Review: Red vs Blue – Family Shatters “Night of the Living Dad”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The Squad stage an intervention to stop Axel from telling dad jokes, but nothing works.

OUR TAKE

Huh, that actually wasn’t half bad. And I think I can explain why! See, for whatever individual identity RVB Zero has managed to form for itself apart from the rest of the series, the involved action scenes were a part of that. Based on what had been announced about Family Shatters, it didn’t seem like that aspect was going to be a part of this spin-off, especially given the short run time and seeing the first episode, which had very minimal movement. However, this episode has a more focused single gag that is able to escalate and is helped by throwing in the action. It reminds me a bit of the anime series Nichijou, which is about mundane situations that are made more hilarious by having heavily detailed and exaggerated moments to enhance the comedy. If we can get more of this for the remaining eight episodes, I think this spin-off might end up being a pleasant surprise, which is a pretty big step up from what it initially was thought to be: a mutated vestigial appendage sprouting from the radioactive zombie corpse that was RVB Zero. Kind of like how some people liked RWBY Chibi over RWBY during its own run.

Actually, the comparisons to RWBY Chibi may run a bit deeper than that. This may seem like a backhanded compliment, but much like the RWBY cast, Shatter Squad and Viper may just end up working better in a two dimensional sort of show since they’re basically two dimensional characters anyway. What I mean by that is, when they were thrown into a serious story that required complex plots and arcs and development and growth…they showed very quickly that they were not equipped for that and the season as a whole fell flat on many levels as a result. In RWBY’s case, Cinder has been a consistently confusing and hard to connect with character in the main series, but in RWBY Chibi she’s just a scheming villain who likes to do evil for evil’s sake, which actually made her A CHARACTER. And I’m seeing that giving Shatter Squad their base surface character trait helps them act in certain roles to drum up conflict and comedy, which can help this show if done right. We’ve got eight more episodes of this to go, so we’ll get to see how much of this was really thought out. Hopefully this one wasn’t just a fluke.