Season 4 Recap

The gang was busy living their lives following the events of season 3 when each was surrounded by a bright light, and woke up in a gladiator arena on a space station. They quickly discovered that they had been abducted by the History Channel, who was using their newly discovered time travel device to snatch the greatest criminals in history and force them to fight in televised arena deathmatches.

The gang fought valiantly, but were all killed, only to awaken some hours later in a prison cell. The security chief heckled them and explained that they were going to die every night, and be resurrected here in the cells, and forced to do it all again the next night.

When they returned to the arena, another prisoner made contact with them, and offered to show them how to escape the arena to the rest of the station, if the gang agreed to destroy the station. She explained that when she broke out, she found the chief scientist’s notes, and the theory that if the time portal was destroyed, anyone who was time-displaced would be sent back to their own timeline.

The gang agreed, and proceeded on a whirlwind tour of the station, where they found the crew in open rebellion, fighting each other over the proper use of the time portal. One group, dubbed “Team Ratings” was running the arena combat broadcasts. Another faction, dubbed “Team Ethics” was opposed to the abuse of the timestream, and concerned about potential side effects. A third faction, the Ops Union was theoretically neutral, and just trying to keep the station functional while the crew fought in the corridors.

The gang made their way to a neutral territory bar, where they were asked to make their way to the cargo bay and retrieve a case of booze for the bar. In exchange the bartender offered weapons and supplies.

They also managed to look themselves up on Wikipedia, where they discovered that in this possible future, they’d all become some of history’s greatest war criminals, responsible for countless atrocities. Shaken by this discovery, the group began to grapple with the moral consequences of their choices.

In the cargo bay, the gang was pleased to find their old friend Nordom the Modron, who had survived all the centuries since they’d last seen each other, and was now the quartermaster. He let them take the booze and showed them a way to use the cargo tunnels to bypass the worst of the fighting.

Then the gang made their way through Engineering, where they were asked to take a set of space suits and stop a coolant leak on the exterior that was threatening to destroy the station.

After trading one suit to the bartender in exchange for a set of laser rifles and a bomb, the gang managed to blackmail the History channel into stopping the arena broadcasts, remove the current station Director from power, and allow them to film a historical documentary about the Burning of Mulmaster to clear their names.

Unfortunately, the Director had traveled back in time to sabotage their documentary (creating yet another timeline in the process) and now the group had been double-framed for the fire.

After discussing their options with the Professor (head of Team Ethics), the gang decided that all this mucking about with timelines was a fool’s errand, and the best course of action would be to ensure all the gladiators were released to their own timelines, and get the Professor (now the acting director) to agree to stop abusing the timeline.

So the gang stepped back through the time portal, returning to the exact place and time they were abducted, left to ponder the ethical choices of their lifestyles.