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anneapocalypse · 5 years ago

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Season 17 is a Fixer-Upper

A many-decker compliment sandwich.

Preface

Hi folks. Welcome back.

It's time to put this thing to bed.

If you have not read my season 15 and season 16 essays, you may want to read those first as I will be building on what I wrote there.

Season 15 of Red vs. Blue was written and directed by Joe Nicolosi as a standalone story arc picking up ten months after the end of season 13. Season 16, sub-titled "The Shisno Paradox" was directed by Joe Nicolosi and written by Joe Nicolosi and Jason Weight, as the first part of a multi-season story arc jumping off, but not directly connected to, the events of season 15.

Then, a mere two days before season 17 premiered, it was announced that Joe was no longer the creative lead on RvB, a decision that had been made months earlier but apparently kept under wraps. Season 17, sub-titled "Singularity," was written by Jason Weight, with two episodes written by Miles Luna and with Miles credited as "Head of Writing." It was co-directed by Josh Ornelas and Austin Clark.

This marks the first time in RvB history that the show has switched creative leads in the middle of a story arc. I can only speculate as to why this is. In the announcement, it was stated that Joe had been pulled to take the lead on an upcoming Rooster Teeth project (as yet, unannounced). This could be sole reason. It is also possible this decision was made for creative reasons pertaining to RvB specifically. Though fan reception to season 16 was… mixed, to say the least, that is something that happens pretty every time the show changes creative leads and so I don't think fan reception alone would be enough to force a change. If there were creative reasons, I think they must have come from within the company itself. But I can't say for sure that there were, so that's all I have to say about that.

Henceforth I will be referring to these three seasons together as "The Time Travel Trilogy." This arc doesn't have an official name as yet, but Miles used that phrase at the RvB panel at RTX and I think this is as good a name as any. In this essay, I want to discuss season 17 primarily but also this arc as a whole. Singularity is, ironically, not a singularity; it is not a standalone season. It cannot be separated from season 16, or even from 15, and I am as interested in how it works as a conclusion and how the trilogy works as a whole, as I am in how Singularity works on its own. So we have a lot of ground to cover here, but if you've read my previous writing about this arc, you already know that.

These are my personal opinions, you're welcome to disagree, please be civil and back up your arguments if you're going to argue, et cetera. You know the drill.

So let's get into it.

Does the Plot Matter?

Eh, yes and no? Bear with me here. I’m getting this part out of the way first because to me it matters the least, but I think it still bears mentioning. I said last season that while I'm interested in plot, because I am absolutely one of those fans who likes plot and cares about the plot making sense, Red vs. Blue has always been a character-driven show, and the show as a whole really does stand or fall on its character arcs. So while I do want to talk about the plot, this is not going to be an essay full of worldbuilding nitpicks. I'm frontloading this so we can move on to what really matters to me, the characters.

Where the plot matters is insofar as it drives the characters to action and meaningful development, and for that we do need a story that is at least… semi-coherent? We need at least enough context for character actions to be meaningful. It's possible to accomplish this with a plot that is silly, even a little nonsensical in places, and the Blood Gulch Chronicles pretty much exemplify this.

And yes, Blood Gulch does have a plot. It's meandering and it's silly, but it is a plot, because the characters have wants and needs and things happen that create conflicts out of those wants and needs, driving characters to act, and to succeed or fail. It's easy to say that nothing happens in season 1, the joke being that it's just people standing around talking. It's funny. It's also not strictly true. Church's primary motivation in Blood Gulch is his desire to keep Tex safe; Tex neither wants nor needs to be kept safe, and her involvement in the Red versus Blue conflict creates the main tension for the season. The season-long tension is resolved when Tex is "killed" by a grenade, but also freed from her aggressive AI, O'Malley. When Tex returns as a "ghost" on a mission to hunt down and kill O'Malley, the season 1 tension is escalated to the main tension of the Blood Gulch arc as a whole. Side plots are introduced to give other characters development as well, like Tucker's Great Journey, but make no mistake, everything in Blood Gulch does tie back into the main tension in some way, that tension being Church and Tex's relationship and their conflicting motivations.

And we would not care so much about those people standing around talking if we didn't have some kind of plot to drive them to action, and to give us context in which to interpret those actions.

That is why plot matters in a character-driven story. That is its function.

Season 17 is the back half of the story arc 16 began. Although I'm referring to 15-17 as a trilogy for simplicity's sake, season 15 really is its own story. You could compare it to Recollections in the sense that season 6, while a part of the Recollections Trilogy, is also a self-contained story arc, though season 6's story does tie into the arc of 7-8 much more directly, so the comparison is imperfect. The characterization in season 15 is relevant, but Temple's plot is unrelated to the plot of 16 and 17 except insofar as it provides two critical jumping-off points: the time machine through which Chrovos is able to influence Donut, and Wash's injury which will serve as a motivating factor later on. The Shisno Paradox and Singularity constitute their own story arc, which for brevity I'm going to call the Shisno arc.

Does season 17 have enough plot coherence to drive meaningful character development? I think that it does, and I think we'll see that when we get into talking about characters.

Of course, the devil is, as they say, in the details.

Cosmology Lessons

So let me, uh… try to summarize what happens in this arc. I'm going to try and lay out the events, not as they unfold to us, the viewers, but as they actually happen, for reasons that should become clear.

The Shisno arc presents a cosmic conflict between a group of AI self-styled as "the Cosmic Powers" and their creator and nemesis, the AI Chrovos, whom they have confined behind a firewall styled as a "cage." Unbeknownst to them, one of the Cosmic Powers, Genkins, is in fact Chrovos—or more accurately, Genkins later becomes Chrovos after a black hole carries him back to the beginning of the universe and he exists in space for billions of years (a fact Genkins himself does not yet know). At some point, he creates the rest of the Cosmic Powers, and at some later point, they decide he's dangerous and imprison him behind a firewall. Somehow, from behind that firewall, he's still able to remotely make contact with and influence humans. And give them physical time machines. And make them immune to harm by any of the other AI.

Yeah, you see how this is starting to kind of fall apart here?

And we haven't even gotten to the Reds and Blues' involvement yet.

Anyway, the Reds and Blues are caught up in this conflict when Donut falls under the influence of Chrovos (somehow, involving Loco's time-powered drilling machine) and distributes time travel devices to his friends with the vague directive to "change the past" in order to fix the future. To provoke them to action, Genkins has traveled back in time to prevent the invention of pizza. When Kalirama, another Cosmic Power, shows up to stop them, the Reds and Blues escape into the past in groups of two, where they make a number of changes. After being stranded in the past by Doc in his O'Malley personality, Grif is approached by Huggins, a sentient light being who serves the Cosmic Powers, and she convinces him that Chrovos is the real enemy, and he needs to find his friends and take action.

Eventually the group reunite and meet the Cosmic Powers, who warn them against any further time travel and urge them to help stop Chrovos by strengthening his prison. (Which apparently they can't do themselves for some reason.) But when a personal conflict comes to a head, the Reds and Blues decide they must defy the Cosmic Powers and time travel one last time to prevent Wash's injury at Temple's base.

This action creates a paradox.

It turns out that a temporal paradox does not simply destroy the fabric of spacetime, but rather create cracks in Chrovos's "cage." Which is a firewall, because Chrovos is an AI, but it can also… protect humans? and also it's… made of time? Such that damaging the timeline damages the cage?

Yeah, here the plot starts to crumble again. But let's try to keep going.

So the Reds and Blues' future consciousnesses (is that a word?) have been sent back to relive their pasts, because… just because. Once they become aware of this, however, they will be able to travel freely along the period of the timeline between Blood Gulch and Wash's injury. Genkins, meanwhile, is also freely time-traveling and strategically possessing AI along the way (mostly but not limited to Church) to make changes and cause further paradoxes, with the goal of setting Chrovos (aka his future self, but I don't think he knows that yet) free. The period of time immediately after Wash's injury now exists as two alternate realities happening concurrently in the same timeline (a la Schrödinger's cat).

By making Wash conscious of the paradox, Donut is able to collapse the waveform, so to speak, and snap the timeline to the reality where Wash wasn't injured. Wash then proceeds to help him wake up the others in the past; Huggins rejoins them and scouts ahead in time to find the paradoxes Genkins has created so that our heroes can find them and fix them.

Genkins, realizing what's happening, returns to Chrovos to demand more of her power (whatever that means in practical terms) in order to stop the Reds and Blues on the grounds that once they're dealt with, Chrovos will be able to reabsorb their power (again, whatever that means), only it turns out he's tricked her and he intends to take that power for himself, a brilliant move except for the fact that Genkins is Chrovos, but again, Genkins doesn't seem to know that yet.

When our heroes return to the original paradox to redo Wash's injury, Genkins intervenes, freezes time, stops the bullet, sends them all back to Blood Gulch where they can no longer freely traverse time, the Reds and Blues impale him with that golf club we saw in season 16 which it turns out is also some kind of AI-subduing weapon, and they're all transported to The Labyrinth that protects Chrovos from escaping, and the Labyrinth is the same as the firewall, or maybe it's different, it's not really clear, but either way it torments them with their own desires and fears and oh my god this is all so squirrelly I'm getting exhausted just trying to summarize it, anyway they defeat the Labyrinth through the power of friendship, Donut figures out the truth about Genkins, Genkins leaps into a black hole that takes him back to the beginning of the universe and after existing for billions of years and developing a God complex, he will be imprisoned by the "children" he at some point created.

Meanwhile the Reds and Blues repair the last paradox and return to Chorus together to visit Wash in the hospital, the fucking END.

So, okay.

What you might have noticed along the way here (and the reason I bothered trying to summarize all of that) is that there are a lot of mechanics of the universe in general and the Cosmic Powers in specific that don't make a lot of sense and are never really explained.

It's never really clear in season 16 why the Cosmic Powers can physically summon objects and affect physical environments, and while we're told that their power has limits, it still kind of far surpasses what an AI should logically be able to do, at least without some kind physical technology at their disposal. There are fan theories about this, and they involve a lot of Halo lore, and you can certainly make something like that work for a Watsonian reading. I have some theories of my own. As it stands, a lot is left pretty thoroughly unexplained in the canon. We're left to just kind of accept that the Cosmic Powers can do stuff, a lot of stuff, but not unlimited stuff. Things like the Cosmic Powers' physical appearances can be explained by holographic projections, but not everything they do can be explained that way.

Things get more squirrelly in season 17, and I think the time-cage-firewall-thing is really the least sensical of all of it. Are they breaking the universe or just the cage? We don't know. Is the cage made of time and how would that even work? We don't know. What will actually happen if Chrovos gets free? We don't know. Why does creating a paradox send the Reds and Blues back to relive their lives and why can they now time travel freely without a time machine? We don't know! They just can, okay? Those are the rules now.

In fact, this is the main purpose of season 17's first episode: setting up the rules of the plot.

Or… more like resetting them.

Because most of that stuff was not established in season 16.

I'm My Own Grandpa: The Villain in Plain Sight

Here's something positive: Genkins as a villain works on every level for me. Yes, even though the plot doesn't make sense.

In season 16, the signs were pretty much there all along that Genkins was out of step with the rest of the Cosmic Powers, and yet he also gave off the vibe that he was just shit-talking because he didn't care, so I never committed any serious suspicion to him, which made his villainy enough of a surprise to be exciting, while foreshadowed enough to be satisfying. It's a great example of hiding your villain in plain sight and I think it's one of the things in season 16 that really works. In fact, I consistently like Joe's original characters, most of whom function better in the stories he tells than the core cast—the latter being part of the problem.

