Headscratchers / Megas XLR

• How old is Coop anyways? They never say in the show, but he looks to be about in his 30's-40's, the usual age Hollywood tends to make basement-dwellers, but Jaime looks to be way younger, probably in his 20's.
  • I assumed he was in his late 20s, since the show takes place in the modern day and he's shown growing up on 80s games. Probably just looks a bit older than he is.
  • Coop never looked that old to me. I assumed early 20's. Only a few years out of school, but still young enough to not really have a goal with his life other than immediate gratification.
  • Coop looks older because he's much, MUCH taller (and larger) than anyone else (giant monsters, robots and Glorft aside) in the show.
  • I think that, in a scene from the episode where a bounty hunter comes after Kiva, you can see some of her background information, including her DOB. If you do the math, it turns out that Kiva is 25 from her time. So I'd guess that Coop and Jamie are about that age, too. I think; I haven't rewatched that episode in a while...
  • I remember giving the show a watch for one asinine reason. I was reading the info for the show and it simply said, "A 23-year-old slacker finds a giant robot and pilots it." I had just turned 23 (it was an interesting coincidence). I don't know if it's official that Coop is 23, but Coop is 23 in my headcanon.

• Something I've never understood about Megas: The Glorft that are in the future come to the present... but we never see the Glorft that live in the present, despite all the space-hopping that Coop, Jamie, and Keva do. If the Glorft are really this giant galactic empire thing, shouldn't they exist in the present as well as the future?
  • As Star Wars shows, empires can rise rather quickly. The Glorft probably won't become a problem and start spreading out for several years, if not decades- they may not have even made First Contact yet.
  • Stable Time Loop. Coop eventually goes into the future and kicks them out, so they settle in the past to escape. Why? It's just that kind of show.
    • Actually, Coop accidentally CREATES the Glorft in the present, on a distant planet. It takes them that long to conquer their way to us.
    • In which episode does this happen?
    • It doesn't. It was just the creator's original plan. They never got to implement it.
    • Wow, was that really Word of God? I had assumed as much, given the nature of the show, it makes sense that the biggest pain in Coop's butt would have been his own fault somehow, but I never knew it was formally acknowledged.
    • Yes, this comes from Jody Shaeffer. The Glorft evolved from snot that Coop accidentally wiped/dripped on some alien tech. They are his fault.
  • In the pilot the opening shot shows a piece of a satellite that says "Earth Coalition Peace and Unity Since 3012". Most likely the Glorft attacked in the year 3012 ,while Earth was at peace explaining why humanity is losing to the Glorft!

• How does communication work in this show? Coop seems to be able to say anything to his opponent with or without the dash videoscreen and be perfectly audible despite differences in size and distance that would cause problems for sound travel.
  • ...the same way it works in every other Humongous Mecha show.

• Given how often New Jersey is assaulted by various mech-piloting baddies, you'd think humanity would be able to reverse engineer the technology and get a MASSIVE head start on the Glorft when it comes to weapons technology.
  • Dude, it's New Jersey. Nobody cares.
  • They usually explode beyond recognition or are Coops. The former they can't get their hands on, the latter they're not allowed to touch.

• Even after accepting that Coop's car can go into space, one might wonder how it's still viable for space travel after he broke its window.
  • Emergency force fields?
  • Everyone in the car is distantly related to Batman and can breathe in space. Besides, you can't say "mantra aside" about a show that at one point has Coop pressing a button that is expressly labeled "The Same Button Coop Pushed Five Minutes Ago" and having it do something different than it did five minutes ago. This show runs on the mantra. It's like saying "Gasoline aside, how do you fuel a car?"
• Where the hell is Kiva living, anyway? I mean, is she living in the basement with Coop?
  • Quite likely. She's too annoyed by Jamie to stay with him, she has no money to get a place of her own, and is so fixated on Megas, she probably doesn't want to be too far from it. That's to say nothing of training Coop like she hinted at in the pilot.
    • I always assumed she lived either in Megas (it has a pretty large space inside it, right? So some of that would be designed for pilots to sleep during long flights?) or Coop's mom gave her their spare room after hearing about the war.
    • Or Coop's mom is just happy that her son is finally hanging around a woman for once, and lets her stay around.
• Given what we've seen of them, how did the S-Force ever beat Ender, who by all rights is a competent villain that almost destroyed Megas.
  • The S-Force knows how Ender operates and are specialized to deal with him. They don't know how to deal with Megas and get trashed, and Megas then gets beaten by Ender since he's new to Coop. Think Rock–Paper–Scissors but with robots.
    • Always.
    • But then the S-Force is also new to Coop, and he trashes them. Coop is also regularly shown trashing other things that are new to him.
    • It's not a matter of different scales of power. The S-Force has fought Ender several times and knows how to win against him. They lost to Coop because they didn't expect that spike fist attack to track them so perfectly. The S-Force probably could have beaten Coop in a straight fight. They only lost because they got caught by surprise. It's not a matter of sheer power. Sometimes cunning and luck win the day.
    • Exactly. Also, the fact Coop is completely random, making it impossible to guess what he'll do next.
    • Not to mention with the type of show the S-Force is parodying, there's almost always at least one enemy who the heros cannot defeat in an all-out battle. Ender would just be that enemy.
  • Notice how long it takes Coop to actually begin to attack Ender. He constantly denies he's a bad guy, right up until Ender sucker punches Megas. And considering he's already fought off the S-Force, these factors combined meant Megas was damaged enough to not be able to take Ender on.

