This post contains spoilers for Episodes 7 and 8 of Dispatch, now available on PlayStation 5 and Windows.
Well, intrepid gamers, it’s all led to this. After four weeks of ebbs and flows, the superhero sitcom Dispatch has reached the end of its first season. Thus far, the branching narrative structure has had its pros and cons, which many of the choices provided often leading to the same results — though the biggest ones have done an admirable job of setting up a high-stakes finale that feels unpredictable to some degree.
The major cliffhanger from last week’s Episode Six saw Robert’s old friend Chase racing off seemingly to his death, using his last ounce of speedster power to rescue Invisigal from the explosion at Shroud’s warehouse. Although that fulcrum was predetermined, regardless of how the game was played, it was a nonetheless shocking turn that gave the end of the second act a hefty emotional punch.
But what lies ahead is what’s most important. Can the Z-Team get their shit together in time to save Los Angeles, or at least avenge the man who never really thought they could be heroes in the first place? The answers lie in the last two installments of Dispatch.
Episode Seven: ‘Retrospective’
The penultimate episode opens in 2003 with a young Robert crying on the floor. It’s a visual that mirrors the very first scene in the first episode, except there it was blood running from the adult Robert’s nose rather than tears.
He’s speaking with a 20-year-old Chase, who hasn’t yet succumbed to accelerated aging. Chase doesn’t have much patience for Robert’s commiserating over his dad’s delinquency as a parent. He calls Robert a bitch (a name he can’t seem to escape even 20 years later) and goes to pick him up some goodies from the store. Before the jaunt, he strikes his signature running pose and quips, “Keep up” — the same words he says to Robert before speeding off to rescue Invisigal in the present.
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But luckily, Chase managed to survive his last big sprint, although it left him clinging to life by a thread. Blazer tells Robert that his old friend is proud of the man he’s become, though it’s of little comfort now. Even the mild-mannered Waterboy is upset, knocking over cups in the kitchen in his own weak way — that is, until emotion gets the best of him, leading to the lanky hero hurling a chair through the vending machine.
Chase hangs on by a thread, leaving the Z-Team at an impasse.
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Ahead of first shift, Robert hops on comms to regroup with the remaining team members now that Invisigal has been suspended. They’re all mourning in their own way — even the city itself seems to be as rain pours across L.A..
The somber nature of the day bleeds into the playable shift, where the usually mouthy heroes abstain from hurling insults and shooting the breeze. It’s eerie to see them all so quiet. After taking a couple of calls, they eventually loosen up enough to talk at least a little shit.
Afterward, Robert’s on his way out when Punch Up comes crashing through the glass door of the boardroom. Seems the Z-Team is holding an impromptu meeting to vote on the fate of Invisigal. Turns out, almost everyone wants her out for jeopardizing their collective redemption as part of the Phoenix program with her very public incident at the docks. To their credit, Robert has already cut someone for far less. The choice is up to the player.
Choosing to stand by Invisigal leads to an impassioned speech about everyone’s growth, but it reduces the team’s morale; agreeing to let her go doesn’t feel great, but makes everyone feel heard. Either way, Invisigal is in the room listening to her friends debate her fate, noticeably slinking out as the door seemingly opens on its own.
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The decision to cut Invisigal is a grueling one after all of her character growth.
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In the locker room, Invisigal is clearing out her stuff, feeling dejected. Robert tells her that she can’t throw away all her progress, especially given that she was trying to help him in the incident. That’s when the bombshell drops.
Invisigal was a part of Shroud’s crew the night Mecha Man attacked their headquarters. Even worse, she was the one to place the bomb that destroyed his suit — and his life — in the process. She did it for an augment that could aid her asthma, but she quit the same night, hence her ongoing struggles with the ailment.
Players get to decide how Robert handles the situation, running the gamut from total forgiveness to ending things if the two had sparked a romance. There’s a slew of ways this scenario can play out depending on all the variables thus far, including a steamy invisible kiss, but she leaves just the same.
On the rainy car ride home, Robert gets a text from Blazer with another hefty choice: tell the press that Chase was the one injured in the blast (outing his secret identity) or pin it on Invisigal as going rogue.