Genkins continues to work in season 17! I don't know if Genkins becoming Chrovos was planned from the start, but it works, and it's one of the things I like best about 17's plot. It's an elegant solution to Chrovos' origins and identity that doesn't take a huge amount of time or exposition to establish.

It also allows the Cosmic Powers a brief cameo in this season. Personally, I wasn't missing them, as I never got attached to any of them as characters and I think with only twelve episodes, focusing on the core cast was absolutely the right decision. But I know some fans did enjoy them, so it's good to have at least a moment of resolution on their end.

Course Correcting

The sheer quantity of exposition dump in episode 1 is the first clue that season 17 is going to be a "fix-it" season. I'll admit, I initially kind of hated episode 1, to the point that it clinched my decision not to watch the season as it aired. It is largely characters explaining the plot, and most of that explanation still doesn't make a lot of sense.

But what's noteworthy to me is that this episode is already overtly responding to season 16 criticism. When Genkins says,

What should we do with the Shisno? And incidentally, who named them Shisno anyway? It's a derogatory term for 'human' right?

That could be something I said. Actually I'm pretty sure it is something I said.

And there are a few other things just in Episode 1 that seem like direct responses to fan reception of season 16. "A hammer than makes prisons! Ridiculous!" Genkins declares, kicking last season's McGuffin off into space. Even female!Chrovos seems like a response to fan disappointment with Kalirama's minor role in the story.

This is just the beginning. Throughout season 17, we will see a focus on reframing, repairing, and resolving things from the previous season—most notably characterization and character relationships.

Look, the plot is a mess. It is dumb as rocks. But it is doing its best to drive motivated character development while staying functionally continuous with season 16, and as a lode-bearing feature, that is what the plot of this season needs to do.

Also, the ending pretty much explicitly says that what they had to do to save the day was to in-universe retcon all of season 16, which is from an in-universe perspective pretty squirrelly and from an out-of-universe perspective really funny.

But the biggest reason I'm cool with the plot nonsense this season is that for the first time in this arc, no one is holding the idiot ball. There is no point at which conflict feels forced, or at which I feel like anyone is acting uncharacteristically stupid, petty, or mean in the interest of furthering the plot. Characteristically so, sure! It's Red vs. Blue. But never unbelievably. Never to a degree that it feels contrived. It does make use of the "time-traveling character thinks out loud in front of other characters who don't know what's going on despite the fact that it might really fuck things up to do so," which gives me terrible secondhand embarrassment, but y'know. It's a dialogue-based show. I get why it's in there. And it doesn't end up mattering at all, so.

This season's plot is dumb but functional. And most importantly, the characters are driving the plot, not the other way around.

So, speaking of which, who's flying the plane?

The Protagonist Problem, Revisited

There’s been a lot of discussion these past three seasons about protagonists. I’ve discussed it myself in both of my previous full season essays. I think this comes up so much now because season 15 lacked a clear lead among the core cast, leading fans to ask: who could have been the protagonist? Who should be? Who would we like to see in the future?

The Time Travel Trilogy is unique among Red vs. Blue arcs in that it does not have one overarching protagonist. Blood Gulch has Church, Recollections has Wash, Freelancer has Carolina, and Chorus has Tucker. The Time Travel Trilogy has Dylan, then sort of Grif, then Donut. Not only are these protagonists and their arcs disconnected from one another, they aren’t all complete arcs. Dylan’s and Donut’s are; Grif’s is not. We’ll get to that.

A lot of fans have wanted to see Red Team get more attention. I think the Red Team characters are just as deserving of character development as any other characters, if that’s the question.

But I think maybe from a storytelling standpoint, which characters deserve to be protagonists is the wrong question.

Sarge and Caboose are great characters, and they would both make awful protagonists for almost any serious storyline. This isn’t a failing of the characters. It doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of attention or screen time, even of character growth or backstory. But neither of them have the kind of motivation that lends itself well to driving a serious plot. They both have excellent supporting motivation, which can either impede or assist the rest of our heroes in their progress depending on the mood. But they aren’t the right characters to be driving serious plot. I don't want to say they could never, under any circumstances, be protagonists, because then that just sounds like a challenge—but in both cases you would need a very specific kind of story to make it work, and it would need to be tailored to the character and probably not take itself too seriously.

And there was a time when I would've said the same for Donut. But that's changed, and I think it's changed for the better. We'll get to that! I have a lot of positive things to say about Donut's character development.

First I want to talk about Red Team in general.

Red Team Problems

The expression "Blue Team Problems" exists on this show for a reason. Blue Team have traditionally been the purveyors of Plot in this show, thanks to their more direct connections to Project Freelancer. Blue Team had Church and by extension Tex (twice). Wash was adopted onto Blue Team, and later Carolina (and yes, all respect to Red Team Carolina headcanons but canonically she is a Blue). Tucker took up the protagonist mantle on Chorus, and that was far from Tucker's first time driving plot; as Grif once put it, "I'm not the one who grabs swords and fucks aliens."

Red Team's avenue into the plot has traditionally been simply by way of their proximity to Blue Team. For the first ten seasons, the plot revolves around Project Freelancer, and none of the Reds have any personal connection to Project Freelancer beyond being sim troopers. It's no surprise that for those first ten seasons our protagonists were characters with very direct connections to Freelancer: Church, Wash, and Carolina. Tucker only had his turn once the story moved away from Freelancer.

So it definitely makes sense to see this as a permanent move away from Freelancer-adjacent characters driving the plot, and toward letting the sim trooper characters have a go. And the truth is, we're kind of running out of Blues here. The only surviving Blues who haven't already been protagonists are Caboose and Kaikaina. Caboose is a great supporting character; his motivations as they stand now are a bit too one-note to be protagonist material. Kaikaina's not out of the question, but she's also been around the least out of the core cast, and her VA's availability has not historically been guaranteed, so at present I think she too works best as a supporting character.

Thus it makes perfect sense that we might start taking a closer look at Red Team.

If Tucker was the obvious choice for a sim trooper protagonist on Blue Team because of his prior capability and character development, Grif is pretty much that to a T on Red Team. Prior to the Time Travel Trilogy, Grif's had easily the most character growth of anyone on Red Team.

Simmons has plenty to work with in terms of motivation, with his array of anxieties and personal hang-ups, but he's kind of noticeably lacking in meaningful growth (something fans have very much noticed). He still has Dad issues, he's still afraid to talk to girls, he's still kind of a kiss-ass. If anything about Simmons has noticeably changed beyond the general increase in capability across all the Blood Gulch characters, it's his relationship to Grif, wherein we began to see signs as early as season 6 that they really do care about each other. But when it comes to Simmons himself, his growth has been pretty thin thus far.

Donut, as of season 13, had seen… about the same amount of meaningful growth as Simmons, which is to say almost none, except that Donut had even less screentime and never got a promotion to Captain. (We'll get to Donut in a bit. We'll talk about our boy plenty, don't you worry.)

Even Sarge has seen some growth over the years. His most dramatic character moment has been the revelation that his military career was a lie, but the most noticeable growth over time has to be his willingness to work with the Blues and his increased affection for his own men. He even learns to care about people outside his own team; remember that it's Sarge who remarks with distaste on the "thousands of deaths" they would allow to happen should they accept the mercs' offer of safe passage off Chorus. Sarge is still Sarge: he's still gruff, he still longs for a good fight even knowing the Red versus Blue conflict is fake, he still occasionally jokes about killing Grif. But he does show a bit of increased self-awareness and the wisdom to know a real fight when he sees one. For all that, though, I still think Sarge is similar to Caboose in that his motivations are fairly one-note, and he works best as a supporting character.

Grif is characterized early on as the lazy one on Red Team—the one who is the least motivated and takes things the least seriously. But over many seasons we see things that challenge the surface-level reading of Grif: the fact that he's promoted to Sergeant as soon as he's transferred away from Blood Gulch (and Sarge), his surprising willingness to go on a mission to the desert with Caboose, his own declaration that he's not actually lazy but simply doesn't want to take orders from people he doesn't respect. In fact, in hindsight, it's easy to see Grif as the savviest person on Red Team with regard to their situation. Most of Red Team is characterized by taking themselves and their situation extremely seriously even when no one else does. But it's Grif who remarks, right from day one, that this, "fighting a bunch of blue guys," is not what he signed up for. Grif realizes intuitively, before anyone else on Red Team, that their mission does not matter. When something matters—such as Caboose potentially wandering off and getting himself killed—suddenly Grif cares, even if he'd be loathe to admit it.

This tension between Grif's actual motivations and his distaste for meaningless conflict and authority reaches an interesting turning point on Chorus, when Grif is forced into a leadership position with actual stakes. Where Tucker's internal conflict is his fear of failure, Grif's fear is of becoming the kind of leader he himself cannot respect. This culminates in Grif's unexpected agreement with Tucker's rescue plan. Unexpected by Simmons, at any rate. If you remembered season 7 Grif, you might not have been surprised by this at all.

Simmons: That's your plan? We just show up and wing it? That's the worst plan I've ever—

Grif: All right. Let's do it.

Simmons: What? Grif? You wanna do this?

Grif: Yeah. So what?

Simmons: So what? You never wanna do anything. Ever!

Grif: Simmons, I've been following orders I never liked for years.

Simmons: No, you haven't. You disobey orders all the time!

Grif: Well, I don't wanna be the guy who gives shitty orders that nobody wants to follow! I will not become a Sarge, damn it! There's no way I'm making a bunch of stupid rebels get shot for something I want. So yeah, whatever. Let's just do it.

So with already the most complex motivations and the most prior development of anyone on Red Team, Grif was kind of the obvious choice for our next protagonist.

The Big Short: Grif’s Incomplete Character Arc

And so, given the obvious similarities between Grif and Tucker in terms of character growth, and with Tucker's protagonist arc completed with Chorus, naturally season 15 gave the protagonist spot to…

Dylan Andrews, a brand new character.

Oh. Hm.

Well, Grif spends most of season 15 absent, and to the best of my understanding this had to do with Geoff Ramsey's availability during the season (he took a sabbatical in 2017). Joe found a way not only to work around Grif's absence but to integrate it into the story in a way that I think works conceptually pretty well and effectively draws on his established motivations.

We are supposed to be done! I don't want to go on another adventure! I don't want to listen to Sarge! I don't want to get shot at! I don't want to shoot at other people! I want to chill! I want to sit and chill.

Grif is exhausted with adventure, and frustrated by the fact that nobody seems to care what he wants in all this mess. He says some insensitive things for sure, like "Fuck Church!" and "Why can't he just stay dead?" to his friends who are still clearly grieving. They say some insensitive things right back, calling him lazy and selfish. And when they leave on their mission, Grif stays behind, only returning to the story when Locus arrives with the message that his friends are in trouble.

In season 16, Grif's motivation resets right back to not wanting adventure, with one critical change: he is now nominally the protagonist. I say "nominally" because while I definitely believe Grif was supposed to be the lead for season 16, the season's central conflict really doesn't have anything to do with Grif personally beyond… pizza. (Donut's involvement with Chrovos, by comparison, is far more personal.) It doesn't really advance Grif's character development beyond convincing him to take action (again), and it doesn't develop Grif's relationship to his friends at all. In fact Grif's new friendship with Huggins gets more screentime than his friendship with Simmons, the only relationship of his that really saw any growth the previous season.

