Just finished binge-watching ReBoot season 3. SO MANY EMOTIONS. AHHHHHHHH!!!!! (Long post- Spoilers ahoy!)
Well, that was the first time I ever saw ‘The Episode With No Name′, and wow things make more sense now! Even though I was definitely glad to have Captain Capacitor and the crew of the Saucy Mare back again the first time round, it’s much better now that I know what’s going on rather than just, “wait, weren’t we going to Mainframe? Why are we looking for Bob now??” LOL
Gosh though, the episodes in the Web look fantastic. All the space-y stuff is just gorgeous! And you gotta love the pirates. (And holy ravioli, I think ReBoot is the only show in the history of ever to have more than one female pirate in the crew! There’s at least three, and even in sci-fi stuff, where there's no historical accuracy to serve by excluding women, there’s usually never more than one female character in any pirate crew. But ReBoot has always had way more female characters than most shows, especially sci-fi shows, and that’s one of the things that I’ve always loved about it. No token girlfriend nonsense here! ALL the characters are real, complicated people we can all relate to.)
...AAAAND then we get back to Mainframe, and everything is pain & anguish. Like, cut my heart out with a knife, why don’t you?! Everything horrible that you could ever imagine happening as a worst-case scenario? Totally happened! Happy trails! o_O
And even when you know it’ll be okay in the end, it really doesn’t hurt less to watch. I mean, my god, Phong! Don’t hurt Phong! And Dot, oh my god, what she must have been through, thinking her family was all dead, watching her city die all around her and being powerless to save it. I actually got a little teary when Dot & Enzo were reunited. Even though it’s a happy moment, it’s just so emotionally loaded after everything that’s happened and all they’ve been through, you just feel how much pain they’ve been carrying around until that moment, & it just hurts. But at least once they’re back together, you feel like everything will be alright again, somehow. Just don’t ever, ever make Dot cry again, universe! That is not okay!
I unfortunately felt Dot & Bob’s reunion fell a little flat by comparison, and not just because they were deliberately playing for a laugh. I just really, really miss Michael Benyaer, and have never felt like anyone else could ever be Bob. He had a wonderful, funny, quirky quality that no one else can replicate. Ian James Corlett is just too bland & whitebread, & the entire dynamic of Dot & Bob’s relationship is missing. Yes, this is a more serious storyline, but there’s something about Michael Benyaer’s goofy Bob that makes his heroic Bob all the more effective, and I really wanted to hear him here. There’s something a little flat about this version that leaves me feeling a little empty. It’s not Ian James Corlett’s fault or anything, I just think re-casting main characters is a nightmare no-win scenario. Unless you have a very broad, caricatured character that can be reasonably impersonated, another actor can’t re-create the old one’s voice & it changes the dynamic, & it just doesn’t work. (Luckily there wasn’t a lot of time for dialogue in the last four eps though! Just, you know, misery & despair...)
And you know you’re really into ReBoot when you get emotionally attached to random binomes in the crowd; I found it pretty hard to watch them getting killed off as the city shut down even knowing they’ll come back to life. I was just hoping that they wouldn’t kill off the cute little baby binome. That one family of binomes with their little baby has been in the background of every episode, and I’m just thinking: protect the baby binome at all costs! (And when the cute binome family was okay: “Whew! Thank heaven!!”) I’d already had my heart impaled while watching Captain Capacitor sacrifice the Saucy Mare, I mean that hurt, so I really couldn’t have dealt with more deaths, thanks. (Except, you know, pretty much everyone in Mainframe over the last eps...)
So it was basically the apocalypse at the end. I honestly don’t think any show, no matter how ‘dark’ and ‘edgy’ they claim to be, or how much violence & swearing they put in, has ever managed to be as all-consumingly bleak & utterly devastating as ReBoot in these four episodes. And it’s because we saw it when everything was wonderful, so the audience feels what’s lost as keenly as the characters do. It all hurt so much because we loved it so much. But leave it to ReBoot to break your heart into tiny little pieces only to throw us back to ridiculous happiness after all of it. The little silly moments of familiar Mainframe in-jokes, even amidst the chaos, were like tiny rays of hope, and of course we’d go right back to stupid happy as soon as it’s over, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Just sitting there like, “damn, I just had my heart torn out as it all fell down, I’m not ready for all this happiness yet- but I’m grinning like a goon as it all gets built back up, darn you- ooh look, the lights are going back on! The virals are freed! The Diner is back, OMG! I’mma cry now, but can I have a second to switch from sad tears to happy tears, okay?! Ahhhhh!!”
And that ridiculous Gilbert & Sullivan number at the end! I was like ‘WTF is this?!’ when I first saw it, but I laughed. And this time I did too. It’s just silly, and you can’t help but be happy. How many shows anymore have the guts and the audacity to say ‘nope, no darkness & pessimism can live here forever, love & laughter trumps all’? And the little snapshots of everybody being one big happy family again, oh god! It’s too perfect. It’s weird. It’s crazy. It’s beautiful. It’s ReBoot, and I’ll always love it. <3
