Red vs. Blue vs. Retrospective Part 3: The Many Endings of Red vs Blue

As I type these words on my laptop, the company (and app) known as Rooster Teeth is in its final days. What began as a bunch of drunk guys playing Halo grew into the source of countless enduring stories, jokes, and characters, but all good things must come to an end. And yet, as the band Semisonic put it, “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”. Before the announcement of the company’s shutting down, I began a rewatch of its first show, Red vs. Blue, mainly because the second season of Halo TV series was also about to air. While going through the series, I noticed something interesting; the sheer amount of places that the show could’ve had a solid, fitting, and even poetic ending…but then kept going. It’s happened not once, not twice, but one could argue as many as seven times in the show’s 21 year history prior to the upcoming season. While the real ending, Restoration, looks to be the actual closing chapter to the story of the Reds and Blues, let’s take a look back, one more time, and see how, if memory serves, sometimes an ending isn’t really an ending at all.

Ending #1: Season 5

“You don’t hate a person because someone told you to…but because you know them and you see them every single day, and you can’t stand them because they’re a complete and total fucking douchebag.”

This one’s pretty obvious, considering it’s the end of the original story arc of the series, The Blood Gulch Chronicles, concluding one hundred episodes of two sides hating each other in the middle of a box canyon, which is often impeded by superpowered agents and meddlesome artificial intelligence. It’s where the show made its breakout into pop culture, not just off the back of Halo’s then-prominence on the gaming scene, but also through its relatable, snappy, and even intelligent comedy. After numerous stealing of flags, ghost possessions, time travel, robot armies, and alien pregnancies, the Blue vs Red battles go out with a literal bang, but make sure to finish on a bookend callback to the now iconic “Do you ever wonder why we’re here?”, closing things out by reaffirming the arc’s recurring themes of not being so easily swept up in some arbitrary cause, but instead thinking for yourself and making your own decisions, including who you decide to hate. And to top it off, when it was originally posted to the Rooster Teeth website in 2007, it came with six alternate endings that unsuspecting viewers could stumble into. It ended so hard, it ended seven times.

And then it kept going.

Ending #2: Season 6 – Reconstruction

“Memory is the key.”

Probably not as expected as the previous entry or the next one, but there’s a lot about Reconstruction that you could argue would make a great ending to the entire show. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that it’s not for many reasons, but it does a lot blow away a lot the status quo of the last five seasons and introduces a much more dramatic tone to the series. Along with the introduction of Agent Washington, the true purpose of the Reds and Blues, while hinted and implied before, is finally revealed as simply being testing grounds for Project Freelancer, a group that itself is on its last legs, and has its own reckoning in the form of the terrifying Meta. Church’s status as a ghost, which had often been used for comedic purposes, is given new light as he is revealed to not only be an AI, but the originator of all of the ones the Reds and Blues had faced before. It’s also the end of Church’s story, or at least this Church. It sets up quite a lot of things to come that get well paid off in the other two parts of this arc, the Recollection (which I’m still surprised with how clever a title that is), but if they had to end it here? Would’ve been a fine note, if not for the absences of Tucker and Donut.

But if memory serves, it didn’t end here.

Ending #3: Season 8 – Revelation

“The reason doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re here!”

We reach another ending to an arc, this time the conclusion of the aforementioned Recollection. Following Reconstruction, the miniseries Relocated, and the following season Recreation, the Reds and Blues, including a new Church based on another AI, find themselves back in the scopes of the Meta, a now very angry Agent Washington, and even a new copy of Agent Texas who swiftly kicks all of their asses. This season is notable for being the introduction of original animation to the show, first done by the late great Monty Oum, finally opening up the show to new possibilities in action beyond the Halo 3 engine. This leads to a final battle with the Meta, as well as a bittersweet ending for Epsilon-Church, who seals himself away in a failing containment unit to search for said copy of Tex, finding himself in a Halo: Reach style simulation of the classic Blood Gulch era. Revelation is considered a high point, if not the peak of the whole series, with some of the all time funniest and coolest moments the show ever had. There were plenty of great moments to come, but if Red vs. Blue had to end, it would’ve been a great spot.

They weren’t even halfway done.

Ending #4: Season 10

“If you don’t say goodbye then you aren’t really gone, you just aren’t here right now.”

