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heyclickadee · 1 month ago

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So. Here's another long Tech Lives, post, or at least the first half of it, anyway. I'm finding myself sort of over-explaining everything and the post was getting a little unwieldy, so I decided to split it in two. So, here's the first half of a "list" of things The Bad Batch left unresolved and which are also, coincidentally, connected to Tech in one way or another.

First, actually, before I get into the list I want to clarify what I mean by "resolution." Resolution doesn't just happen if something ends or stops. It's not automatic. Resolution is more about the resolution of tension in a subplot or a story. Tragic endings can have resolution. Happy endings can have resolution. Resolution just means the tension has been dispelled; that's all.

And second, I feel like I have to clarify this, but I'm not arguing that a Tech return was planned and cut at the last minute; I'm arguing that a Tech return was planned and either moved later or was always going to happen later than we expected. (I also think Tech is just to popular to stay dead even if that was the plan, but I'm still banking on this being a rare planned character return rather than a retcon.) All of my Tech Lives posts do honestly double as arguments for why it would be one of the worst handled character deaths if it were to turn out he's never coming back, but, that said, I am still arguing that the character's alive.

Third, in this post I'm talking about characters mostly as tools used to tell a story. So, when I argue that there would need to be some on-screen processing for Tech if he were dead because he's a main character, I'm not dismissing clones like Nova or suggesting that Tech is more important in the fictional universe we're looking at. I'm saying that he's a tool that's far more heavily used in the telling of this particular story, and therefore would need more dealing with than a more minor character.

With that said, here's the first six entries in the list. (The next post should be shorter even though there's, like, twelve more entries. I'm sorry.)

1. Crosshair’s reconciliation with the batch.

So, this is about 95% of the way there, since his relationships with Hunter, Wrecker, and Echo have been repaired and his relationship with Omega has been developed, but his relationship with Tech remains broken. The last time they spoke to each other things were tense, we know for a fact that Tech struggled with Crosshair choosing the Empire after the destruction of Kamino, and now Crosshair’s walking around knowing that Tech sacrificed himself during a mission to save him. Here’s the thing, though—Crosshair’s and Tech’s relationship could have easily been resolved without Tech coming back by the end of the series. All it would have taken was a single conversation—something as simple as:

Omega: Tech wouldn’t have blamed you. He thought it was worth it to try to find you. I did, too. That’s why I couldn’t leave you, Crosshair.

Crosshair: What if both of you were wrong?

Omega: I know I wasn’t. And Tech seldom was.

Now, I would prefer more, but that would be all that was needed for resolution of this thread if Tech was meant to be dead. You don’t need Tech alive to resolve it. Explore the idea that Crosshair is not going to get the chance to reconcile with Tech the way he got a chance to reconcile with the others, that he’s never going to see Tech again, and that they left off on bad terms. Make Crosshair come to terms with that and make that the resolution. Except…the show doesn’t even attempt to do that. It allows Crosshair to repair his relationships with the others while leaving his relationship with Tech almost completely untouched, and so we have the narrative thread of Crosshair’s reconciliation with the batch left incomplete because there’s one batcher with whom he hasn’t reconciled even though he could have without Tech there.

2. Crosshair’s guilt (and Crosshair generally):

So, Crosshair’s carrying around a lot of self-loathing for choices he did and choices he did not (but may not understand he did not) make for most of the show—I actually think his decision to stay with the Empire was made partly because giving the order to kill those civilians while still fully chipped really messed him up—but in season three we get another level of how he feels about what he’s done. He doesn’t just feel sort of vaguely bad about it or like no one will take him; at the end of “Confined” he tells Omega that she should leave him in Tantiss because he deserves to be there. And then in “The Cavalry Has Arrived,” he calls plan 99 and tries to convince the others to let him take the risk of going into Tantiss alone because it’s dangerous, and he uniquely deserves whatever might happen to him in there.

