Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S2|05: They Never Miss…
Is Steve calling us stupid? I think he’s calling us stupid.
To be fair, he’s not totally wrong. Collectively as a group, we’re very much about moving the plot from A to Z, and sometimes we kinda get impatient and blow through the exposition scenes. To borrow the appropriate Seinfeld reference, we “yada yada yada” a bit more than we should. Guilty as charged. The part about showing up at a final boss fight not really remembering why we’re supposed to be there… yes, that has totally happened before.
To be fair, part of the issue is that Bob Markee was traditionally our dedicated scribe and Plot Summarizer, so I’ve been pushed into a new role on the fly here. Bob was meticulously on the ball and could often summarize the action better than Steve could. Me… not so much. So at the risk of sounding defensive, I would like to say that I DO take notes; I feel like it dovetails with Basil’s role of “investigator” to do so. However, I think there have been times where maybe I haven’t latched on to what’s important about a particular conversation, so sometimes my notes are a little incomplete or focus on the wrong things. Also, as a secondary logistical thing, sometimes Steve just dumps stuff in the “handouts” channel in Discord, and rather than copy them to my Word doc, I just leave them there, which works… but there’s a delay while I realize that was one of the Discord notes instead of Word-Doc notes and I have to go looking for it.
So… yes we’re idiots. But we’re also trying to do better. Like Mr. Data, I’m attempting to evolve beyond my programming. Honest.
This week’s episode gives us the continuation of the warehouse fight. One of the main things that frustrates me about this episode was Pierson Droan being able to destroy the evidence before we reached him. But the reason I was frustrated when I was playing and the reason I was frustrated when listening were totally different.
When we were playing, I’ll admit that I felt like we should’ve gotten the evidence, and not doing so was at least a partial failure. But going back and thinking about it, I think I’m more frustrated at the mission design; that there wasn’t really a good chance to even GET the journals the way the encounter was set up. MAYBE if we’d gone in one of the side doors and gotten directly to Droan’s office, we could’ve done it, but with a frontal assault, there was just too much to fight. Also, an off-handed clue about “check out the globe in this dude’s office” kinda undersold the importance of the evidence; “hey, he keeps two sets of books and if we could recover those, dude would pretty much go away for life” might have put more of a spotlight on the books and suggested a totally different tactical approach.
Let’s say we know more explicitly that there’s evidence we want to preserve. If that’s the case, maybe we look for one of the doors that’s not guarded and try to sneak in that way. Or Dougie goes in as part of a stealth mission or Gomez goes in as part of a schmooze mission (Bluff/Intimidate/etc.) and tries to figure out where Droan’s office is before we rush the joint. So part of this is the guard captain’s fault for basically hiring us to be muscle instead of explaining it as a finesse job.
At the end of the day, we did the job we were contracted to do. We knocked some heads. It’s just the job itself could’ve been defined more clearly.
When it came to Seth’s line of interrogation… I can see both sides of this one, and it really comes down to whether this is a regular business that happens to be run by crooks, or more of an organized crime operation that happens to have some civilians working there. If it’s more of a business operation… people have shit to do and they’re not always where you think they’re going to be. To pick an example, at my job, I have an intern bullpen and a makerspace near my office, but I couldn’t tell you how many people were in either place. On the other hand, if it’s got more of an organized military bearing, yes, I’d expect Delta Team to know that Alpha Team has the docks tonight, Echo is patrolling the exterior, and Bravo is out on a delivery. And yeah, they’d probably know if their boss was in the building.
That said, I could’ve done without Seth throwing us under the bus with the “you guys aren’t coming up with any questions” when Steve overruled his line of questioning. For me, it got back to our role as muscle; we were there to arrest bad guys, so other than “where are the bad guys?” I didn’t really have any questions. Figured the guard captain would handle that stuff once we cleared the place out.
The remaining fights themselves weren’t that rough, especially once we healed back up to full. Droan was a little tough to hit, but he didn’t seem to have the same corresponding nastiness on offense. (I mean, yeah, he hit well, but no lightning or acid or crap like that.) So… numbers ultimately win out and it’s a pinata party. With the fight on the docks, the surprise appearance of the bunyip was really the only thing that added a wrinkle; otherwise, it was just another round of the grunt-level smugglers we’d dealt with fairly effectively up to that point. Though, OK, I love the fact that the bunyip was also named “Dougie”. It clearly needs to replace Sharky as the group mascot.
So we finish our task with aplomb, and even though Droan burns the books, we still get full credit for the assignment. Chadaxa is going to get her clean slate to work the festival, and hopefully, she’ll give us some information that will prove useful to our investigation of the bank job. (See. I DO pay attention.) But that… will be next week’s adventure. As always, feel free to stop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.