Arcane: Season 2 (part two (the second))

Apparently, cyber-werewolf is a popular League of Legends player character. And apparently they were dropping breadcrumbs connecting him to Vander from the beginning, though only a LoL player would be able to see them. This isn't an asspull. It was intended and built up to all along.

Does that make it any less stupid? No. It's just another place where the story is suffering from its need to stay tethered to League of Legends.

Like, look at this from an in-universe perspective for a second. Dr. Shady (Slim to his friends) has been wealthy, powerful, and well-connected since at least the beginning of S1A2. Think about how many human(oid) test subjects this guy must have had access to. What are the odds that Vander is the one guy who he kept ahold of for a decade or however the hell long it's been and used for this project?

It gets even worse than that. See, another detail I glossed over in my first season one post is that Dr. Shady himself was badly injured in the explosion. In his couple of brief appearances before that battle, he's a normal-looking old man. During that sequence, we see the explosion set a bunch of chemicals on fire, and the fire spreads into his lab room where he looks up in alarm before we abruptly cut away. In all subsequent appearances, he's disfigured and scarred and often wearing AdMech-esque medical support gear. The implications are pretty clear.

So, uh. When is he supposed to have recovered Vander's body, exactly? While he was nearly dying of burn wounds himself?

Did Silco's goons recover Vander's body and keep it preserved/alive/whatever until Dr. Shady recovered, even though Silco had just made his intentions to kill Vander as dead as possible very clear?

How is this supposed to have happened? Why are they supposed to have done it? Why would they make a point of nabbing Vander, specifically, as a test subject, and why would they have had the presence of mind to do it then when they'd just taken enormous material and personnel losses and should have been focused on saving their own?

The answer to those questions is "to tug at the audience's heartstrings, and to be able to traumatize Vi and Powder all over again in season two." Illogical thing that the story is forced to accommodate just to make things darker and more tragic. So far, Arcane has done a very good job at being a dark, cynical work without straying into grimderp territory, but...this is textbook grimderp.

And also just plain stupid on its face. "Werewolf Vander." Just...no.

To Arcane's credit, the story makes a really noble effort to redeem this concept. It makes Vanderwolf a really scary rampaging monster before the reveal, uses said reveal to move the plot forward in a new direction (well...for a while, at least), and then manages to make the sisters' attempt to restore his mind surprisingly poignant and touching despite the stupidity and contrivance.

The subplot gets kicked off when Dr. Shady himself is arrested by Noxian soldiers at the rally. Before they can grab him, he spills some blood (I think his own) on the pavement, and elsewhere in Zaun his creation detects this and activates. We get some scary POV shots from Vanderwolf's eyes as he rampages through the streets of Zaun in search of his master and mauls anyone who gets in his way.

There's a moment where his eyes briefly linger on the statue of himself, as if not sure if he recognizes it or not, before he rampages on. Nice touch.

Anyway, where this all goes is that Powder attempts a jailbreak to rescue Isha and whoever else happens to be within reach. Simultaneously, Vanderwolf is drawn to the prison to rescue Dr. Shady, compelled by the latter's blood alchemy. The two jailbreaks trip each other up, and it's pretty chaotic for a bit, but the outcome is basically:

• Vanderwolf overpowers Powder, but then briefly recognizes her and has second thoughts, running away into the underground. Jinx recognizes him in return.

• Jinx successfully rescues Isha and many other Zaunites, which has the effect of boosting her symbolic power for the resistance and encouraging her many copycats to continue doing their best to live up to her. Good thing she's actually doing something productive this time, instead of just breaking things!

• Dr. Shady is not rescued, due to Vanderwolf going off the rails and dashing.

• Vanderwolf causes extensive damage to the prison facility, kills lots of people, and leaves lots of Piltoveran and Noxian witnesses.

This has the result of Jinx bringing her tagalong to go reconcile with Vi and try to track down their foster father together, while Ambessa and Caitlyn rally their forces to track down whatever that fucked up werewolf thing that killed a bunch of their dudes is together.