The end of the show’s first decade, as well as the Freelancer Saga duology, this season was pretty much a giant victory lap for Rooster Teeth in general at the time. Season 9 basically jumped between two plots: Epsilon-Church’s adventures in the simulation and flashbacks of the fall of Project Freelancer. The former plotline wrapped up and brought things back to the present for Season 10, which saw Reds and Blues be led by another surviving Freelancer, Agent Carolina, to find and kill the creator of Project Freelancer, Dr. Leonard Church, the source of every AI and Carolina’s father. After leaving Blood Gulch, destroying the group that brought them together, and defeating their greatest enemy, hunting down the sole architect was pretty small potatoes. That’s why the season itself is full of references and callbacks to every previous season at the time, and thankfully in respectful and character focused ways that feel appropriate and not just fanservice. And once again, everything ends in a gigantic fight, once again against an army of robots, though this time all of them are Tex. This season was pretty much a huge party celebrating itself, and one they definitely earned, especially with the first season of RWBY on the horizon.

The party didn’t stop there.

Ending #5: Season 13

“Ain’t that a bitch.”

This season ended The Chorus Trilogy, the arc that finally put the Simulation Troopers in a real war, putting all of the themes and lessons that the show had instilled in the viewers and characters to the test. After a rough start with Season 11 that tried to be all Machinima again, Season 12 revealed a civil war playing out across the planet of Chorus, with each of the Reds and Blues seeing a side of it; two factions led to conflict, vision narrowed by irrational hatred and propaganda, and, as later revealed, both the pawns of the UNSC Chairman. After uniting both sides against their common enemy and avoiding planetary destruction, the Chairman’s forces lure the Reds and Blues to a corner, with the season ending on an episode even titled “The End” and closing out on what seemed to be Burnie Burns’ last big monologue as Epislon. After over a decade being forced to fight within and around the stage set out for them, what better way would there have been for this bunch of morons to go down swinging after finally fighting a fight they believed in?

Well, turns out there were a few other better ways.

Ending #6: Season 15

“Leave a message after the beep, compadres! But I won’t check it, because I’m in the eternal infinity! This is 5-5-5 V-I-C-K signing off!”

Of course an episode titled “The End” wasn’t going to be the actual end! After a fun anthology season to cool down from the Chorus Trilogy, production moved on ahead to the next trilogy. Well, to be specific, Season 15 was supposedly only meant to be a standalone season, which is apparent with it feels like a complete story on its own. With the previous mainline season having gone into a full scale war, it made sense to tone things down…but instead they decided to have the plot lead to the Reds and Blues essentially meeting their evil twins, along with a couple new characters who were meant to look at their story up till this point from an outsider perspective. All that, along with the death of yet another Burnie Burns character, a final episode titled “Epilogues”, and the numerical synchronicity of being a season that’s a multiple of five, would’ve made this season a pretty nice bow to put on fifteen years of multicolored dudes bobbing their heads up and down, especially the company had decidedly shifted focus to RWBY by that point. And if it hadn’t led right into the next couple of seasons, it probably would be the end!

But let’s do the time warp again.

Ending #7: Season 17 – Singularity

“…I’m ready.”

Lastly, we have the final season to have most of the original cast prior to Restoration. The Shisno Trilogy, which began with Season 15, pretty quickly blew up into a massive time traveling odyssey in Season 16: The Shizno Paradox, introducing things like gods who were actually AI, erasing the idea of pizza from history, and even giving DONUT of all people a character arc. The following season, subtitled Singularity, seemed to have shifted priorities along with directors and writers, as the time travel shenanigans end up focusing more on the personal timelines of the Reds and Blues instead jumping all over random points across ancient history. But whether intentional or not, this ends up acting as a cool way to essentially do a “Greatest Hits” style look back on some of the best, and even some underrated, moments in the show’s history. It basically becomes RVB’s version of Avengers: Endgame, which is doubly interesting since Endgame came out in the middle of this season. And as said, this was pretty much the last time most of the cast were all together, and probably the last time many of these characters got to be majorly involved in events. This could have worked as an end to the story, and for awhile, it seemed like the last canon adventure for the Reds and Blues.

Conclusion:

But fate had other plans, and through the return of Burnie Burns, RVB would be announced to return one more time in Restoration, whose review will likely be up by the time this feature goes out, so check that out here. Restoration is, for all intents and purposes, the true, final, and total end to the Red vs. Blue story. And while not intended at the time, it will be Rooster Teeth’s final release as a company. While that is sad in many ways for both people who once worked there and the fans who followed them, it can be happy too. I’m glad I got to go through this series one more time on the site that it originated from, and notice how many times it found itself in a place it could stop if need be, and then decided it could go just a little bit longer. Every ending led directly to a new beginning for RVB, and now the ending of Rooster Teeth will hopefully lead to new beginnings for everyone of the roosters ready to leave the nest. We can wonder why we’re here all we like, but what matters is that we ARE here, so let’s spend the time we’ve got making a little purple.