WARNING: A GOD DAMN NOVEL OF A REVIEW IS WRITTEN BELOW. IF YOU DO NOT LIKE LONG STRETCHES OF WORDS, GO MAKE PICTURE MEMES IN A NEW POST INSTEAD. THANK YOU.

I think it's safe to say that after last year, most of us were extremely skeptical about what Season 17 would bring to the table.

Not everyone hated Season 16, but a lot of fans, myself included, weren't enthusiastic about what it brought to the table. To keep it brief, it brought along a shark-jumping premise with logistics that make less sense the more you think about it, all the while with no sense of reasonable restraint, in part due to its emphasis on wacky spectacle over story or character development. It was weird for its own sake and it was at the expense of a lot of what fans have come to love about the franchise; sure it wasn't all bad, I can count a few things I liked about it, but most of it felt like a step backwards, and the icing on the cake was the cliffhanger that meant we weren't done with any of this stuff just yet.

All this combined with the fact that Joe Nicolosi suddenly stepped down as main writer mid-arc, leaving most of the execution up to his co-writer from S16, Jason Weight. The transition was a huge gamble that had any number of possibilities open to it, and this is while omitting the fact that, full disclosure, Jason's S16 contributions made up a lot of what I personally disliked the most about the season.

There was a lot to process, a lot to finish, and a lot to make up for. Season 17 needed to pick up the slack where Season 16 faltered, in addition to being entertaining in its own way, and not just a damage control season. So does it succeed?

I'm gonna say it depends, but despite this it's still a very entertaining and compelling story, and a great improvement over its predecessors.

The story's strengths and weaknesses can easily be summed as such: it's great when it's self-contained, but harder to swallow once it has to be a direct sequel to Season 16.

However unlike prior seasons that also have trouble being sequels, this flaw isn't due to any lack of progression in the characters that have been there since Season 1, but rather a lack of finality to the lore and rules that were only ever introduced in Season 16. Which still makes Season 17 a much better watch by default, since this time any and all flaws don't damage the greater whole of the franchise, only the elements within this one story arc.

The primary conflict for most of the season, that being Donut travelling between timelines and recruiting his friends to save the multiverse from Genkins, is all really good stuff. And this is in spite of time travel still being a concept that I'd argue shouldn't have been tackled in the first place, especially if it also involves the fate of the universe. But if it needed to be tackled at all, every aspect of how Season 17 handled it was probably as good as it was ever going to get; and yes, how it handled it is good. Time travelling through the Everwhen is a million times more interesting and less confusing than the time guns from Season 16, and it's all due to Season 17's consistent theme of applying clear restrictions to its scope; the total antithesis to how Season 16 basically had no filter from start to finish, leaving it unfocused and quick to diverge from why fans watch the show at all.

A time travel-based story from a franchise as big as Red vs. Blue always had more business focusing on its own history rather than Season 16's route of focusing on generic world history. The former leads to revelations about past events or clever subversions of what we've come to expect, but the latter only served to tell jokes and subsequently, get in the way of the shit people are supposed to care about, all while clashing harshly with RvB's sci-fi military aesthetic.

Side note, on the topic of aesthetics, it's kind of a bummer that we never got Halo 2: Anniversary machinima at all throughout the season. I understand why they did it but at the same time, maybe that could have taken the place of all the bits that take place within vanilla Halo 1 and 2 just to emphasize how not-normal this new timeline really is. It'd have been a nice breath of fresh air, and we already have enough Halo 1 callbacks to last us a lifetime anyway. Totally inconsequential, doesn't affect the quality at all, but it was on my mind anyway. Same with the occasional odd sound mix too, while we're at it; Locus sounds weird and we've had a few times where stuff like this popped up. Not sure where to put that note so it might as well be here too.

Anyways, in addition, the Everwhen gets bonus points for restricting the way its time travel influences the universe. Of the three methods of time travel Jax demonstrates to us in the arc, Season 17 chooses to delve solely into multiverse theory, and directly tying that fact into the stakes and conflict in a way that's clear and focused to boot. Any and all time travel ends with the same consistent result, and it's a result that can actually be avoided by travelling straight to the original source without damaging the future in the process. Season 16 had trouble determining whether its time travel was flexible or had closed loops, and so despite it also featuring stakes that are tied to the Reds and Blues messing with time, the ambiguity and inconsistency of their actions (in addition to the lower amount of agency viewers have with world history) meant you spent more time scratching your head than caring about the aftermath. The season's still complicated, but it's the right amount of complicated, the kind that actually allows you to think and come to rational conclusions as you're watching, rather than wondering how all this shit is supposed to properly function to the bitter end of it.