While pursuing Vanderwolf, the sisters stumble on some old letters and records that I feel like someone probably should have already dug up by now, but I guess not. Included among these is an apology letter from Vander to Silco for trying to drown him that one time that never got delivered. These serve as a catalyst for some flashback bits to before the sisters were born.

Apparently, Vander and Silco weren't kidding about how they used to be like brothers. They used to co-own that tavern (explains why Silco made a point of fancying it up as soon as he had control of Zaun). And they were both close with the woman who would become Vi and Powder's mother. Neither of them seem to have been romantically involved with her, as best I can tell, but they were close.

That certainly does recontextualize some things. The sisters weren't just some war orphans that Vander felt responsible for. They (and possibly their now-dead foster brothers) were children of his close co-revolutionaries. Also makes Silco's extreme hot-and-cold treatment of them...well, it makes it something alright.

Anyway, got to set up some other stuff before getting to the climax of this act.


The Real Slim Shady

It doesn't take long for Catelyn and Ambessa to triangulate the prisoner who Vanderwolf was trying to break out. And to put that inmate together with a mysterious figure who the Piltover Enforcers have had on their radar for some time. They knew that there was a much more skilled alchemist than Silco behind the invention of shimmer and its associated drugs. They knew that there was a mysterious Doctor Shady who lurked the back alleys of Zaun. But it isn't until now that they put this figure together with the scarred old man in their cells. Or put either of them together with the legendary academy alchemist Dr. Marshall Bruce Mathers III who was banished for his unethical experiments decades ago. So, here he is. The inventor of the universal drugs-and-weapons component that's been destabilizing the Piltoveran regime for so many years, at their mercy.

Once he's been threatened and browbeaten a bit, Shady proves flexible to negotiation. He'll help them neutralize his monster, and even counteract shimmer-based weaponry, in exchange for permission to continue his research on Ambessa's dime. She pretty clearly wants him to do the same job for her that he used to do for Silco, which...well, this is yet another contributor to the growing tension between Ambessa and Caitlyn. And, implicitly, between Piltover and Noxus overall.

I'm not sure how much his word can be trusted, but Dr. Shady at least presents himself as a somewhat interesting character now that he has people talking to him about stuff. According to him, he was actually trying to revive Vander with his mind and personality intact, and only settled for turning him into a weaponized brute after he failed in this. Again, not sure if he's telling the truth here, but if he is then that does cast him in a somewhat different light than before. And it answers a few of my "why Vander, specifically?" question, if he was initially hoping to bring back the mind and social status along with the souped-up body. Not all of those questions, not by a longshot, but a few of them.

He also throws Catelyn's attempts at moralizing over how much suffering he's caused back in her face (which I have to admit was very satisfying to watch). All of Dr. Shady's research has either been in pursuit of curing death, or to get the capital he needs for the above. In a world where every person in a position of power has blood on their hands, where every social system is exploitative and cruel, can anyone say his actions are less justified than their own? Catelyn, of course, has got nothing to say to that.

...

There's some juicy implicit drama in Shady's backstory, if you look back at the other academic controversy we've seen in this series.

The guy running the academy - Heimerdinger - has been shown to have a huge blind spot where lifespan is concerned, on account of being of an ageless species. He also has an even huger blind spot when it comes to the underbelly of the society he helped create and lead.

One can easily imagine a young Dr. Shady being lectured by Heimerdinger about how life extension isn't really that urgent, there's no need to make such moral compromises in pursuit of it, all while sitting atop the throne of a Dickensian police state with crushing poverty and torture prisons. And Slim coming to conclusions based on what he saw and heard. Makes Shady's worldview understandable. Not justifiable, but understandable.

It also adds a nice bit of irony to Heimerdinger himself going into the streets of Zaun where Dr. Shady now lives at the end of season one, and finally realizing how much he didn't know. Though granted, that also feeds into my growing frustration at what the show hasn't been doing with Heimerdinger since then.

...