Crosshair grows a great deal over the course of the series and the season, and we do actually see an arc of him beginning to heal (he's repaired his relationships with the rest of his family and "The Return" allowed some processing for Mayday's death and the horrors of "The Outpost"), but this line reveals that this is one area where he’s still stuck. He goes from passively to actively suicidal and makes it clear that he still believes he deserves every bad thing that’s ever and will ever happened to him. And this is the last thing he says about himself; he never takes it back or gets past this.

This leaves his otherwise magnificent character arc just slightly undercooked. He hasn’t reconciled with himself yet. He hasn’t quite learned to live with his choices because he’s still trying to die over them. And the thing is, the other thing that line does besides establish that Crosshair has made no progress towards thinking that maybe he doesn’t deserve to die? It connects his guilt with Tech. “Clone Force 99 died with Tech! We’re not that squad anymore!” a line I discussed in my last Tech Lives post, is the preamble to Crosshair declaring he needs to go in alone. It basically reads like, “Tech’s gone, we can’t be who we were without him, and it’s my fault he’s gone so it’s my fault we’re broken, and I’m going to go get myself killed over it.”*

What happened to Tech isn’t Crosshair’s fault, of course, but even just going off of the parts of the story we know happened for sure, it’s easy to see how Crosshair could come to the conclusion that Tech falling is the unintentional consequence of his choice to stay with the more at the end of season one. After all, if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have eventually needed saving from Tantiss and Tech wouldn’t have been on Eriadu looking for information about him in the first place**. If he’s feeling guilty over Tech, it would make some of his actions earlier in the season make more sense; insisting Omega should leave him, not bringing Tech up at all in his argument with Hunter (because I adore Crosshair but he is not a man who holds himself back from crossing lines like that when he’s trying to get under someone’s skin; if he didn’t needle Hunter about what happened to Tech it’s because he feels responsible for it), and so on.

And, again, Crosshair’s lingering sense of guilt could have been resolved. You don’t need Tech to come back to deal with it, not if he’s supposed to be dead. All you need is a single conversation, maybe a single line that could resolve both this and then issue of Crosshair reconciling with the entire batch. But the show didn’t do that. What it does instead is establish that Crosshair is still so wracked with guilt that he feels like he deserves to die and that his guilt is directly connected to Tech in the very last episode of the show and then left it there with no pushback. That didn’t need to happen! Crosshair’s guilt didn’t need to be tied to Tech. They could have had the hug (God I love the hug) and had that lead into Crosshair realizing that he wants to live for the family he still has in the next scene. All you need is a line! His guilt would have been resolved!

But Crosshair doesn’t get lines after Tantiss. We don’t even see Crosshair in the epilogue. He seems to be living on Pabu, sure, but—is he okay? Does he still thinks he deserves death and worse? We get no indication that he is or even that he's going to be. Are we sure he’s not a non-functioning alcoholic? We actually kind of need to see that he’s okay in order for it to feel like all the suffering he and the others went through (and Tech’s sacrifice) was worth it.

It’s not like Crosshair was a throwaway character, either. I kind of always got the impression that he’s something of a writer favorite—he’s the one who gets the big, meaty character arc. So the only reason I can think that the show didn’t deal with that lingering guilt or Crosshair’s reconciliation with himself is because it’s being dealt with later; and if we’re dealing with that later, and if it’s connected to Tech, then maybe we’re dealing with Tech later, too. (In fact maybe we’re dealing with Crosshair’s guilt later because Tech’s coming back later because, again, it would have been very easy to deal with in a sentence or two if Tech was supposed to be dead.)

*Sidebar: Wrecker’s rebuttal, if you can call it that, reads more like, “Hey, don’t get yourself killed over this alone. Let’s go get ourselves killed together,” than anything, in part because that’s sort of what they proceed to do. They go in, get their asses handed to them, almost die, and it’s only thanks to Echo, Omega, and the clone prisoners that they don’t end up dead or brainwashed.