The Everwhen isn't perfect, and the later introduction of Huggins' light-based time travel ends up messing with the understanding of these rules at the last minute (I think I get it but at the same time it's clearly separated from any other time travel we've seen and yet doesn't quite get the necessary elaboration we need), but it's far more concise due to the limits it imposes, allowing for more interesting storytelling.

Closely tying into this is the comedy, which feels more like Red vs. Blue because... well, its story focuses on Red vs. Blue history.

Stuff like bringing celebrities to Jax's movie set, RvB characters superimposed on priceless artwork, or the one-eyed beast that shall not be named, these are all gags that go against Red vs. Blue's initial principles of character-based comedy. It was a restriction the show needed to abide by due to the primitive nature of machinima, but even after animation and VFX became intertwined with the show, RvB still kept its emphasis on the cast first and foremost.

Season 16, however, only makes the cast spectators to gags that are so anti-RvB that they'd be no more or less funny in any other show, making their agency to the story practically nonexistent and the comedy less clever due to, again, the lack of restraint providing less nuance to the punchlines. Even stuff that was tied more directly to the characters like Camelto, Caboose's travels, and the disappearance of pizza still felt more like sideshows than anything that influences the characters directly, and so you don't think much about them because you're given no reason to care beyond a slight chuckle. With Season 17's gags all originating from familiar moments and jokes, it's practically forced to make the characters more involved in the punchlines (except, oddly enough, all the shit in the hospital with Dr. Grey; total contrast there). And for good measure, the comedy never, ever interferes with moments that are supposed to be serious and dramatic; thank lord and heaven, we're finally at a proper balance again. Consequently to all this, the jokes resonate with you more, and I want to say that's due to more than just nostalgia pandering.

Which this season does, a lot, but it's never to the point where it's obnoxious. Extensive focus on past events of the series only go as far as quick montages that are over fast enough for you to appreciate the gags, without wishing they were over already. Past that, the biggest use of nostalgia comes from twisting past events in ways that explicitly go against what we may have seen the first time, be it from never-before-seen perspectives, off-the-wall alternate timelines that result in completely different jokes, or a new angle that comes from characters knowing what happens in their past and reflecting upon it.

Carolina gets the most out of this because it forces Washington, and by proxy the audience, to learn more about parts of her history that used to be completely blank slates in the canon. It adds to the past while also adding to the present day without taking any steps backwards due to the advantages time travel provides; providing a unique opportunity to explore her backstory without needing her present self to simultaneously reflect on it; the same can be held true for Wash's trips down memory lane at Project Freelancer.

On that note, Washington gets an interesting exploration of his character in the same way, as he's able to be more self-analytical about the brain damage he received and come to terms with it while in a less fragile state of mind due to the paradox temporarily fixing his mind. This allows him to have more definitive closure with Carolina and the crew before actively choosing to go back to his broken state for the sake of the universe. And in my opinion this doesn't sacrifice anything else that Wash could have provided instead, if anything it gives us one last opportunity for Wash to be the strategic badass we've loved for so long before finally closing the book on that side of him for good. Maybe it makes you wonder how Wash could have handled that transition without that momentary reset button, but I think future seasons could still handle that if it wanted to.

On the subject of character portrayals, I can't think of a single RvB veteran that annoyed me as much as Season 16 or even Season 15 did. They all feel right at home, and while not every character has an arc to them (which for 11 cast members was never a must anyway), there are a handful that are much more pronounced than past seasons as well.

Donut's the obvious example here; his relationship with Washington is so refreshing, adding new character dynamics to spice up the nostalgia train, and his progression in becoming a more thoughtful, rational fighter for the more part, feels totally natural. Sure you could argue that his “mistreatment” by his teammates was too on-the-nose and it still feels like it'd suit Doc way more, but what Donut gains from it does make up for that exaggeration. He becomes the next soldier to step up to the plate as a leader and a strategist in a way that's both familiar and fresh compared to Tucker's arc on Chorus, because the circumstances that force Donut to take the reins are completely unique to him. Even the resolution the finale provides, the fact that Donut wants to leave the team after everything he's done up to this point, also makes for a fresh take on a familiar character arc. Donut used to be so irrelevant before this season went and added new qualities to make us engage with him more, and that's probably why this feels like one of the most impactful character arcs since Chorus, as much as I don't want to say the only way to do that is to just make one of the Reds and Blues a more competent leader. I think it's just the definite change in Donut's character regardless of what he becomes by the end of it, which yeah, we haven't quite seen in full since Tucker.

