Guilded Age

TBH, I think we overestimated the comedic potential of the “flooding prison incident.” It seemed like a nice gag: our heroes found themselves in an outrageous situation and haha, you’ll never find out exactly why they were there. But it wasn’t really that outrageous by the team’s usual metric, and it’s a lot more mysterious why Ardaic would call it “the flooding prison incident.” Did the team somehow cause the prison to flood? Was that a valuable piece of property? Were there other prisoners on other levels? Did they get out?

The gag fits better with the “running away from explosions they caused” vision of our heroes seen in the Moribundi fight than the lowercase-p peacemakers they were becoming. This chapter– this scene, really– is devoted to killing off that original template, so Phil brought back the flooding-prison gag partly because he knew we’d soon have no more use for it.

And in retrospect, the other items on Ardaic’s checklist hardly seem like sins to “overlook,” since it’s hard to believe the Houses would’ve preferred Scarlett or those cultists to remain alive. I think of Ardaic as an honest guy, but the best defense of him I can muster here is that he’s fudging details because he needs to instill discipline in these paratroops, and “you did what we wanted done but not the WAY we wanted it done” isn’t likely to motivate them as much as “you done fucked up and your jobs are on the line.”