**And it’s possible there’s something about the situation that Crosshair knows that we don’t. We never do find out why Crosshair’s stress tremor manifests the way it does. BUT WE AREN'T ACTUALLY SHOWN THAT FOR SURE.

3. Hunter’s other character arc:

So, I know this can be a bit of a touchy subject, because I know Hunter’s a weirdly divisive character, but I love Hunter. Hunter is great. He’s also, like all the boys, flawed and a little complicated—and he’s got two intertwined but still separate character arcs.

One, of course, and the main one of the two, is his arc with Omega; learning how to me more of a parent and brother towards a child and achieving the goal of being able to give her the childhood he knows she needs without the threat of her Kaminoan-designed purpose hanging over her. This arc is resolved beautifully, including Hunter being able to step back and trust Omega to direct her own life, and he achieves that goal of being able to give Omega that childhood. Hunter, uniquely of all the bad batchers, has found his new purpose in taking care of Omega.

His other arc, however, was an arc exploring Hunter’s role as a leader and what that means in the post-war period. This is an arc that has actually been set up remarkably well; we see Hunter struggling in his strange new circumstances, agonizing over what decisions to make and whether to make any at all, trying to balance being the CO of a team with no mission with still being responsible for the safety of his squad as a whole with allowing his squadmates their agency with also suddenly being responsible for a child who can’t take care of herself (at least not initially) and who therefore has to be priority. It’s a difficult balancing act, and not one that he always gets right, or even can get right given the impossible circumstances in which he’s placed. It’s something he struggles with so much, in fact, that he actually loses every single member of his squad, Omega included, at one point or another, either through freak circumstances over which he has no control, choices they make, or, in some cases, both. Losing Tech is just the most extreme example. But because losing Tech is the most extreme example, this secondary arc of Hunter’s is something that ends up tied directly to Tech.

It’s all there, and it’s something of which I think the show is very aware, but I think because it is a separate issue from that one subplot that was resolved (Omega), it’s not something that’s been resolved or unpacked yet. And the thing is, even with the whole losing Tech thing being at least moderately connected to it (less than losing Crosshair was, but definitely still connected), this is an arc of Hunter’s that could have been resolved in a single conversation even without Tech there. For an example that wouldn’t change the plot and wouldn’t add any screen time, shift Hunter and Crosshair’s argument in “The Return” away from losing Omega (the traumatic event at the end of season two that actually fuels all the conflict in season three) to losing Tech, and then have Hunter’s part of the conversation he and Crosshair have at the end of that episode after they start to reconcile be a little more open and explicit about what mistakes (losing Crosshair, losing Tech, losing Omega, etc) he feels his made. There you go. Again, you could do more, and probably should, but that’s all you would need to resolve it if you were forced to keep it to the bare minimum. But the story didn’t even do that.

Which…is not necessarily a bad thing as long as it’s an arc that’s going to continue moving forward.

4. Wrecker’s fear or heights:

So, Wrecker is sort of the one character who I feel like got the short end of the stick when it came to getting development—at least, so far. Most of his development in the show was frontloaded into the front half of season one; since then, he’s kind of been coasting along, still having development, but it being fairly incremental and in the background.

Which—something I’ve actually realized as I’m typing this is that the thing this story has done with the development of every single one of the adult batchers has been to take their development to a certain point that allows each of their relationships with Omega to be brought to (or almost to) it’s peak for the purposes of being able to complete Omega’s character arc, while also introducing and developing elements that are particular to the part of their arcs that aren’t connected to her, and then puts their development on the back burner to potentially be picked up later. It continues to remind us of the elements of their arcs disconnected from Omega (so we don’t forget that was happening) without pushing them much further or resolving them, and either puts them in a little more of a supportive role (Wrecker, I would argue Crosshair in the last ten minutes of the finale), or largely or completely removing them from the action (Echo and Tech). Hunter and Crosshair are the two whose arcs are most intrinsically tied with Omega’s, though Hunter's main arc is tied at the hip to hers, which is why he's the one who show's up in the epilogue; it's the culmination of her relationship with Hunter. Tech’s and Echo’s arcs are the least connected to Omega's arc directly, and Wrecker is in a middle ground.