So, this guy proved more interesting than I expected once we started getting to know him. Though I did kind of groan and roll my eyes when he showed the boss ladies the preserved body of his own dead child in stasis to explain his motivation. IMO, this is a totally unnecessary cliche whose presence only hurts the character. There's enough death in the world by default to motivate someone like Dr. Shady, he doesn't require a bargain bin Mister Freeze backstory to explain.

Anyway. He drives more tension between Ambessa and Catelyn, and also agrees to help them capture Vanderwolf. That brings us to...


Victor of Borg

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.

Like, they're all mentally linked, and Victor can do the ASSUMING CONTROL meme with them. On one hand, this seems to be completely voluntary on their parts. On the other hand, the fact that they're all - without exception - perfectly willing to enable this and none of them seem to present the collective with any dissent suggests that there's some kind of brainwashing going on. Or maybe being a hexborg really just is that good and anyone who becomes one is rationally happy and content with it, who knows.

And uh, also that lab assistant who got vaporized by the hexcore is living within the hive mind network as a force ghost or something.

Um. Okay?

Early on in this act, we were told that Jayce, Heimerdinger, and Ekko all vanished after going into the mass relay tower's basement and meeting the alien from Annihilation, with the first two's disappearance playing a major role in Ambessa's success at soft-conquering Piltover. Well, after a while Jayce reappears - now with a big scraggly beard and a traumatized expression, as if he's just spent a month in the Mad Max dimension or something - and confronts Victor via his drones. Trying to tell him he needs to stop doing everything and help him destroy all hextech and hextech-derived inventions immediately, before it's too late. Um...okay? Victor tells him no, too late, he's decided that the hextech hivemind is a good end for the world.

Um. Okay?

Well, after they manage to find and calm Vanderwolf, Vi and Powder bring him to the legendary healer who's recently set up his cult compound in Zaun. Victor is eager to help, though recovering Vander's mind from whatever the fuck Dr. Shady did to his brain proves a real challenge for him. We get some cool psychedelic imagery of him trying to make mental contact with him in hexborg-vision, though.

It seems like he might be slowly making progress at getting Vander's mind back (though...depending on what joining the hexborg hive does to your personality, I'm not sure if "back" is really the right description). After spending some time living among the hexborg, helping them build and garden and craft, Vi, Powder, and Isha are considering joining the hexborg collective themselves.

But then Dr. Shady tracks Vanderwolf to the commune and - after failing to convince Victor to turn him over - aids in an attack. And then Catelyn meets up with Vi and decides to secretly work with her against Ambessa, but then their betrayal of the Noxians gets nullified when...ehhh, you know what? This is way too complicated. A lot of stuff happens really fast at the end of episode 6, some of which really needed more setup. But anyway, during the chaos Jayce shows up and kills Victor in his brain bug gigercave while the battle is going on outside. This causes the entire hexborg collective to scream in agony, collapse, and die. Including Vanderwolf, albeit more slowly and agonizingly while going into an indescriminate killing friendly. And Isha the little girl sacrifices herself to blow up Vanderwolf and a bunch of Noxians while the sisters escape.

So I guess that whole subplot amounted to nothing?

Victor's attempts at healing Vanderwolf were actually managing some pathos and poignancy despite the goofiness inherent in Vanderwolf's concept, but with that not having any payoff aside from the little girl dying and the sisters being even sadder than they were before...well...I have trouble accepting Vanderwolf's existence at all if this was all that it was netting us.


Whatever the Bloody Hell This Is

Meanwhile, Medarda Junior is being interrogated by evil wizards in an evil wizard dungeon. No insight into the Black Rose here. Nothing about them as characters, or their motives and politics. Apparently, the reason they're targeting the Medardas isn't due to anything Ambessa did. It's because she got knocked up by a magical being and gave birth to a unique superhybrid, and they're trying to figure out which of her children it is and then abduct that one.

Um. O...kayyyy?

This is...what is this?

Anyway, that happens in this act.


I have no idea what to expect from the final three episodes. I'm starting to lose faith in where the story is even going, but I haven't lost it yet.