Arcane: Season 2 (part one)

This review was commissioned by Aris Katsaris.


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.

Where the first season left off, it seemed like most of the dramatic questions had been answered, and the themes brought to their conclusion. With Silco dead and no provisions in place to keep the undercity together without him, Zaun is essentially ungoverned. Piltover, likewise, has lost most or all of its chief governing body in Jinx's attack, and any surviving leadership will find themselves unlikely to trust Zaun with independence even if they still had anyone to negotiate with. Vi and Powder are probably irreconcilable now, if Powder is even capable of reconciliation with anyone about anything now that she's gone fully "Jinx." Catelyn and Heimerdinger learned their lessons too late. Councilor Medarda's warlord mother, Ambessa, is perfectly poised to de facto take over Piltover and turn it into her private arms manufacturing complex after crushing Zaun for them.

And, at least for the first act of season 2, that's pretty much exactly what happens.

There are some curveballs. Some interesting character arcs that don't flow purely from the initial premise. There's also one developing subplot that is mostly independent of the broader politics (which is a mixed blessing in practice). But, for the most part, this feels like an extended post-credits sequence after Jinx blows up the tower. There being a lot more long, artsy stretches that are high on visual interest but low on story progression adds to this impression.

I like the long art shift interludes, to be clear. They're very stylish and evocative. Some of them are outright music videos, and quality ones at that. But the much, much higher concentration of them than the previous season's - combined with the very extended scenes of people sitting around mourning the deaths of characters who died in the S1 finale that partially overlaps with it - feels like filler in an act that just doesn't have enough story to go around.

I don't want to overstate these misgivings. There are still two thirds of a season left to go, and it's possible the creators just struggled to fill out this transitional phase of the plot. The substance that is present is generally up to the high standard set by the previous season. It just feels like there's not enough of it.

There are four main plotlines going on through S2A1, some of them much more closely interwoven than others.


The Politicians

The hex-rocket attack ended up killing a lot fewer people than one might have expected. Three members of the ruling council, including Caitelyn's mother, were killed in the explosion, and several others wounded. Medarda Junior (I think her first name is Mel?) looked like she was standing in just the right spot for the warhead to detonate inside of her literal skull, but apparently it went over her shoulder or something, because she survived. So too did Jayce, and (unfortunately for everyone else) Medarda Senior, Ambessa.

In the wake of the attack, and with Jayce preoccupied by both a grieving Caitelyn and a dying Victor, Mel suddenly finds herself in a truly unfamiliar situation as the one voice of reason within what's left of Piltover's government. The other remaining councillors really don't want to hear that this was all the work of a single disgruntled ex-legbreaker of Silco's and that there's no big enemy they can bring their full forces to bear against. It doesn't help that her mother has basically bought out one of the other surviving councillors, a previously unimportant character named Salo, and is using him as a native frontman for her attempts to use a military-adjacent crisis to take over Piltover and begin full-scale hexweapon production.

Well, she uses him as a "front" for as long as she can help herself. Even moreso than her daughter, Ambessa is the type who has trouble staying out of the spotlight.

When things don't go their way quite fast enough, Ambessa and Salo get some help in the form of a Zaunite terror attack on the memorial ceremony for the lost councilors. A pretty big attack too; multiple shimmer-berserkers using Silco's old battlesuits, infiltrators in police uniforms to kick things off, and a weaponized civilian blimp. Jayce, already barely functional with everything he has going on, has his most painful moment yet when one of the terrorists turns out to be the mother of the little boy he accidentally killed during his abortive raid on the shimmer labs, and she's gunning for him in particular. She even manages to injure him before going down.

While a lot of the successful defence was done by Vi and Caitelyn (who happened to be in attendance in honor of the latter's mother), the final mopup is done by Ambessa and her retinue who arrive in the most perfectly dramatic moment to make themselves look imposing and impressive.

The show treats the revelation that she helped orchestrate this attack as a big reveal at the end of episode 3, but...come on seriously lol. It was so obvious that I was half-convinced the shocking eleventh hour twist would be that she wasn't involved.

I'm also kinda narrowing my eyes at the fact that nobody besides her own daughter seems to suspect her, despite their being an openly acknowledged mystery about how they could have pulled something this big off without inside help and Ambessa being both a) the one person best positioned to benefit from it, and b) a literal foreign despot who's been throwing her weight around and openly expressing frustration at not getting the civil war she wants yet.

Yeah...

I did enjoy watching Mel engage in spycraft and politicking trying to prove her mother and Salo's meddling over the following episodes, at least. The subplot stemming from this is engaging and well-written, and it's a big ironic enjoyment watching Mel get pushed into a redemption arc in reaction to her mother's awfulness being right up in her face again.

We also get a few glimpses of the enemy that Ambessa is desperate to tech up against, and with it an answer to one of the worldbuilding questions I asked in my season one reviews. The Medarda homeland of Noxus is apparently a semi-balkanized Holy Roman Empire kind of place, and they're just one of several dominant families. The people who Ambessa and her late son foolishly picked a fight with are a magic-using Noxian faction called the Black Rose. So, I asked where are all those dangerous wizards that we've heard about are supposed to be in the present day, and now I have an answer.

They make a failed assassination attempt on Ambessa during her stay in Piltover. And then, near the end of episode three, they manage to abduct Mel, presumably under the mistaken impression that they can use her as leverage against her mother.

