spoilers for RWBY Volume 1 and Hyousetsu Teikoku, TL;DR for this behemoth at the bottom

Before dissecting what makes RWBY: Ice Queendom such a nightmare, there’s one thing that has to be discussed, and it’s that for both us fans who stuck with the original series since the early days, and the team behind the franchise’s inception, this show is a dream come true. When Monty Oum created RWBY and got his friends (Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross) to bring his ideas to script in the early 2010s, he provided several anime such as Cowboy Bebop as homework so his friends could get more acquainted with his ideas and vision. RWBY was always inspired by anime as well as anime-like games such as Blazblue, with entire scenes and fighting styles being lifted from those aforementioned titles, among others over the years.

When the four main girls of the series got to be part of Blazblue Cross Tag Battle in 2019, one can only imagine how happy those friends must have been, keeping the series and Monty’s ideas afloat 4 years after his tragic and sudden passing in 2015. Likewise, even with the troubled production that was no-doubt hampered by COVID-19, RWBY becoming the very thing that inspired it should be seen as a testament to how far the dream of a man and his friends has gone.

Furthermore, fans of the show have needed something to lift their spirits up in years, and no, the Cross Tag inclusion doesn’t count given its own controversies regarding the handling of the RWBY cast (among other things). RWBY has long since abandoned its school roots in favor of an adventure series, and most of the later volumes have justifiably received large amounts of flak compared to the early entries. Adding how COVID-19 impacted the production of Volume 8 and how for the first time, a volume had to be split in half and the release of the next volume would be delayed by an entire year. After the rough road fans have endured following Monty’s death and the myriad controversies that have plagued both the show and the company that produced it (Rooster Teeth), this show’s announcement must have seemed like a beacon of hope.

Unfortunately, we had to learn that damn near ¼ of the show would be spent recapping the first volume of the show before launching into its own original arc.

Let’s not play fools, RWBY is an awful, broken murikanime that has lost any of the life and charm that kept it afloat during its early days. None of the writers, not even Monty, have ever had a good grasp on the characters or setting they wrote, with retcon after retcon, character shift after character shift, and the myriad of ridiculous time-wasters and other baffling decisions that made Volumes 5-8 so especially galling. Even back in Volumes 1-3, most of the aforementioned issues were apparent. Hell, the fact that the OG writers decided to add an overarching subplot about human on faunus racism leading to a civil rights turned extreme terrorist group into their pseudo-magical school adventure fantasy and that it was reportedly inspired by their understanding of the Black Panthers, should set a military base worth of alarm bells inside your head. Amidst all the sloppy, amateurish high-school sitcom-esque writing where character arcs are horribly clunky at the best of times, we have racism and bigotry to sloppily contend with.

It’s important to highlight much of what makes RWBY so bad even from the early outset in order to show where Ice Queendom stacks up in comparison, and how it somehow manages to be even worse. However, one must start with the obvious aspects this show improves upon. Where Volume 1 started with Ruby busting a shop robbery ala Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, Ice Queendom decides to flesh out Ruby and her family on the day of the event, providing some extra pathos and grounding to her character while also taking the time to do the same for Weiss regarding the White Trailer. To hype up the then-upcoming main series back in 2013, four trailers were produced to focus on one of the main leads each, and given that Ice Queendom focuses more on Weiss, focusing on her trailer and expanding upon it was a smart decision. Furthermore, the original series pretty much only has Blake and Weiss have any discussion on the White Fang nonsense and how it has led to Weiss and her family company’s racism towards the faunus, whereas Ice Queendom lets Ruby and especially Yang weigh in more on those topics. As such, the girls have more agency on one of the main sources of the group’s many fractures throughout their early escapades at Beacon Academy. Sure, Volume 1 should have had more of said pathos and agency to begin with, but that does mean that both in subtle and more overt ways, Ice Queendom improves on a few of the main show’s shortcomings.

Alas, the show somehow manages to be so much worse than what it covers and spins off from. Let’s start with how the show’s bigger issues affect the V1 material before delving into how the new content suffers from similar problems.