ANYWAY, the thing about Wrecker is that most of the development he’s gotten happened in the front half of season one, and it centered largely around Omega; since then he’s developed a little—he comes across a touch more serious and tired in season three, for example, but what we’ve gotten for the most part (outside of fixing his relationship with Crosshair) have been reminders of possible points of conflict and/or development.

Little things, like periodically reminding us that he’s remarkably intelligent and great with demolitions and ordinance…without ever allowing that skill to play into the plot. Pointing out that he is still impulsive in a way that be helpful but can get him hurt…without giving him a chance to grow around that besides being a little more somber. Or reminding us that he’s afraid of heights…without ever allowing him to confront that fear. These are all things of which we’re reminded in the second half of the season, some in the last episode or two, they’re established and re-established, but they never really go anywhere.

The fear of heights is relatively minor. It’s not something he has to confront or which has to be resolved, but it’s something that’s definitely THERE (and which might be the closest thing to an inner conflict he’s got) and, well, I’d like to see Wrecker get the chance to confront it. Maybe he never gets over it, but he gets a better handle on it, or better tools to deal with it. But, the thing is, because of the way Tech supposedly “died,” because of when, where, and the way in which Wrecker was involved, Wrecker’s fear of heights can’t really be dealt with at all without also allowing him to deal with what happened to Tech on screen.

Once more, it’s not something that requires Tech coming back to be dealt with. In fact, you could make dealing with Wrecker’s fear of heights part of him processing that Tech’s gone. Explore the idea that he lost a brother to something that would be his personal nightmare scenario; give him a scenario where he maybe needs to go out over a cliff to help someone, his phobia is actually much worse now because of the whole Tech situation, he pushes through it anyway and in so doing both confronts his fear and begins to process grief.* One sequence, maybe two or three minutes long. It even gets close to doing this at points, because it keeps putting Wrecker in situations where he’s up high. Take one of those situations and push it a little further! There’s room. It’s not like the third season was trying to go anywhere fast. The last half especially is stalling for time. But that didn’t happen. Wrecker’s fear of heights remains basically where it always was.

*Not gonna lie, “Tech knew the risks,” does not strike me as something that someone who’s actually dealt with their grief would say. It sounds like something someone who’s been trying to not deal with it would say. He’s just trying to get Crosshair to not go get himself killed alone.

5. Tech:

Yeah, I know this one is obvious, but Tech isn’t resolved. And not because he didn’t come back.

One point on the handling of the aftermath of Tech’s sacrifice that I think has caused some contention in the fandom has been the discussion of the in-show processing, or lack thereof, of what happened to Tech. Part of the reason for the contention, I think, is that people are often talking past each other and not talking about the same thing when we try to discuss it.

Fandom focuses most heavily on character and character development—which is great! It’s fun!—and most often tuned to looking at fiction from an exclusively in-universe perspective. So when someone will criticize the handling of the aftermath of Tech’s sacrifice by saying it isn’t processed, I think there ends up being a misunderstanding, and people can sometimes take that as someone saying that the other characters aren’t sad that Tech is gone. Which is absurd—of course they are. We see the batchers after he falls, they’re gutted, that grief is raw. Of course they’re upset. It also isn’t what most people who say there was no processing are talking about at all.

You see, on-screen processing is not about the characters being sad. Not really. It’s about solidifying the loss, allowing the characters to move on, and, by proxy, allowing to audience to internalize the loss and move on as well.

For good examples of what on-screen processing for a character death looks like, see "Jedi Night," for how it treats the lead up to Kanan's death and "Dume," "Wolves in a Door," and, "A World Between Worlds," for how it treats the aftermath. Kanan has a little moment of goodbye with every single member of the ghost crew leading up to his death, and while it's true that in-universe this is because Kanan knows full well that he's about to die, those goodbyes are there for the audience too.

