Hi! Sort of as usual, I hope you don’t mind me jumping in with commentary. These are all really good points, and I agree that there’s a lot of potential for a spin off that continues the story after the show is over. And I could see Tech coming back possibly turning into a mess, because there are absolutely ways to mess it up. There should be permanent consequences. I would also argue that there potentially (potentially) already are.
As long as the writers play their cards right, the consequences are kind of baked in. Let’s say Tech comes back completely unscathed. It doesn’t mean that the time the others spent mourning him never happened, that Omega didn’t have to deal with losing him, or even that Wrecker’s not going to have spent all the time Tech was gone blaming himself. I could see any of them, especially Omega and Wrecker, having this weird adjustment period when Tech comes back, especially if it turns out he had a plan to survive and just didn’t have the time to tell them, where they aren’t mad, exactly, but there’s a part of them that’s still grieving and they can’t get the image of him dangling from that line out of their heads, and they’re not sure where those emotions should go. And it won’t erase the time Tech spent away from everyone, no matter what it is he gets up to or what happens to him. He’s going to be going through things on his own for at least a bit; that’s going to be new, and it’s going to be difficult, no matter what it is and even if it’s for a short time.
Now, the other thing Tech coming back can’t erase is the fact that he was still willing to sacrifice himself. (I’m going to be tooth-achingly schmaltzy here for a second). The weight of Tech’s sacrifice—and this is a hill I will die on—doesn’t come from his presumed death. It’s that he was willing to die. It’s that he looked at the situation, knew that if he cut that connection he was probably never going to see Hunter, Echo or Wrecker again, never fix things with Crosshair, never see Omega grow up, never really get to have a life outside of being a soldier, and loved his family enough that he went through with it anyways.
That said, I think the writers have a chance to do something really interesting by having Tech come back, but not necessarily unscathed. I could go either way on Tech being experimented on by Hemlock (I’m currently thinking that Hemlock didn’t find Tech either), but I do think there’s a decent chance he wont come back exactly the same. Maybe he can’t walk, maybe he has to use a cane, maybe he has some kind of chronic pain from a spinal cord injury, but whatever it is, he has some kind of injury or physical disability that cybernetics can’t totally cover, and he can’t fight or be a soldier the exact same way he used to. Disability is a huge part of the text (I was going to say subtext but it really is just text), and adapting to change and carrying on is a part of Tech’s whole…thing. The writers could show Tech adapting to doing things differently than he used to and living with the consequences of the choice he made to save everyone and, if they do it well, it could be a fantastic way to keep Tech’s story going alongside everyone else’s, have that eucatastrophic clone force 99 family reunion that the narrative really seems to want the audience to want, and lend even more weight to Tech’s sacrifice (especially if he’s able to turn around and tell Omega that he’d do it again, even knowing the consequences).