The show has some of the worst pacing in an anime, period. Hell, Sword Art Online, a show infamous for its first arc being time-skips and rushed ideas galore, has better pacing. Volume 1 was almost 2 hours long, though Ice Queendom opts to skip most of one infamously bad arc, so the 67 minutes that make up IQ’s first 3 episodes cover around 90 minutes worth of material. However, it’s already been established that they also cover the White Trailer. Ideally, given that the show often combined scenes together, the show would be able to cover what it’s working within a reasonable amount of time, but there were two gigantic wrenches thrown into the cogs of the machine.

For some ungodly reason, episode 1 decided to cover and expand upon the Black Trailer where Blake defects from the White Fang, even though the show provides more than enough information on why she left that sinking ship of ever-worsening morality to restart her life in a more honest way at Beacon. They covered this in episode 1, when, if there was any place to put it, episode 3 would fit the bill as that is where the White Fang and racism ideas in V1 are brought to the forefront. That’s about 5 minutes of material that could have been spaced out better to set up the big forest test the group must pass in ep 2 to establish teams, so that ep 2 can have more time to breathe when adapting that mini-arc. As it stands, several explanations for why characters do the things they do such as being forced to permanently team up upon eye-contact are tossed aside. Sure, they added one scene to explain how Weiss and Ruby wound up encountering a giant nevermore, but everything else suffers as the pacing has to tighten up far too much for comfort.

Episode 3 has it so much worse with its big wrench. In episode 2, they introduce an original character looking for an anime original type of grimm known as nightmare grimm, and both Weiss and Jaune find themselves affected entirely offscreen with weird, mysterious markings showing up on them out of nowhere. Cue the middle ⅓ of episode 3 being original material of Jaune being trapped in a nightmare by said grimm and the new huntress sending Jaune’s teammates to help him. Even discounting how only close friends can enter even though Jaune’s team does after only a day of them teaming up and having barely any time shown getting to know each other, this entire sequence is a rushed disaster focusing on Jaune’s insecurities regarding his disappointment, which have two tremendous issues of their own. Firstly, given that Jaune’s arc with his bully was skipped and only the parts of him getting whooped by the man and later having a talk with his teammate Pyrrha were kept, this means that the explanation of him forging transcripts to sneak into the elite Beacon Academy were skipped. A core aspect of his insecurities which explains why he is unusually weak at combat and ignorant about basic mechanics such as a person’s aura, is skipped in favor of general shittalking by suits of armor before he is quickly rescued. Secondly, the effects of this original scene being inserted here end up resulting in the stories covered in the first and last ⅓ of the episode being utterly eviscerated.

Weiss has two problems the show tackles relating to her stubbornness and lack of respect, those being her refusal to accept Ruby as her team leader, and her racism towards faunus such as Blake (who she didn’t know was one until ¾ into episode 3). The first part of episode 3 has her finding herself increasingly annoyed at Ruby’s behavior before snapping at her, leading to the two getting talks from their professors on their weaknesses and lack of faith before they make up at the end of what was a single episode of RWBY Vol 1. Originally, we saw how Weiss' ideas for the group's living room arrangements got vetoed the morning before class began proper, as well as Ruby’s myriad antics within the classroom which led to Weiss getting angry at Ruby and deeming her childish and incompetent even if she was still in the wrong for being so confrontational so quickly. Here, we only see Ruby dozing off in class and backseating Weiss during her demonstration as opposed to the many times Ruby goofed off. Combined with how oddly warm Weiss was at the start of the episode, now it just feels like Weiss is almost entirely in the wrong, so the scenes with the professors talking to them work so much less and the complicated reigniting of the conflict given both girls’ issues comes off as lesser if not senseless. As such, when Weiss gives Ruby a specific cup of coffee –that she asked RWBY about in V1 instead of somehow already knowing here– after seeing Ruby having passed out during intensive night studying, there’s even less impact than before.