Then in the aftermath, we get each character working through their grief in different ways and each coming to a place where they're able to find consolation what he was able to accomplish and that he didn't die in vain (Sabine and Zeb discovering that Kanan took out Thrawn's tie defender project in the moment of his death), that he will always be a part of their family and a part of them (Hera talking things out with Chopper and adding Kanan to her kalikori), and in the guidance he was able to give (Ezra being directed by Dume and learning to accept Kanan's sacrifice in the world between worlds).

Through this on-screen processing the audience, for whom the processing is really meant is offered justification for why Kanan's death will be the new status quo going forwards, an invitation to let the character go, and, hopefully, consolation right alongside the characters. On-screen processing is sort of like…grieving by proxy. And, if you kill off a main character, it's something you absolutely have to do. Otherwise you are never going to get audiences that are predisposed to dislike main character deaths anyway to accept what's happened or even think the character is dead for real. (Basically, there's a REASON people in the audience are having such a hard time with this.)

Kanan, rather than, say, Hardcase, is actually a good character against which to measure what on-screen processing does and does not happen for Tech. He, like Tech, is one of six main characters, features in every episode before his exit, and develops a personal relationship with the POV protagonist. Because they are characters who occupy similarly important places in the stories that are being told with them, and if they are both supposed to be dead, you would expect the lead up to and processing in the aftermath of their exits to be comparable on at least some level.

They are not.

This is an understatement.

Because there isn't really any on screen processing for Tech's sacrifice. What we do get is some raw grief from our characters; Echo looking at the empty pilot's seat, Wrecker being too torn up to even get drunk, Hunter keeping it together because he's the leader and he has to, and Omega pointedly refusing to accept the idea that Tech is gone for good.* This lasts for less than three minutes (I timed it) before we slide right in to the next plot point.

Aaaaand that's where we leave that grief. It's not that the characters stop being sad. They don't. It's that the story freezes their grief in that raw place and doesn't allow it to develop into anything less painful which, in turn, also freezes the audience's reactions to Tech's sacrifice in that same very emotional place. We aren't given the opportunity to do that by-proxy dealing with it that on-screen processing provides.

We are not invited to let go of the character--in fact, Omega's outburst invites us to hang on and reject the idea--and any narrative meaning the sacrifice would have had is immediately undermined by everyone being badly injured and Omega getting taken before they can all get to safety anyway. Instead of clarity we get introduction of the broken goggles by Hemlock--the established untrustworthy villain and sadist who has a vested interest in getting Hunter to roll over and do what he wants--in a moment that simultaneously twists the knife and throws what even happened to Tech into question**. So, when it comes to Tech, we leave season two shocked, grieved, and confused.

Then, as we move into season three, we not only don't see any on-screen processing or…anything designed to make the audience accept the situation, we actually get the opposite. Tech's sacrifice is never actually talked about in the third season as a sacrifice, something that they're trying to honor, or something that bought the others the time and peace they're living with. In fact, it's never talked about at all. Not even in places where it would make sense to talk about it.

Yet the story doesn't completely drop (I know) Tech, either. He actually comes up either by name or by via pointed visual reference about once an episode, but never in a way that even tries to make the audience okay with the situation.

What it does instead is, well, poke at the wound. It's like the show is going, "Hey look, there's Tech falling again in the recap. There's his broken goggles sitting next to Hunter. Sure is sad, right? Tech taught Omega the plan numbers. Look at that empty seat in the cockpit next to Omega. Tragic. No one on this team knows how to decrypt anything but Tech. In fact, no one on this team knows about ANYTHING apart from Tech. Look at the empty space they're leaving between them when they stand! Sure sucks that Tech's not here! Hey, look at this mysterious Tech-shaped Tech-speaking individual in a mask! Here's Tech's girlfriend. Sure doesn't seem like she's over him, and look at how perfect they are for each other! Don't you want to see them together? Clone Force 99 is broken because they don't have Tech. Damn. Here's another couple shots of those broken goggles that we never made into anything besides an agony momento. Tech's not here and that's terrible. Have you thought about Tech today? Now you have. There is no comfort. There is only pain."