• How long have the humans been at war with the Glorft? In the pilot episode, you see a sign that claims the Earth Coalition has known peace since 3012, and when Kiva sends Megas back in time the current year is revealed to be 3037, leaving a gap of 25 years. But in the episode "viva Las Megas", Kiva claims the Glorft destroyed Las Vegas about 13 years before she was born, which, combined with the fact that Kiva herself appears to be somewhere in her (early) 20's suggests the war has been going on for at least 33 years or longer.
  • Maybe Humans and the Glorft have fought multiple times, with several extended periods of peace.
  • At one point, a bounty hunter comes after Kiva and knows details about her that she shouldn't be able to know. Now, I'm not quite sure what date she says, but the wiki says Kiva was born on September 15, 3012 putting Kiva at 24/25 years old, so the two species came into to conflict at least in 2999. They may have had a war or several skirmishes with a smaller Glorft fleet that they either beat or scared off eventually. Either way, conflict ended in 3012 and the war restarted some time after that.

• I might be missing something, but is Megas actually called XLR at least once?
  • Megas is the official name given to the mecha by the future Earth fighters, while XLR (Xtra-Large Robot) is the moniker Coop bestows upon it when he finishes his modifications. The XLR name is quickly phased out and never really used, so the confusion isn't too surprising.
    • It's probably not "phased out" so much as it's just not used, for the same reason characters don't really refer to each other by their full names constantly: "Megas" is a lot faster to say and flows better, and everyone knows what they're referring to even without the XLR. A character not having their last name used much (if at all) doesn't mean their last name just goes away, after all.

• Considering she was born about a thousand years in the future, shouldn't Kiva have a lot more than one direct ancestor in the present?
  • Yes, but given the state of the future, that they found even one ancestor with no other information is pretty impressive.
• We're never shown a sequence where Coop's car actually affixes itself to the activating mecha, so how exactly does the car stay in place when MEGAS, say, gets knocked to the ground?
• What happened to the pilots of two robots who accompanied Kiva, or were they actually unmanned AI drive robots?
  • I think they were drones or something. For that logic we could question where Kiva's mech went after the 1st episode. Only the head unit seemed to be damaged but all the rest was in good state it seems.

• In eighth episode, Jamie gets a date with a girl who is supposedly from Jersey City or recently moved there. When Jamie tells her casually that he gets into fights with aliens and death machines, she looks at him confused and slightly concerned. Jersey City is destroyed on a regular basis and episodes are any where from a few minutes to a month apart in universe. How is the Megas and the alien invaders not common knowledge by now? Yeah it's a comedy, but it's not like we never see characters who are serious or who have noticed the monsters all the time (like the kid that thinks everything is "cool").
  • Perhaps it’s not a look of confusion, but ‘’concern’’. If someone told me about a bunch of life threatening scenarios they’d lived through, I’d be pretty worried, too. Maybe she was concerned for him, or, if you’re more cynical, she is considering him to have too much baggage.
• In the sixth episode of season two, Coop shifts his car from park, goes through R-D-1-2 (apparently, there is no neutral until the next episode), and lands on "Space". If you were paying attention throughout the series, you should know that Coop's car normally has a manual transmission. On top of that, he can be seen using the usual stick shifter later in the episode, meaning his car has both an automatic transmission and a manual transmission installed simultaneously.
  • Clearly, the stick shifter was reconfigured to control weapons systems, while the automatic transmission controls flight operations. Duh.
  • The first episode actually has a wide shot of the car's interior (shown when Coop and Jamie first get into it), and there are at least two shift levers (one with the 8-ball Coop's always shown using, and another with a chrome-skull shift knob). Of course, MEGAS's controls constantly change as Rule of Funny demands it, so this can hardly be taken as proof of anything.
  • If I may, I would remind you that Megas also features a button labeled "Exactly the Same Button Coop Pressed Five Minutes Ago", and that the function of said button changed during those five minutes. I believe that you're overthinking things just a tad.
• The New Jersey transportation authorities must have been Crazy-Prepared for some nutball with an 80-foot-tall Humongous Mecha from the future if they were able to produce the equipment to boot and tow MEGAS just months after Coop started driving it.
  • Rule of Funny in a nutshell.

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