Arcane Season Two (part four)

S2E8: "Killing is a Cycle"​

Episode eight is split between two plotlines. Both of them are at least decent, if not good. However, they each felt like they neededat leastone more episode to properly set up before getting to this point. Probably more like two or three episodes, for one of them.


The One That Needed Another Episode

The original Zaunite protagonist duo of Vi and Powder, along with closely associated characters Ekko and Catelyn, finally get the reconciliation that they've been bouncing off of each other away from since mid season one. When Isha sacrifices herself to put down the berserk Vanderwolf and a bunch of Noxians who happened to be near him at the time, Vi was knocked out in the blast. Powder, apparently, brought her sister's unconscious body back to the Piltover police and then turned herself in. Vi is recovering in Catelyn's palatial family home. Powder, in a jail cell. Neither of them are especially happy about this arrangement, especially after Vi thought that she had talked sense back into Catelyn, but, well, she's still a cop.

And, more sympathetically to her, Powder did launch the missile that killed her own mother. I can see why Catelyn might have trouble keeping the kid gloves on after that, even though her mom totally deserved it lol.

This subplot really comes down to four critical scenes, each of them a conversation between Jinx and someone else as she languishes in her cell. First, an exchange between her and Caitlyn. Where Caitlyn tries to self-righteously extract a sign of remorse or repentance for what Jinx has done, and Powder just turns it around on her (and the Piltover police she represents more generally) in the obvious ways you'd expect. It's important that Powder isn't really arguing, in this conversation. She's basically given up on everything after losing Vander for a second time and seeing her own adoptive daughter die to save her. While Catelyn comes in adversarial, clearly trying to project her guilt and self-loathing onto someone else, Powder just calmly tells it like it is. And also makes a point of telling Caitlyn that she had no idea her mother was in that tower when she blew it up. It probably wouldn't have made a difference if she did know, but still, nothing personal. They've all killed people without it being anything personal. Those people all had loved ones who decided to make it personal, as Catelyn is doing now. See the episode title.

The second key "conversation" is between Powder and herself. Well, sort of. She has a dream-conversation with a figment of Silco, who expresses regret at all his many failures and how he harmed both Powder and Zaun itself more than he helped them. I don't know if the Prime version of Silco would have ever had the self-awareness to say all this, but the version of him we saw in the other timeline would probably make approximately these assessments. He concludes by telling her to stop trying to pursue a version of his flawed vision, and just walk away to save herself and Piltover-Zaun any more of this fruitless pain.

The third is when Vi, after multiple frustrated arguments with the ever-more-remorseful Catelyn, steals the keys to Powder's cell and releases her...only for Powder to lock Vi in before running off to commit suicide with Vi unable to stop her. Powder's interpretation of the "walking away" her inner voice urged her to do. Vi is as distraught as you'd expect...but gets an emotional bone thrown to her when Caitlyn comes down there and tells her that she was the one who ensured the cell block would be unguarded and the keys stealable. Leading to a (steamy) reconciliation between Vi and Catelyn.

One could read this more cynically, and say that Catelyn didn't have a change of heart here so much as she made an exception for a lover. But I think the show's intent is the former.

Finally...this scene is technically the teaser for the following episode, but it's really the proper resolution for this one, so I'll include it here. Powder runs off to Silco's former office and prepares to burn it down with herself inside, only to be caught up to just inside by Ekko.

In one of the strongest scenes of the entire series, Ekko talks Powder - the "Jinx" who he had a season ago been determined to kill despite Vi's insistences to the contrary - down from suicide. There are two details that really make this scene work. First, is that Powder's earlier statement to Vi before leaving her in the cell was "there is no good version of me," and now Ekko is here after having seen a version of her that anyone in their right mind would consider good.

Second is that Ekko still has a component of the intertimeline travel device with him, and it enables him to reset his consciousness up to four seconds back in time. My understanding is that this, along with the goblin glider, is Ekko's "schtick" as a playable character in League of Legends. So, after every time he says the wrong thing, every time he hesitates too long before answering her or interjects too slowly and she does it, he goes a few seconds back and tries again. With enough attempts, he's able to relay enough positive sentiments from her own alternate self - sentiments that she can readily imagine herself holding, since another version of her is the one he got them from - to talk her out of it. She follows Ekko back to Vi for a proper final reconciliation.