I covered last year why Grif's arc in 15 doesn't feel complete in the season 16 essay, and I don't want to rehash all of that here. But suffice it to say, that interpersonal conflict never really feels resolved. To quote myself:

So Grif’s arc in season 15 only resolves in the sense that he reunites with his friends, returning to the status quo. His relationship to his friends, with the exception of Simmons, does not change, his need is only partially fulfilled, and his want is unfulfilled. So he begins season 16 with the same want… and his arc basically resets from the beginning, except that this time his separation from his friends is involuntary. Yet again, he finds his wants belittled and dismissed, only this time it’s by Doc instead of Sarge and the Blues.

For Grif to have a truly satisfying resolution to his arc, I think we really need to see his friends express in some way that they value him as much as we can tell he values them.

Unfortunately in 17, Grif's protagonist run is clearly over, and he doesn't get much screentime at all outside of the ensemble scenes. Huggins is alive and Grif gets to be happy about that, at least. He shoots down Tex's ship to fix the timeline, something that definitely wouldn't have enraged Church and broken the timeline even further. His relationship with Simmons develops not at all, and he gets two significant scenes in the Labyrinth at the end, one by himself and one with his sister.

So let's talk about that Labyrinth.

In Grif's personal Labyrinth scene, we see him at the mercy of a sadistic gym teacher forcing him to run an obstacle course. This seems to reflect an experience from Grif's early life, which, in his own words, "made me hate effort itself!" When he finds Kaikaina in the Labyrinth to rescue her from her own nightmare, he makes a startling confession: he was never drafted for the war, but voluntarily enlisted. (Grif being drafted has never explicitly been stated on the show, by the way; it was in a set of character profiles from the season 5 DVD extras, many of which have already been retconned, and it was a Word of God statement from Geoff. Nevertheless it was something a lot of fans had come to accept as canon.)

Fan reception to this scene seems to have been… mixed. Some, I think, have appreciated that the obstacle course scene dug into the possible roots of Grif's hatred for power-tripping authority figures and meaningless effort, and I can appreciate that too—I think that scene makes this point well. And taken together, I think the obstacle course and the enlistment confession do offer some real insight into Grif's character: he learned to hate meaningless effort and authority at a young age, and he enlisted, it's implied, to find structure and purpose that was meaningful—only to be shunted off to Project Freelancer's simulation program, where he found no such thing. This ties right back into what Grif says in season 1: "I signed on to fight some aliens. Next thing I know… I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere, fighting a bunch of blue guys." This lines up well with what we've seen of Grif over the years. And I think it does an even better job than season 15 of contextualizing when and why Grif hates effort.

It just doesn't have anything to do with Grif's relationship to his friends.

So why is that Grif doesn't get that kind of emotional resolution, the kind Donut gets—wherein he gets apologies and his feelings respected?

Well, I think the answer is that Joe just didn't see that as the conflict he was setting up, and I think that becomes very clear when you look back at how season 15 plays out. It's why no one but Grif ever apologizes. If the only problem to be solved is Grif not wanting to go on the adventure, then that problem is resolved when Grif goes on the adventure. If the problem is Grif, and no one else, then it's Grif who has to come around, Grif who has to apologize for forgetting what kind of story he's in, for selfishly and wrongly wanting something for himself.

So, Grif was wrong, Grif apologized, character arc over. And season 16 offers no follow-up, no emotional resolution, but simply rinses and repeats: Grif refuses the call to adventure, Grif becomes convinced of the need for action, Grif accepts the call and acts. Also, he gets a sword, proving he's as cool as Tucker.

Character arc complete! That's a wrap, bring it in folks.

For many Grif fans, though, it's a bit more complicated, as I laid out last season.

See, Joe thought Grif was cool, way cooler than stupid Tucker. But for all his determination to prove to us how cool Grif was by tearing Tucker down next to him… it seems like he didn't actually care very much about Grif's emotional core. That Grif is motivated when he wants to be, but that nothing will make him shut down and go full Bartleby on everyone's ass faster than feeling disrespected.

Instead Grif's inertia was just a problem that had to be solved by getting him motivated. How he was treated by those around him wasn't part of the equation and didn't matter. Joe didn't know how to make Grif a protagonist without tearing apart the core of who he was—and that ties back to Joe's difficulties with giving meaningful growth to established characters.

Joe misread Grif, and he misread the desire of Grif fans, and of Red Team fans generally, to see their faves in the lead. But I point back once again to that protagonist problem. Grif was, after Chorus, the right choice for the next protagonist among the core cast. A lot of fans saw that and they wanted a Red Team driven plot. But at the heart of that was a desire for Red Team character growth.

Season 16 technically was a Red Team driven plot, yes. But it missed the boat on character growth and missed it hard. Because Joe could see that Red Team was cool, but he missed the heart. He missed what makes Grif so compelling to fans in the first place.

So when Jason took over writing, I think he did set out to resolve Grif's arc—the arc that Joe believed he was setting up. If Grif's arc was about Grif hating effort, and then coming around to taking action, then his arc resolves with him facing down some truths in his own past about why he hates effort in the first place. I think when it comes to that tension, Jason's resolution to it was actually a bit more nuanced than Joe's setup, more clearly illustration what kind of effort and authority Grif hates and why.

It is a resolution.

But it's not a resolution to the tension that a lot of Grif fans felt was the more important one: the hate glue, Grif's relationship to his friends and how they, specifically, treat him. That's why to a lot of fans, Grif's arc doesn't feel resolved, where Donut's does.

I can both appreciate the effort that was made, and also feel that Grif's emotional arc is still incomplete.

I personally hope that Grif's not passed over for character development or even a protagonist role in future seasons, because I think Red Team fans kind of got monkey's pawed with his role in this trilogy. And if Donut is any indication, it's never too late to return to a neglected character and give them some much-needed resolution.

More like Do-nut!

Probably season 17's most smashing success is in proving that Donut can not only grow as a character, but carry a storyline.

Donut has been central to the Shisno arc since it began, but he had far less screentime in season 16, appearing more as a quest giver and briefly as a soft antagonist before ultimately choosing to side with his friends. Most critically, though, season 16 laid the groundwork to give Donut the necessary motivation and character growth to take the lead in this season. Whether that was originally intended or not, it works. In fact, I think I would have been quite disappointed if the setup for Donut's character development hadn't been paid off in this season, because if you read my season 16 essay you'll recall that I very much felt it wasn't paid off there.

Season 17 more than remedies this. In fact, functionally, when looking at this arc as a whole, I think it makes more sense to see Donut as the overarching protagonist. We could compare it to Wash in seasons 7 and 8. Wash isn't even seen until late season 7, and most of the season focuses on Red Team's antics, Tucker in the desert, and Epsilon's rebirth. Even Wash's return in Valhalla is shown from Simmons and Donut's point of view. But when we look back at Recollections as a whole, it's clearly a Wash-centric arc. Likewise, while Donut has less screen time in season 16, and the point of view is centered around the rest of the core cast and their adventures, it is ultimately Donut's actions that set the plot in motion, and it is Donut who has the first and most direct connection to the Cosmic Powers, via Chrovos.

So with the rest of our heroes now lost in time, the story re-centers around Donut's point of view. Plot-wise, I do think this was the right call. This plot centers more around Donut than any other character, Grif included, and having now made the choice to turn against Chrovos, Donut was the logical choice to carry us to the finish line. And that's not to cast aside other characters who may or may not have gotten the character development they needed, only to say, this is Donut's story and it was right that he got to finish it.

Donut works as a protagonist, and Donut also works here as Donut. A big part of the success of this season is not just putting Donut in the spotlight, but understanding who Donut is, looking for the unrealized potential in that, and letting Donut's own growth carry the story forward.

See, Donut's first primary character trait was being oblivious.

I know what you're thinking. "But Anne, isn't it the innuendo thing? Everybody knows that." Indeed. But go back and rewatch the Blood Gulch Chronicles, and you may notice that the accidental innuendo doesn't really develop for a season or two. One of the first things Donut does is fall for a classic military prank, walk into Blue Base thinking it’s the “store,” and buy the flag.

And the obliviousness never really goes away. It's still there in season 10 when Donut doesn't recognize Wash in his blue armor. It's arguably even there implicitly in season 12 when Donut and Wash are being held captive and Donut doesn't appear to notice or care that he's standing next to the man who shot him.

The obliviousness also goes hand in hand with a kind of benign self-absorption. We see this in Blood Gulch when Donut exclaims to a wounded Tucker, "You can't die! I'm bored! All these girls wanna talk about is chick stuff! And not the fun chick stuff, like ribbons and unicorns. Boring stuff, like oppression and a hostile work environment." We see it in season 7, when Donut thinks the Meta is a friend of Simmons', and gets indignant about not being introduced, completely missing the fact that the Meta is attacking them. We see it in season 11 when Donut and Doc fly all the way to Chorus to respond to the gang's distress call, and then send their ride away.

But the critical point is that when Donut gets his pink armor, the joke is that Donut doesn’t initially realize his armor is pink. And it's only over time that this joke morphs into "Donut is effeminate," and then into "everything Donut says is sexual." In the logic of the show's humor, pink = feminine = gay = hypersexual. Yeah, not so great when I lay it out like that, is it? But that's how we got from headlight fluid and Donut buying the Blue flag to where we are now.

And I bring this up, not to critique the poorly-aged humor from which the show has at least somewhat moved on, but to point out that innuendo is not all there is to Donut and it never has been. If it feels like it is, it's because Donut has undergone some Flanderization over the years, and most critically, since his return in season 10 he's had no character growth to challenge that characterization and no major role in the plot for which a writer might need to do so.

See, Donut being self-absorbed and oblivious to everything going on around him made him a character who never had to be taken seriously. If the Reds make fun of Donut, ignore him, and so forth, but Donut never really seems to notice or care, then it’s fine. If the others are dismissive of Donut's needs but he's also pretty dismissive of theirs in kind, it's fine. If Wash shot Donut, and Donut seems to hold like, a humorous kind of grudge again "that jerk Washington," but either doesn't notice or doesn't care that Wash is still around, then it's fine. It's fine. This is fine. It's fine! He's fine. This is fine. It's fine.

Well, except a lot of fans have been saying for years that maybe it's not fine. But narratively and tonally, it's not been framed as a problem that needed solving.

But the moment you have Donut express that he doesn’t like the way his friends treat him and it makes him feel bad—well, now you have tension. Now you have a conflict that needs to be resolved.

This is actually the root of my problem with season 13 Doc, which I brought up in my season 16 essay. Everyone forgetting about Doc in season 13, and Doc being upset about that, raises a conflict that is never resolved. His friends never do change or address the way they treat him, it's mostly treated as a joke, and it doesn't come up again in the Chorus arc. In fact that conflict returns in season 15, when Doc sides with the Blues and Reds—and I'll give Joe credit for that, he saw an unresolved thread and he ran with it. But we'll come back to Doc.

So Donut needed attention like this. In fact the development Donut gets is one of the things that does feel truly continuous with season 16. And while I remain discontented with Grif's incomplete arc, I can see clearly here the challenged faced by a writer picking up where 16 left off, and given only twelve episodes in which to wrap up a lot of threads. I think a season could've been made that gave both characters the resolution they needed. But it probably couldn't have been made in twelve episodes. Jason probably had to make some tough calls.

And I just can't bring myself to be sorry we got the Donut development we did, because it's so good.

