Review: Red vs Blue “Invaders from Another Mother”

99 Red Team Troops, floating in the summer sky…

…huh, I figured we’d get one more part out of that. Also, I may have spoken too soon on thinking Turf wasn’t as nuts as Sarge, because he’s definitely up there, if not more so.

But yeah, this is the conclusion to the Funhaus episode of the anthology. As said, it’s shorter than I thought it would be or would have liked it to be, but it was still a sturdy, self-contained tale of soldiers left without an enemy and trying to find purpose in life again. I might be over-analyzing it there, but RVB does tend to be known for its strong pathos beneath its comedy. We’ve seen the main Red Team deal with this sort of dilemma in their adventures, though they were arguably kept alive by main character shields. I’d say it was a tragedy that we had to close the book on this team…if they weren’t so damn funny right up till their abrupt ends.

The FH57 team clearly wasn’t meant to stick out nearly as well personality-wise as the main group, especially given their armor color scheme, but they were easily intriguing enough to instantly latch onto and get invested in on their short journey. They were a team lost without conflict, and each member reflected a different response to that: Turf stuck to his guns and would kill himself and his crew to complete the mission. Santos risked mutiny to pursue his dreams (as simple as they were). Sue and Drag tried to make themselves useful. Peake looked after those who needed him. And Morgan just wanted to keep everyone alive. It took the team nearly being torn apart and a hidden cult of aliens for them to wise up, but eventually they figured out that the rest of their lives were ahead of them. And…they weren’t wrong on that front.

It was nice seeing the Halo 3 engine again, even though it we never got a reason they and the Blood Gulch team were so far apart in tech, but there’s probably tons of fan theories that could explain it away well enough. Also pleasant to have that cameo from Caboose, which was funny and fits his character perfectly as to how and why he never brings up this encounter later. Most essentially, we’re given a prime example that these short stories don’t need to keep relying on humor from the regular cast to make some worthy installments to this universe. Though I do hope that we can break away from the period of the first five seasons for the remaining parts. Plus, if this is the writing we can get from Funhaus, maybe I should give their stuff a look at after all.