The last ⅓ of ep 3 has the arrival of stowaway Sun and the fallout of several dust robberies trigger the White Fang conversation and heated arguments regarding Weiss’ racism, her baggage, and Blake’s baggage before she snaps and outs herself as a (former) member and dips. The bulk of the material with the girls is actually improved, but then we get the climax. In Volume 1, Roman Torchwick, the criminal boss from early in the volume, reappears with his White Fang members (for reasons that don't get explained here or make sense when they do in Volume 2) to rob a Schnee Dust cargo boat before Blake, Sun, Ruby, and their new friend Penny all arrive to fight him, in that order, after Weiss and Yang discuss Blake’s reveal and fleeing. Not only is the ensuing spectacle the best fight in Volume 1, Ruby re-encountering Roman provided some semblance of natural conclusion, and Penny forcing him and his team back after revealing her OP robot powers was a fun cherry on top that explains why he did, in fact, have to retreat. Ice Queendom skips EVERYTHING in favor of cutting to Penny having swords and rocket feet out of nowhere with Roman retreating from what we didn’t get to see, completely deflating any and all tension and spectacle leading to everyone’s reunion. Perhaps if Jaune’s nightmare plot was removed from ep 3 and turned into its own episode immediately after the V1 material ends, there would have been enough time to give these other parts of the episode the time they desperately deserved and allow for things to breathe and make sense…well, more sense than they do now, given that RWBY Volume 1 is still broken. Maybe if we had 4 episodes instead of 3, many of the problems would be alleviated, but given how troubled production was, perhaps that wouldn't have turned out well, either.

Alas, one can make the argument of "ofc the recap content is bad, it's adapting RWBY, the original stuff is probably better". Yeah, it is, inherently. This arc isn’t horribly rushed. However, most other issues remain, but transitioning into why they exist in the current arc and what said arc is even meant to be about requires acknowledging one more weakness that both V1 and Ice Queendom’s 3rd episode share. Even though Blake was the most active in confronting Weiss’ racist views before running away, it’s only through Ruby and especially Yang that Weiss starts to reconsider by the time everyone reunites with Blake. Perhaps having Weiss stumble upon the battle with Roman and the supposed White Fang or something could have been the final push she needed to reevaluate both Blake and the faunus at large, but as it stands, she only gets the ball rolling and gets everyone to look for her and make up. In the main series, this is how Volume 1 ends before Volume 2 has her Kirito it up by having already developed offscreen so she can immediately be a more pleasant person. The majority of Ice Queendom is an interquel theoretically designed to fix this issue by further delving into her headspace and using V1’s content as a jumping off point to begin showcasing that offscreen development to bridge the gap between the two volumes. In fact, the finale is dedicated to focusing on early Volume 2 content, further lending credence to this idea.

To get to the meat of the issues with how they handled said idea, let’s not dwell in matters like how the mechanics of the nightmare grimm world things Jaune and Weiss have in terms of how the characters are affected by the victim’s perception are inconsistent between the two. Nor should we focus too hard on how nothing about new character Shion’s semblance and overall powers make sense in the context of RWBY’s world. RWBY’s worldbuilding is notoriously broken, with contradictions and retcons all over the place, and the real issues start with the mere conceit of how things here are meant to play out. If you haven’t seen RWBY Volume 1 it can be easy to conclude that neither Weiss nor Jaune should have had anyone close enough to rescue them at the point in which they’re trapped. This is because Ice Queendom completely skips over the throwaway line explaining that there was a time skip of a few weeks between the Ruby and Weiss leadership spat story and the rest of what episode 3 covers. As such, the mere conceit only works on any level if you assume that the V1 continuity and Ice Queendom’s continuity are the same despite all the subtle and less than subtle alterations. Better make your peace with it pronto cuz while Jaune’s nightmare lasts 8 minutes, Weiss’ lasts for 8 whole episodes. Both have plenty of baggage to unpack but since they cut out what would have substantiated Jaune’s deal for the sake of brevity, we’re gonna spend an eternity with Weiss’ dream. In an instant, the show goes from being incomprehensibly fast-paced to being unbearably slow, and the fact that neither Yang nor Blake jump in immediately like Ruby did so that we can drag things out longer doesn’t leave a positive impression of the arc’s start.

The dreams also muddle what is the real person trapped in the dream and what is a predatory version of them and their insecurities about both themselves and others created by the grimm. The idea does explain why Weiss seems out of character in her dream after a while, and the dream settings do allow for some neat main series callbacks while theoretically allowing for more insight into their character with their interpretations of characters invading them and how those who do are altered to Weiss’ perception of them. It does get rather baffling when Team JNPR gets thrown into the mix, especially with Weiss’ portrayal of Pyrrha. Said depiction doesn’t work on a textual level given she’s in the dummy jail with the rest of her team despite being idolized by Weiss, and even on a subtextual level of Pyrrha being this girl alone on her figurative pedestal and how she sings “Mirror Mirror” to convey it…why would Weiss know that? Even going the route of projection given that Weiss has sung songs for her family in the main series, it’s still such a threadbare connection that even discounting how it can only come about with knowledge of later mainline RWBY volumes, it's such a threadbare, tenuous reach that the non-sequitur event is perhaps the most puzzling moment in the show. Hell, even the later potential explanation of Weiss wanting to keep the visages of people she cares about trapped doesn’t work because she barely got to interact with anyone in Team JNPR barring like 2 minor conversations with Pyrrha and Jaune. What, did they do all of that OFFSCREEN, like in REGULAR RWBY?! Fuck off with that shit!