I know some fans might be disappointed that Trollnut (the theory that Donut’s innuendos haven't been accidental and he’s been deliberately trolling everyone the whole time) is now explicitly not canon, at least not in the past. As funny as that interpretation was, I think the way Jason took it plays far better with Donut’s classic characterization: he's just kind of oblivious. Not just of what's going on around him, but of how he comes across to other people.

And with that as the starting point, I think the freshly-gained self-awareness works as character growth and is an effective way to propel Donut to a more active role in the story and begin to challenge and grow his relationships with the others. If there's anything that maybe gets a little lost in this take on Donut, it's that benign self-absorption, but I think even that might be implicitly acknowledged in Donut making a conscious attempt to work on the way he talks—becoming aware of how he's perceived, realizing that he's been making people uncomfortable without realizing it. I think it's a thread that could have been developed a touch more—Donut is not, after all, an innocent character who's never wronged anyone before this arc—but again, this season had limited space to do all it needed to, and I'm certainly not unhappy with what we did get.

There is an earnestness to Donut that I do not think is inconsistent with previous characterization but which comes through much more strongly in 16 and especially 17, and provides a believable foundation for serious motivations. And that earnestness dovetails nicely with his increasing self-awareness. It doesn't follow that he'll never be funny again—the innuendo does return in places once he's convinced the others to take him seriously where it matters, and I don't think we need to worry that Donut won't be recognizably Donut from here on out. But this season taps into a depth of sincerity and even vulnerability for Donut that we haven't seen before.

As a sidenote, I was actually relieved to hear Donut finally swear again when trying to get his friends' attention, as that's something that's been bugging me since last season. If you take a look at Donut's dialogue in the past, he swears plenty; it was Doc who would use softer euphemisms. I can only assume that Donut stopped cursing when he found God; maybe Chrovos doesn't like strong language or something. Hopefully that will go back to normal now that his connection with Chrovos is over.

Donut in this arc is a doer. Even in season 16, as an agent of Chrovos, he's doing what he thinks is right, and in 17, it's his actions that save the others—and ultimately challenge the way everyone else sees him.

The stakes of the plot may be nonsensical. But the stakes that matter to us, the fans, are those of character growth and character relationships, and it is there that season 17 vitally succeeds. Perhaps the real success here is that Donut's arc unites action and emotional resolution in a way Grif's arc did not. His resolving things with his friends—getting them to listen to him, hearing their apologies, coming around to maybe forgiving them—directly ties into his role in the plot, because he needs them to take him seriously to wake them up. Donut's plot motivation and his personal motivation can't be separated from one another, and they both find resolution in the end with Chrovos' defeat.

Most notably, Wash and Donut see a resolution to their history that has been a long time in coming.

If this season set out to prove that Donut could be a protagonist, I think it was a great success. It's a great example of how to grow a comedic character into a serious plot role without robbing them of who they are and why audiences love them.

Well done, sir. Chef's kiss.

The Wash Revival

Speaking of Wash, man, isn't it great to see Wash, like… doing stuff?

I wrote last year about how frustrating it was to see Wash basically treated like a crash dummy for two seasons, and season 17 remedies this with flying colors. When Donut rescues him from Schrödinger's Hypoxia, Wash becomes not only conscious but an active agent in the story. On a plot level, he works with Donut to wake up the others where they are adrift in the Everwhen; on a personal level, he finds meaningful resolution both with Donut and with Carolina.

I think Jason did a really brilliant job of using humor to highlight the absurdity of Wash and Donut's situation—with Donut getting shot over and over as they both keep inadvertently jumping to the same moment in time. That they become literally stuck in a loop they must break out of symbolizes the need for resolution between them.

Wash, at long last, not only takes real responsibility for his past actions but becomes a friend to Donut. More than a friend—Wash is both ally and advocate for Donut, standing up for him when the rest of his friends are still inclined to dismiss him. For the first time in a long time, Donut has someone in his corner. And so when he travels back to Blood Gulch to confront the others, he's not alone.

Wash's own journey through time mirrors Donuts struggle. We see Wash relive a moment in his past when he felt truly alone, with no one in his corner—Recovery One. We see Wash in the Freelancer era struggling to be taken seriously, and finally asking himself in exasperation, "Is this how Donut feels all the time?" It's a moment that builds empathy for Wash, and I think it also serves as a small but poignant way nod to the story of season 15. The Freelancer relates to the sim trooper—sees him as he is, a real person with feelings. This has been a part of Wash's journey for a long time, really ever since his adoption into Blue Team, highlighted by his sticking up for them in season 10 and again in his relationship with Tucker in season 11. But it was an unfinished journey, until Wash found that resolution with Donut specifically. It's really wonderful to see that finally happen.

It's great to see Wash finally taking an active role in the story again. But it's just as important that that action is about supporting Donut first and foremost, with Wash's character development as secondary. I've said before that you don't need to put the Freelancers in the spotlight to give them character development, they just need to be active in a supporting role, and Wash's relationship to Donut in season 17 does that incredibly well.

It would be easy to just stop there—I think Wash is for the most part handled very well this season. But I do want to talk about where this is going in the future, because the ending of season 17 indicates that things are about to change for Wash—though it's hard to say exactly how much.

The Follow-Through

I was not fond of the contrived conflict between Wash and Carolina in season 16, to say the least, but the portrayal of Wash's condition itself I thought was pretty decent. He hadn't lost any of his core personality, and it was pretty clear when and how his memory lapses were affecting him—repeating himself, forgetting how he got where he was, confusion and irritability due to that confusion, etc. While I had issues with the framing of the situation to put Carolina at fault, the effects of the cerebral hypoxia itself were not done badly, and I wasn't sorry to see Wash's injury have some real consequences given how little narrative purpose it served in season 15.

What we see of Wash in " Schrödingin'" before Donut wakes him up and snaps him back to his uninjured timeline… very much does not reflect the condition we saw in season 16. It doesn't indicate memory loss or confusion so much as just… uh, weirdness? And because it was also part of the general weirding of the timeline, I'm kind of willing to let that slide and assume it was purely for comedy and not meant to be of much consequence because Donut was about to snap him out of it anyway. That said, I really hope it is not representative of what we can expect for Wash going forward, and I think I am justified in feeling a bit of trepidation about that.

I think it needs to be kept in mind that Wash is an important character to a lot of fans. He's already seen some big ups and downs in terms of characterization and not all of it has sat well with fans, from the Freelancer characterization that makes Wash appear not just naive but clumsy and inept, to the Fan Guide interview that more or less directly contradicts that naivety, to his extremely passive role in the past two seasons. One can bring up continuity in this context, but it's not simply about whether you can explain away these wild swings in characterization. I've said it before, I'll say it again: you can make up an explanation for just about anything if you're creative. Fans do it all the time. I do it myself. And it's also to be expected that longtime fans will be resistant to new canon that challenges their interpretations of characters they love.

But what fans really want, I think, is for the heart of the character to stay intact.

And as the character who introduced RvB's first serious storyline, Wash should not start behaving like, say, Caboose (whom I bring up because he is the other character who canonically has brain damage). We already have a Caboose. Wash is Wash. And he can be Wash even while dealing with a serious injury. I want to be very clear here that this isn't me saying Wash can't be funny, or that there shouldn't be humor around him managing his condition. I'll point back to what I said above about Donut getting repeatedly shot—it's a great example of how humor can be used to approach a serious problem.

I'm just saying: let Wash continue to be Wash. After all, that is the point of what he says to Carolina, right? He's not dying. He's not even going away. He'll still be Wash. He's just going to have some memory problems—and it's not exactly like Wash hasn't dealt with things like that before. Furthermore, I think realistically he's going to have a much easier time dealing with it when his friends know and can support him.

Wash has undergone one of the longest and most complex character arcs on this show, and one critical part of that arc only just saw resolution, so to then turn Wash into a character who is too goofy to be taken seriously or to have active agency in the story would be… a huge mistake. That doesn't have to happen. And it shouldn't.

I'll admit I'm apprehensive, but I think this can be done well.

You're My Best Friend

You may recall last year I was very pessimistic about Wash and Carolina getting resolution. And I don't think that fear was unwarranted, based on the precedent set by Joe's writing. But Jason more than surpassed my expectations.

We're going to be talking about Carolina here, so full disclosure for anyone to whom it wasn't already extremely obvious: Carolina's my favorite character. Not my favorite character in RvB, my favorite character in anything. I can't remove that bias but I can acknowledge it. Her arc has always resonated with me a lot and her relationship with Wash has always been important to me as well, both for the ways in which they mirror one another and the ways in which they are very different.

So when I say that, for example, it's tough to hear Wash be angry at Carolina, that doesn't mean it's a bad thing that he is. Given the circumstances, his anger is reasonable. It's easier on a rewatch, knowing the resolution is coming.

And actually one of my favorite lines this season comes when Wash is very much still angry at Carolina—when he says, "When you get injured and your best friend lies to you, makes you into a secret invalid, I'll hear you out, I promise. …Friends talk to each other. They trust each other. I thought we were closer than that." He's mad at Carolina because he cares so much about their relationship, because he thinks of her as the person he's closest to, and she kept something important from him and he doesn't understand why. And I think that's really the best reframing of this situation we could possibly get, without retconning it altogether.

Donut points out to Wash the lengths to which Carolina was willing to go to help him despite her mistakes. But I think what really gets through to Wash is his own time travel experiences, and the perspective he gains through seeing Carolina at different points in her life.

The Freelancer-era bit is… rocky, and we'll come back to why. For now suffice it to say that while Carolina ignoring Wash in an almost comically-dismissive manner does further the development of Wash's relationship with Donut, it doesn't particularly reflect Wash's relationship with Carolina at any point we ever saw in Freelancer. Put a pin in it.

The critical point is when Wash finds Carolina during her missing years.

This is, arguably, Carolina at her lowest point. Lower than the time after CT's death, lower than present-day season 10, which I've argued before should probably be seen as a step up from her years in hiding, in the broader context of her whole journey. Carolina is alone—working under a false identity, in a generic suit of armor (which I'm well aware was a choice made due to Halo 2 limitations but it's also brilliant, for reasons we'll get into later). When Wash finds her, she is alone at her post. From what her CO says, she is an oddity in her unit and probably doesn't have many friends if any. Even the weapon she's holding, a sniper rifle, speaks of solitude and distance.

Carolina has no one in her corner right now.

There's the parallel to Donut, and to Wash.

And though she responds with anger and suspicion—unsurprising, given the circumstances—Wash responds with compassion.

It's really significant here what Wash goes through just to find out where Carolina was. It means that in all the time they've been together since Freelancer, she never once told him and he never once asked. And that right there—the absence of that knowledge shared between them, tells us far more about these characters, about their relationship, about Wash and about Carolina individually, than any implied backfill that Wash just already knew would have done.

And notice that when Wash does ask Carolina, on Iris… she just tells him. Like she's perfectly okay with him knowing, and maybe would have been, even before that. But it just never came up. Wash probably never wanted to pry, Carolina doesn't volunteer painful things about herself, and neither of them are good with… emotional stuff.

Oddly enough, it's this, this small meaningful exchange on their vacation moon, that makes me almost kind of okay with their season 16 subplot, in the hindsight of their reconciliation. Because it serves to highlight what was still missing from Wash and Carolina's relationship. They've built teamwork, trust, and a genuine friendship in their time together since Carolina's return. They're both part of this odd little family called the Reds and Blues; both of them would absolutely go to the wall to protect this family and one another. That much has been clear since Chorus.