Robert ends up stopping at The Sardine, the supervillain bar from before, to drown his sorrows. A series of patience-testing exchanges with the bartender can turn really messy, and ultimately do one way or the other, as the grizzled, bespectacled patron at the other end of the bar puts a bullet in the server’s head. After all this time, Shroud finally appears — and he’s not alone. Whichever Z-Team member Robert cut from the team (Coupé or Sonar) knocks him out. They had to come back sometime.
Robert must stare down the barrel of the gun that killed his father.
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Dangling upside down, taking slices from his ex-teammate, Robert is confronted by the now-masked Shroud with the same gun that killed his father. It’s a good old game of Russian Roulette.
Before his luck runs out, Robert is saved by a very pissed off Blonde Blazer, who intimidates Shroud’s crew with the bluff of backup, or at least killing half the gang. A key thing to note here is that despite his ruthlessness, Shroud holds Blazer in high regard; he kills the bartender for disrespecting her and scolds either Coupé or Sonar for the same. Once a hero himself, Shroud seems more disillusioned than diametrically opposed to the good guys just for the sake of villainy.
Whisked off to the billboard where they had their first non-date, Robert and Blazer try to figure out what Invisigal is planning to do with the Astral Pulse; seems it never ended up in Shroud’s clutches after all.
But before they can formulate a hypothesis, explosions begin erupting across the city. Shroud’s forces are in full assault mode, but this time Robert isn’t letting Blazer leave him stranded atop the sign.
Episode Eight: ‘Synergy’
The finale opens in the aftermath of the sudden reign of terror across L.A., with all hands on deck at SDN. Blazer is going into the field to do some super heroics, and even Royd is picking up a shift, taking over Chase’s station in the cubicle next to Robert. Shorthanded in the middle of the night, only a few of the Z-Team are available; Golem already took his sleepy time gummies and is stoned off his gourd.
The final mission is a cascading series of crises for SDN.
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The shift is intense from the get-go — especially if anyone has low morale based on Robert’s reluctance to drop Invisigal from the squad. Worse still, a meter appears at the top of the screen that shows the state of things. If it drops too low, the city is screwed. Some heroes trickle over time, but others will need to be located by some tricky hacking of their trackers — and prioritizing which ones are found first is key.
Amidst the chaos, Invisigal turns up to assist and, despite some protest from her detractors, it’s a blessing. The Z-Team needs all the help it can get. Once everyone’s assembled, things get even worse as an overwhelming number of incursions crop up. At this point, Robert enlists whomever he can — specifically the one person he chose not to add to the roster episodes back (Phenomaman or Waterboy).
After putting out enough literal and metaphorical fires, the scope of the Z-Team dispatch area expands dramatically as Shroud’s forces, led by either Sonar or Coupe. Robert will need to weigh the benefits of attacking their syndicate to reduce their ranks with managing the tenuous situations across the rest of the city.
But when push comes to shove, Robert’s no dummy. He knows that Shroud, with intimate knowledge of the superhero playbook, wants to spread the SDN too thin. It’s time to take the fight to the source. The intense tug-of-war between Shroud’s army and the SDN requires smart thinking, with failures easily mounting up. Fortunately, there’s even more backup as Blonde Blazer herself steps in to help turn the tides to defeat the Z-Team’s former ally.
Blazer joins the Z-Team for their last stand, but is it enough?
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The reprieve doesn’t last long as the power suddenly goes out at SDN HQ. In the blackout, Robert stumbles across Royd duking it out with Invisigal, who’s returned to the base to apparently steal the Mecha Man suit using the Astral Pulse she lifted from the warehouse.
Royd subdues and binds her before taking off to restore the power. Robert will need to determine if he can trust the thief, but what other choice does he have? After activating his Mecha Man suit, he confronts Toxic (the douchebag baddie from the pilot) and ends up staring up at Shroud’s big trump card: a towering spider-like machine that is real bad news.
The climactic battle sees Mecha Man completely outmatched, even when Blazer shows up to help. But there’s hope; Shroud’s whole schtick is being able to statistically predict outcomes, but how can anyone predict what a bunch of often stupid former villains will do? The Z-Team fights as a unit, upending things for a while. But once Coupé or Sonar show up, things go south.
Aggrieved by their layoff, the ex-team member distracts and splits the fighting power of the team until they’re eventually subdued by a Robert/Blazer team-up. But Shroud doesn’t let the victory stand, blasting the blonde heroine with a near-fatal shot that takes her out of commission. And when all seems lost, a last second bolt — too fast for anyone to comprehend — tears through the spider-suit.
