Review: Red vs Blue “Consequences”

Well, color me purple with astonishment. That seriously did not happen how I figured it would.

SPOILERS

Like I said last time, I wholeheartedly assumed that Siris’ lack of presence or even acknowledgement in Locus and Felix’s later appearances meant that he would meet his fate by the end of this story. As the one keeping the other two morally centered, he would somehow lose his life in the fight, driving Locus to retreat into his killing work and Felix to become cynical to the idea of partners, friendship, and so forth. Or Siris would get cornered, with his life in Felix’s hands, and Felix would make the move to kill Siris, revealing his true evil nature. Suffice to say I was wrong, and Siris goes on to live another day, and might even be still alive in present day RVB.

In fact, past some initial tension in the building up to the showdown at the start of the episode, the three pretty much gain and keep a clear advantage on Lezano and his group simply because Lezano didn’t actually know Siris was part of the team. In the ten second preview Rooster Teeth posts the day the episode comes out, they hinted that Siris might use this as an opportunity to bail on his teammates and go back to his wife to protect her, which might have led to some trust issues from Felix and been a hint at one of the many possible ways Siris might have died. Another outcome I figured might happen was that Lezano DID know about Siris, but kept that fact a secret to make the three of them THINK they had an advantage…only for things to turn sour quickly once they learned they had been player leading to Siris’ death. There were just SO MANY death flags for this guy! But as it turns out, Lezano really didn’t know, and Team Fe-Lo-Si (a nickname that will totally catch on) comes out of it with barely a few bruises.

Which is what makes the title of this episode, “Consequences”, a bit confusing. The other two titles for this story, “Club” and “Call”, basically describe a location and an action happening in their respective episodes. Kinda boring and direct, but they did their job. This one, meanwhile, doesn’t really fit, unless it’s referring to Lezano facing consequences for daring to face two people who aren’t allowed to die in this story if it wants to make any sense. Again, aside from a couple minor injuries here or there, our three bounty hunters basically end the story the way they started it. Keep in mind that another aspect of an anthology series is that its installments really only need to be glimpses into certain interpretations or stages in certain characters lives. Sometimes they play a direct role, like the three prequels we saw at the start of the season, sometimes they tie up all loose ends by the end, like the Funhaus two-parter where every key character died at the end, but they don’t necessarily need to do either. This story really only needed to show a day in the life of Felix and Locus back before the whole Chorus business, not that it needed to be a particularly monumental day in the life.

With all that said, though, it really seems like a bit of a cocktease for what looked like it was shaping up to be an interesting origin story for the duo that we came to know and love in the more recent RVB seasons. Like the first part of the story, this episode seems to just coast on the (admittedly fun to watch) fight scenes between the bounty hunters and the gangsters without much in the way of character development. The middle part last week seemed to set the elder Lezano as a cruel and calculating ringleader who was in complete control, and stressed the character dynamic of Felix and Locus (as well as how noticeably different it was) with Siris in the picture. All of that seems to fizzle out as nearly all the guards are taken out with relative ease, while Lezano barely gets any swings in before being gunned down. It’s pretty anticlimactic.

That in mind, this episode and story overall did have plenty of redeeming elements, not the least of which was the performances by Miles Luna, Grey Haddock, and Chris Sabat. Unfortunately, I feel like it would not be very fair to rank this as high as the middle one or even the first one now that the potential is gone. Still, this was certainly an enjoyable ride like the rest of these segments have been and hopefully will continue to be.