Red vs Blue: The Shisno Paradox Episode 1 Review

For only the second time in its sixteen-year life, Red vs Blue needs a reason to exist.

It didn’t have one in 2003, when it first launched, but it’s not like it needed one. That show was barely a show at all, but individual web clips of comedy sketches with some questionable continuity. More importantly, on the production side, it was one person roping his friends into it all, and doing almost everything else himself. That the show found success (and launched a media empire off its back) is, when it comes right down to it, a lucky break. That’s not to reduce the hard work that went into creating the show back then (and now), but instead to recognize the alchemy inherent in the Red vs Blue story. By all accounts, it should never have happened.

It needed no reason to exist for the next ten years, which had turned into a kind of feedback loop of retcons, eating its own tail for our entertainment. And it worked, partly because it was audacious, but also because it was inherently built on our memories of things that had come before. Nostalgia is powerful, and ten years is a good amount of time for nostalgia to sink in. The show managed to build a meaningful plot from disparate scraps (sometimes trying too hard in the process), but the result was captivating.

That is, until Season 11, when the show suddenly found itself without a decade of plot retconning to fall back on; adrift, like the Reds and Blues themselves, looking for purpose in yet another box canyon. I’ve extolled the virtues of “One-Zero-One”, the first episode of that season, on this blog before, saying that it “might come to be seen as the most important episode in Red vs Blue history.” Looking back, I think that still mostly holds, but the problems it fixed didn’t turn out to be as permanent as I’d thought.

Everyone’s anxieties at that time (including, I’d wager, B. Burns and M. Luna) were about whether the show could pull off a completely original plot that didn’t tie into the Freelancer saga. As the overall success of the Chorus Trilogy showed, they could. People were invested in the newest characters and were gratified that the spirit of the old characters were not violated. Nobody turned out to be The Meta, and all was well. For now.

But when Season 13 came to an end, the production team once again found itself at something of a loss. Following a sporadically entertaining anthology season that nevertheless failed to satisfy audiences (the first serious clunker of a year of RvB? The “Season 9 was garbage” partisans disagree), the show began a new era with Season 15.

I believe most people went into this one reasonably confident. Joe Nicolosi, the writer and director of the season, had also created the best episode of Season 14. What’s more, if my theory about Season 11’s success had held true, the format of the show was now as bulletproof as something like Doctor Who. In that show, the main characters parachute into any kind of story they want (western, noir, tragedy, farce) and are gone before the hour. I had hoped that RvB wouldn’t be exactly like that, but that it would have a huge amount of versatility, dropping these well loved characters into new stories every season.

It didn’t quite happen that way. There were things to love in Season 15 - the new characters are generally strong (I even like Jax) and the jokes are good. But in general, it doesn’t succeed where Season 11 did as a reboot/continuation conceit. I think my main problem with this is the idea of the Blues and Reds, one that reaches back into the depths of our characters and finds…well, nothing. Our characters have always been sketches, just very good ones. Grif is lazy and gets annoyed easily, Tucker is lewd and cocky. But trying to create Mirror Universe characters (which is basically what’s happening here) of sketches just results in scribbles. And since so much of the plot revolves around them, the season falls down. The idea of the bulletproof format is, of course, nonsense - all shows are teetering on the tightrope whenever they perform a reboot like this. So now, at the crest of Season 16, we have to ask ourselves: do the last two seasons represent our two strikes?

Before we examine whether Episode 1 (this post is, allegedly, a review) resolved that overhanging question mark, let’s address the default response from Rooster Teeth themselves: “As long as people keep watching it, we’ll keep making it.” This has generally been the cited retort when people ask whether the show would be ending at Season 8, 10, 13, or 15, reinforced by the consistent message from the production team. But it’s impossible to see it as being that cut and dry when you examine it.

First, there’s no way of actually knowing whether people are still watching, since Red vs Blue isn’t a TV show or movie with ratings or ticket sales. Much as those gleefully declaring the show’s death every year want to imply that the “buzz” this year hasn’t been as high as previous years, that’s not an objective metric. Neither are YouTube views, especially if the most dedicated viewers have First memberships and are watching on the site. At the same time, even if that dip hasn’t happened yet, it will one day, and would those still watching really prefer that it never ends? That it becomes a hollow version of itself, long after anyone involved has lost any enthusiasm for the project? An undead fiend, shambling on toward no kind of climax at all?

(To be clear, I don’t think this is the show now, just that the ethos of “if people are still watching it” must inevitably cause it to turn downward. Fifteen years is a long time; the greatest shows in the world don’t last for fifteen years, and many don’t last half that. In old media, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that shows must end. But RvB is not old media, so does any of that apply? I don’t know the answer to that, so I hope you don’t think the previous paragraph is scaremongering.)

So, we come to the crest of Season 16, or “The Shisno Paradox”. And…as it turns out, I don’t have a lot to say about it. It is essentially an extended trailer, featuring as it does lots of showcases for the upcoming episodes. Donut being pulled apart by time is funny, and also genuinely creepy. The medieval “Why are we here?” was exceptionally bad, and called to mind the worst impulses of the show’s most callback-heavy moments. The wisps are a fascinating idea that might prove to feel completely unlike Red vs Blue, not that that’s a bad thing. The titles were pretty but RvB isn’t Westworld. And the idea that the season might revolve around a pizza quest is truly excellent.

Maybe it’s an anticlimax that that’s all I have to say about the episode. But it nonetheless inspired me to write this post, and that has to mean something. I think, above all, I’m worried about what’s going to happen. Which means I’ll keep watching. And I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it in the coming weeks. After Fifteen Friggin’ Years, why stop now?