That's. Not. Normal. That's not even what a badly handled character death looks like, and it's not resolving the character, either. It's, again, doing the exact opposite.

Far from closing the box, the cumulative effect of these moments is to refuse to let the Tech box close and draw out the tension between what the audience largely wants to see (ie, Tech handled, one way or another but mostly alive judging by the sustained reaction of, "PUT HIM BACK RIGHT NOW!") and what is happening (no Tech). And the end result of making the choice to bring up Tech only in ways that highlight his absence (and how difficult that makes life for everyone) and/or poke at the wound of losing him in the first place without every having a moment of on screen processing or encountering any death tropes is to just make most of the audience unhappy with the Tech situation.

Now, one possible explanation is that the writers simply don't know how to write processing, but the way other major losses in the series are handled actually suggests the opposite.

When Echo leaves, we're given an episode for both the characters and the audience to process this drastic change in the status quo. Mayday was a single episode character who largely existed to push Crosshair's development, but we still got that quiet, intimate moment of processing in "The Return," an episode which largely exists to allow Crosshair to heal from his horrific experience on Barton IV.

And as for what a longer processing arc from this creative team looks like, well--there's the processing we get for the destruction of Kamino, which stretches all the way from "Kamino Lost," aka Kamino's funeral, to "Pabu."** And I feel like it goes without saying that the creative team knows how to kill a character on screen, since that's what they do with literally every named character besides Tech.

So, processing and clear confirmation is something they know how to do but chose not to for Tech, and Tech specifically.

Highlighting this even more is that the story doesn't seem to be unaware of what usually happens when a character dies or even common tropes that you would encounter or even write more or less by default in the wake of a character's death. It actually keeps presenting us with situations where it would be natural to tie Tech's plot-threads up and invite the audience to let the character go. The current last conversation between Tech and Phee, Omega talking with Crosshair in his cell in Tantiss, the fight between Crosshair and Hunter in "The Return," the meditation lessons in, "Bad Territory," even (I would argue), the archium scenes in both "Point of No Return," and, "Juggernaut" (I will be explaining what I mean about the archium scene in "Point of No Return" in another post; short version is that the scene is all about Omega not wanting to leave Pabu, not about Tech at all), and more are all scenes where both processing and real confirmation of what even happened to Tech could have gone without even changing the plot or adding any runtime. But it never happens in any of the scenes where it could; instead, the show sidesteps it every. Single. Time. Either by playing against the trope and refusing to let resolution happen or just avoiding the subject and placing the emphasis on something else.

And--okay. I have to give @eriexplosion credit for this idea, because it wasn't mine, but let's say that they were planning on having Tech come back and had to cut it last minute. You could actually still resolve Tech (badly, but it would still be there) with one line at the very end of the show. Instead of, "She'll be all right," be the last line of the show and the last thing Hunter says, have him say, "You would've been proud of her, Tech." Or, have Hunter say, "Tech would have been so proud of you," directly to Omega before she leaves. This would make Hunter never saying Tech's name or ever bringing him up in the season more of a gut punch, clarify that he didn't come back in the gap before the epilogue (there's currently nothing keeping this from happening), and would retroactively tie Omega's season three motivation to Tech's sacrifice. "Tech would have been so proud of you," is a no-brainer line I think someone would write without even trying to resolve something, it's RIGHT THERE. But the show sidesteps that opportunity too.

Basically, Tech remains unresolved, and not, I'm hoping, because it's just done badly in a unique way I've never seen before. It's more active than that. The show makes a balancing act out of never allowing the audience to forget about him or his absence, but it simultaneously avoids every single opportunity to actually deal with it like a gymnast tumbling through a laser maze. It's actually impressive--IF Tech is alive, coming back, and the story is just treating him like he's MIA until he does so.

