Apex Legends’ latest short, “Gridiron,” gave fans a few answers about Bangalore’s past. The video shows fans a bit of her interactions with Jackson after she awoke in the IMS Hestia and finally tells fans exactly where she got her Heirloom.
The cinematic kicks off at the end of the Frontier War. Bangalore fights off a cloaked enemy Pilot, who stabs the legend. Her injuries send her straight to the hospital wing of the IMS Hestia.
The video shows the final days of the IMC home base of Gridiron, surrounded by Militia troops. The IMC brass tells soldiers to enter attack formation. Bangalore’s brother, Jackson Williams, defies that order because he believed the war was lost. Instead, he told his crew to prepare for a hyperspeed jump, which brought them to the Outlands.
The Hestia crash lands on the Outlands, where Bangalore wakes up. Jackson tells her the IMC called a retreat and the ship was one of the few that made it out. Still clinging to her IMC loyalties, Bangalore believed the IMC would never give up Gridiron. She sends an SOS to “any IMC friendlies” requesting “immediate evac.” The system says there are no signals in range.
She receives a response from the IMC’s Commander Scryer, who asks Bangalore about the status of her commanding officer. Scryer presumably tells Bangalore how the War ended and how the order was not to retreat. The soldier confronts her brother with this, with him saying the war was a lost cause and that he’d signed up to protect his family. A landing IMC ship interrupts the conversation.
Commander Scryer appears, telling Jackson he was “a traitor to the IMC” and that his punishment for desertion was death. Bangalore tells Scryer he promised leniency and the commander replies he would give Jackson “a quicker death than he deserves.” Bangalore asks for a trial, but Scryer pulls his gun. Bangalore draws a pistol of her own and the commander appears to back off.
Instead of going away, though, Scryer calls an airstrike on the village, then personally chases after Bangalore and Jackson. Using his jet thrusters, he follows Bangalore and grabs her. The soldier takes Scryer’s knife from its sheath and plunges it into the commander, making him drop her to the ground.
The IMC commander shows up, and Bangalore and Jackson stand their ground. The commander also uses cloaking technology, and Bangalore, reminded of the fight against the cloaked Pilot at the beginning of the short, gets the jump on him and kills him with his own knife. This would become Bangalore’s Heirloom, added in the Chaos Theory event.
After the incident, Bangalore and Jackson went on the run. As she explained to Wraith in the countdown before the cinematic, there was another IMS Hestia—and that’s presumably the one from which Jackson went missing.
Although “Gridiron” doesn’t come with as many bombastic revelations as other installments in the Stories from the Outlands series, it still brought fans some much-needed lore for one of Apex‘s original legends—and one that didn’t get the spotlight until last year.
Stories from the Outlands is Respawn Entertainment’s usual way of delivering lore on new and old legends alike. Wraith’s “Voidwalker,” Bloodhound’s “The Old Ways,” and Pathfinder’s “Fight Night” told the stories of the original cast in the game. All of them also came with an in-game event, meaning fans may see a Bangalore-themed event in the coming weeks.
