Carolina’s Story is a Forgiveness Story but Not in the Way You Think

A Critical Look at Her Fan Guide Profile, Part 2

[Read Part 1 Here]

From the Red vs. Blue Ultimate Fan Guide:



Carolina spent the next few years in hiding before hunting down Epsilon to find and kill the Director. However, rather than taking her vengeance, she forgave the old man and decided to move on with her life.

I don’t think this is an accurate description of what’s happening there, and I want to talk about why.

(For the record, the reliability of the Fan Guide as a whole is questionable at best. You can take a jaunt through my Fan Guide meta tag for more on that.)

Let’s talk about why I feel that season 10, though pretty rocky in terms of writing, ends up the way it should for Carolina.

I know not everyone finds it satisfying that Carolina chooses not to kill the Director—both because of what he did to her, and because of what he did to other beloved characters.

I think Carolina’s decision is important. I think it’s a good one.

*

Part of the mistake people make, I think, is seeing Carolina’s arc as simply a retread of Wash’s arc when it’s not. Granted this is understandable, as Carolina’s arc does closely mirror Wash’s, one of the major differences in framing being that Wash’s motivations are never obscured from the audience. We know about his experiences with Epsilon from the minute go, and his desire for revenge is established just as early.

With Carolina on the other hand… despite being the ostensibly the protagonist of seasons 9 and 10, we’re largely denied her point-of-view for most of it, because to give us her POV might undermine the Big Reveal they were saving for the very end. The result of this, however, is that no one knows where Carolina is coming from, why her investment in all of this is so personal, until her arc is already over.

I think this accounts for a lot of the negative fan reception of Carolina during seasons 9 and 10.

So the takeaway for new viewers of season 10 is mainly that Carolina is hyper-competitive and making bad decisions. As present-day season 10 interweaves with the Freelancer flashbacks, all a new viewer sees is that present!Carolina is angry, impatient, and dismissive of the safety of the people she has dragged into her revenge quest.

Something which, I would like to note, Wash also did.

Season 10 Carolina is often compared to Season 8 Wash, where Wash is arguably at his worst. But the real comparison is season 6, where Wash’s actions most closely mirror Carolina’s. Season 6 and season 10 read very differently because of tone and framing. But when it comes to actions, they’re basically doing the same thing: commandeering a group of sim troopers to break into a secure facility and take down Project Freelancer. If you give season 6 another watch, you may notice that Wash very transparently has nothing for the Reds and Caboose to do once they arrive at Command; they don’t even help him get inside, and in fact having to smuggle them in is an added inconvenience. Once inside, his only orders to them are to create a diversion and hold off the guards for as long as they can. He’s explicitly brought them along as canon fodder. It just doesn’t read the same way, because the tone is different, and this goes back to a longstanding double standard in the framing of RvB where gender is concerned. When a guy is mean, it’s funny. When a girl is mean, she’s just mean.

So Carolina in season 10 is just mean. And her story is a repeat of Wash’s story, but less entertaining. And instead of rooting for her, the way most viewers root for Wash in season 6, the audience becomes impatient either for her story to wrap up or for Carolina to be put in her place. Subtle clues to her true motives, her concern for her team in the past and the loss she feels in the present, gets missed, ignored, or simply overshadowed by that overwhelming framing of her as “mean.”

What that also overshadows, of course, is that Carolina is actually trying to finish what Wash started.

*

Notably, while Wash’s vendetta against Freelancer is certainly personal, it’s personal in a very different way than Carolina’s. Wash certainly has hostility toward the Director; we can hear that in his voice when the Director speaks to him over the loudspeaker. Yet when he’s describing the Project’s misdeeds to Church, you might notice that he repeatedly says they.They tortured the Alpha. They harvested the fragments. He refers to the Director specifically, too, but it’s clear that for Wash, Project Freelancer is more than just the Director. His extended familiarity with the Counselor might have a lot to do with this.

In season 6, Wash’s goals are twofold: stop the Meta, and expose Project Freelancer. His plan is a two-pronged attack. One: lure the Meta inside Command and set off the failsafe to destroy the rest of the AI. Two: steal Epsilon out of storage and send the Reds and Blues to take him to the authorities, who can then use the evidence to bring down the Director.

That first prong succeeds, and the Meta is defeated, but the second prong fails, with Caboose as the point of failure: Caboose never turns Epsilon in. Epsilon was supposed to provide the evidence to have the Director arrested, tried, and convicted of everything the Chairman had already deduced he was doing but could not prove. Because Caboose fails to turn Epsilon in, the Director is never apprehended.

So Wash’s plan in season 6 is never completed. Epsilon!Tex, brought to life during season 8, also sets out with the goal of finding the Director and she also fails. This is why Recollections is not the end of the Freelancer story.

This is probably also a big part of why Wash agrees, initially, to help Carolina. He knows as well as she does that the book is not closed on Project Freelancer. He only objects, at long last, when he sees Carolina making the same mistakes he made, making decisions he now regrets. Whether or not Wash knows Carolina’s relationship to the Director, whether or not that was passed to him in the memories from Epsilon, I think he does understand better than anyone why this is important to her, why bringing the Director to justice matters.