The chickens come home to roost for whichever co-worker Robert fired earlier.
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It’s Chase, newly empowered by Blazer’s amulet (which is a twist for players who decided against ever going on that date weeks back). Blazer, now the de-powered brunette Mandy, stumbles out of the wreckage. She found a new way to give the old-timer a temporary lease on life.
But even as the Z-Team cripples the suit and brings Shroud’s assault to an end, there’s one last twist: the psycho appears on the office roof dangling Robert’s dog beef over the edge, and reveals that Invisigal was a plant all along. The villain knew that she’d worm her way under Robert’s skin one way or the other. Forced to make an impossible choice, Robert must give up the Astral Pulse to save his dog leading to a more complex series of outcomes than we’ve seen previously. For once, a three-way decision can actually lead to serious consequences based on all of the previous paths the player has taken.
One way it can go is that Shrould is given omniscience by plugging the power source into his own brain and determines his only chance of survival is to kill Robert. As the last bullet in the chamber of his father’s gun barrels toward him, Robert’s saved as the last second by an unseen barrier. There’s an invisible girl taking the shot instead.
Beating Shroud to a pulp, Robert will need to decide if he’s going to make the kill or spare the bad guy. The repercussions are unknown. Alternatively, Invisigal can make a heel turn, executing Shroud herself. Escaping into the night, this scenario is a sadder one. Robert’s failed as a friend and mentor.
Players get multiple chances to redeem Invisigal, but every choice leads to something lost.
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As first responders clean up the mess and Shroud’s crew are packed into paddy wagons, the Z-Team gets their due on the local news. Breaking out the beers for a sunrise celebration, the good guys ignore their wounds to revel in their victory. But there’s no fine point to put on the story.
The culmination of all the player’s choices only leads to more as a string of decisions leave the story open ended. Is Robert a savior or an avenging spirit? Is the turncoat SDN member given pardon or punished for joining Shroud? Which paramour will Robert take solace in?
In the end, did Robert really do his job?
An unwritten future
From the onset, Dispatch has had to walk a fine line between telling a cohesive, engaging story and affording its audience the agency to determine where its various threads will go. For the bulk of the season, it was mostly effective. While small preferences mostly led to alternative scenes and chunks of dialogue, larger choices ended up heavily impacting the season finale.
But it didn’t always feel like the player was fully at the helm. While divergent paths like the Z-Team layoffs and picking a romantic partner skewed things to a degree, the narrative tree mostly stuck to the same roots. The finale did a solid job of making both the passive actions (like selecting dialogue) and the active ones (like the dispatch shifts) feel more meaningful. The chaotic playable section in Episode Eight can have tons of variables based on the ways players built out their teams, but only to a certain degree.
Season One ends with multiple possibilities, making a potential Season Two a tough proposition.
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On the backend, a bunch of major choices are thrown at audiences that are somewhat predicated on their previous ones. Certain options aren’t even available if the player has failed certain objectives along the way. But for the most part, many of the scripted scenarios feel destined to happen by midway, although there are off-ramps provided given the right selections.
But was it a success? As a TV show, Dispatch really works. It’s funny and heartfelt, and its characters are charming enough to make revisiting each episode worth it — if only to see what crazy shit they’ll do or say, or to relive some of the more tender moments. As a video game, it felt like there was less player agency than many would expect. The various outcomes hinge on only a select few critical choices, and the dispatch and hacking mechanics are more of a passive cozy simulation than a feat of skill.
The real question is where the series goes from here. The branching narrative manages to tie back together into a serviceable ending, but there’s also multiple ones. Picking up from here will be a huge challenge; without defining a canonical golden path, whatever comes next will be like creating parallel seasons of TV as prospective sequels.
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The developers recently said that the positive response to Dispatch (which sold over a million copies so far) has led to them considering a second season. It feels like a no-brainer given how delightful this inaugural batch of episodes has been, but it might not be any time soon. AdHoc has already announced they’ll be teaming up with D&D group (and Dispatch producers) Critical Role for their own video game and based on the sheer complexity of continuing a story like this, fans will likely be waiting a while.
In the meantime, there’s plenty to do by replaying the game and finding every possible deviation in jokes and dispatch mastery. However long it takes for the Dispatch to continue, players can spend time cobbling together their own perfect version of what season one ended up being.
