Arcane season 2 was conceptually damaged even before getting into the pacing and storytelling issues.

I'm going to restate what I pointed out earlier, about how much time early season 2 spent on long, slow mourning scenes and artsy music video sequences. Again, to be clear, I *liked* most of the music videos. I'm glad that they were there and that I could see them. But like...if they knew they had this amount of story to tell and this little time to tell it in, what the hell were they even thinking when they did that stuff? Priorities!

This episode tells us what happened to Ekko, Jayce, and Heimerdinger after they met the Annihilation-blob in the relay tower's engine room.

So, Victor has sculpted a little section of the Zaun outskirts into a psychedelic pseudo-organic landscape, where his cult of former shimmer-addicts are becoming a cyborg hive mind.

This was an idea that someone had. They then proceed to include this idea in the story.

So I guess Victor was right, but like...not for the reasons that he said?

For the most part, the first act of Arcane's second season is exactly what you'd expect. This is an intentionally double-edged description.