Y’know, I find it really moving how Matt and Travis gave genuine dignity to Bertrand’s death.
It’s an odd thing to say about Bertrand Bell, a throwaway joke character with more bravado than braincells who ended up getting unceremoniously shanked in an alleyway. But I felt that the joke suddenly stopped in a way that reminded everyone - actually, he’s a person, he’s dying, and that’s important.
There’s the way Bertrand stopped being a joke at the moment he drew his rapier. Travis could have chosen to play it for laughs, to have Bertrand try to run and get cut down. One last useless screw-up. But instead Bertrand holds his ground, draws his sword. I think that’s close enough. I have you at a disadvantage. Having bravadoed his way through seventy-plus years, he’s not going to stop now. It’s useless, because he’s old and he’s drunk and he’s been through one fight already today, but he chooses not to run or to go quietly. He makes his stand, because… well, for the same reason he went to find the Windowed Wall in the first place. Sometimes you just have to hold up your head.
And that was the moment when I remembered - yes, this man was an eighteenth-level fighter once. Whatever he might have pretended to do, he really did go through Pandemonium to retrieve Grog’s soul, he really did battle a corrupted Empyrean, he really did fight a horde of bugbears single-handed to get Percy’s arm. Bertrand lived a life, and it wasn’t the life he pretended it was, but he did things, and he could have done more.
Except he couldn’t, because Travis always planned for him to die here, before he could be the hero he pretended to be. Idk, to me that sudden realisation of the fact that he could never have fought with this party, gained back all those fighter levels, bragged about things he’d actually done… that suddenly felt like a goddamn tragedy.
There’s the narrative framing of it, with Matt bookending the scene with Imogen’s dream. At the moment Bertrand dies, Imogen’s dream turns cataclysmic. Like her powers sensed the death of the man who only a few hours ago was making ridiculous attempts at subterfuge with her. Like the universe responded to that loss. And the last thing that a member of the party sees of Bertrand Bell isn’t him drunkenly stumbling into the night, it’s him walking, dignified, into the storm.
And that final ‘Lieve’tel’? Yes, it’s Travis being a troll, twisting the knife and making Liam’s day, but it’s also a reminder: there were people who mattered to Bertrand. Whatever shape his and Lieve’tel’s relationship took after Pandemonium, she meant so much to him that her name was on his lips as he died. He was a person, he had a life, he had at least one person he cared for deeply. And he died, and that matters.
Tl;dr: Matt and Travis played Bertrand’s death in a way that acknowledged that, out of universe, he was always totally disposable… and that in-universe, he was never disposable at all.
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