If he's not then this is all baffling.

*This is an important point. Like it or not, The Bad Batch is a kid's show. A show written for older kids, sure, but still kids, and Omega is the POV protagonist, which means her emotional truth is one we should be paying attention to. You can go the entire of the rest of the, show including into the epilogue, without knowing if Omega thinks Tech is really dead or not. She says she lost Tech shortly after this scene, and can't lose the others too, but the context of "lose" in that sentence is the others being captured, she said the same thing about the very alive Echo when he left. She may well think Tech is alive. She could have been leaving a message on his goggles when she left them in the Archium. It's that vague. Yelling that Tech isn't gone and needs their help is the most explicit thing she says on the whole matter, and I do think that emphasis is important.

**Even if we take Hemlock at his word, something I see no reason to do, there's a reason why EZRA was the one to confirm Kanan's death to Zeb and not, say, Rukh, there's enough wiggle room in what he says for Tech to be alive and for Hemlock to have found the goggles and nothing else. Even if he found them on a body, remember that there are at least three dead stormtroomers who fall with Tech, and that Tech, who's established as capable of powering through some severe injuries, could have put enough of his armor on one of those before crawling away and finding a ditch to hide in. There is literally nothing saying this man is dead.

***I sort of feel like this is something no one (myself included) ever talks about, because the processing is largely done via Omega, and Omega is something of an afterthought in the fandom. Which makes sense, we're all more focused on the adult characters because we're mostly adults here, but Omega is actually the protagonist, has a great character arc, and the handling of the loss of Kamino and its aftermath through the eyes of a child is really well done. A lot of Omega's actions in season two are explicitly motiviated by that loss, and you can track how she feels about it over the course of the season. This is in stark contrast to the Tech situation and, no, I don't think they cared more about Kamino than Tech, or about Omega's relationship with Kamino more than her relationship with Tech

6. Tech's and Phee's relationship:

Nope, this isn't resolved either. Resolution of a relationship doesn't happen just because one of the people in the relationship falls off a cliff; you actually have to put a bit of work into it. And, once again, this is something that could have been resolved in a couple of lines, and in a couple different ways.

Option one would have been to resolve it before Tech even falls.

Do it with the conversation they have in "The Summit." Have it be a conversation where they both get on the same page and definitively decide that, yes, this is something they both want and are going to pursue once Tech gets back. Explore the fact that Tech doesn't get back and Phee is left with that. They've both made a decision and the resolution ends up being in the tragedy that they had both decided to be together, but fate decided it wasn't to be.

Alternatively, have that conversation be one in which they decide a romantic relationship isn't going to be something they pursue. I ship these two hard, but resolution could also be had in a version of that most current last conversation where they talk out wanting to be friends or not wanting the same thing out of the relationship, because that would still resolve the tension between them.

The conversation we actually got in canon, though, not only doesn't resolve the general will-they-won't they tension around Tech and Phee--it actually hightens it. It's an at-times sweet but fumbling, tense, non-conversation where they both end up pushing each other's buttons and talking (or not-talking) around one another in a way that draws attention to the fact that they are close and probably at the point where they need to talk about what's going on between them but completely fail to to so because neither of them are in a good headspace for it. And, because it's such a non-conversation (and because we end the scene with that long shot Tech watching Phee leave like he's mulling something over or there's something he wants to say but doesn't), we leave the will-they-won't-they tension hanging. Up in the air. Much like Tech*.

Even keeping the "The Summit" conversation as is, however, the TechPhee tension could still be resolved at some point afterwards without needing to bring Tech back or have him alive. Resolve the relationship via Phee being shown dealing with this relationship she almost had but which never fully blossomed. Show her coming to terms with not really knowing what would or wouldn't have happened. Hell, tie it to an arc about Omega coming to terms with Tech not coming back. Imagine a version of the archium scene in "Point of No Return" with Phee also there, and the conversation centering around the archium being somewhere Tech would like to be and/or letting Tech go. Done. You wrap Tech, Phee's relationship with Tech, and Omega's relationship with Tech up in one go without adding any screen time.

