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xandromedovna(CW: torture, gaslighting, grief and mourning)
What sets Blood Gulch Chronicles (RvB s1-5) apart from the rest of the series is its irreverent kookiness and focus on absurdist satire over character or plot (which some later seasons tried and failed to recapture). On the first watch-through, the sixth season feels like a complete overhaul of the series (because it was), taking it to a more serious and nuanced place. But on rewatching the series knowing where it goes, it becomes clear how thoroughly they had to retcon things for any of BGC to make sense, and that’s most evident in s3. This is the first season where the characters leave Blood Gulch, and halfway through the season a bomb in Church’s stomach explodes, which the characters all miraculously survive (whether the bomb did actually even detonate is up for debate given the timey-wimeyness). The characters assume they have been blasted far into the future—clearly the most logical explanation—whereas they believe Church to have been blasted into the past, which ostensibly bears out when Church appears rendered not in Halo but in Marathon (1994), Halo’s predecessor.
Season 3 is the first season to be rendered in anything besides Halo: Combat Evolved, using both Marathon and Halo 2 (2004), which had just been released the year previous. The blast to the future was the showrunners’ initial justification for why the characters looked so different in the switch to Halo 2, which had much better graphics. Fans generally accepted this explanation as in keeping with the tone of the rest of the series so far and moved on, but the longer the show went on the less useful the time-travel plot point was because of all the contradictions and paradoxes it created. It was eventually retconned to be a matter of them being clueless and delusional and not actual time travel, unlike what they get up to in Shisno Trilogy (RvB s15-17). The way the show retcons Church’s time-travel, however, makes it much darker and sets up the next few seasons’ focus on Project Freelancer and its abuses.
Agent Wyoming was assigned a time distortion unit, which in s5 allows him to restart the fight every time Tucker or Church or Tex get the upper hand trying to stop him. This creates a gaggle of Wyoming clones in the basement of red base (in violation of the law of conservation of mass, but they don’t care about that til s16). This mechanic previously appeared in s3 with Church’s various attempts to fix things in Blood Gulch using the time machine he builds with Gary. This created a bunch of Church clones on Sidewinder (including Yellow Church, my beloved), and returning to this concept in s5 subtly draws a connection between Church’s experience and Wyoming’s, one that solidifies with the reveal that Gary is really Wyoming’s AI fragment, Gamma.
Later seasons explain that Gamma and Omega were routinely recruited to torture Alpha/Church into fragmenting further, and it’s disturbing to note that even after the end of Freelancer’s search for more fragments, Gary still tortures Church. He makes Church think he has been blasted 1,856 years into the past, that Caboose will be the downfall of an entire civilization, that he has to fix the timeline so nothing bad happens, and that he has to wait 1,000 years for Gary to build a teleporter to let him do that. Each time Church tries to change something in Blood Gulch, it ends up setting in motion the very thing he was trying to prevent, such as getting himself killed by accidentally changing Sheila’s settings to allow friendly fire. Then, when he reaches the point in the timeline where he’s “blown back in time”, he has to wait another thousand years to try again. Because of Gary’s cruel use of the time distortion unit, Church is driven mad trying to fix the past only to be foiled by fate. However, unlike the Director before him and like Epsilon after him, Alpha is able to break the cycle by accepting the past: “I learned a very valuable lesson in my travels, Tucker. No matter how bad things might seem, […] they can’t be any better, and they can’t be any worse. Because that’s the way things fucking are, and you better get used to it, Nancy. Quit your bitching.” (3x14)
This association between time travel and torture plays out in later seasons too, part of a larger theme of traumatic revision of the past. This is most closely associated with Church, who in every iteration is obsessed with starting over and getting things right. Even after the fall of PFL, the Director was obsessed with perfecting Tex, torturing a copy of Beta by endlessly reproducing it. S9 centers around Epsilon’s attempts to reunite with Beta, changing the simulated world around him until the conditions are right for them to be together. (Which I have a LOT of feelings about.) It is only when he lets go of Tex, saying “I forget you” (9x20), that he can move on with his life.
The Shisno Trilogy quickly becomes this as well. I’ll talk more about the productive meta-revisionism of this arc, but what’s important here is that the term ‘shisno’, first appearing in s3, is resignified. Originally a derogatory term for humans, Huggins tells Grif “my species’ myths always warned that time travel warps weaker minds, drawing them in by offering them the ability to fix their mistakes. If you give into it too deeply, you become a shisno, an agent of Chrovos” (16x8). At first, the RnB indiscriminately time travel for a sex bucket list or the lols, but several times they point out the possibilities of the time gun. Sarge immediately wants to correct his biggest military failure, only to make it worse by duplicating himself and giving contradictory orders. O’Malley becomes the second Agent of Chrovos (after Donut) when he steals the time gun from Grif, who refuses to let Doc save people. The paradox that destroys time itself occurs when Carolina convinces the RnB to go back and prevent Wash from being shot. S17 then features them frantically trying to repair the past and return the timeline to its original state, a quest filled with torture, as literalized by Wash continually shooting Donut every time they get stuck on that moment in s7, or Caboose going berserk on Genkins for possessing Church’s body.
When Jax begins his project to map their time-travel shenanigans, he explains, “I’m just trying to figure out if time travel is some sort of Monkey’s Paw that’s always gonna blow up in our faces” (16x9). RvB’s answer seems to be that not only is it doomed to failure, but even the promise of changing the past is enough to completely ruin someone’s life. The association between memory and torture is an overarching theme in the show that I’ll return to; for now, I’m interested in the staunch determinism of RvB’s closed loops. No matter how hard they try, no matter how much they unravel the fabric of spacetime, the past is what it is and will correct itself to continue to be as it is. Caboose, who has a similar load of grief to Church by this point, encapsulates this lesson at the end of s15 when Loco builds the time machine that allows Caboose to see Church one last time. “Caboose, pull him through!” encourages Tucker, but instead Caboose says (excuse me while I crytype):
No, Tucker, I…I know what I need to do. […] Church: Church, there’s a lot of things I never got to say, and I know I won’t get another chance to say them, so… I think you are cool, like super-awesome-amazing cool, and I always felt like, really awesome too when we were hanging out together, and I never really felt sad when you died, because […] I couldn’t imagine a world without you, but I know it’s real, yeah I know, and I’m sad. Things really aren’t okay without you, but I know with my other friends, who even if you add them all up together aren’t really as cool as you, I know we’re all gonna be okay. I know we’re all gonna be okay. I know we’re all gonna be okay. Go back to Heaven now, Church, and say hello to Loco when you get there. He was alright too. (15x21)