It's amazing. One of the best scenes of the entire show, if not THE best. Just on its own, Ekko using his extratemporal knowledge and powers to bring Jinx back in contact with her own better self goes a long way toward improving my feelings about season 2. Made all the more powerful for the ways in which it visually reflects some aspects of their fight scene on the bridge in the previous season.

So, the four young'uns are all now willing to trust each other and fight side by side against...well, um. So. You see. Well.


The One That Needed At Least Two or Three More Episodes

So, first of all, Mel Medarda undergoes a transformation in Black Rose captivity and gets gold shit all over her skin.

Apparently this is what the Rose was trying to push her to achieve all along. They tell her a piece of backstory I really don't understand about her mother having done some kind of "transgression" that resulted in Mel's existence and also doomed her siblings, and for some reason that means that Mel now has to go use her newfound magic powers to go stop Ambessa from doing yet another bad thing that has the potential to start another ruinous Mage War.

So, uh. Gold-shit-covered Mel goes back to Piltover from wherever this Black Rose facility is to go fight her mother or whatever.

Meanwhile, her mother and Slim Shady have secured the site that was once Viktor's commune and are cannibalizing Vanderwolf's body for shimmer-infused tissues to save Viktor with. It works. And um...Viktor and Ambessa come to an agreement for her to help Viktor get to the mass relay tower so he can do *something* with the fractal eldritch blob gestating in its basement, and in exchange he will induct anyone and everyone who wishes into his hive mind. She plans to order all her soldiers to undergo this process, because um...I don't know why she wants that, to be honest. The hexborgs didn't seem to be especially superhuman or anything in the previous act, and given their whole hivemind deal with Viktor at the center it seems like their loyalty would be questionable. But she wants it I guess, and he agrees. He then mutates the dead bodies of his acolytes into these cybernetic mannequin things that are in fact super powerful and dangerous, so...I guess she somehow knew he could do that before he did it lol.

Mel and Jayce meet up in the newly rebuilt Piltover council room. They start to have a hard hitting conversation, where Jayce finally calls her out for her cynical manipulations of himself and Viktor back in season one and she struggles to explain that she's turned a new (gold) leaf now, and I'd have liked to see where this confrontation ultimately led to as they got into the nitty gritty, but unfortunately one of Viktor's cyberzombies intrudes right then.

He and Jayce have a conversation that I literally cannot make heads or tails of. I don't know what Jayce is accusing him of, though he's accusing him of something. I don't know if Viktor is now alone in the hivemind after what Jayce did earlier, or if the others are just (voluntarily or otherwise) taking a backseat while Viktor uses their bodies. I gather that Viktor wants Jayce to grant him access to the tower so he can use the arcane anomaly in its engine to do a thing, but Jayce violently opposes that idea.

My best guess is that he's figured that allowing Viktor to do the thing at the tower will result in the apocalyptic results Jayce saw in that other timeline, but like...he doesn't try to TELL Viktor this. Just insists that it would be wrong for him to do the thing, and that he shouldn't have revived him with the hexcore after the attack if this was what he would do with his life afterward.

Oh um. Also apparently the reason Mel and Jayce survived Jinx's attack is because Mel unconsciously used her magic to protect them. Sure, whatever.

Anyway, they fight the Viktor robot and just barely manage to defeat it, and Viktor tells them that he and his Noxian allies will just have to take the tower by force then. There's a big dramatic montage of Jayce rallying all of Piltover-Zaun to fight against the Noxians and Viktorhive over a thing that I still don't understand. Meanwhile, Viktor migrates his primary consciousness into a reconstituted, hulked-up cyborg version of Vanderwolf. And um...apparently also says goodbye to the ghost of that lab assistant lady who will be leaving the network during this transfer. For some reason.

(this part, btw, is why I don't think that the ghost lady is just the hexcore tricking him. If that was it, it would have had her stay with him and keep gassing him up through this)

Still no word on whether or not the other people Viktor cyber-converted are still alive in there and how much free will they have. And whether or not this changed as a result of Jayce shooting him to pieces a couple episodes ago.

...

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!


One episode left. It's a finale alright. It aired.