Needless to say, even though the bullshit per minute quota is mildly lowered for the big arc compared to the V1 retread, the show’s still dumb. It does eventually try to develop Ruby’s insecurities about being a leader. The execution is…fine, minus how Ruby doesn’t even remotely feel like any version of her from the show at this point as she feels more and more like a stock heroine who cries a lot. A lot of her early V1 quirks like her asocial nature and love of weapons also had to get dropped given how late V1 practically rewrote her entirely. Everyone else also feels like facsimiles of their main series counterparts, like Blake being ridiculously cold at first before being just there, Ruby feeling a lot less homely in her childlike manner of optimism, and Weiss being weirdly too warm and sanitized compared to her V1 self.

Furthermore, exploring Weiss’s family baggage in a weird, loosely canon interquel is a bit of a tricky prospect, as we aren't allowed to learn anything important that won't come up in later volumes otherwise it would have to and thus make no sense here, but it can still allow the others to get to know her more. Unfortunately, they hardly expand on any of Team JNPR, that group’s dynamics, or how they interact with members of Team RWBY considering they didn’t get to do that all too much until Volume 4, and with only Jaune being able to tag along halfway through the show, the rest don’t get to do anything. It’s especially annoying considering Weiss idolized Pyrrha and empathizes with the idea of being isolated via being put on a pedestal, yet they never get to interact past episode 2, which, again, is volume 1 content. The fact that a non-speaking dream version of Pyrrha has more involvement than the girl herself is criminal.

Neither the old writers, nor script writer and series composition writer Tow Ubukata have any understanding of RWBY’s cast and it shows with how utterly stilted and devoid of any semblance of expressiveness or banter almost everyone is 99% of the time. It honestly makes the entire excursion feel like a waste of time, as there’s almost no real expansion of any character or dynamic, and it doesn’t even remotely develop Weiss, either. Weiss doesn’t actively grow or struggle with curbing her family-ingrained bigotry, she gets trapped and warped into a muddle perversion of herself who has to be rescued. Any insight that can be gleamed is utterly minimal, and once the arc is over, it’s clear that the dream story has just been one useless cul-de-sac not actually progressing anything. If it weren’t for episode 12 FINALLY progressing that shit for the first time by having Weiss properly make up with Blake after the final V1 storyline and later sit with Sun while her friends question if she’d be comfortable doing that, the entire purpose of the show would have been completely and utterly wasted! Now it’s just mostly wasted…

Speaking of the arc’s conclusion, the latter half just devolves into contrivances galore. Critical explanations are overlay delayed, important items to keep the characters safe and alive crop up outta nowhere for the sake of plot armor, and apparently the Jaune nightmare grimm that was imprisoned wasn’t even taken out for over a day for literally no reason other than because the writers needed it to be given to Blake as a last-ditch cop-out effort to help Weiss and make Blake the final boss in the “Weiss Struggles To Not Be Douchebag Hitler” show. It’s nothing short of maddening. By this point, a lot of critical pieces of information the show previously used as tension against the characters and their lives just get discarded for no good reason other than “the plot said so”, as is tradition for RWBY.

Honestly, even if the show was consistently well-animated, which it isn’t, it’s hard to say that Ice Queendom would be any fun. While the characters were jittery and not well-established for the most part, what made the early volumes of RWBY fun was the comedy and the few character dynamics that did naturally exist and result in banter. The show wasn’t exactly batting a thousand regarding its comedy, but there are some legitimately funny moments here and there thanks to how characters like Nora were presented, and how the show took the time to show its cast chilling, throwing pillows, getting quippy and smarmy, etc. Ice Queendom is just so unbearably dry that all of that gets thrown out the window, so the more in-your-face wildcards like Nora get toned down to oblivion and said moments of life got removed entirely, Attempts at jokes are few and far between given how stilted, stoic, and stock everyone is. Outside of a cute nod to V1’s background shadow people in episode 2, even chuckle-worthy moments are scarce enough to be counted in one hand. The only one with any life to her is Yang, at least until episode 12 when the show finally lets the girls be cheeky dickheads to each other and get into lively food fights and whatnot. Still, it’s not through sitting through over several unbearable and lifeless storylines just to get to the finish line and start seeing Ice Queendom attempt to have fun.