And for Carolina herself, as personal as it is, it’s not just about herself. She says to Epsilon outright, in a brief moment of vulnerability Epsilon effectively forces out of her: “Not just for what he did to me, or for what he did to York, and to Wash, to Maine, the twins, to all of them. And for what he did to you, Church.”

This isn’t just personal vengeance to Carolina. It’s justice. It’s not just for her, but for her team.

And when Wash finally stands up to her, it is not the mission he objects to, but her treatment of the Reds and Blues—while fully acknowledging the trouble he himself has caused them.

In a way, I think Wash confronting Carolina, forcing her to see what she is becoming, is the kindest thing he could do here. I don’t personally think Carolina had any intention of actually shooting Tucker—had she shot him, she would have lost the others for sure. But if Wash hadn’t confronted her, I don’t know if Carolina would’ve come to the realization she comes to in that bunker.

Maybe a part of Wash wishes that someone had been there to confront him with what he was becoming, back in season 8—before he pulled the trigger.

Because of Wash’s intervention, Carolina and Epsilon go to the Offsite Storage Facility alone, and because they go alone, Carolina becomes overwhelmed by the army of Texbots and begins to despair— right before the Reds and Blues appear, with Wash, to give her backup, having had a change of heart.

Their change of heart is mostly about Church. It’s Tucker who initiates it, in response to Caboose’s sadness over his best friend leaving him again, and the Reds follow, and Wash, despite misgivings, comes along.

But once there, something changes.

Wash offers Carolina a hand up off the floor. He hands her his pistol. “I told you,” he says, “they’re not so bad once you get to know them.” There’s no more anger in his voice, and none of the uncertainty we heard in his earlier interactions with Carolina in this season. Wash is sure of himself again, sure enough that he can extend this gesture of forgiveness toward Carolina.

I think that’s important too.

*



So this is where Carolina is when she walks through that last door, into the Director’s hidden office deep in the underground facility. She’s had to face herself, to face the way she’s been misdirecting her anger; she’s felt alone and helpless; and for probably the first time in a long time she has experienced a team rallying around her, and a gesture of forgiveness.

This is the Carolina who steps into that room, and sees this old man. An old man weary from a mind more filled with memory than it is with hope. A man who abused her, manipulated her, lied to her, violated her trust. A man who was once her father. A man responsible for the violent deaths of the teammates she once called “the people who were closest to me.” Her history with him spans her entire life, and though we do not know the details of that history before Project Freelancer, it is a history unique to Carolina. No other Freelancer has the relationship to him that she has. No other Freelancer, Wash included, would be feeling exactly what Carolina is feeling in this moment.

Carolina has really been fighting her own demons this whole time. In Freelancer, and in the present. I said once before that she didn’t need two voices in her head to destroy her. She didn’t even need one. The voice she’s carried since childhood, telling her that she is never, ever good enough, has been doing a hell of a job on its own.

When she walks into that bunker, her first words to her father after “Hello” are: “So. This is what you’ve become.”

And her resolve to put a gun to his head and pull the trigger seems to dissolve in an instant.

Is this forgiveness?

If forgiveness means the absolution of a past wrong, the idea of her forgiving an abusive father, and in fact the common narrative of forgiveness as a moral imperative, might seem pretty unsavory.

But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.

“The past doesn’t doesn’t define who you are,” Carolina says to Church, by way of explanation. “It just gives you the starting point for who you’re going to be.”

This has nothing to do with the Director. The Director is an old, broken man obsessed with doing what cannot be done. He hasn’t even eaten in days. The Director isn’t going to be anything or anyone. It’s also pretty clear he’s not going to walk out of here, even before he asks her for her pistol, so that’s important.

This is not Carolina forgiving her father.

This is Carolina separating herself from her father, and from her past.

This is her seeing what her father’s obsession with the past has made of him. This is her refusing to become that. Not just what he is now, in this room, but the man who displaced his pain onto everyone around him.

Carolina needs to let go of her father because if she can’t do that, then she can’t forgive herself for displacing her own pain onto other people.

This doesn’t mean that Carolina wanting revenge was wrong. It doesn’t make her mission, in and of itself, was invalid. There are layers to this. She had to follow that anger to get here. She needed to be angry at him. She needed to hate him. That was part of the journey as well—recognizing who hurt her and her team. But on her journey for revenge, she’s been taking her anger out on the wrong people, so the journey isn’t just being angry, but figuring out who that anger is actually for.

It’s really important, by the way, that in season 13 Carolina’s apology to Sharkface is her refusing to displace her anger onto him. It’s her refusing to find an enemy anywhere she can. That’s a major point of character development for her. Recollections Wash and season 10 Carolina saw anyone who stood in their way as their enemy. Both of them, at the end of these arcs, had to grow past that.

She doesn’t have to forgive him for what he did. But she does maybe have to find a way to forgive the part of herself that could have become him, had she continued down a similar path.

She does have to let go of him, to set herself free of him. And if she kills him—shoots him in the head with her own hand—that’s one more thing she has to carry with her out of the bunker, one more memory she has to live with.

Instead, she chooses to see that the Director has already taken the burden of his own destruction upon himself. And she lets him have that. She cuts herself loose from him, and walks out the door so she can live her life free of him—so that she can become who she’s going to be.

The conclusion of Carolina’s Freelancer arc isn’t about her forgiving her father. It’s about her forgiving herself.