But they never really talked. Not about their shared history, their feelings. Not about the elephant in the room, Epsilon, the AI they both knew in sharply different ways. The difficult things. Their season 15 conversation touched their history, briefly, but didn't go much further than York.

So when something happened where they really, badly needed to talk, Carolina just… didn't. She stayed faithfully by Wash's side during his recovery—kept him company, helped him get his strength back, all the things that didn't require difficult conversations—and she hoped that would be enough. It wasn't.

I do still think it was unfair, from a meta standpoint, to create a conflict between them specifically to be all Carolina's fault, because we know from history that Wash isn't much better at talking about difficult things than Carolina is, and a conflict arising from a genuine misunderstanding between the two of them would have made this point a lot more effectively. But I can appreciate the point all the same.

And going forward, it seems like Wash and Carolina's friendship has ultimately been strengthened by this. Not just by Carolina's apology or their reconciliation, but by Wash gaining a deeper insight into everything she's been through. And this sympathy is especially meaningful coming from Wash, who's been through a lot himself, and generally garners a lot more sympathy from fans.

Your life, Carolina. You've survived things that would've broken me. Broken anyone. Do you even know how far you've come? Carolina, you are so cool. I am so proud of you. I'm always gonna be your friend.

For a subplot that started out as my absolute least favorite thing in season 16, this sure did wrap up as my favorite part of 17, and that says a lot. I can't overstate how grateful I am for it.

And speaking of things I'm grateful for.

The Lost Years: What This Season Adds

It will come as no surprise to my regular readers that I've always had sort of a fascination with what I call Carolina's Lost Years—where she went, what she was doing, what her emotional state was, who if anyone knew that she was alive, what made her decide to come back, etc. And until this season, it was kind of up to us as fans to fill in that huge blank space in her backstory.

That's seven solid years of headcanons you're facing down. There's an inherent risk in adding backfill this late in the game.

I want to be clear that new canon not lining up with fans' headcanons does not mean that the new canon is bad. Sure, it might be risky to tackle something that's been left open-ended for so long, but that doesn't in itself mean it should never be done, or that it's automatically wrong if it doesn't line up with fanon. Sometimes writers do fumble on these things (lookin' at you, Fan Guide Wash!); sometimes fans have gotten so entrenched in their own headcanons that they respond with not only disappointment but anger to new canon that challenges their interpretations. And we should be honest with ourselves that there isn't always a clear line separating the one from the other—just look at the controversies around Star Wars. (Please don't ask me what I think about Star Wars; thanks in advance.)

Similarly, the challenge for a longtime fan who has spent a lot of time thinking about these characters and their stories, interpreting them, writing about them, theorizing, and so forth, is to remain open to new canon that might challenge one's interpretations without necessarily being bad writing or a retcon. And I will be the first to admit, this can be really hard. For the split second I thought Sharkface might be Maine in the Prologue to season 13, I had several small heart attacks, and I was very relieved when he wasn't.

So when I saw signs that we were about to get a canon glimpse of Carolina's lost years, I definitely braced myself more than a little.

It didn't precisely line up with my headcanons, no.

And I liked it. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it felt perfect.

Having Carolina re-enlist under a new identity was probably at least partly a practical decision, as it provides an in-universe reason for her to still be wearing armor, but in the Halo 2 engine, where the distinctive helmets of the later games don't yet exist. It would've made it easy to choose a setting, since any vaguely-military looking map will do, and can be populated with other generic soldiers. Really, given the medium, the obvious choice would've been either to have Carolina re-enlisted or to have her doing mercenary work, and I think you could easily make either one work. But I think her returning to military service works best, for many reasons.

To re-enlist, Carolina probably had to start from the bottom—no record, no rank. Before Freelancer she could have been an officer for all we know; now she's a rank and file soldier. No status, no elite special ops program, no leaderboard. Just a straightforward military assignment.

Imagine being Carolina, on the run from the disastrous program that was Project Freelancer—a program that was supposed to save humanity, so you gave it, and more importantly your father, the man in charge of it, every benefit of the doubt. Every nonstandard oddity, even things that might have seemed wrong or counterproductive or unfair or unethical, you gritted your teeth and swallowed, and you told yourself it was for the greater good.

After it all came crashing down around you, you created a new identity and re-enlisted. Somewhere quiet, where you could fly under the radar.

And suddenly, you remembered what real military was like.

I'm by no means saying that military culture generally or the UNSC in specific don't have Problems, but getting herself back into a regular outfit might have started to put in perspective just how off the wall Freelancer really was, and that's the kind of revelation that could lead Carolina to put more of the pieces together.

Plus, as a soldier she'd have access to, at the very least, more information channels than the average civilian—she even says she did it in part to have access to military intel, and with her Freelancer experience, she might well have able to get more information through backdoor channels. It makes sense that from that position she might not know everything, like what happened to York, but she might have bits and pieces of information like Wash being with the Recovery force. And at some point, she must have either learned or figured out what the Director was doing with Alpha, because Wash seems to presume she already knows, and she does not correct him.

(She doesn't still have her adaptive camo, though—sorry Jason, that one actually is a continuity error. The Meta took that; we see them use it throughout Reconstruction.)

You've survived things that would've broken me, Wash tells her. And I think that's what's so meaningful about all of this to me: the picture we get of Carolina, in the darkest period of her life, surviving. She's lost everything—her family, her friends, her career. But she keeps moving. Puts herself back in a position where she might be able to do something good for humanity, even if that wasn't her primary motivation at the time. She doesn't become a mercenary, or simply disappear. She stays a soldier, in the only way she can.

I also find something deeply poignant about the fact that Carolina kept her old Freelancer armor in storage. She could have sold it, destroyed it, thrown it out an airlock—but she kept it, hidden away somewhere.

Maybe because she knew, deep down, that one day she would be Agent Carolina again.

No Regular Girls: Why RvB Needs to Stop Punishing Carolina

I just wrote a whole bunch about why I think Carolina and Wash's resolution is great and how it even kind of redeemed that subplot for me in a way I didn't think was possible. I just wrote about how much I love the backfill for Carolina's lost years. And those are certainly not the last positive things I have to say about this season, so I hope that will temper what I'm about to say, because I'm about to get critical—and critical about a character who is very near and dear to my heart.

Season 17 is, on the whole, very sympathetic to Carolina, and I don't want what I'm about to say to diminish that. But this is what we do here at anneapocalypse dot wherever you're reading this—we get into the weeds and deconstruct the framing around characters.

So into the weeds we go. And to contextualize all of this, we need to go back a ways, so strap in.

Carolina's writing has always had it rough. She was introduced during what I would call, within RvB, the Golden Age of Animation and the Dark Age of Storytelling. The Freelancer seasons are jam-packed with action sequences and retcons, and confusingly lacking in exposition and consistent characterization. Part of the reason interpretations of Freelancer characters vary so widely is that big chunks of the story��including, incredibly, who the antagonists actually are—are just missing from these seasons, leaving fans to fill in the blanks in wildly varying ways.

Even Wash's writing suffers during this time period, giving him an extremely passive role in the plot and characterization completely subject to the whims of it. (Ever notice how season 10 Wash mysteriously develops a fear of heights that wasn't there in season 9?) But Carolina in many ways gets the worst of it, thanks to two factors that are in direct conflict with one another:

She's supposed to be the protagonist.

She's the Director's daughter, which isn't supposed to be revealed until the very end, so her point of view has to be extremely limited, leaving her motivations unclear to most viewers for the entire arc.

To make matters worse, because the narrative actively avoids Carolina's point of view for so much of the Freelancer arc, she ends up being repeatedly framed by the way other characters talk about her, rather than by her own motives or even simply her actions. I wrote a whole thing about this with regard to the Sarcophagus mission specifically, in which Carolina is framed as being in the wrong for the way she completes the mission—despite the fact that, in context, all of her actions pretty much square up. And unless you're a nerd like me, obsessed with cutting through the framing to get at the raw text—it's the framing that sticks. She really wants to win. Who cares who gets it first? I guess the leaderboard beckons.

All the words of other characters, which most of the audience will nonetheless take at face value.

But there's more to this than just Carolina. It began with Tex, and it becomes very pronounced in the Freelancer seasons: this pattern of creating strong, assertive, even aggressive female characters and then finding some way to justify why they're going to be punished for being strong.

You know that John Berger quote about vanity? @tuckerfuckingdidit reminded me of it in this context, and I was struck by its appropriateness:

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

You wrote a female character who was an asskicking badass because you thought it was hot. You put other characters around her and made them call her "mean," thus morally condemning the woman whose badassery you had depicted for your own pleasure.

So Tex has always been a rotten bitch. (Was she, though?) South was a backstabber who rarely worked in a direct fashion. (Didn't she, though?) CT betrayed her team for some Innie dick because she was bitter about her ranking. (Or did she?) And one by one, they die. Tex even gets to die twice.

Carolina only cared about winning, and now she's screaming on the training room floor. Carolina didn't listen to York, whom she should have just known was right whether he explained what he was doing or not. Carolina just had to fight Tex, Carolina wouldn't give up her AI, and now she's getting thrown off a cliff. She made her bed; now let her lie in it.

See, she was too strong, too competent, too driven, too dedicated to her work. She cared too much. Please pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, or the man sitting at number three on the leaderboard but it's fine because he definitely doesn't care as much and that's what matters. Carolina cared too much, she was too good, and that was wrong, always wrong, definitely wrong, and also she was a bitch.

Because Burnie said she was ambitious! And Burnie is an honorable man.

But hey, fans will sympathize with her now, right—now that we know the true nature of her relationship to the Director? Isn't she more likable now that she's been taken down a few pegs, now that she's sorry she didn't listen to York about all the things he never actually told her? Isn't it good how she feels bad for not throwing away her career to run away with him and have babies?

The thing is, for the fans who were already determined to hate her, none of that made her any more likable. And for the fans who liked her, even related to her arc, the framing of her as always wrong about everything was kind of a constant slap in the face.

Following season 10, Carolina disappeared, and it was unclear at the time if she would ever be returning, until the teaser at the end of season 11. She showed up halfway through season 12 to rescue the Reds and Blues and get stabbed in the leg, and from there she settled into a pretty passive role for the remainder of the season, mostly carting Epsilon around and standing there silent while he was mean to his friends.

At that point, I kinda figured, well, okay, this is how it's gonna be.

It wasn't as though Chorus hadn't also given us some great new developments with regard to female characters. We got Katie Jensen and Emily Grey, both female comedic characters, something the show had been pointedly lacking since Kaikaina was last seen in season 6. And we got Vanessa Kimball, a war-weary rebel leader who broke the mold in a variety of ways: she was a serious, grounded character, but not a hypercompetent hardass (even if some fans seem determined to portray her that way… ahem)—just a kind, principled woman doing her best in dire circumstances. As for Carolina, I figured, at least she's still here, so… yeah, I'll take what I can get.

Then season 13 happened.

And it turned out Miles Luna had been listening to the Carolina fans' disappointment with her role in season 12.

So he not only raised the stakes and beefed up the antagonists—he gave Carolina a subplot. A mini-arc with an old antagonist from the Freelancer days, who forces Carolina to confront not only her guilt about Project Freelancer, but also her sheer terror of losing her team all over again. As @epsilontucker so aptly put it once, "He tells Carolina the things she tells herself. I killed my team. I'll burn for what I did." Sharkface serves as a foil through which Carolina confronts her own past:

I'm sorry. You were on one side of the fight and we were on the other. We thought we were the good guys. I'm sorry.

