Review; Red vs Blue “The Musical”

525,000 RVB Skeeeeetches…

 

Honestly, in retrospect, this one seems pretty obvious. If anything, I’m surprised it took them nearly thirteen and a half years to get to it. One of the things I’ve appreciated about this season is how, considering the non-linear and varied nature of an anthology, we’ve gotten a fair amount of stories that can look explore more of the continuity, hand the spotlight to lesser used or completely new characters, or review certain scenes from different perspectives. However, about a third of this season so far has been slightly tweaking the usual cast and setting of the Blood Gulch Chronicles in ways that could be pretty easily explained as “RVB, but…”. Amongst these, we got “RVB, but animated”, “RVB, but Legos”, “RVB, but colorblind”, “RVB, but Red Team are girls”, and now the musical version. Now, I know that in an anthology with 20+ slots to fill, some of them aren’t going to be as fleshed out or thought provoking as others. It’s just that there’s only so many ways you can cover what is essentially the same material with small changes.

SPOILERS

To their credit, they do manage to fit four songs in the space of ten minutes. The first is, of course, a number about the most classic line in the franchise: Why are we here? This lasts 30 seconds, and then goes into a song about the Reds getting a new shipment of rocket launchers, naming them, and how they’re going to kill the Blues with them. High up on a ledge, Church spots this song occurring while Tucker asks to use the sniper rifle again, leading Church to belt about how he’d love to die and/or kill his teammates in order to escape their annoyance and his miserable life while everyone tells him to get over it. This culminates in the Reds confronting the Blues with their new equipment…only to discover they forgot to pack ammo. Instead, Donut suggests that instead of fighting, they DANCE! And then it turns out that this was all in Donut’s head during Season 12, but that doesn’t add anything.

Like with the last time, it was nice to see the Halo 2 models again, but I think I’m about done giving credit for whichever engine they choose for these things. The one thing that would surprise me about that would be if they finally used Halo 5 for one of these. Unsurprisingly, this episode was co-written by Nico Audy-Rowland. And if you don’t know who the hell THAT is, he’s one of the members of Trocadero, whose members composed most of the music for many of Rooster Teeth’s shows. So, it seems a perfect fit for the one of the music guys to handle a music-themed episode. With all that in mind, it pulls it off well enough, but as I said, there’s not a whole lot to talk about. The songs are a bit catchy, but they fade. The characters are still fun, but they’re funner in other things. As with the last few episodes, I’m hoping next time will be something stronger, so until then, fingers crossed.

Oh yeah, and The Blues Brothers!

SCORE
6/10