The Black Rose is portrayed entirely from an external, adversarial perspective, and to all appearances they're exactly the kind of ruthless, power-mad wizards that Heimerdingger warned us about. On the other hand though, this is almost exactly what the show did with the Firelights before revealing who and what they actually were in S1A3 in the wake of them abducting someone, so I'm reserving judgement on the Black Rose until we see what they're actually doing with Mel.


The Poison

Catelyn. I wanted to like you, Catelyn. I really did want to like you. The sad thing is that I don't know if I can actually call what happens to her in these episodes a corruption arc, because it increasingly seems like this is what she really was all along.

Scratch this girl:

And this one bleeds:

Yes, the final scene of this act literally has Catelyn putting on an ersatz SS trenchcoat as she assumes leadership of Piltover's now Noxus-aligned police enforcers.

Catelyn had my sympathies for the first episode. Her mother wasn't a character the audience was ever given a chance to sympathize with, and her family as a whole has been portrayed as thoroughly unpleasant, but still, she just lost her mother to both a) the same criminal she'd been failing to arrest and b) her lover's precious little sister. But with her family and government's social pressures all pushing her to process it a certain way, and Vi not doing the best job at being a mitigating influence, everything she'd been learning about Zaun goes out the window. The unaccountable violence and brutality that her fellow enforcers have inflicted on Zaun for decades vanishes in the face of the personal pain she's suffered now. When the not-even-remotely-suspicious terror attack strikes her mother's memorial service and she has to be one of the people fighting for their lives against souped-up Silcoists, she can't understand what sort of animals would do this. She wonders that right in front of Vi, and only barely backs off when Vi reminds her that enforcers killed her parents and burned her neighbourhood to the ground in front of her.

Catelyn feels the base violence necessary for change, but she won't see the base violence necessary for preventing change. Even when she starts enthusiastically performing it herself.

As for Vi, well...her role in this arc is weird. Largely as a consequence of her role in the previous arc being weird.

In S1A3, Vi was the one agitating for the council to send an army at Silco's infrastructure, accompanied said army, and then got mad at Jayce when he got cold feet from the collateral damage. I said at the time that I had trouble believing this coming from her at this point in her life. And...it seems like the story ALSO had trouble believing it, because come the beginning of season 2 she's suddenly acting the way I'd have expected her to act all along. Pushing for a light hand with minimal disruption to the Zaunites' lives. Advocating for surgical assassinations over military raids, and for careful consideration of the facts before action period. When Catelyn asks her to join an elite strike team going into Zaun after her sister, Vi reacts with the outraged disgust at the prospect of joining a police enforcer operation that I *thought* she was going to have at Jayce's proposal in the last season.

In the end, Catelyn talks her over by convincing her that joining her spec ops team and hunting down Jinx ASAP will be the only way to prevent Ambessa and the Council from going full Netanyahu. And Vi reluctantly puts on an enforcer uniform herself, after being made to think that seeing a Zaunite wearing it will be the best way to convince the Piltover government that there are still some good ones out there.

...

If this sequence with Vi and Catelyn happened before the one with Vi and Jayce, Vi's character arc would make a hell of a lot more sense to me. As it is, the best justification I can give for it is that Vi just couldn't think about anything besides killing Silco until he was dead, and now that he is she's able to actually think about things. It's not a great justification, but it's the best I've got.

...

Where this subplot goes really dark is in the tactics Catelyn employs for her little killteam. After her mother's death, Catelyn was given access to some family secrets only known to its current heads, and she learned about a massive public works project her ancestors undertook back in the days when Piltover actually cared about its progressive principles. A system of massive airducts connecting most of Zaun and Piltover's industrial centers and shunting the worst of the air pollution out of the city. The air quality in Zaun isn't good, but without these ducts it would be a hell of a lot worse.

Catelyn's mission objectives are 1) kill Jinx, 2) stop the production of the "shimmer" supersoldier drug, and 3) eliminate all remaining Silcoist leadership figures. Most of those objectives happen to be clustered around the industrial zones. Thus, the team is heralded by a cloud of toxic waste that paralyzes and blinds their victims before the enforcers in enclosed hardsuits can murder them or drag them off to the dungeonlike hell prison, and in their wake the streets remain choking and hazardous for some time. During the first couple of killteam scenes, we aren't told what's going on at all; there's just a sudden grey cloud all over the place, and then we see monstrous silhouettes and hear screams.

The first such scene actually uses camera angle tricks to make Vi and Catelyn's hair blowing around in the toxic fumes look like the tentacles of a literal monster. For all the audience knows, this is literally a demon released by Victor's hex-computer experiments or a monster created by rogue alchemists, until the following episode reveals the truth. Catelyn has literally weaponized her ancestors' philanthropic legacy to poison the people they built it for, and she's doing it in their name.

Vi goes along with this by convincing herself that the toxic eruptions are the least dangerous way to get the nearby streets clear of civilians so they don't get caught in the crossfire. I'm not sure how much paint she had to chug in order to convince herself of that, but hey, she was motivated.

The killteam takes down a number of the chembarons as they claw at each other for dominance in the power vacuum left by Silco. Eventually, they also manage to catch up with Jinx.


Splitting it here.