Best version of resolution here if Tech was actually supposed to be dead? Wrap the relationship up in the conversation in "The Summit," and wrap Phee's feelings up alongside a processing arc that happens with everyone else.

But, of course, that's not what happened. The conversation in "The Summit" was the purposefully awkward non-conversation we've already discussed, and we never see Phee dealing with the fallout of Tech's sacrifice in season three.

Part of that is because Phee has…very little screentime (*aaaauugghhh*) in season three, but the interesting thing is that Phee never shows up in season three without reminding us of that relationship she had with Tech. She brings him up in "Bad Territory" for no real reason, the one incredibly tense scene she has in "Point of No Return" has her almost running into the mysterious Tech-shaped masked guy, and then.

In "Juggernaut"

She shows up for a sequence that is wholly unnecessary for the plot--there were ways for the batch to get off Pabu, including having Echo show up instead since Echo has a ship and Phee drops the boys off with him in the very next episode--but does go out of its way to: one, establish that Tech and Phee were even closer than we thought and they were having conversations about Crosshair, a thorny issue we know Tech was having trouble with; two, that Phee is not even slightly over Tech and still talking about him like he's going to walk in a door at any second; and three, that Tech and Phee are perfectly matched in ingenuity, daring, piloting skill, and their ability to annoy the hell out of Hunter.

It's. It's not closing the box on these two! It's an escalation, it's ripping the box open and parading the open box around. Phee is criminally underutilized in season three and instead of using her under ten minutes (if we're generous) of screen time to wrap up a tragic relationship that wasn't to be, the writers choose to develop the relationship further without even having Tech show up and make the audience want to see them together even more. Look at her ship! It's painted orange and blue, just like Tech's jeans and armor! Look at her fly! They're perfect for each other! Don't you wish Tech were here right now to see this? It's terrible Tech isn't here right now! Isn't it?

It's LUDICROUS if the show is doing that and he's supposed to be dead. Just woeful mishandling all around.

If he's supposed to be alive, though, it makes sense not to resolve it. You actually want the audience to be reminded of that relationship, and you don't want to give any inkling of closing it out. You want to foster that tension in the audience and make them look forward to it being resolved. (Even if the resolution is happening elsewhere and highlighting the tension is kind of backfiring at the moment by making people more depressed about it. That's a whole other conversation.)

*I am. Aware. There is discourse around this scene. I'm not interested. My view? Phee was justified in being a little upset that a friend she cares about (and is more than kinda in love with) was walking out without saying goodbye. Tech knew it was going to be a dangerous mission and was justified in being way too overwhelmed to actually have the conversation Phee clearly wanted to have. Tech is an at least six foot tall highly trained combat vet who does not mask and is NOT shy about saying what he thinks; he saw Phee coming and waited for her instead of running into the ship and probably would have told her to get lost if he didn't want to spend time with her. Phee has been mildly flirting with Tech over a period of at least several months, she's not forcing him into anything. People trip over themselves while trying to communicate sometimes. It's not the end of the world. I'm so over the discourse around this scene.

**I'll get into this more on my next Tech Lives post, but The Bad Batch does have this delightful tendency to literalize its metaphors, so I'm not sure that's an accident.

That's it for part one of this post. Hopefully I'll get part two, where I talk about things like. "We don't leave our own behind," and the Omega hug thread up sometime in the next few days.

#the bad batch #tech lives #tech bad batch #i'm sorry but not sorry this is so long #I will overexplain everything #and then someday I will die #so anyway a lot of my interaction with TBB recently has been sitting there enjoying it #and then going 'AND ANOTHER THING' about the Tech situation

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