AWESOME. Clear. Much more divorced from the WC trio. Also, I don't see the backstory so much as backstory; it's more like a nonlinear narrative device, well-incorporated. It doesn't feel parenthetical, the way you've smoothed it out.

The last sentence is bothering me. Parallelism? It seemed to work, or it seemed to be working, I know they're redundant, but the verb form is no good just "be".