Tucker himself also gets an arc that allows him to reflect on what being a leader is and isn't about, which again... is super on-the-nose, and still doesn't justify Tucker's derailment from past seasons, but it's also easy to argue that it never could have done that anyway. Like Donut's mistreatment, Tucker's asshollery can only be mediated so much when it comes to how past seasons handled it, but the way Season 17 went about concluding those snags was about as good as it could have ever been. The way both of these arcs ended, despite the buildup being poor, still felt earned and still felt gratifying. The fact that Tucker's arc is directly tied into Donut's arc and allows them to have engaging interactions is one of the best aspects of both their stories.

Even Doc, who I'd argue was the best character of Season 16 due to the added depth of his psyche being front and center, gets a nice moment here too when I wasn't even expecting more from him; one that provides an interesting evolution to his character in the assimilation of his and O'Malley's personalities.

And while this arguably doesn't progress his character, Caboose understanding the complexities of the Everwhen through intuition suits him to a tee, and like Wash and Carolina, takes good advantage of the time travel gimmick in ways Season 16 just didn't bother to do. His moment with Genkins in Blood Gulch was all the character progression he needed anyway, Caboose works best in bite-sized development like that.

Other characters like Sarge, Lopez and Sister get minor character exploration during their time at the Omphalos, but given that they're both incredibly short and entirely irrelevant to the season's main plot, I wouldn't put them on par with the other five mentioned above (though side note, Carolina's Omphalos experience was icing on the cake for what was already a great arc beforehand). But the fact that there are five at all is a massive step up compared to, I'd argue, Seasons 15 and 16 combined.

One thing that surprised me was how much of a backseat Grif takes in this season. Seasons 15 and 16 built him up to be a more prominent protagonist but here he's delegated to little more than a side role, if even. Not that I think Grif deserved to be anything special, honestly his entire story in Season 16 felt contrived and didn't give him any merit to the arc's scope, plus Season 17's conflict doesn't provide any incentive that would force Grif to be more involved than the rest. But it's still strange to see everything that was built up with him just... abandoned. His relationship with Huggins is barely touched upon, and the sword he wishes for in Season 16 is never brought up once before time resets in the finale, which not only feels like a wasted opportunity for this season, but also emphasizes how redundant that moment was to begin with, especially since it came at the expense of Tucker's character development which Season 17 had to fix.

This is where Season 17's cracks start to show more, in that while it makes a clear effort to give everything from Season 16 more logic, more purpose and more closure, it doesn't always pan out the way they wanted it to because there was just too much to catch all at once.

The Cosmic Powers are a blatant example of this; they were some of the biggest problems about Season 16 but the decision to undermine their importance until the last few episodes means they really don't get the same amount of revision that some of the other flaws of Season 16 were given. It baffles me that Atlus, Kalirama and Burnstorm are reduced to silent cameos, Muggins doesn't appear at all, Huggins is shockingly underplayed despite how involved she is in saving the day and the backstory she gets with her parents getting revisited, and even Chrovos feels like a serious downgrade when so little was known about him in the previous season.

I don't understand the logic behind the gender swap; it's not that Lee Eddy does a bad job, but I think Ray Schilens brings a more unique flair to his voice, and the change itself doesn't add to anything to the story. If anything, it calls into question why Chrovos was called “Him” this whole time when more often than not, we see the character as a “Her”. The change felt gratuitous and like kind of a tease compared to what we could have gotten instead with old Chrovos's dulcet tones; that kind of chill radio DJ voice is behavior we've never seen from an RvB villain, and could have made for an interesting juxtaposition when paired with Chrovos's actions and goals. But Lee Eddy just sounds like every other high-and-mighty god villain ever created. Along with this voice and body change comes a total overhaul of Chrovos's personality. She's far more incompetent, blurting out things that end up being more helpful to the protagonists than not, which calls into question how she was able to be so manipulative in the past season if most of this season is spent having her seal her own fate through a poor choice of words or in Genkins' case, being too trusting. This is technically justified by having her say how her incarceration made her more and more stir-crazy and impulsive, but that just lessens her intimidation factor, and ultimately leaves her as kind of a shell of what she could have been. The added quirks to her personality don't make her any more charming or funny than before, the new voice performance, while again not bad, is very cliche and unremarkable, and her change of heart during the season's climax is something no amount of lampshading can truly make up for. She feels like a very barebones means to an end, all while doing away with any potential her Season 16 self could have brought to the table.

