Season Review: Red vs Blue Season 14

The loneliest number…plus 13

Spoilers Below

Red vs Blue has had a very weird, but intriguing history over its 13.5 years of life. What started as a six-episode run on a budding new site in the pre-Youtube era of the internet has grown to a five-chapter saga, to a heart-pounding trilogy, to an informative dialog, to another less than satisfying trilogy…to this: A reflection and celebration of how a handful of assholes in a box canyon impacted the imaginations, lives, and funny bones of its ever expanding audience. But was this experiment a success, or would we rather be pondering more of life’s great mysteries? After 24 episodes, we find out now.

Unlike the previous shows I’ve completed like Camp Camp or Combiner Wars, this didn’t have a continuing story, and most of the characters used were more often reduced to their main components to fit the situation at hand. So, I can’t really do paragraphs covering how certain characters grew more than others or how they grew or regressed or changed. However, I can touch on the differing types of episodes we got, which I’m going to break up into two types: One-shot gags that are run by a single gimmick, and additions to the canon that are expansions of certain characters or concepts.

If you’ve kept up with my reviews of this season so far, you probably could tell I wasn’t very fond of the gags since they didn’t offer anything for me to describe in these posts. I actually think I ran out of ways to say that I had nothing to say, and that’s not a situation you ever want to be in…or describe how you would be in it. But that’s not to say some of these episodes were without merit. The Lego episode, Brick Gulch Chronicles, did give me some Toy Story vibes and went as far as it could with those jokes, plus as a Bionicle fan of old, it did strike a nostalgic chord in that regard. The another notable one of these was the Death Battle episode, which reminded me of the mind-blowing moment when the show began utilizing animation in its story…and then started abusing it by Season 12, but when it started, it was something! And of course, the finale that had some of the characters finally busting down the fourth wall to interact with their creators was funny and interesting enough to make it a good place to leave on.

Some of these, though, were either padding or wasted space. The movie trailer “episode” had notable production value, was really only extending a joke we didn’t need more of from the last two seasons PSAs. The gender bend episode was a decent concept, but felt more like a joke that’s funnier in your head than it would be actually saying it. The musical and rap battle episodes added nothing, the Immersion episode was better left as a DVD feature, and the season opener was just a repurposed animated pilot episode for a failed project, with a couple seconds of even worse animation added at the end. But the worst of these was Gray vs Gray, which was as monochrome in its delivery and ideas as it was visually. Unlike the other episodes covering new characters, which had distinct, unique personalities, or at least subversions of existing ones, this cast was defined solely by accents, cliché dialogue, in a nonsensical set-up and ending. And even worse, the nonsense wasn’t even funny. A lucky few of these spitballs felt like fun time wasters, but instead of slots where we could have had stories filling in the blanks on what Tucker did in between Seasons 5 or 7, or learning more about the Director or Chorus, we got the Game Grumps screw up bigger than the Naughty Bear play through.

Moving on to the other side, we have the episodes that at least added something to the universe this anthology was made for. Most of these were two or three parters, either touching on the pasts of people like the Blood Gulch Crew or the mercenaries from the Chorus Trilogy, or bringing in completely new groups that have only a loose connection to existing events, along with a few one-shots sprinkled in that explore the undisclosed gaps between seasons that likely many a fanfic has covered. After the reused animated episode, the prequel three-parter gave us some insight as to how our usual suspects were picked for their five-year mission to sit in canyon, as well as a darker revelation of one of the show’s earliest quotables. The other three-parter covered Felix, Locus, and an old partner pulling a mission rather detached from the show’s Halo roots, and had a distinguishable look similar to the popular Telltale games coming out now…even if the ending kind blue balled me. As for our two two-parters, both debuted characters who symbolized aspects and perspectives of this world that previously went unconsidered: Reds without an enemy in the Funhaus team, and Freelancers without a purpose in the Triplets. In addition, we also got to revisit a pivotal moment from the end of the Blood Gulch Chronicles, and see what happened right after between all the battles with some mind easing stories of a few multi-colored misfits just trying to coexist.

This was the show’s longest season yet and an experiment that certainly bore fruit in certain areas. That said, about a third of it really just fell flat and should have been cut and replaced with something that people watching this long actually asked for. That’s not to say that we didn’t get plenty of great additions to the franchise in through this, but I’ve pretty much become soured to the idea of doing this sort of thing again anytime soon. If there’s a good idea that could’ve fit here, we should probably just stick to miniseries for the time being. All in all, well enough execution of a fine distraction, but I’m ready to get back to the real story.