Another contributing factor to the lack of fun in this show is its visuals, which are woefully inconsistent. Studio SHAFT isn’t exactly a stranger to terribly rushed production cycles that require serious post-airing BD patching, and sadly Ice Queendom is no exception. There are certainly some bursts of fun, lively, fluid Hiroto Nagata sakuga and even shading to add a sense of dynamism to the fights and a few other moments throughout. Occasionally, the show’s art direction provides some striking colors, and the show’s commitment to trying to sell a coolness factor pays off with some well-presented and shot sequences. Then you have the other 95% of the show which looks bad even by seasonal standards. It’s clear that directors Kenjirou Okada and Toshimasa Suzuki want to preserve the “coolness” and “aesthetic” the series tried to give off from the initial trailers and character designs, but there’s a myriad of reasons why things didn’t quite pan out.

Frankly speaking, the presentation is all over the place. Just like how some scenes manage to look sick and mysterious, there are other frankly baffling creative decisions. Occasionally, the show presents this awful GATE level split-screen for no real rhyme or reason, leading to several instances of abysmal editing throughout. Throughout the V1 portion of Ice Queendom, the texturing on the character models, backgrounds, and sometimes freakishly thick black outlines often results in a very sloppy, muddy look to everything. Even most of the animation is lacking in impact compared to the simple yet well-choreographed fights Monty Oum did in the early RWBY volumes back when he and his team relied on Poser for their 3D rotoscoping. Furthermore, There’s very little crunch to most of the animation, outside of strange places like Ruby’s victory pose in episode 2, and the vast majority of attacks, landings, and general collisions all feel limp and weightless. As a result, most of the fight scenes range from mediocre to downright terrible compared to being among the few saving graces of early mainline RWBY. On that note, while the CG in early RWBY can best be described as the level you’d see from Vtuber models, the CG in Ice Queendom is perhaps less flattering, and it only increases once the anime original content kicks in. The show shuffling between overly glossy and ridiculously flat artwork for its characters doesn’t help with the show’s either, especially for the male adult characters, which leads us into the topic of huke’s take on the original character designs.

huke made a name for himself designing for Black Rock Shooter and Steins;Gate, among other works. His artwork has this wispy, mysterious, ethereal quality to it, especially for the female designs of those aforementioned titles. Sadly, they do not translate well for RWBY’s approach to anime-esque character designs, as they feel far more ho-hum than enigmatic. The resulting mismatch results in a jarringly ugly look that often swaps between greasier than a fry cook’s face after work, and flatter than a pancake, and the early premiere versions of episodes 1-3 had it even worse than the proper airing versions and the rest of the show, probably due to the rushed production cycle. The art style benefits the snowy dream Weiss presents, but the redesigns for each of the main girls are all over the place.

Nega Weiss and Nega Blake are interesting extremes of their views, with the former being this complicated multi-piece imperial design that can be stripped down for combat, and the latter resembling Adam, the embodiment of how far the White Fang has fallen. Ruby’s redesign is also fine, highlighting the kiddy that Weiss sees in her while still feeling appropriate for the weather and maintaining her primary color. Yang’s is more complicated than before with a new emblem and more brown to resemble her V5 design, and as usual for her, there’s no yellow barring her hair despite it supposedly being her primary color. Blake’s main redesign for this season is an absolute dumpster fire. While the inconsistent purple highlights on Blake’s hair in the show’s take on her original design was done for stylistic purposes, here, it might as well be her primary color for her new outfit rather than black. The white has been kicked largely to the curb in favor of grey, and the stitches and ear patchwork along with the colors and nature of her new outfit in general make her look like a trashy, beat-up, sexualized and oversized stuffed animal. It’s as ridiculous and displeasing to look at as her V7 design. As for the JNPR redesigns, they’re fine, as they’re more or less similar to their main designs while keeping their primary colors consistent and exaggerating what little specific elements Weiss could possibly gleam from them.