Genkins is the only one who gets better but that also has a lot to do with him being the most unimpressive to start with. Giving him more influence in the conflict and with the characters was already a drastic improvement, and with it his personality is more defined as he's able to commit to actual mischief instead of goofy nonsequiturs. But even then he still lacks agency; while “Buttworld” is never mentioned again, all that means is that Genkins is basically doing all of this for shits and giggles and when compared to the grounded motivations of the Director, Temple and even Felix, it makes it harder to be engrossed in his disposition. Still, he's funny and he's intimidating, and the fact that he becomes Chrovos at the end (while raising a huge red flag about the logistics behind present Chrovos's own decisions) made for a pretty cool plot twist.

But all this can't save the fact that everything confusing, irritating and damaging behind the Cosmic Powers was never really explored or solved in Season 17. We know their origins, and that's great, but everything else is still a blank slate that causes more problems than it solves.

The lack of logic and limitations behind their technology, even if (if not especially since) they're normal AI, was something that jumped so many sharks because it meant boundless potential for problems to be solved with the flick of the wrist; which is why gods and other omnipotent entities are such a gamble to introduce in fiction. And with them still being around, that just means any problem could be solved at any time if the Reds and Blues just gave Huggins a call because she still remembers all the events that took place, and thus provides a direct link between the heroes and the Gods. It's broken and it's stupid and while I never want to see it again, the fact that it still exists is honestly just as hair-ripping.

The “never happened” paradox at the end of the season could have easily been changed to Genkins never jumping down the black hole, never becoming Chrovos and never creating the Cosmic Powers, to avoid the one loose thread that was probably the most perplexing and extreme case of scope-breaking the season had to clean up but didn't. It keeps the same fun twist as before, still erases the time travel, but does away with all of the overpowered bullshit about the Cosmic Powers by removing them from the picture, thus making the question of how they worked and what the scope of their powers means for the future of RvB a total non-issue. Since they'd have never existed, how their technology works doesn't matter anymore. But instead there's always the potential for them to come back and totally break the RvB power-scale all over again.

For everything I questioned throughout the season, this is basically the one thing that I'd have honestly wanted outright altered; the Cosmic Powers don't need to exist in any capacity no matter how much I missed Atlus's charms as a personality separate from his biography. What these Gods bring to the table is too intense and too exploitable for as long as they continue to exist, and you'd be hard-pressed to change my mind unless the time reset also brings a super-hard retcon to the abundance their abilities can offer, reducing them to suit the same level of defined restraint Season 17 already proved it could provide. Like, Santa-level restraint, with almost no independence to their actions. It wouldn't make sense, but at the same time, it never did to begin with, so I'd rather see what they can't do instead of everything they can, with the latter being greatly downsized the next time we see them. If anyone from the Big RT is reading this, feel free to take this idea to heart, so long as you credit me as “Gustavo Sorola”.

Past that big-ass rant... everything about Huggins' family also feels incomplete, given how the “biology” behind these light-based folks is still a huge topic of debate. Why they're in the dark about the Cosmic Powers' true nature as AI is never brought up, Muggins' affiliation with Chrovos (if any) isn't explored on account of his absence in this story, Cheryl and Gerald's relation to the Cosmic Powers is a total mystery, it just all feels like a joke when the whole buildup to this moment and to Huggins' character was always anything but. One of the only serious aspects about Season 16, oddly enough, just becomes a trivial punchline in its sequel. The fact that there's no aftermath following this reunion just adds to how superfluous they feel, since all they end up doing (besides introducing black holes as a plot device, which Huggins could have figured out through her own intuition) is make the family's place in the “lore” insanely confusing. There's just not enough time put into refining the pieces of that entire faction.

And yeah, that sense of rushed storytelling basically applies to the whole season's last quarter. As soon as Genkins' paradoxes get fixed by the Reds and Blues, and the fight is taken to Chrovos directly, everything falls down like a stack of dominoes... if said dominoes were all toppled simultaneously by a freak earthquake halfway through. The Omphalos especially is this strange case of offering a lot of interesting character exploration, but subsequently being so intrusive to the actual conflict that the latter suffers greatly for that lack of extra time.

As fascinating as the labyrinth was from a self-contained point of view, it really didn't need to exist at all if this is what it meant for the main story. Everything from why Donut felt the need to gloat to Genkins at all, Genkins' betrayal, how transferring “Shisno energy” works, the confusing aftermath that followed Genkins getting stabbed by the golf club (and how it should have done something but didn't), Chrovos' “redemption”, Genkins' defeat, the aftermath behind time resetting, and even the conclusions to Donut and Wash's character arcs, they all feel rushed. I said it before and I'll say it again, that two-and-a-half minute epilogue could have easily been its own episode, but instead they cut corners because too much was going on for the time they allowed themselves in the end.

