Meta: Ain't That a Bitch (RvB s13)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW: MCD, suicide

What makes a hero? While critical theory has pretty soundly deconstructed the notion of a hero from a literary standpoint, heroics are a major theme in s13 of RvB. Doyle and Church especially are held up as heroes due to their self-sacrificial actions, but throughout the season there are several examples of different models of heroism. This helps mitigate the potential pro-military valence of the war hero trope by calling attention to the necessary component of memorialization to cement one’s status as a hero. Additionally, Church provides a unique comment on heroism by noting how stories of heroes necessarily require an outside perspective. The undecidability of his sacrifice and refusal of the gaze made for a very powerful ending that could easily have (and arguably should have) wrapped up the entire series in fascinating ways.

 

For better or worse, in US television Joseph Campbell’s monomyth is the most prominently used notion of what makes a hero due to his universalizing take on comparative mythology in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. More commonly taken seriously in script writing than in academia, I invoke it here because RvB specifically references Campbell throughout s16; after Grif returns to rescue the guys, he tries to avoid getting sucked into any more drama, simply wanting to go for pizza. Ironically, however, the Pizza Quest jumpstarts the fate-of-the-universe stakes of the next two seasons. He mentions the first stage of the monomyth by name, the Call to Adventure, and Simmons references the second (Refusal of the Call):

Grif: See that shit, Simmons? Diffused the story bomb like a boss. No call to adventure, no adventure.

Simmons: So just curious, in Jax’s book, what happens after the call to adventure?

Grif: Uh, I don’t know, I stopped reading after the important bit.

Simmons: What if refusing the adventure is part of the adventure?
Grif: Don’t be dumb, Simmons. Roll credits, we’re done. (16x2)

That episode’s title, “Incendiary Incidents”, refers to dramatic structure; in a Freytag pyramid (the predominating structure of a ‘well-made play’), “the inciting [or incendiary] incident is that event that throws the world out of balance, disturbing the original state of equilibrium and setting events in motion. Something happens that is so important that it requires somebody to do something about it” (Rush 44). The “somebody” that “do[es] something about it” is the protagonist or the agent of action (Rush 44-45). Or in Campbell’s terms, the hero, who “is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood” (42).

Despite the focus on the active hero and his (and in this masculinist structure it’s usually ‘his’) actions, heroes don’t actually predate the incidents that call them to adventure. Heroes emerge intra-actively (see Barad) from the world out of balance and are interpellated by a herald, the one who does the calling to adventure (Campbell 42). (In this sense I agree with anneapocalypse that Grif is coded as the protagonist in early Shisno making the shift to a Donut-protagonist story strange, as Donut is the herald in 16x2 and Grif’s arc is left unfinished.) But more than that, a hero does not preexist their story; it is only in the retelling that the actions of a person become retroactively heroic (Schneider 23). A hero cannot declare themselves the hero (except in that we are all ‘heroes of our own story’) but must be commemorated as a hero in community memory (Roach 37). In fact, to performatively declare oneself the hero is often a means to ignore the ways in which one is anything but heroic.

To be declared a hero is often a political function, such as at tombs of the Unknown Soldier (Roach 17). Or as Felix puts it, “the only thing different about these soldiers is that they inspired us, and I’m telling you, they can still inspire us even though they’re gone”, a point he makes to instigate the war further (12x14). But Chorus Trilogy, and s13 in particular, is more concerned with the qualities that make someone worth being declared a hero. Locus is obsessed with “the perfect soldier”, first idolizing Wash then the Meta in their representation (to him) of the perfect killing machine:

Locus: Why do you continue to help these people, Agent Washington? […] You had nothing to gain from them, no reason to fight for them, and yet here you stand, putting your life on the line for them.

Wash: Is that so hard to understand?

Locus: You used to be so much more. […] You were once an enemy to these men. You were ruthless, you were a survivor.

Wash: I was a different person.

Locus: No, you were a soldier.

Wash: You say that like they’re two different things.
Locus: When a true soldier is told to kill, he kills. He does not question why, he does not mourn the fallen. He fulfills his role and moves onto the next. (12x18)

Locus: Would you say Maine performed at his best when controlled by Sigma, when the Meta strove to be the perfect weapon?
Aiden: You’re mistaken in assuming Sigma’s definition of perfection. The Meta never wanted to be a weapon. The Meta wanted to be human. (13x14)

Importantly, heroics factor nowhere in Locus’s conception of a perfect soldier, might in fact disqualify someone from being a good soldier. He seems incapable of understanding Wash’s motivations for defending Chorus and the RnB. In this way RvB argues that heroism is not inherent to military service per se but is a quality only of certain soldiers. The RnB are heroes to Chorus because of how they took down PFL, and later the whole galaxy with their last stand defeating Charon, how they took a war that wasn’t their own and made it their own. What makes a hero is responding to the necessity of action (Rush 46).

In this way, the mild-mannered Doyle is an unlikely hero, but on two pivotal occasions he does what needs to be done. When the space pirates are about to steal the sword, Doyle takes it before they can, meaning he’s the only one that can use it until he dies (13x10). When the plan goes sideways and someone has to manually detonate the nuclear reactor, Doyle leaves Kimball in charge of the army and sacrifices himself to save his troops (13x16). During Church’s final speech, he mentions him: “It was actually Doyle who made me realize something I never thought of before. There’s so many stories where some brave hero decides to give their life to save the day. And because of their sacrifice, the good guys win, the survivors all cheer, and everybody lives happily ever after” (13x20). Heroism is about the courage to do what needs to be done when it counts, despite fear.

In Campbell’s monomyth, the hero must necessarily die eventually: “The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today” (303). However, most of the time the hero overcomes defeat and is granted the boon of their success (Campbell 148). In s13, in contrast, heroism is specifically linked to a faith-based martyrdom: “But the hero never gets to see that ending. They’ll never know if their sacrifice actually made a difference. They’ll never know if the day was really saved. In the end, they just have to have faith” (13x20).

The story structure privileges this undecidability. It refuses to show us what happens after Church’s sacrifice, whether the others win or lose. It was thought that s13 might be the end of the series, even when s14 premiered, as it was an epilogue-like anthology of missing and semi-canonical moments. Even in s15, we don’t learn what happened on Chorus until well into the season. By refusing the gaze through a cliffhanger, s13 drives home the stakes and motives of heroism as well as pointing out the typical celebratory nature of most stories. It also allows the characters agency to write their own story. It allows for the hope of success in the face of sure failure. In a time when happy endings are increasingly unbelievable and easily deconstructed, the easiest way to retain hope is to remove the ending altogether. The ethical hero, stories like this seem to argue, is not determined by the author’s judgment of whether they succeed or fail, whether their ends justify their means, but rather is determined by the nature of their actions themselves. In such a story, the hero is the person who does the right thing even if there’s no guarantee they’ll live to reap the benefits.

Ain’t that a bitch.

 

Works Cited

anneapocalypse. “The Nicolosi Paradox: Season 16, Character Growth, and the Question of What Matters.” Blunders of Thedas, Dreamwidth, 6 Feb. 2019, https://anneapocalypse.dreamwidth.org/96385.html

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2006.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. 3^rd edition, New World Library, 2008.

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

Rush, David. A Student Guide to Play Analysis. Southern Illinois UP, 2005.