#crosshair wasn’t tortured to death in the end but that doesn’t make his willingness to go through that any less

[heyclickadee]

Okay, but what about Crosshair’s sacrifice? Because he makes one, and it’s a doozy.

He’s being tortured. He takes advantage of the one lull in the pain and attention from the guards to break out. He could try to escape, whatever Emerie says, but he doesn’t. He knows he’s being held by a monster who sees him as property. He knows he’s a non-person in the empire’s eyes. He knows that they’re just going to keep hurting him until he talks, and still. He throws his one chance at getting away from all of that—maybe even his one chance at ever seeing his family again and making things right, as far as he knows at the time—to send a message and warn the batch about what’s coming.

And then, far from talking once he’s recaptured, he determines that he’s going to keep silent and protect his family, believing at the time that Hemlock is going to torture him to death if he does.

It’s a sacrifice every bit as heroic and selfless as what Tech does in Plan 99. What’s more, Crosshair maybe has an actual choice where Tech doesn’t. Tech is going to fall one way or another, his real choice is just making sure the others don’t take that risk with him; Crosshair is told the suffering will stop if he just tells Hemlock how to find Omega. And he still chooses to stay quiet because he wants to keep the people he loves safe.

But it doesn’t work.

Now, I’d argue that Tech’s sacrifice doesn’t work either, or that it’s at least not exactly an unambiguous success. He gets the others to safety, but it’s barely, and things immediately go wrong. Everyone’s badly hurt, Omega almost dies, they lose any chance they had at finding and saving Crosshair, the whole mission was pointless, Omega gets taken, and then they spend months floundering around because the guy who knew how to do the things they need to do got thrown off a train. In fact…contrary to almost every other entry in wars, none of the self sacrifices in TBB are total successes, and many make things worse—though more on that in another post.

But Crosshair’s sacrifice? Crosshair’s sacrifice is a disaster. The message he sends with the intent to warn his family only low is exactly what brings them out of their sanctuary to find him. It’s why Tech was on Eriadu to make his sacrifice in the first place. It gets a kid Crosshair loved so much even at that point that he was willing to, again, be tortured to death if it would keep her safe captured by the exact person he was trying to save her from.

He makes a choice at the end of season one that breaks his family apart a little more than it already was; he makes a choice here to protect them with the best of intentions, and no hope of escape or reward, and it just makes everything worse. It’s like he can’t outrun that first terrible mistake of choosing to stay with the empire. No wonder he hits a point where he wants to die.

And then we leave him there. Thinking that the bravest thing he ever did just compounded his first terrible mistake of choosing to stay with the empire, and broke his family forever, saying that it’s his fault and he needs to die for it—without actually unpacking that or allowing the trajectory of his arc to bring him to a point where he’s at peace with himself.

This one of the reasons why I think we’re not quite done with this story or these characters*. You can actually play with historical irony and have a character’s intentions backfire like this, but you do actually have to deal with it after the fact. You need to lean into it. Force the viewer to look how awful it is in the eye. And if you’re doing it with a character like Crosshair, with an arc like Crosshair’s, you do have to do it in a way that allows the character to come to some kind of terms with themselves. Offer self-reconciliation, or, alternatively, go full in on the other direction, and make it explicitly clear that reconciliation is impossible.

But if you are completing the arc—which, given the trajectory and given that this is still a Star Wars show for kids, I have to think they eventually are, even if they haven’t done so yet…at least let us know for sure that he’s not a suicidal, non-functioning alcoholic whose only reason for not walking into the sea is that it would make Omega sad because literally that is the most likely outcome for him given where we left him IF we don’t get more story in the intervening time period and what the hell did we do all this for if Crosshair is just going to keep suffering forever. Finish off his arc and tie up his threads at the very least.

But they don’t. In fact, they sidestep any opportunity to do so, and any closure with Crosshair besides solidifying the fact that Hunter and Omega trust him beyond words, by not giving him any lines after Tantiss, not making him part of the “Whatever we want, kid,” conversation (he and Wrecker walk in after that part—they’re talking with Echo and the other clones in a conversation we don’t get to hear), and never having him say anything about himself after declaring that he deserves to die.

Which is fine as long as there’s more story to tell; leaving certain things off as an unmitigated and unpacked disaster is actually very Empire Strikes Back. I just think that leaving Crosshair (and the audience) thinking that his sacrifice was useless is unlikely.

*Just to clarify, when I say that I think there’s more to this story, and that we hit the end of a chapter and not the final ending, I’m not saying that I think the next show is going to be TBB 2: Too Bad Two Batch or anything like that. I don’t think it will be. I think it’ll be a show following mostly Rex and Echo, maybe with a new POV protagonist as an audience touchstone (young Hera pllllssss though that’s just a wishlist item), in which the bad batch characters appear in and out (some more than others) and in which their unfinished arcs and threads from TBB fold into and serve a larger clone story that actually ties up this era. That’s what I mean when I think there’s more and that TBB was a sort of middle chapter designed to get everyone to where they needed to be for the next one.