Everything happens so quickly that it's either not explained properly or happens too quick to process in the moment, and this is due to how late the whole climax was in the first place, likely because Season 17 was paranoid about the things it needed to tackle that its predecessor started.

Which is especially odd, because prior to that whole mess, Season 17 was excellent at explaining its logistics. In fact, I'd argue it overdid it a little. Practically everything about Season 17's story relied heavily on exposition dumps, including things that aren't directly related to time travel like Tucker's epiphany about being a leader. It overexplains a lot, and this is something that I hope doesn't persist in future seasons, but I can see why Season 17 was cautious enough to go through with it in this case. Season 16 was so vague when it came to everything involving its new elements, that I'm sure this was done to make certain Season 17 didn't fall under the same trappings. And to its credit, for the most part it worked; stuff like why the Shisno are called as such despite the origin of the word having nothing to do with Chrovos or time travel, or Caboose's golf club being a Chekhov's Gun rather than a redundant gag, or yeah, how the Everwhen works, I'm glad those were addressed and explained.

But it still fell short during times where it either didn't address things Season 16 introduced (again, Grif's sword, the Cosmic Powers' limits, the origins and agency of the light people), or during that whole rushed final act (not the least of which has to do with Church's unexplained absence following the present-day reunions of the Reds and Blues, which is a huge oversight to me).

Hell, on that note, if the time travel was reset before Season 16 could take place, what ended up powering Loco's machine in Season 15? How did they save the day now that the device functioned completely differently? Does V.I.C. still die, and is it in the same fashion? Stuff like this, the stuff that doesn't get explained because it never gets explored, are probably Season 17's greatest shortcomings; the fact that for all it tries to do as a sequel, there's still some oversights it ended up passing by along the way. It couldn't fix everything in one go, but the fact that it added value to the arc at all is still impressive in and of itself.

The time reset also means one big thing for Season 15 as well, and that's the scapegoat it provided during its mid-credits scene. Season 15 wasn't without its share of plot holes, contrivances or strange abnormalities either, but those were easily done away with using the one line Jax provides when pitching his film adaptation of the story:

“It's all true! Every single word...for the most part. I took some dramatic license with the movie references, oh, just a few plot points here and there, but that's the gist of it, you know, the gist of it!...more or less.”

That one line immediately allows you to brush off any and all of Season 15's trappings by dismissing them as being creative liberties from Jax's movie script, with the season itself being his own version that he adapted. The best part being that these parts are all subjective and up to the viewer's interpretation. Season 16 crushed this headcanon to the ground by making Jax's movie batshit crazy using the time gun, but with those events undone, we're back to the status quo. You can keep the good, retcon out the bad, and it'd all still make perfect sense regardless. I know that ends up trivializing all of Joe's contributions but honestly... I think it's better off in the long-run, and given that this arc had no problem resetting itself in the end and trying its damnest to fix as many of Season 16's faults as possible, it's clear they're fine with trying to change up whatever snags they may have ended up causing along the way to better suit the greater whole.

This isn't really something about Season 17 specifically, but it is a footnote that I was always kind of hoping for since the very beginning. And even now I still hope nothing about the “Season 15 was Jax's movie” headcanon gets jeopardized in future arcs.

To conclude, Season 17 offered some stellar characterization, with a multitude of character arcs that all felt natural and progressive, jokes that felt more like the RvB standard we've come to expect, new elements to the time travel theme that are more concise and interesting without sacrificing comprehension, and for good measure, exciting callbacks to old characters, some engaging fight choreography that felt oddly unique compared to past seasons, and some compelling drama that's integrated way more smoothly into the narrative than before (despite the overdose of death fakeouts that are taken back the very next week).

It may not be perfect, the flaws of which I've mentioned enough times that it's not worth repeating, and at the end of the day I think I'd still watch the Recollection, Chorus or Season 10 more than I'd want to watch Singularity. But given that it had to work with everything Season 16 threw at it as its baseline, it surpassed expectations and provided a story that, as a self-contained adventure, provides highs that are just as strong as all those seasons, even if its lows are a little lower than that standard as well.

It's still a great watch, one that I'd have no issues revisiting in the future, and Season 17 makes for an excellent start for Jason's career as a main writer for the series; if he ever does come back, it'd be with open arms, and I'd look forward to whatever he's able to come up with on his own.

(...although Miles's episodes were also really really good and jived well with Jason's style and if he ever came back I would not say no to that either, even as a secondary writer)