Gary Goodspeed

Gary Goodspeed is the main protagonist of the sci-fi animated series .
He is a prisoner on a ship called the Galaxy One, and has a sidekick whom he names Mooncake (otherwise referred to as Specimen E-351) and tries to protect him from the Lord Commander, a sadistic, power-hungry alien warlord with telekinetic powers. What Gary does not realize is that Mooncake is an extremely powerful weapon that can destroy planets that the Lord Commander hopes to use to open Final Space. He is the adoptive uncle of Little Cato and the archenemy of the Lord Commander.
He is voiced by the series' creator , who also voiced Mooncake and Tribore. As a child, Gary was voiced by , who voiced Lucas Sinclair in Stranger Things.
==Appearance ==
Gary has blonde hair and caucasian skin. His prisoner attire consists of 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 telekinetically 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 conducted 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 center. It is paired with a brown leather jacket, blue jeans, a belt, and brown boots.
In Chapter 2, after returning back to the Galaxy One after Gary's arm was ripped off by the Lord Commander Mooncake gets the idea for a cybernetic replacement by ripping off one of the S.A.M.E.S.' (specifically Rob's) left arm. Avocato then volunteers to perform the prosthetic surgery on Gary, which strengthens their bond and officially signifies the start of their friendship.
Starting in Season 2, Gary has a much more roughed up look. His outfit is the same with the blue circle on his shirt changing to orange. His hair is more “fluffy” looking when compared to season 1. During the time when he was stranded on Terra Con Prime following the events of The Remembered, he grew patchy stubble, which can be inferred he shaved off shortly after being rescued by the crew.
Starting in Season 3, Gary's voice gets deeper, and has even more roughed up look. His outfit is the same with the orange circle on his shirt changing to a yellow lightning bolt. His hair is even more “fluffy” looking when compared to seasons 1 and 2.
==Biography==
=== Backstory ===
Gary was born as the son of John and Sheryl Goodspeed, the former of whom was a captain of the Infinity Guard and the latter was a spy who worked for an unknown organization. One day, when Sheryl was reporting her data to her superior, a baby Gary started crying, causing John to see how he was going, only to find Sheryl talking about the Anti-matter bomb. The two would then argue, and John would tell her to get out of their house, and Sheryl tells Gary that she wished he was had never been born.
For the next couple of years, Gary would live with his father until he was sent on a mission to close a breach to Final Space with the Anti-matter bomb, and was killed during the mission. Gary would go to his funeral, and so would Sheryl, but she left Gary behind. With no one to take care of him, Gary burned down his treehouse and start living on the streets. During this, his butterfly Mooncake was killed by a group bullies who were mistreating Gary.
By the time he was 27, he would steal a gem from two thugs named Dr. Bluestein and Derek, and would hide at a restaurant, where in it, he would find a woman he was attracted to named Quinn Ergon. In order to make Quinn pay attention to him, Gary knocked an Infinity Guard pilot unconscious and put on his uniform. After this, there was an alert, and Gary was forced with trying to pilot a ship, but he fails misery and causes the destruction of 92 Imperium Cruiser ships and a small family-owned Mexican restaurant. This would cause Quinn to knock him out and arrest him, and was then sentenced to 5 years in prison aboard the Galaxy One, where he would repair satellites.
=== Season 1 ===
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 92 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 (despite being less hostile with him later on) 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. That said, Gary does tolerate KVN, trusting him with tasks.
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.
Despite the death of his father and subsequent abandonment from his mother as a child, he seems to have learned certain social standards, either alone or from observation. He becomes emphatically infatuated with Quinn, yet is in spite of his childishness, he shows a strong sense of respect for her boundaries; while she initially rejected his claims of love, his persistence was restrained, and arose in moments that she appeared to instigate (which is probably the bare minimum for human decency, but considering this is a comedy, it is noteworthy that consent is respected). When they do start a relationship, he respects her desires to remain distant, not pressing on the issue (albeit, one such time was due to poisoning she was suffering but didn't want to worry him about). 
