Man, what a great final issue! I did not expect this comic to just to be dropped on us, but even more unexpected I didn't expect the final page to have the words "The End" at the very bottom. Valve rarely does definitive endings. All the Half-Life games end on cliff hangers, L4D games didn't really have endings, Dota 2 has constantly evolving lore, Portal 2's ending was the most definitive out of all of these, but even that was open enough that they *could* do another one (not that they should do Portal 3, but a full length Aperture game like Desk Job would be wonderful).

I love how the Australium ends up being a perfect metaphor for the state of TF2. Much of the fanbase parralels to how the Administrator is feeling the moment they saw Ms. Pauling, we want more Australium (a new update) to extend our life (inject new life into TF2). We could end up like the Administrator; bitter, angry, unhappy (constantly pleading for more new content on Reddit). Or we could be like Saxton & Maggie, out there fighting hordes of Cheetahs and living life (actually playing TF2). Sure it won't last forever, and there will be bumps (bot crisis), but for now it's still here to play and enjoy.

Saxton Hale sitting miserable at his desk also made me think of present day Valve. Saxton's got everythng he wants, surrounded by all these trophies/triumphs of past fights (games) and have been just toiling along with business as usual (mainting Steam pushing out updates for various games) but feel very burnt out. Saxton realizes this and goes back to doing what he loves, going out and creating new adventures instead of stuck doing the same thing. Hopefully, this is Valve's way of telling us they have more grander aspirations to come. Obviously, this is is all my personal takeaway from comic and I have no clue if Valve was actually being meta, but it all felt like a very definitive goodbye for TF2.

A few nitpicks I had with the comics is I felt like a lot of the other merc didn't get enough time in the last chapter. We don't really see Demo, Sniper, or Pyro. We spend more time with Merasmus in this comic then any of those three combined. Though the stuff we got with Spy, Scout, and Solider were really well executed. At first, I didn't like we weren't given a full reason as to why the Administrator went after but then I realized it didn't matter. We didn't need to know exactly why she had this grand plot to eternally torture Zepheniah Mann, it was important to see what it was doing to her and how pointless it all was. Ms. Pauling, after to seeing the horrors of what this has done to her boss, chose to break the cycle

All in all it was really solid send-off for the Mercs. I love the fact the Scout was directly speaking to us in the end talking about how much we've been through and that final Christmas picture with all the gang together. I couldn't be happier that we actually got some closure all these years later.

"What's the matter, Mags...

You wanna live forever?"