Review: Red vs Blue Zero “Sideways”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Shatter Squad arrive at…a place Tucker is training people at to keep him safe, but Viper is hot on their heels and immediately start their attack. Carolina and Axel try to hold them off while One, East, and Raymond attempt to get Tucker to the ship, but it’s revealed that East is actually a part of Phase, mortally wounding Tucker and stealing his sword before fusing back together and leaving. Back at Viper’s base, Zero prepares for the final part of their journey, though Phase believes he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.

OUR TAKE
Well, we’re starting the second half and if there was anything that would start to make me actively worry about this season, it would be this. Not only is the pacing incredibly broken and not allowing a second to properly breathe, we now have a character from the old cast returning just to be “killed” for shock value. And let’s be clear, I don’t think that the Blood Gulch crew are so sacred that they can’t be touched or changed in these later seasons, but if you’re going to kill one off, at least give him something to do! Tucker may not have been the best fighter, but he still had a personality! All he does here is show up (without any explanation as to how or why he started training these people or for what), then get shuffled away from the action only to get stabbed. And no I don’t think he’s actually dead, but that really only makes it worse, no matter if you’re coming into the show with this season or are a long time fan. If you’re a previous fan, you get to see a character you like have his death faked in order to get a reaction out of you, and if you’re a newcomer, there’s no chance to feel anything before he’s “killed”.

Then there’s the revelation about Phase, which only raises more questions than it answers. Viewers had been starting to notice a connection to her and East for a few weeks now, so that isn’t much of a surprise, but we hadn’t had nearly enough time to actually connect with either East OR Phase for this to have nearly the impact it could have. We’ve only known either of them a handful of episodes, with none of those showing much more than the two of them bickering with their respective teams. And now we find out one of them has actually been fake this whole time, which just makes me scratch my head as to how long this has been going on. When did Phase create this double? For what purpose? There’s no way they could have predicted that they’d need to find Tucker, nor that Carolina (the only one on the team who knows him) would end up with them after their initial attack, so what was the tactical advantage of this? We’ve got three episodes to go, which seem to be closing in on finally explaining what the hell Zero wants out of all of this, but we’re kinda piling on the many other things we need to get some explanation with that. What the hell is going on?!