Blood
Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix Creator on the Series’ Big Swings, From Rayman to The Warden
Warning: The below story contains full spoilers for Netflix’s Captain Laserhawk, which is now streaming on Netflix. If you haven’t watched the series yet, check out our spoiler-free review.
Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix takes some big swings with Ubisoft IP, to say the least. It’s actually a little surprising that Ubisoft even let creator Adi Shankar do things like (and this is your last spoiler warning) make Rayman an unhinged propagandist, or blow Beyond Good and Evil protagonist Jade’s head clean off in his wild mishmash of the publisher’s characters.
As Shankar told IGN in a recent interview, however, Ubisoft was in full support of this madness – to the point where one of its owners actually went with Shankar to every meeting “to literally sit in the room and say, ‘Yes, he can do all of this. Yes, we are going to allow that.’ “
After watching the series, we got the chance to pick Shankar’s brain about some of those wild choices, including the reveal of one big character that was kept under wraps pre-release.
What the heck inspired these takes on Rayman and Bullfrog?
Rayman starts as a pretty terrible propagandist news anchor, although he clearly has a soft spot for the hybrids of Eden. The character takes a hard turn, however, when Rayman has a big realization after talking to Bullfrog, and Eden meets Ramon – basically a badass killer version of Rayman. Before Bullfrog is killed on live TV, Rayman (er, Ramon) takes matters into his own hands instead, going full vigilante.
Shankar: “I would say maybe I had 7 to 10 images flash into my brain immediately as to what the project is, right? One of them was Rayman with two Tommy guns.”
Bullfrog, meanwhile, is an easy standout in the series. Both an incredibly skilled killer inspired by Assassin’s Creed and the show’s frequent moral compass, he quickly becomes easy to root for and interesting to watch. But, uh, why a frog?
Shankar: “I think frogs are just cool, you know what I mean? I feel like they’re taken for granted in a lot of ways. You know what I mean? What the fuck is a frog? Where the hell did they come from? Okay, tomorrow if aliens show up, the UFOs land, they come out and they all look like frogs, and they’re like, ‘Okay, that makes sense. I buy that.’ Yeah, they’re like, ‘the frogs are actually alien. They’re like an alien thing.’ Because they’re just so wild. And the way ancient cultures have responded to frogs… I could talk about frogs for hours.”
On Bullfrog’s strong moral compass: “The thing that I dig about Assassin’s Creed is effectively a meditation on morality.”
Can Sarah Fisher be redeemed?
In one of the biggest surprises of Captain Laserhawk, the character referred to as The Warden for the first half of the show is revealed to be Sarah Fisher, the daughter of Splinter Cell protagonist Sam Fisher. The show takes a particularly dark turn on her story, however, revealing through flashbacks that she’s the reason for her father and Marcus Holloway’s (Watch Dogs) tortuous imprisonment. Just when it looks like she’s turning around, having bonded with Laserhawk, we learn that she actually infected Laserhawk’s robotic arm, and is still serving the evil government council, Eden Tech – which has also gone by the Templar Order, something familiar to Assassin’s Creed fans.
In the end, she survives in her spider tank form despite Laserhawk blowing up both of their human bodies. After all that, is there any good in this character?
Shankar: “I would look at it this way. This show is a cartoon, because it’s drawing off cartoons. It’s drawing off anime. Some of the characters here are drawn purposefully more as cartoons: Bullfrog, Rayman have more of an adult animation influence. But overall, a big piece of this is the Saturday morning cartoon feel. We even have old school sound effects and whatnot. But I think part of the juxtaposition that I wanted to craft with this show is to have a Saturday morning cartoon that exists in shades of gray. So it’s like Breaking Bad as a cartoon. You know, it’s a Saturday morning cartoon.
“I would say that she’s a traumatized character, and you get into a little bit of the trauma. She’s a character living with guilt from childhood. I hope that comes across. So however she shows up, there’s an internal logic, there’s an internal framework that’s driving her to behave in a way that is rooted in psychological realism as to how someone would act.”
Was The Warden always meant to be Sam Fisher’s daughter? “Always… [Sam Fisher] was always part of it.”
Was it a difficult decision to kill off Jade so early?
On of the most shocking early moments of the series is when it kills off Beyond Good and Evil protagonist Jade in particularly gory fashion. She’s immediately charming when she’s introduced, and even more endearing after she fails a seduction test that’s portrayed in Captain Laserhawk as a dating sim. That makes it even more shocking when she’s killed by Pagan Min (right in front of Pey’j, who swore to protect her), and then has her head blown up so The Warden’s gang can escape.
Shankar: “Yeah, It was dark. Yeah, it was hard because in a way, I’m transcribing what’s happening. There’s a story playing out in my mind, and I’m transcribing it. So yeah, it was hard to experience that. I did experience the heartbreak. Because to me, that was a real thing that happened. Does that make sense? Because there’s an element of not being able to differentiate between fiction and reality, because this is all occurring to me in my mind, and this is, it all feels real… I mean, anything can happen in this world. Yeah, there’s no training wheels here, for sure.”
About those live-action sequences…
In episodes 4 and 5, Captain Laserhawk dips into live-action for certain scenes between Laserhawk and Sarah. It’s where the two manage to get a little more vulnerable, surprisingly bonding before Sarah betrays him. Were the live-action sequences supposed to feel more emotional?
Shankar: “That was 100% intentional. I think with everything in this show, the idea is to have everything be multilayered… It’s one emotional choice to be able to shift into live action and use live action to really pivot into drama in an emotionally satisfying way. And then it’s also a little bit of social – or not social commentary – but reality commentary because they’re (the audience) like, ‘Wait, what? And so, live action is actually virtual reality, and the real world is a cartoon. What?’ But, that is how I see things, that is a belief system about the nature of reality of the universe.”
Were there any Ubisoft characters that Shankar would’ve liked to fit in, but just didn’t have room for?
Shankar: “It’s kind of like a yes, but also a no, and allow me to explain. By that I mean there are a lot of characters that are in the world, and I can literally sit here right now and tell you, ‘Hey, this character is in this world. They’re not here. They’re actually in a different region, and this is what they’re doing, and this is what their life is like, and this is what the quote unquote alternate Bootleg Universe take is on this character,’ but they don’t fit into the purview of the story we told in these six episodes. So does that make sense? So it’s like a yes and no. It’s like, yes, they exist in the world. They just don’t exist in the story that we’ve told about the world.”
Would Shankar like to return to tell more stories in this world?
The show ends in a way that clearly teases at more to come. Not only is Sarah Fisher still alive, but a mid-credits scene shows a typical video game “Continue?” option, with it having the viewer click “Yes.” Captain Laserhawk hasn’t been renewed, but we asked Shankar if he would want to tell more stories in this dystopian universe.
Shankar: “I will say this: This isn’t just a show. This is an entire universe that exists [in my head]. And so what you’re seeing with the show is six episodes of this universe. And I’ve thought through this. I mean, not just thought through it, I live it. I live it. So do I know more of what happens in this world? Yeah. I hope to be able to reveal – because it’s not telling, it’s more of a reveal, right? These things have happened already, and I’m just telling them, you know what I mean? They’ve already happened to me and now I’m just revealing what happened. So I would love to reveal more of what has happened.”
Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix is now streaming on Netflix.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
