U.E. contacts Gary to tell him that his radiation levels have become critical, but he can't hear him because he's still delirious from the radiation. When the star goes supernova, Mooncake flies him back to the Galaxy One before he is caught in the explosion. On the ship, Gary asks Quinn what she knows about the gravitational disturbance that she was investigating when her escape pod malfunctioned because the flashbacks he had made him realize that his father may have had something to do with it. When Gary mentions his father's name to her, Quinn finally remembers their previous encounter at the bar where Gary impersonated a pilot and blew up ninety-two Imperium cruisers.

In Chapter 5, Gary, Quinn, Mooncake and Avocato go to a planet housing an Infinity Guard outpost to investigate a laser being fired from it that is causing the gravitational disturbance. Gary recklessly crashes the Galaxy One on the planet's surface. At the Infinity Guard base, Quinn, Avocato and Mooncake witness the Infinity Guard saluting Lord Commander, therefore revealing them to be corrupt. When they reach the laser control room, they fight off the Infinity Guard members there, after which they are confronted by Stone, a superior in the Infinity Guard. Stone tells them that the Infinity Guard is trying to unlock a way into Final Space in order to flood the universe with "light" so that there will be no more death. When Quinn tells him that it's because there would be no more life, he responds that although there will be no life at first, there will be in "phases two and three". He then destroys the controls for the laser, and Gary uses Avocato's blaster to create a small black hole that Stone is sucked into, killing him. Gary then tells Mooncake to shoot the device shooting the laser with one of his own lasers, which disables it, but unfortunately, it hit the planet's moon before that, causing its flaming pieces to fall down on the planet. Gary, Avocato, Quinn and Mooncake try to escape, but one of the moon pieces hits the elevator while they are in it, causing it to break, leaving Gary and Quinn stranded on its remains in mid-air. While Quinn is hanging off the edge, Gary asks her to trust him, but she tells him that she can't. Gary tells her "I think you can" and takes himself and Quinn towards the ground by using his robot hand to slide down the elevator's metal pole. However, the pole doesn't reach all the way to the ground, and Gary and Quinn begin falling to their deaths, but they are saved by the Galaxy One flying under them. On the ship, Gary assures Quinn that he, Avocato, and Mooncake are the good guys when she thinks that there are none left after the Infinity Guard's betrayal.

In Chapter 6, Gary and Avocato go to Lord Commander's prison colony to rescue Little Cato, Avocato's son who is being held there. In the colony, Avocato reveals to Gary that he was once Lord Commander's second in command, but betrayed him when he asked all of his generals, including Avocato, to kill their first-born children to prove their loyalty. However, Lord Commander took his son hostage as a way of forcing Avocato to keep working for him. The reason he joined Gary in the fight against Lord Commander was to atone for the things he did while working for him.

When Gary and Avocato find Little Cato, they find out that he has been brainwashed by Lord Commander. When Gary and Avocato go to the room Lord Commander is in, he uses his telekinesis to torture Gary and orders the brainwashed Little Cato to kill his father. After a brief fight, Avocato is able to return Little Cato to normal by embracing him. KVN and Mooncake come to Gary's rescue, with KVN carrying Mooncake and Mooncake blasting Lord Commander with a laser beam to free Gary from his telekinesis. Gary, Avocato and Little Cato escape back to the Galaxy One, but unbeknownst to them, Lord Commander has used his telekinesis to plant a bomb on Little Cato. On the ship, Avocato notices the bomb on his son as they hug. He takes it and runs to other end of the ship, sacrificing himself for his son when it explodes and kills him instead.

Personality
At the start of the series, Gary is shown to be more immature and arrogant, but as the series progressed, Gary has notably matured over the course of each chapter. Gary often has a habit of talking inadvertently, or as he self-proclaims it: 'word-arrhea'.

His time spent isolated in deep space has made him excessively receptive to friendship, as shown through his staunch loyalty to both Mooncake and Avocato, despite barely knowing them and becoming involved in various dilemmas because of them. Despite this, his hate of KVN has not been whittled away by his years of separation from intelligent lifeforms, and instead reveals a very petulant and short-tempered side of his personality.

Gary's emotional development seems stunted to some extent, which series creator Olan Rogers' notes as being a consequence of his father's passing away when Gary was quite young. In addition, Rogers has commented that Gary's energetic and cheerful demeanour is a psychological defense mechanism that he uses to cope with the grief of losing his father. It is also evident that his mother abandoning in his childhood also played a role in his current personality as he grew up. Furthermore, this element of his personality may have been further compounded by his five years without human interaction; while Rogers states that Gary is at least thirty, his personality seems more akin to someone in their twenties, which is the age at which Gary was imprisoned.

While his immaturity seems to lessen between the flash-forward in Chapter One and his current state, he is still shown to develop emotional attachments with extreme ease, and to have very poor and strange mechanisms for handling rejection, which seem to entail "Footloose," styled episodes of elaborate dancing. In addition, he has an obsession with cookies, to the point of being willing to undertake the risk of imminent death for the opportunity of being able to slip a cookie under his helmet, throwing a childish tantrum after H.U.E. tells him that he's matured too much over the course of the series to possibly want cookies anymore, and even asking that H.U.E. change his death countdown to the time until a batch of fresh cookies has been baked.

Powers and abilities
Gary has no unique powers, but he is reasonably good with a gun and very good with people.

He also has a friend called Mooncake, who protects him by firing planet-destroying lazer beams, but this is not technically a power of Gary's.