Meta: The Enemy of My Enemy Is Our Oppressor (RvB s12)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW: genocide, colonialism, spoilers s11-13

Of all the people that could have crash-landed on Chorus, its residents are lucky it was the Reds and Blues, who after 10 seasons are uniquely qualified to settle the civil war raging on the planet. Then again, no one else could have crash-landed, and in fact it is precisely this failure that breaks through the well-organized machine that is Charon Industries. Not only do the RnB not have a side in this particular fight, but their experiences with Freelancer make them suspicious of the type of propaganda that mercenaries Felix and Locus have been feeding the armies of Chorus. Ironically, by splitting up the RnB, they brought about the unification of the Federal Army and the New Republic. The pain and promise of surrogation create space to disrupt the pattern of sabotage that keeps the status quo in place, allowing the armies to realize who their real enemy is.

 

Major spoilers, but the main premise of Chorus Trilogy is that Malcolm Hargrove, aka the Chairman of the UNSC Oversight Committee, is also the head of Charon Industries/The Insurrection. The irony is that his letters to the Director paint him as the good guy, when in reality they’re both exploiting the system and by extension the RnB (which is why Church begins his speech with Dear Chairman, their feud continues in every iteration). The planet of Chorus is locked in a civil war because Hargrove has hired two mercenaries, Felix and Locus, to keep it going so that Hargrove can trade in weapons. Felix is working with the New Republic, and Locus is working with the Federal Army of Chorus, meanwhile they have their own troops keeping things spicy. The reason Chorus is at a stalemate is the same reason the RnB were at a stalemate: their superiors wanted it that way and the war wasn’t real.

Of course, we don’t know this right away. We’re encouraged to see Felix as the good guy and Locus as the bad guy, as Felix is the only one who talks directly to the RnB in s11 and is the one we follow at the beginning of s12. It’s supposed to be a big reveal when he betrays them in 12x10 (and the scene itself is deliciously evil), but there are hints before this. First, he’s competent. Like, very competent, and as we've seen, competence is a marker of evil in RvB. He’s also subconsciously linked with PFL: when they ask who he is, he says “I’m a freelancer” (11x16), at which they immediately draw their guns until he clarifies he meant a mercenary. He’s constantly pumping Wash for information and telling them stories about Locus and the war. This happens later, but in keeping with the theme of only villains have faces, we get an animated backstory for Felix, Locus, and their friend Siris showing all of them out of armour, seeing as this is the story of how they went darkside (14x9-11).

The mercenaries’ divide-and-conquer strategy for maintaining the status quo on Chorus relies on the main flaw of surrogation, namely that the faster you need to replace people, the less institutional memory can be passed on and the less the substitutes’ efficacy. ‘Surrogation’ is Joseph Roach’s term for how “into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure, […] survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates,” performing “the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins” (2-3). Because “the dramaturgy of doubling in a role governs the functions of cultural transmission in the service of institutional memory, […] despite the conventional panegyrics attesting to the fact that he or she can never be replaced, one or more of the survivors will move in to take over, overtly or covertly, the positions vacated by the decedent” (1-2). If surrogation does not take place, the culture cannot replicate itself, and even then “the fit cannot be exact. The intended substitute either cannot fulfill expectations, creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus” (2). The more frequently this process needs to be enacted, the more rapidly the culture mutates and the more vulnerable it is to external interventions “because candidates for surrogation must be tested at the margins of a culture to bolster the fiction that it has a core” (6). In other words, the easiest way to disrupt an enemy’s efficiency is to create vacancies that cannot be filled internally to the same level of quality.

We get hints this is what’s happening when we learn more about the leaders of the Feds and News. Dr. Gray laughs when Sarge asks if she’s a civilian, explaining that the war has become so totalizing that there is no such thing as civilians anymore (12x9). We learn that Kimball hasn’t been in charge long, and why: “Tucker, I am the fourth person to lead the New Republic. […] Our first leader was killed in action. The second was assassinated at what we had been told would be a peace treaty. And the third was blown out of the sky while trying to leave Chorus for help. […] I guess my position does have a pretty quick turnover” (12x6). As for the soldiers, “too many people have died, and our remaining soldiers are young, inexperienced, and scared” (11x19). The Feds have the same problem:

Doyle: As I’m sure you already observed, I’m not a battle-worn soldier ripe with military expertise. On the contrary, I was simply next in line to run the army should something happen to its leader.

Wash: What do you mean: Lieutenant General? Major General?

Doyle: Uhh, Personal Secretary to the Brigadier.

Wash: What?!

Donut: Where’d all the other guys go?
Doyle: Some of them left before things took a turn for the worst, but umm, most of them were…killed, yes definitely they were killed. Not many of us left these days, I’m afraid. (12x9)

A similar surrogation process happens when Tucker, Grif, Simmons, and Caboose are promoted to Captains by the News, although with unexpected results. The leaders of both Blue and Red teams (Wash and Sarge) were left on the other side of Freckles' landslide, meaning that the four of them not only have no one giving them orders besides Kimball, but they are themselves tasked with overseeing a unit of soldiers with even less experience than them. Fortunately, the others are still alive, but even still they are called upon to become leaders despite their general incompetence. This intersects with Tucker’s arc in Chorus Trilogy of becoming a leader; in s11, Wash is trying to whip him into shape, constantly encouraging him to try. When Kimball gives them their commission, she implores them all to try, a directive Tucker takes seriously in honor of Wash. Ultimately, surrogation can never be about exact replication, but is about “stand[ing] in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace” (Roach 3). Even though he and the other Captains are complete disasters (e.g. 12x5), Tucker pushes them to be better and leads them on actual military operations.

Tellingly, Tucker doesn’t do this the way Wash would, or the way Felix or the News have been trying to do things. As a surrogate “alien to the culture that reproduces it and that it reproduces” (Roach 6), their failure to replicate military action is actually their strength:

Tucker: Look, we keep trying to strategize and use codenames and act like real soldiers, but we’re not. We haven’t been from the beginning. So why are we trying now? I say we just get in there and do what we do best.

Grif: Uhh, which is…?
Tucker: I have no idea! But whatever it is, it’s worked for us before! (12x7)

Roach calls this ‘displaced transmission’: “Displaced transmission constitutes the adaptation of historic practices to changing conditions, in which popular behaviors are resituated in new locales. Much more happens through transmission by surrogacy than the reproduction of tradition. New traditions may also be invented and others overturned” (29). The mercenaries can’t control the RnB precisely because they are so far removed from the status quo. Ironically, by destabilizing relations on Chorus through forcing such rapid surrogations, the mercenaries sow the seeds for their own destruction when those processes incorporate the RnB, who reinvigorate both teams and eventually reunite them. This is also because the RnB have seen this shit before, the last time two allegedly opposing sides were actually being manipulated by a larger structure of oppression. Actually, the exact same structure of oppression: the UNSC.

 

Work Cited

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Columbia UP, 1996.