Retribution and Reapercussions
A follow-up to “Long Reasons Not to Trust Moira in Retribution”, “A Clash of Kings,” the post about the declassified Blackwatch memorandum on Venice, a post about Overwatch and Blackwatch investigating their own organization, “The Immortal Soldier?”, and other essays. The ones linked above are the most important at the moment.
McCree: Did you even consider what was gonna happen before you pulled the trigger?
Reyes: I made a decision - I’ll deal with the consequences.
McCree: What, like gettin’ the four of us killed?
Reyes: That’s not going to happen.
McCree: How are you gonna explain this to the Strike-Commander?
Gabriel: You let me worry about what Jack needs to know.
McCree: You know you can’t shoot him.
Gabriel: No, but I could shoot you.
McCree: Our target was dead, so I guess he got what was coming to him. But still…it didn’t seem right. But that wasn’t the end of our problems: for the first time, people knew we were out there. New faces stepped up to fill the void in Talon. And I can’t help but wonder…if that’s where it all started to go wrong.
“Long Reasons Not to Trust Moira in Retribution” covered a lot of the evidence, ideas, and possible hypotheses that went into creating “the perfect storm” of the Venice mission, where different ideologies, motivations, personalities, and perspectives collided and struggled with one another for the “fate” of Overwatch and its narrative control.
In that essay, I touched on some of the consequences of the mission, but not in full detail. This post will likely be the first of several that pull together what we know occurred after Retribution in the Overwatch timeline, and how several of those things might fit together. It’s going to build on what was written in “Long Reasons,” so yes, hypotheses on top of hypotheses/analyses.
The Immediate Aftermath: minutes to several days (?) after Retribution
Three major things happen in the immediate aftermath of the Venice mission, likely within minutes to hours of the dropship returning to the Overwatch headquarters in Switzerland:
1. The debriefings: the four main agents involved in the Venice mission - Gabriel Reyes, Jesse McCree, Genji Shimada, and Moira O’Deorain - are debriefed on the mission, mainly by Strike-Commander Jack Morrison (although possibly with Captain Ana Amari and BW agent Gérard Lacroix present as well).
2. The Venice memorandum: as a result of the debriefings, Gérard Lacroix prepares a three-page memorandum that has (for “us the audience”) been mostly declassified. It covers Antonio’s profile, the events of the mission, and the main Talon paramilitary operatives (the four “minibosses”). Plausibly missing (or still “classified”) from the mission are potentially further pages of the memorandum or an entirely separate document dealing specifically with:
3. Blackwatch’s suspension and an internal investigation: likely, as a result of Moira, Blackwatch is suspended - either by Jack Morrison himself or by “higher ups” in the UN. At minimum, the suspension lasts from the ending of the Venice debriefings to the events of Null Sector’s uprising the following year. However, it is very likely the suspension was never formally lifted between “Retribution” and the fall of Overwatch (roughly a 2-year time period).
And, contrary to what people might think -
Blackwatch’s “suspension” means next to nothing in the interal workings of Overwatch.
Because the straightforward “truth” of the situation is that -
Blackwatch’s “formal suspension” was essentially “for show.”
…You could even call it a “masquerade.”
(A LOT more under the cut. Seriously. Like. Imagine if we had all this information in like, book format or something. Wouldn’t that be wild. Maybe I wouldn’t have to write all of these then.)
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