Please note here that Carolina both takes responsibility for what she was a part of in Freelancer and expresses genuine remorse, while still acknowledging what was beyond her knowledge and control.

I'm not saying season 13 was flawless and beyond criticism. I actually think Carolina's mini-arc might have been even more meaningful if Sharkface had lived, and I think given his justified grievances he was much better set up for a redemption arc than Locus was. Carolina's subplot still serves to continue her isolation from the Reds and Blues, and when she calls them her "family" it's kind of a case of telling and not showing. Nevertheless, what is there works, and it gives Carolina's main arc a kind of resolution that season 10 did not. Miles cared about understanding Carolina and giving her real character development, and that shows.

Season 13 meant a lot to me. It still does.

Unfortunately, season 13 wasn't a turning point. It was an outlier.

Temple was a good idea. While the role of our Reds and Blues in Project Freelancer had been addressed in the past, even giving Sarge a huge existential crisis and some really neat character growth in season 8, the perspective of other sim troopers was a fresh addition to the story. The prototype concept is kind of a mess, and in my opinion makes the rest of the Blues and Reds really boring, but Temple himself and his grievance against the Freelancers, I think really works.

The fumble, in my opinion, was making Carolina the one involved in Biff's death.

Because we already had that story with Sharkface. (And while some have suggested it could be Wash, I don't think that'd be ideal either, because we already had one unresolved "Wash shot a sim trooper" situation going.)

And yes, there are differences between the two stories. But doing another "Carolina's past comes back to haunt her" storyline so soon after Sharkface was a mistake. That proximity to season 13, plus the over-the-top callousness with which Carolina is portrayed in the flashback, is actually a distraction from the larger question of how Project Freelancer treated sim troopers generally—and there are a variety of hints throughout the years that sim trooper deaths were horrifyingly common and accepted, from FILSS's "Oh, that would be wonderful! What a successful test," in season 8, to the Fan Guide anecdote about Agent Alabama at Rat's Nest. Like, this was a thing that happened. A lot. And some incidents were probably a lot less accidental than what happened at Desert Gulch.

But it comes back to that framing thing again. You make it Carolina, and what the audience takes from it is not a statement about the many war crimes of Leonard Church, but a statement about how Carolina, specifically, is mean. And in this case, she doesn't get any character growth from it. She doesn't even get to hear why Temple hates her.

She just gets tortured.

Joe does have that problem where he likes references… a little too much. To the point of cannibalizing past beats from the very show he's writing, without an understanding of what made them good in the first place.

Because the fans liked it when Carolina felt bad about something in season 13, so they'll like her feeling bad again! Don't worry, we'll make sure to keep reminding you, season after season, how sorry she is. Maybe we'll even invent some new past sins for her, and punish her with some literal torture, to make sure she feels extra bad. Has she done anything wrong recently, that she can feel bad about? Make sure she does something new wrong, so she can be sad about it.

Season 16 was a rough time, man.

And then 17 arrived, and began to set things right.

As I said in the two previous sections, the Carolina and Wash portions of season 17 do Carolina very, very right. The backfill for her lost years works incredibly well.

Then we come to the Labyrinth… where Carolina is literally beating herself up.

Oh no.

The House of Mirrors

So, the premise of the Labyrinth is that it works as kind of a house of mirrors, reflecting the worst of its victim's emotions—fears, desires, insecurities, basically whatever will do the most damage—back at them in increasingly distorted ways until it drives them to suicide.

The first thing you might notice about this is that we're kind of back to torture again—it's just psychological torture instead of physical. And the second thing is that this is pretty much the same type of plot device as the True Warrior test in season 13. I'm not a huge fan of this kind of thing in general, but there is one notable exception between the two:

The True Warrior test simply showed the characters something they were afraid of. It showed them something true about themselves, and for Carolina and Locus in particularly this serves as a vehicle for character development.

The Labyrinth, by contrast, takes something true and twists it.

And I do want to point out that even so, every other vision we see in the Labyrinth is framed as being based on something real, amplified though it may be. Kaikaina's guilt over the fire in her childhood home, based on her conversation with her brother, appears to be both a real event and a real feeling she had. Grif's Coach Prestwood seems to be based on a real person in his life, and the emotions he evokes are certainly meant to be real. Tucker's fear of failure rings true, as does Wash's fear of losing his friends. Even Sarge's conflicting desires for both victory and ongoing conflict seems to come from a real place. All of that is the context from which we must approach Carolina's experience in the Labyrinth.

I've noticed it's only with Carolina that active distortion is needed as an explanation for what she experiences. Apparently it's only Carolina who has a self-image so distorted that the past self she confronts in no way resembles who she actually was.

Because no, it doesn't.

Let's unpack the way this scene characterizes Freelancer-era Carolina.

“I feel so much rage when I look at you,” Carolina says to her past self. “You know that? You prioritize yourself over everything. You’re going to get people killed. Heck, you’re going to kill people. And they won’t always deserve it. Dad won’t love you more if you keep winning. He can’t. He died when Mom died. And you’ll bury him. Your competitive streak stops. I’m demanding it.”

“Oh,” says past Carolina, “you’re done? Okay. You got pretty talkative! No need for the lecture. I can read your whole shitty life from your whiny tone of voice.”

“Oh, you think you’re so—”

“Directionless? Scared? No. No, actually I—” Past Carolina laughs viciously. “I feel great. Weird to hear all that from you, though. Let me unpack this. You’ve now tasted defeat, I’m assuming, and you were—aw, sad? For a while?” Her tone grows taunting. “And you want people around as crutches in case you trip again. When have I ever—think about it!—ever allied with someone I didn’t need? A friend in a high place. A bolt hole. A wing man. To forget how to utilize people is to forget yourself. Forget me. And frankly, that’d be damning enough, but you went further. Carolina, you stripped away what comes without thought. What’s instinctual. Your passion. What greater betrayal is there? You’re not you anymore.”

Hoo boy. Okay. Let's try and unpack this.

It’s worth noting that it’s present Carolina who immediately goes on the offensive here, spitting venom at the image of her past self before that image has even spoken. And the things she says… “You’re going to get people killed. You’re going to kill people.”

So what is she talking about? Who did Carolina get killed by being competitive? Who did she kill?

If she’s talking about enemy targets that weren’t who she believed they were… I mean, yeah, they didn’t deserve it, but Carolina was acting as a soldier under orders and her being less competitive wouldn’t make those any less her orders.

Is she talking about the other Freelancers? Because… Carolina didn’t get them killed. North, South, York, Wyoming, Florida—none of them were killed by or because of Carolina’s competitiveness. The only one you could really ascribe to her actions is Maine, and there is a case to be made that Carolina gave up Sigma as much to prove she didn’t need an AI as to help Maine after his injury—but that act was based on such incomplete knowledge that to call it a direct result of Carolina’s competitiveness is a stretch. Furthermore, this argument always seems to ignore the fact that if Maine hadn’t gotten Sigma, someone else would have, and while we don’t know how Sigma might have behaved with a different host, it’s hard to imagine it ending well regardless.

Are we talking about Biff? Because… we’ve been over this, but Carolina didn’t kill Biff, and Biff also didn’t die because Carolina was competitive. Biff’s death was an accident; even Tex, who threw the flagpole Carolina deflected, wasn’t intentionally aiming at Biff, though it does seem like she (or someone else inside that helmet, more likely) must have realized she was throwing it with lethal force. Had Carolina been less determined to win that particular match, there’s no reason to assume Tex (or Omega) would’ve dialed back the aggression. And as we've covered already, sim trooper deaths were far from uncommon in Project Freelancer, and something not one of the agents, not even Good Guy Do the Right Thing York, are ever shown objecting to.

Let’s look at what "past" Carolina says about herself.

“When have I ever—think about it!—ever allied with someone I didn’t need?”

CT.

You know, that person everyone forgets about when they’re trying to make a case for Carolina being purely self-serving.

I wrote about this one a long time, ago, but for a refresher: the first time we ever see Carolina question the Director’s orders is when he says that CT is an “acceptable loss.” Carolina embarks on that mission with full intent to disregard that order and try to bring CT in alive, despite that fact that doing so will be far more difficult and offers her no personal gain whatsoever and in fact results in her failing the mission. And while Carolina’s motives in the briefing with the Director may be subtle, her intent on the mission itself is not. The first thing she does upon catching up to Tex is to remind her that they only need the armor. And when she tries to pull Tex back from the killing blow, she explicitly, verbally, objects to Tex killing CT, and even knowing that they have failed the mission and that she will take the blame, Carolina still chastises Tex for what she’s done. This is not just subtext. This is text.

And this is not the only instance of Carolina caring about her teammates. Look at the haste with which she calls for medics when York is injured in training (York who is, by the way, only one spot below her on the board and arguably her closest competition before Tex). There's the offer on the Sarcophagus mission to come to Team B’s aid instead of going after their objective, the “No!” she screams out when Maine gets shot.

None of these are the behaviors of a person who is only out for herself at everyone else’s expense.

Freelancer Carolina is not a ruthless lone wolf who disregards her teammates except when they can benefit her.

This ain't it.

Even if we hadn't already beaten the horse to death with regard to Carolina's Past, this image of her past self is so hideously warped that it's not a meaningful confrontation of that past.

And even if we assume that Carolina is the outlier and accept the "it's bad on purpose" explanation—what does this mean? What truth about Carolina is this based on? Is it just her self-hatred? Because Carolina might have had this kind of warped self-image back in Freelancer—in fact she probably did—but now? We've already seen, multiple times, that she can separate what she was responsible for from what she had no control over. We saw it with Sharkface. We saw it all the way back in season 10, when even in the midst of her profound regret over what happened to Maine and York and the rest of her team, she was still able to see who was truly responsible: the Director.

Is it the fear that she's lost some essential part of herself? Because that hasn't come up even once in this trilogy.

You know what the Labyrinth could have addressed, something that would be relevant to Carolina's arc in this trilogy and to the plot as a whole, and dovetail nicely with the really excellent character growth she gets elsewhere in this season? The fear of opening up and talking through difficult emotions that led to her unintentionally hurting Wash and temporarily drove a rift between them. That's something that would relate deeply to Carolina's recent struggles, and with her friends coming to her aid and her allowing herself to be vulnerable in front of them, it could symbolize her overcoming those struggles.

Instead, we got to see Carolina once again being punished for Freelancer.

This ain't it.

The Freelancer Problem

And if it hadn't been for the Labyrinth—honestly, I probably wouldn't have squinted too hard at the Freelancer-era bits of time travel. The way Carolina repeatedly blows off Wash might have felt a little on the nose, sure, but you know, I could accept the point it was trying to make and the purpose it served for Wash and Donut, and that it was ultimately being played for comedy, and also playing much more off the tone of "The Triplets" from season 14 rather than the tone of seasons 9 and 10. I think that latter point is important, because that's part of what makes this bit feel just a little bit off, even when you can't put your finger on why.

But the Labyrinth happened, and it left a really bad taste in my mouth, such that it was difficult to even rewatch season 17 for a while despite how much of it I liked, and when I did finally rewatch it, well. It case those scenes in a bit of a new light. So squint I shall.