Gary is faithful to Quinn, but did struggle with the arrival of Nightfall, who was a version of Quinn from 20 years in the future; when Gary and Nightfall met, he was not in a relationship with Quinn yet, as she remained aloof; however, Nightfall did reciprocate his feelings. Nightfall occasionally flirted with Gary, with her enthusiasm being partly fueled by not seeing Gary for years. Despite Nightfall's attention - which strongly tempted him - he remained loyal to "his" Quinn; this self-control was eventually appreciated by Nightfall, since while she still loved him, the version of him that she was in a relationship with was a different man, in a different time and dimension. Nevertheless, Gary and Nightfall were able to become really good friends.
During a time travel episode, Gary reunites with his father, John, shortly before the man's death. Despite the oddity of the encounter, John and Gary quickly bonded and were affectionate; as a window in John's mind, he realised that his death was imminent, but accepted it, and simply appreciated the brief time he could spend with his son, while also being proud of the man he became.
Gary's relationship with his mother, Sheryl, was extremely dysfunctional, in no small part due to her status as a spy being revealed to John because infant Gary's cries brought him into the room in which she was communicating with her contact; not just due to her deception, but fulfilling the mission that she was sent to undertake, made John lose faith in her, and when she angrily blamed Gary, he lost all love for her, which ended their relationship. John's eventual death meant that there was no hope for reconciliation, which drove Sheryl into alcoholism; she continued to blame her son so much that she abandoned him, until reuniting around 30 years later. At first, Sheryl pretended to be kind, which Gary - starved for parental affection - was partially fooled by, and helped her in a few schemes; but when she was about to ditch him again, he cut her off to reveal he expected it of her and chided her, but didn't stop her. Sheryl was tricked into a mission that would result in what she thought was the resurrection of John, which drove her to even threaten Gary with injury or death; however, after she was defeated, Gary criticised her for blaming him for all of her problems when she is the one at fault. While Gary was about to leave her, seeing her cry in genuine remorse made him reconsider; the revelation that the offer from her contractor to bring back John was a lie further devastated her. Thanks to some unconventional therapy, Tribore was able to help Sheryl move pass her obsession on bringing back John, and finally build some sort of relationship with her still-living son. Sheryl expressed a true desire to finally be a mother, and despite all of the trauma she had inflicted upon him, Gary was willing and happy to accept her into his life, showing the strength of his forgiving nature and ability to sympathise with his mother in spite of everything she had done.
==Abilities and Equipment==
After Gary lost his left arm to the Lord Commander, it was replaced with a mechanical one. Gary brandishes a laser pistol in combat and is a decent shot, landing a few good hits on the Lord Commander after saving Avocato.
Gary has no unique powers, but he is reasonably good with people, as he is able to recruit people who had tried to kill him (Avocato), had neglected him for years (Sheryl), people that thought him a fool (Quinn), among others in a makeshift family.
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. 
==Trivia ==
*Gary is voiced by the creator of Final Space, Olan Rogers.
*It's possible that the reason Gary messaged Quinn every day of his sentence, is because he has no one else to call and talk to outside of the Galaxy One ship.
*Gary lives in New York City currently to today.
*As a child, Gary has an interest in insects, as his childhood treehouse had a collection of bugs. This could also be a reason why his father gave him his pet caterpillar Mooncake.
*He is the first character to lose a father. The second being Little Cato.
*In Chapter 1, Gary mentions that he is Presbyterian. This is then later referenced in episode 8 when Gary is told that he had been pre-selected to see Bolo before he had been born. This is a reference to a belief that Presbyterians believe in called "Predestination" where a person would be destined by God to either go to hell or heaven before they had been born.
* According to Olan Rogers twitter, all of the characters birthdays are the same as their voice actors. This would make his birthday June 11.
*Gary is 32, as mentioned in The Sixth Key.
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