Unfortunately, the visuals somehow manage to tank considerably in the 2nd half, as by the midpoint of the show, the wonky animation and modeling which seemed to be kept to a minimum in episodes 4 and 5 compared to 1-3 come back worse than ever. Grotesque CGI fights and incomplete drawings not masked by moving panning shots in time are some of the wilder instances of the show’s production issues in episodes 6 and 9, respectively. Episode 10 is where 2 good cuts get surrounded by the animation completely melting, as the stilted character movements are cranked up to 11, shots break continuity and the 180 degree rule consistently, and the embarrassing choreography can’t even be seen half the time with the animation constantly being cut away from while also constantly being reused in a show that reuses animation like a Super Robot or Mahou Shoujo anime. Sure, when episode 11 isn’t looking like total dogshit it does pick things up quite a bit, and there are some occasional stylistic switch-ups in episodes 1 and 9 that look great, but generally speaking, the show’s visuals are complicated in how bad they are. Honestly, Ice Queendom looks worse than even RWBY Volume 1 on the whole, and that was made by amateurs at a gamer internet animation studio that wouldn’t have remotely been considered pro-grade back in 2013. At least V1 looked kinda consistent, even with the obvious shortcuts and awful walk cycles. Even the Mistral Arc volumes of RWBY are animated better than this, and considering how equally catastrophic most of that section's fights are, that's saying something.

Perhaps the only saving grace of RWBY’s that was kept somewhat intact here is the music. Sure, none of the tracks by Nobuko Toda or Kazuma Jinnouchi are as grandiose or beautiful as some of the more whimsical and wispy tunes of Jeff Williams’ early RWBY score, but it’s a solid OST nonetheless. It takes a while to pick up, but there are some solid orchestral tracks and guitar pieces to match the theoretical intensity of what RWBY tries to present in its big arc. Similarly, the inserts by Void_Chords are decent, even if they can’t match up with most of the alt metal songs Casey Williams performed for the main series. The OP and ED do fare a little less well though. “Beyond Selves” by Void_Chords feat. L tries to be a bombastic and triumphant jazz tune, but the mixing is so muddy and the compression goes so overboard that the track feels overly restrained and muddled. “Awake” by Saori Hayami is an ok, if still over-compressed attempt at an epic song. Honestly, the music in the show feels a little unremarkable, but that’s still the best thing the show has going for it, unfortunately.

It’s still utterly insane that the sound effect editing is so bad that not only are some effects mistimed, but artifacts from unused storyboards were left in. Is it worse than early RWBY’s horribly compressed sfx? Who knows?

What happened here, exactly? Was it Gen Urobucnhi’s planning, Tow Ubukata’s script and series composition, Eddy Rivas’ supervision? SHAFT’s scheduling issues? Whatever the case, RWBY: Ice Queendom is an idiotic, lifeless disaster that can’t live up to how it tries to present itself 95% of the time. It’s two distinct shows that each fail spectacularly at their own ways while barely feeling like the OTHER piece of shit it’s trying to harken back to. There are some decent scenes and ideas explored once in a blue moon. There are some bits of solid if not stunning animation here, with more to follow once the staff has to clean things up for the BDs so that the show doesn’t stay looking like Assassins Pride or some shit. However, the pulseless Ice Queendom wastes a lot of time and chances to justify or explore anything, as is RWBY tradition. Unless you really miss the early days of RWBY and don’t feel like watching the first volume again, this show isn’t worth your time. At best, just watch the last two scenes of episode 12 between V1 and 2 when you rewatch RWBY in preparation for V9. Better yet, if you were interested in this show and haven’t seen the franchise yet, steer clear of both! RWBY has long since lost any of the soul, style, humor, chemistry, or occasional inklings of compelling character writing that propelled the show to stardom in the mid-2010s. If you found yourself woefully disappointed after thinking this spinoff had promise, just know you’ll be feeling that a lot by the time you’ve caught up to RWBY proper. If you’re one of us veterans, you know the drill.

No, using Monty’s name to discredit Miles, Kerry, Eddy, Kiersi, or even Tow, is not part of the drill. Hate the show, not his friends and their collaborators. The man’s dead; let him rest in peace.