So, okay, back in Freelancer, maybe Carolina liked and trusted her team, but she wasn't close to them as friends, though. She didn't socialize with them outside of missions and training, and she didn't see any reason to speak to them outside of a mission context. That tracks, right?

Does it, though? Does it really?

I don't want to dwell too much on Carolina and York, because the canon itself has always been kind of confused about what the nature of their relationship actual was, which I have discussed at length, repeatedly. But it is at least implied that York and Carolina had some kind of social relationship, and that alone means Carolina wasn't opposed to that kind of relationship with her teammates on principle.

But maybe she was only friendly with York? But—no, Carolina engages in friendly banter during missions with other teammates as well. Her chatter with Niner is consistently friendly, something that carries even into the season 15 flashback. And in season 10 we even see Carolina teasing Wash himself.

Maybe Carolina preferred only to socialize with agents of a certain status. Their elite pilot, York, maybe a few other high-ranking agents. But no, back in season 15 we were told that Carolina used to go out drinking with York and his buddies who included lower-ranking agents, people who weren't even on the leaderboard and certainly lower-ranked than Wash.

But okay, maybe it's just Wash Carolina didn't like. Maybe that teasing isn't so friendly. Maybe Freelancer was just like high school, and Carolina was the Mean Girl snubbing the guy most recently moved up to her squad.

Back up the fun bus.

If anyone treated Wash like shit in Freelancer—particularly in season 10—it was York, and to a lesser extent North. York picks on Wash constantly throughout season 10, and initially Wash mostly seems to snark back, but by late in the season York's comments are making Wash visibly deflate.

York who is here calling Wash "buddy." And this scene is in the season 10 era. It has to be because Maine has the Brute shot. The series of jump-cuts that follow kind of imply that Wash jumps around to different points in Freelancer, but this point, where York, Wyoming, and Maine walk by and Wash stops York to talk to him, is unmistakably season 10.

Squint.

North also picks on Wash in this scene, and that much tracks, though it is interesting that he gangs up with South, not with York, making this probably the most unity the twins have during this time period.

But the other characters' appearances are brief and therefore of less consequence. It's Carolina who ramifies here because it is Carolina who is a part of this story, and whose Freelancer-era characterization is an issue elsewhere. And in that light, her dismissals of Wash feel more suspect. It sounds as though Jen's been directed to sound, not exhausted and frustrated as she actually would have been during season 10, but smug and snobbish. Like she thinks she's too good for Wash. Because, you know, high school.

I point back the fact that as recently as season 15, we had a photo of Carolina while in Freelancer, gone out drinking with lower-ranking agents, but in 17 I'm supposed to believe she wouldn't even talk to a member of her own team. I realize we're talking about different writers here, and I actually found that photo a little weird myself, for other reasons which I covered in the season 15 essay. In the context of the Time Travel Trilogy as a whole, though, all this just adds a certain incoherence to Carolina's characterization—like with Tucker in season 16, it feels like trying to have it all ways. Carolina was social with other Freelancers when it's convenient for the plot and exposition we need to set up, but when it makes for angst material, well, she was a total standoffish bitch actually. This is less the fault of either writer individually, and more a fault in the trilogy itself and its lack of focus, generally and specific to Carolina.

But I bring this up to point out that you don't even have to go all the way back to season 10 to see examples of Carolina's relationship to her team that do not square up with her being a snob who wouldn't even speak to a team member outside of a mission context.

Though if you're going to comment so heavily on seasons 9 and 10… giving her characterization in those seasons a closer look definitely would not be amiss.

Here's something else Carolina said in season 10, something I would expect Miles (who wrote episode 5) in particular to remember:

It's because I had a team once. A team with the best training, the best equipment—and despite everything that they had that made them the best, they still lied, and stole, and tore each other to pieces. So you tell me--how the hell am I supposed to trust a ragtag team of idiots, when I couldn't even trust the people who were closest to me?

The people who were closest to me. Those were the Freelancers. That was Carolina's team. That's canon, baby. No, Carolina definitely didn't make it easy to get close to her but she did trust her team at one point and she did care about them and this is a hill I will die on. That's why it hurt her so much when it all fell apart: Freelancer, the Director, broke her trust in other people. That's why it takes her so long to trust anyone again.

There's a lot of great Carolina in this season, but the Freelancer-related stuff misses the mark on a lot of levels.

What Did You Just Call Me?

So, let's talk about Real Names.

A lot of us have enjoyed the Four Seven Niner cameos in recent seasons, myself included because she's a great character and we miss her. I am however going to use her to point out the pattern in this arc of using Real Names where there is no in-universe reason to do so.

Way back in season 6, we learn that Wash's first name is David when the Director addresses him as such over a speaker during the break-in at Command. The Director adds, "May I call you David?" to which Wash replies tersely, "No, you cannot. You gave me my new name; the least you can do is use it." Fine. Good. This works both in-universe and in what it telegraphs to the audience. Of course the Director knows Wash's real name, but the critical thing is that he's trying to use it to presume familiarity, to disarm Wash and to assert power over him. Wash sees this for exactly what it is and responds in kind. The Director may know a lot about Wash, but that does not mean he gets to act like they're friends. Please note that this scene tells us nothing about how Wash feels about his real name generally. It tells us about his relationship with the Director and that is the point. This is good use of a real name and good storytelling.

Wash's real name is not used at all during the Freelancer seasons, nor during the Chorus Trilogy (with I think the exception of Locus's stalker diary, but that's bonus content, and it's information it makes sense for Locus to have). Fast-forward to season 14, "The Triplets," and we see Wash called David for the first time since season 6—this time by Agent Ohio, in a glimpse of Project Freelancer pre-season 9. This time, Wash responds with, "Just... don't call me "David", okay? This unit takes that kind of stuff pretty seriously." Here, again, through the use of the name we learn some things. Wash was at one point familiar enough with Ohio, Idaho, and Iowa for them to know his first name. It's possible the lower-ranking agents are less careful about these things, but it's also implied that Wash and the Triplets were friends before he moved up the ranks.

In the following episode, "The Mission," we learn the real names of the Triplets: Ohio is Vera, Idaho is Ezra, and Iowa is Mike. It's clear Shannon wanted to establish real names for them in the limited time we would have would them, but their use is still justified by its context: Idaho's feelings have been hurt, and he uses first names to shift to a more familiar tone with Ohio and talk things out. He also asks her if it's okay to call her Vera, and I like this because it noticeably mirrors the Director's question to Wash in season 6, while conveying something completely different about the characters. Where the Director sought to presume familiarity as a means of controlling Wash, Ezra offers familiarity as a way of reaching out to his friend.

Fast forward to season 15 and Wash and Carolina on the beach. We're going to set aside everything else that's weird about this conversation, and just focus on Carolina's "Do you really believe that, David?"

It is not impossible that Carolina knows Wash's first name. I mean, it's a little weird, because season 14 explicitly made the point that the higher-ranking Freelancers are much more diligent about sticking to codenames, and it's pretty clear in season 10 that Carolina didn't have access to the detailed information about the inner workings of the program. But since Wash's name was floating around the lower squads, maybe she heard it at some point. Maybe she was able to dig up records while on the run. Maybe Wash simply told her his real name offscreen at some point between season 10 and now. Like I said, it's not impossible. Moreover, she uses it in an appropriate context. This is an intimate, emotional conversation between two close friends, and Carolina signals that by using Wash's rarely-used real name. Fine. I accept that.

Also in season 15: Kaikaina Grif's real name is used onscreen for the first time in the show's history. This is not only appropriate but long overdue, and coming from Dylan Andrews, a reporter, it makes perfect sense. Great name drop. Feels good. Feels organic. Thank you. (That said, it is a little weird, come season 16, when Tucker waffles back and forth between calling her "K" and calling her "Sister"… almost as if perhaps a lead writer and a co-writer never got on the same page about that.)

Then, at the climax of season 16: Carolina says, "David's hurt. We have to go."

So, the appropriate response from pretty much everyone else onscreen was, "Who?"

There is no reason to assume the Reds and Blues know Wash's real name. He has been "Wash" the entire time they've known him. The one exception might be Simmons, who actually read the personnel files they found at the Offsite Storage Facility. But none of these people think of Wash as "David." Again, is it impossible? No, of course not, because you can always make up something happening offscreen to explain it. But based on what we've actually seen, it is not well set up that most of the Reds and Blues would even know the name, nor is there any reason for Carolina to think they would. Even Carolina herself has only used the name once, and in a very private context. So this just doesn't track. It's supposed to make us feel something, but the logic doesn't connect, and for me, it ends up being distracting more than anything else.

Part of the reason I think this feels so weird with regard to Wash, specifically, is that we just don't know the real names of many of the Freelancers, period. And that's kind of fine? Because in most cases we do not need to know. Yeah, it is sort of implied in Out of Mind that the Freelancers knew each other's real names, but so much of the early miniseries canon has been retconned away that I don't consider that particularly relevant now. We don't know York's real name. We don't know North's, or South's, or CT's. And we don't know Carolina's.

But we do know Wash's, and he's still alive, and the fans like it when we do name drops, so… okay.

Smash cut to season 17: Donut is looking for Wash after a time jump and calls out, "Wash! Agent Washington? Yoohoo! Uh... David?"

So, if there is one character who has no reason to know Wash's real name at this point in time, it's Donut. He wasn't at the Offsite Storage Facility in season 8. He and Wash don't have any kind of a relationship that might've led Wash to share that information offscreen, as Wash might have with Tucker or Caboose. And he wasn't there when Carolina used Wash's real name in season 16! He'd already left with the Hammer! Donut should not know Wash's real name, even if him using it in this context would tell us something significant about the characters and their relationship. And it doesn't, because at this point in the season they don't have a relationship.

And then there's "Ash."

When Wash travels back to his Recovery One self, he hears Command, aka Four Seven Niner over the radio, and exclaims "Ash, is that really you?" And thus, the Pilot Without a Name now has a name.

Now, Niner's little slip where she blurts out, "I thought maybe we'd lost you, too"? That is the kind of emotionally intelligent backfill I am here for. The Freelancer seasons gave us our beloved unnamed pilot with the same voice as Wash's Command, the unbeatable Lee Eddy, and whether they were always meant to be the same character or "I'd hate to have that guy's job" was just meant to be kind of a meta joke I was never sure. But they certainly became the same character, whether it was originally planned or not.

And that idea of the team's old pilot now stuck jockeying a radio, having to give Wash the order to kill South—I think that's always quietly haunted a lot of us, myself included. "Recovery One, please confirm, you are now Level 0." What was she feeling? Did she regret having to do it? Was she detached from it? Tapping into that question, that feeling, with just one little line—in an episode all about Wash facing a particularly shitty part of his past, that is the line that really gets me. That makes me feel something.

"Ash," on the other hand…

So, why would Wash call her by her first name?

I will definitely grant you that the absence of any kind of official designation for the Freelancers' pilot, such that the fans had to take to calling her by the name of her dropship was a hole in the canon. (It's not even a callsign, it's a vehicle designation—as in "This is Vehicle four-seven-niner, go for secure.") It would've been nice back in season 9 to get a real name of "Flight Officer So-and-So," or even some kind of codename for her as Project Freelancer seems to have been pretty big on codenames!

Which brings me to: If the Project was so strict about codenames for the upper ranks, why would Wash even know the first name of his elite squad's star pilot? And even if he did know it, why would he blurt it out on instinct like he's used to calling her that, when he never did in Freelancer—and when, judging by the Freelancer seasons, it doesn't even look like they were that close? And this is not like Carolina calling Wash "David," where they've spent time together post-Freelancer and grown closer. Wash hasn't seen or heard from Niner in years.

