Review: Red vs Blue “Get Bent”

Memory is the Rule 63

This week, we finally reach a story in the engine of…Halo Reach. Yep, another “in between seasons” episode, this time revisiting the period between the end of the Recollection Trilogy and the Freelancer Saga. Though unlike the opening story for this season, which repurposed an unused 2D animated pilot to fit into that timeframe, this fully brings us back to the Epsilon Memory Unit, where Epsilon-Church spent his days in an Edge of Tomorrow/Groundhog Day/Endless Eight time reset type deal, looking for the Epsilon copy of Tex that got trapped in said unit at the end of Season 8. And with the background out of the way, onto the episode itself!

SPOILERS AHEAD

Like the “Room Zero” short, this shows us the perspective of Epsilon during one of the simulated Blood Gulches he went through before being yanked out by his friends and Carolina to go kill both her dad and the guy whose personality created both Churches and the rest of the AI. Things start out regularly enough with Tucker promoting the prospects of picking chicks up in a tank. Having heard this dumb idea at least infinity plus one times by now, Church asks how Tucker could possibly pick up any women in a sausage fest like Blood Gulch. But sure enough, Church discovers that in this version of remembering his “past”, he’s accidentally made all of Red Team into women with his faulty memory of events. Oh, what fresh hell have we wrought.

Aside from finding it refreshing to be using Halo Reach, this change is the main gimmick of the episode, so I’ll mainly be discussing how it’s used here. Anna Hullum, Lindsay Jones, Amber Benson, Maggie Tominey, and Ashley Jenkins voice the female versions of Sarge, Simmons, Grif, Donut, and Lopez, respectfully. Hullum is the wife of Mat Hullum, the regular voice of Sarge, while Jenkins is currently engaged to Burnie Burns (Church and Lopez) as of this writing, so while they don’t do that bad at reading lines, their involvement is really not much more than a casting gag. Jones is a well known voice talent in Rooster Teeth, voicing Vanessa Kimball from Seasons 12 and 13, as well as a main role in a previous RT Animation “X-Ray and Vav” and the title character of another flagship show at the company “RWBY”. A shame then that her take on Simmons really just comes off as Lindsay being Lindsay. Benson is a bit of an inexplicable choice, since she hasn’t done any previous work for the company, but lends a sufficient voice to Fem-Grif. Tominey is a Production Coordinator at RT and sometimes lends her voice to things, here doing the logical step away from Donut’s Tobias Funke act as a very obvious lesbian…though the jokes for her didn’t seem to have much thought put into them.

This episode was written by Chris Roberson, who is known for creating the comic IZombie, which currently has a loosely adapted show airing on the CW. Rahul Kohli, who plays a regular on that show, briefly appears as a male version of Tex to snap Church out of this version of reality. As for Roberson, he seems to write everyone well enough, it’s just the gag seems to wear thin pretty quickly, so like the Caboose Friendship segment, this isn’t all that bad, but it’s not much to write home about like last week. It doesn’t reach “Grey vs Gray” levels of boring though, so I’ll count that as a plus. We continue to inch closer to the end, and the calm in the storm may just be about to break.