Meta: Freckles, Shake! (RvB s11)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW:  military violence

This is an appreciation post for Freckles, the Goodest Boy^TM and one of a long line of mechanical best friends Caboose has had. Freckles illustrates both the pitfalls and potentialities inherent in the triangular interrelationship between humans, other animals, and machines and is an excellent case study for Donna Haraway’s concerns in her work on cyborgs and companion species.

 

For Haraway, cyborgs and companion species are figures that allow alternative ways of thinking borders and relationality through human-machine and human-animal intra-actions respectively: “Cyborgs and companion species each bring together the human and the non-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture in unexpected ways" (3). Because of the overlap of these projects, she has “come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species, in which reproductive biotechnopolitics are generally a surprise, sometimes even a nice surprise" (Haraway 11). Partially this is because both figures “are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships—co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all” (Haraway 12).

This by no means makes these inherently subversive or revolutionary figures; after all both machines and other species (dogs especially) have been and continue to be used by the military-industrial complex to further empire. And given RvB is about the military, these associations are inescapable. However, the ways that Caboose’s relationships to companion species, especially cyborgs, play out illustrate Haraway’s belief “that all ethical relating, within or between species, is knit from the silk-strong thread of ongoing alertness to otherness-in-relation. We are not one, and being depends on getting on together” (50).

Caboose is unconcerned with species or material composition in making friends in principle, although practically speaking he does have preferences. In “Caboose’s Guide to Making Friends”, he talks about sometimes quite literally making his friends:

First you need to know what makes good friend material. Cotton is most people’s favourite friend material, mainly because it is soft. But in my personal experience, it catches on fire pretty easy. Other friend materials you might want to avoid are: cactus, snow, water left over from melted snow, spiders, rock, and imaginary. Speaking from personal experience, I really like metal. Metal is pretty much the best material for making friends because it is durable. It is really strong! And even if it’s a little cold at first, it eventually warms up. (RvB 14x15)

This demonstrates an awareness on his part that our relationships with other humans are not the only ethically salient relations we have, and that being aware of which differences matter and which don’t is vital for making friends.

A running gag is that Caboose will encounter a new “friend”, only for it to be revealed to be a horror or a threat from everyone else’s perspective. When the RnB are recapping their adventures on Iris to Dylan, Carolina says, “Caboose went and made friends with the dinosaurs,” to which Grif adds, “because of course he did,” indicating this is typical behaviour for him (15x5). When he introduces Freckles to the RnB, they all look up at the MANTIS (a type of giant mecha) in fear. We see this even in s1, when Caboose befriends and gets a crush on Sheila, their tank. Given how many of his mechanical friends he’s killed/broken, he often conducts these relationships poorly, but he values their importance as relationships nonetheless, relationships he has to negotiate in real time. Even though Sheila runs the tutorial for him, he still accidentally maroons her on a rock, kills his teammate, and almost gets blown up because he has not yet learned how to co-operate with her. When Caboose is accidentally made leader of Blue Team, he learns that Freckles needs to be given instructions carefully because misunderstandings could get his friends killed.

Part of the problem is that he tends to anthropomorphize his mechanical friends, but to be fair, that’s because many of them are AI or cyborgs. His best friend, Church, honestly didn’t even remember being an AI until s6, and even when Caboose reformats him into the Monitor (a floating ball), he still treats him like a person. When they encounter a sentient alien AI in s13, Caboose names him Santa (because he’s red and delivers gifts). His preference for electronic friends even plays out with Simmons every once in a while, such as 15x7, when Caboose and Simmons work together during the search for Church. Because cyborgs blur the boundaries between organic and mechanical, he tends to get confused because he doesn’t fully understand what Haraway calls “significant otherness”: “Answers to these questions can only be put together in emergent practices; i.e., in vulnerable, on-the-ground work that cobbles together non-harmonious agencies and ways of living that are accountable both to their disparate inherited histories and to their barely possible but absolutely necessary joint futures” (7).

This definitely plays out in his relationship with Freckles, although here he conflates him with a dog instead of a human. When he introduces him to the RnB, he calls him over by saying “Freckles, come!” and whistling, and when he almost shoots Grimmons, Caboose admonishes, “no, bad Freckles, down!” (11x6). After Caboose tells the Blues how he found Freckles, Tucker quips, “great, boy meets dog, dog turns out to be a military-grade killing machine from a crashed spaceship” (11x7). Caboose insists on teaching him tricks, such as ‘fetch’ (shooting targets), ‘roll over’ (rotating his turrets), and of course ‘shake’ (stomping his foot, which shakes the ground). Later, when Freckles is reduced to a microchip carrying a tracking device, they tell Caboose he has fleas so they can remove the tracker.

It's theoretically important that Freckles is specifically a dog. C.C., the other mecha in the valley, is treated purely as a machine, and Dos.0 is treated as a soldier/replacement for Lopez. What calling Freckles a dog does is emphasize the affective connection between Caboose and Freckles, that more than just coworkers or user/tool they’re companions. Haraway used dogs as her primary example of a companion species for a reason: “Human life ways changed significantly in association with dogs. Flexibility and opportunism are the name of the game for both species, who shape each other throughout the still ongoing story of co-evolution” (29). Freckles is not something that can be abandoned, like C.C. or Dos.0; their lives are entangled in ways that require them to take responsibility for taking care of each other.

In that sense, Freckles is a Very Good Boy. Freckles routinely takes care of Caboose, from watching over him at the crash site to alerting him to enemies. When Caboose tells him to shake during a firefight, Freckles protects Caboose from harm by stomping on the ground, causing a cave-in that separates him and some of his friends from the (supposed) enemies. After Freckles’ MANTIS body is destroyed, he’s returned to Caboose as a microchip, which Dr. Gray inserts into a gun with autofiring. She disables the trigger to give Freckles full control (which was correctly deemed to be safer); pulling the trigger simply releases confetti. This accommodation gets them out of several sticky situations, including the climax of Felix’s attack on the RnB, when he tries to shoot Caboose with Freckles and instead only releases confetti (one of the funniest moments in the show, we love a Chekhov’s confetti gun).

Similarly, though, Caboose takes care of Freckles. He refuses to leave him behind unless he is forced to, at which point he mourns him. He talks to him as a living creature and plays with him, including playing dead. In fact, when they first encountered each other, Freckles was badly damaged, and Caboose fixed him up and activated him. Sure, he was a substitute for Church, who had left by this point, but their relationship develops into something separate from Caboose’s grief and a source of joy in its own right. For better or worse, Caboose and Freckles are close friends.

Neat.

 

Work Cited

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.