As always you can make up offscreen explanations for it if you want, but this doesn't tell us anything new about Wash's relationship with Niner so much as it just confuses the relationship they already had. I think the best way this works for me is if Ash is actually her last name, or a nickname of her last name. It's at least less weird that way.

And this isn't me pointing out plotholes just to nitpick. My problem with the name drops is that they've begun to feel fanservicey in the bad way: gratuitous, distracting, lacking in meaningful context. It's clear that hearing "David" or "Ash" is supposed to make us Feel Something, but each out-of-context overuse of Real Names dilutes that—until it makes us feel nothing at all.

You Need to Let Go

In the same way that RvB needs to stop beating the dead horse of Carolina's past, it needs to stop beating the dead horse of Freelancer generally.

Freelancer was the heart of Red vs. Blue for ten years, as the shadowy backstory to Blood Gulch that reared its head in Recollections and found resolution at the end of season 10. And while certain artifacts of Project Freelancer found their way into the Chorus storyline, Chorus was not about Freelancer. It was an effective step in moving on from the Project, moving the story and the characters in new directions. At points both Wash and Carolina grappled with their pasts, and from that they moved forward.

Season 15… landed us right back in Project Freelancer. And as I said before, I do like Temple and his story and I do think it was a fresh take, but it shouldn't have centered Carolina and that aspect of it did feel very derivative. Now, two seasons later, we've had a storyline that has nothing to do with Project Freelancer—but we're still reaching back there, revisiting it, revising it, adding to it, angsting over it. This is a problem for character reasons I've already covered, but I think it's also a symptom of the show as a whole feeling a little bit… stuck in a loop, shall we say.

I'm not going to say that Wash and Donut, for example, shouldn't have revisited their history, as that was resolution that was long overdue, and also relevant to the plot. And I'm not opposed to character moments that touch on the past in such a way, like, say, Wash and Carolina finally having a conversation about Epsilon. I'm certainly not saying that the ways in which characters were affected and grew from those experience should be forgotten—quite the opposite in fact.

But the revisiting Freelancer over and over, mining it for angst, especially when it's not plot-relevant—

It's dead, Jim.

It's over. We need to let go. These characters need to stop reliving their past, and the show needs to stop returning to plot threads and character beats that are already resolved.

It's time to move on, for the characters and for the story as a whole.

I hope season 17 can serve as kind of the final bookend on Freelancer, and let the show move on to new stories.

Reframing Tucker

Season 16 hit Tucker's characterization the hardest. Wash and Carolina's conflict may have been my personal least favorite, but Tucker's writing certainly takes the cake for the most actively mean-spirited, something I discussed at length in last year's essay.

I'll admit I wasn't feeling super optimistic about Tucker's writing for this season after watching the first episode, which seemed to be playing off the same kind of "Tucker is arrogant and stupid" hot take as last season, but as it came from the mouth of our villain, I can kinda take that with a grain of salt.

And beyond that, Tucker's role in season 17 is brief, but strong. I think brief is fine, as Tucker is not the protagonist of this arc, and season 16 did itself no favors spending so much time magnifying his flaws at the expense of screentime for its own protagonist. Tucker needed one thing from this season: resolution.

But it's a bit more complicated with Tucker, as it's not merely an in-universe resolution he needed. The nature of Tucker's maliciously over-the-top characterization in season 16, abandoning all of his Chorus-era character growth and inventing new flaws he didn't really have before just to take him down a peg, kinda needed a meta-resolution. It's not the kind of thing you can really fix, short of straight up retconning the previous season—which, hilariously, season 16 does kind of do via time travel! but the characters still remember it so it's not quite the same as it never happening.

Season 17 doesn't try to pretend that what happened between Tucker and Kaikaina didn't happen. In fact it's referenced directly in "Limbo" when Kaikaina wants to fuck with Tucker, and Doc remarks that they seem to have some unresolved issues. I like this a lot. It's funny, for one thing! And it's good Kaikaina. It's great to see her just being ridiculous in true Sister form—especially since Jensen and Dr. Grey aren't around anymore and we're a little short on comedic female characters again. (And for future seasons—it is 100% okay to let Carolina be funny, for the record. She's done it before!)

But Tucker's moment in this season comes later, once the Reds and Blues have set out to fix the timeline. After all, in a story about time traveling through one's past, what better way to remember Tucker's growth on Chorus than to send him back to Chorus?

So, setting aside the silliness of the plot, Tucker's self-reflection on Chorus also doesn't erase his season 16 actions—but it does kind of reframe them.

This was one of the worst moments of my life. But it reminded me of something. I became a leader on Chorus. And since we left it, I've been trying to act how I thought a leader should: cool, macho, totally self-confident. But somehow I forgot that I wasn't any of those things while I was actually leading. I was scared all the time, constantly second-guessing myself. But when shit got bad, I was the one to step up and make a decision. That's all it is. And right now, Donut's doing a better job of that than anyone. So yeah, I have faith.

Again, it's not that this undoes season 16's meanspirited dragging of Tucker, or makes me like it more. But there's a sincerity here, and a meaningful move to tie in Tucker's recent fumbles to his insecurity, which as I've discussed before, has kind of always been a thing. And on a meta level there's an acknowledgment in this monologue itself of what season 16 missed about Tucker. Not just the growth that was forgotten, but the team dynamic we've been missing—the faith in his friends, which Tucker now expresses toward Donut.

That means a lot. It's a truly good faith effort at making things right for Tucker, and I really like it.

Reintegrating Doc

I talked a bit about Doc last season, in regard to feeling like he'd fallen pretty out of step with the other characters in terms of his characterization and how seriously his feelings are meant to be taken, and how this goes all the way back to season 13. And though he too turns out to be an agent of Chrovos in season 16, it doesn't really end up mattering that much, and even his big fight with Donut ends up being of little consequence.

Doc plays a small role in this season, but I like the role he does play. Even Donut initially talks over Doc in "The Everwhen," and there's a certain irony in that considering that Donut's whole arc here is about being talked over and ignored—but it's also kind of in-character for Donut to be oblivious to the fact that he's even doing that.

So it's pretty satisfying to me, at the end of "Omphalos," when Doc points out that he's being talked over, and Donut… actually listens to him! And teaming up with Doc serves to further the plot. It's pretty great.

And it's equally satisfying when Doc, once in the Labyrinth, gets a moment to grapple with his O'Malley personality and reclaim control of it in order to escape. That really works for me, because I've come to read O'Malley as the part of Doc that emerges when Doc needs someone to stand up for him and in his own personality is incapable of standing up for himself. It certainly follows from season 13, and from season 16. So Doc calling upon O'Malley and consciously reclaiming that part of himself feels like good character development, and it really works here.

It's a nice little piece of resolution for Doc: reintegrating Doc's personalities, and beginning to reintegrate Doc himself as part of the gang and a plot-relevant character.

Stakes That Matter

See, the real stakes in season 17 are relationships.

Some of this carries forward from season 16, most notably for Wash and Carolina. Some of it taps into old unresolved conflicts, like Donut and Wash. And much of it involves rebuilding the team as a whole. Donut must travel through time collecting his friends, and with Wash's help, reunite them to fix the timeline. And at the end, they must find each other in the Labyrinth to overcome their demons and escape.

Season 15 lost track of that team dynamic, and the power the Reds and Blues have always had to triumph when they work together. In its final act, it lost track of the stakes that matter to fans: the characters we care about. Season 16 lost track of character arcs we've been following for many, many years now, and caught up the characters in a conflict that ultimately had little to do with them.

Season 17 has time travel in it, but it's not about time travel. Not really. The time travel serves as a mechanic, not just for plot but for character and relationship growth. What season 17 is about is restoring that neglected found family dynamic, bringing everyone back together to save the day.

Because that's always been a theme of Red vs. Blue: when the bonds are strong enough, the power of friendship wins every time.

Season 17 has the right idea that it's the characters and their relationships that matter, that the characters should drive the plot and therefore the stakes. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: No matter how grand the stakes, how wacky the adventures, or how cool the animations, Red vs. Blue is a show that hooked us with a bunch of people standing around talking. It is character-driven first and foremost, and the characters will always be its heart.

Loose Ends

I mentioned earlier that not every character gets a complete resolution in this storyline, and there are some loose ends to be picked up in our next arc, whatever that may be. Grif is definitely the most prominent one. Simmons is another to me—not so much a loose end as just kind lacking a character arc at all. Both could use some attention in seasons to come.

As I discussed earlier, I think Blue Team has had a pretty solid run of protagonists. The one exception I can see might be Kaikaina, but I think she could use some more time hanging with the core cast before she's ready for that role. With the Freelancer storyline well in the past (or at least it should be!) it makes sense to let Red Team have their time. Donut made a decent start to that. He has a good arc here.

So Grif, in my opinion, deserves another shot. He did not have a complete character arc in this storyline, and in hindsight, the Shisno arc really is Donut's story, not Grif's. I think Grif can be a good protagonist and I think he deserves another chance to be one.

Then there's Simmons, who's had a lot less character development than Grif, to the tune of almost none, and could really use some.

I don't think those two things are in conflict at all. Grif and Simmons' relationship has itself seen a long-running arc that many fans love. A storyline focusing on Grif and Simmons as co-protagonists could be really cool, and if this phase of RvB is Red Team's turn to shine, I can think of no better way to do that than to put Grif and Simmons in the spotlight. This leaves open the possibility for some great Grif siblings moments as well.

And of course, if the show were to finally canonize Grif/Simmons of a romantic nature, a lot of us would not be complaining one bit. But even simply focusing on their friendship and letting their partnership drive the story has some great potential.

Just an idea, but one I think could be really cool.

Conclusions

Jason Weight had a basically impossible task here. He had to finish somebody else's story with a lot of balls in the air while also resolving a lot of character threads that, uh, troubled a lot of fans from last season. It's much easier to critically analyze someone else's story than to write your own, never mind to complete someone else's. This was a tough goddamn job. I'm not surprised this season went through three treatments before one stuck.

It’s also really hard to judge a person’s writing when they’re writing under someone else’s direction and not running the show. I'm aware that Jason wrote one of my least favorite episodes of season 16, but he did so under Joe as lead writer, so it’s hard to say just how much creative freedom he had there.

This season, Jason's had a lot more freedom with character writing and I think that’s where this season shines. The plot's a mess, but given that Jason was tasked with completing someone else’s story arc, which was already a mess, I can’t really lay that on him. Moreover, if he changed the rules, and rearranged the universe a little, he did so in such a way as to allow the story to be more character-driven, and that's what we needed.

Season 17 was a fixer-upper, and for the most part it accomplished what it needed to. There's an emotional intelligence to this season overall that I found lacking in previous seasons, and an attention to characters and character arcs that I find heartening. This is no surprise, when you listen to Jason talk about his work in interviews and panels. There's a love for the characters that really shines through.

Gosh darn it, his writing has heart.

And I would really like to see more. Since it seems pretty clear the show will be continuing, I think there's no better candidate to write season 18, and to lead us into whatever new adventures may come.

Jason deserves that shot, if he wants it. And I do hope we'll get a chance to see his work with these characters again, in a story that is his own.

#red vs blue #rvb17 #agent carolina #agent washington #franklin delano donut #dexter grif #rvb critical #time travel trilogy #avian dentistry

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