Arcane Season Two (part three)

For the final act of Arcane, I've decided to change my structure. The broad strokes, arc-by-arc format worked for season one and the beginning of season two. If I had to review those parts again, I wouldn't change it. However, the way the plot is progressing and the focus is shifting is making now makes that less ideal for dissecting them. I believe the quality of my previous post suffered for this.

So, for this last act I'm going to go episode by episode. Three shorter posts, one to cover each of the final three chapters of Arcane. Each of these episodes is tightly focused on a different subplot, and while they each have a lot that happens in them I think I can give all of them the space they deserve in one and a half thousand words apiece.

Two out of three of them are better than what came before, so that's good.

S2E7: "Pretend Like It's the First Time"
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This episode tells us what happened to Ekko, Jayce, and Heimerdinger after they met the Annihilation-blob in the relay tower's engine room. The answer is...arbitrary in a way that kind of feels "because the author says so," but there are some hints at a possible in-universe explanation, so I won't hold that against it just yet. The hex-anomaly transported them to different timelines, and also seemingly to different moments within those timelines. In a manner that seems oddly purposeful.

Ekko and Heimerdinger arrive in a world where the burglary of Jayce's illicit lab went differently. Jayce happened to come home at a different moment, the explosion happened in a different spot, and Jayce and Vi were both killed in the blast. The other kids were arrested minutes later.

Without Jayce being around to speak on his own behalf, and with his research materials seemingly all destroyed, the Piltover authorities simply chalked it up to a case of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes." The kids all received short jail sentences for burglary charges, as the explosion and death was clearly down to the recklessness of the scientist who kept a highly illegal secret lab in his apartment rather than the intruders.

So, the kids do time and get out, and they and Vander all grieve the death of Vi. Shortly thereafter, in the Piltover high council, Councilor Heimerdinger suddenly has a change of heart and begins calling public attention to the historic and ongoing injustices of Zaun. He personally leads a massive urban renewal program, cleaning the air and water, creating high-paying local jobs, and investing in the education of Zaunite youth. Over the course of the next few years, the lanes are transformed. They're still the poorer, more blue-collar side of the city state, but the wealth inequality is much smaller, and there's more support available for the least fortunate among its people.

What happened is that Heimerdinger Prime arrived in this timeline shortly after the explosion. Apparently, his mind just overwrote his younger self's in this timeline. He's in his local body, with future memories of the prime timeline, and he's admirably proactive in correcting his mistakes now that he's been given this second chance to prevent things from reaching the boiling point.

Then, some years later, Ekko Prime wakes up in his local self's body too. In this world, Ekko was found and recruited into one of the new programs for gifted Zaunite children, and is a promising biochemistry student at the Academy's new Zaunite satellite campus. Heimerdinger had a hunch that Ekko Prime would suddenly show up in this version of himself's body eventually, so he's been using the academy connection to keep tabs on him and wait. It's fortunate that he runs into him so shortly after his own arrival, because Ekko Prime is really weirded out by his new surroundings.

With the manhunt for the burglars never happening, Silco wasn't able to make his move. When the Piltover government suddenly turned a new leaf and made meaningful efforts into fixing Zaun, well...I doubt it was an overnight change, but he eventually calmed down and reconciled with Vander.

The most uncanny part for Ekko Prime, though, is this version of him's girlfriend.

Powder's become a bit of an underachiever, on account of guilt from getting her sister killed making her afraid of being too proactive again. However, she's also gotten the mental health care she needed, and is looking forward to inheriting Vander's business one day even if he wishes she'd do something more cerebral with her life.

On one hand, Ekko Prime is amazed to see a world where everything went so right for people not named Vi. On the other, he's acutely aware that these are not "his" people. In fact, seeing this now, seeing what everything *could* be, he's more motivated than ever to get back to the versions who need help.

Heimerdinger doesn't think it's possible. I'm not sure how much of that is him being his usual conservative self, and how much of it is cowardice at the prospect of having to actually fix his mistakes instead of undoing them. He seems very willing to convince himself that the prime timeline is effectively out of sight and out of mind.

Ekko's arc in this episode has him being tempted by the prospect of staying in the good timeline, but deciding that wouldn't be fair to everyone else. The turning point for him is a mourning session that he and Powder have over Vi. She's still alive in the Prime Timeline. She deserves a happy ending too. He can't leave her and the Firelights, if they still exist out there in the multiverse. As for this one...he just commemorates Vi Prime in this world by painting her image on the tree that the Firelights used to memorialize their dead in the Prime timeline, and by telling Powder about her other self's genius and power without burdening her with the more unpleasant details, motivating her to do more with herself here too.

While all this is going on, Jayce finds himself in the future of a different timeline, where things went more or less the same way as in the Prime universe. The region formerly known as Piltover-Zaun is now a Bloodborne level.

Everything is Giger'd into a fractal multicolored hexborg-mass. The only living creatures are mutant cyborg zombies that lay in weight among the piles of corpses for prey to come close. Jayce spends most of his time here mending his own broken bones and surviving on mutated rats and cave-fish after the zombies chase him into a ravine.

I will say, this section is some of the best visual work in this entire series. This depiction of the surreal, bombed-out mutation nightmare version of the city Jayce once knew is just phenomenal.

He even finds his own corpse, petrified and fractal-fleshed and overgrown with mutant plantlife. Which...is completely different from how Heimerdinger and Ekko were sent to their own timeline. Like I said, this feels arbitrary in a very convenient way. But, regardless.

In the good timeline, Ekko Prime manages to convince Heimerdinger Prime and Powder to help him find a way back. Recovering broken shards of the magi-crystal from that old bombed out apartment (erm...apparently they never rebuilt it? weird.) and using what Heimerdinger remembers from the Prime timeline and Powder's general smarts, they spend months building a hextech device to send them back where they belong.

Although...only Ekko ends up using it. Heimerdinger has to stand outside of the field to throw the switches. Ekko's body falls unconscious, and then his local version wakes up in it with a several month hole in his memory that Powder needs to fill in for him. Heimerdinger...bodily vanishes. For some reason.

Meanwhile, in the bad future world, Jayce is haunted by visions of the wizard who first saved his life and gave him his first magi-crystal when he was a child all those years ago. When he finds his own petrified husk, the wizard's is waiting right beside it.

It was here that I realized that the wizard looks an awful lot like Viktor, with the new look he picked up after becoming the hexborg brain bug. And with time travel now being an explicit thing, well...

At any rate, Jayce begs the wizard-who-might-be-Victor to send him back to his own present so he can prevent this. The maybe-Victor-wizard complies. Setting up the ending of episode 6, where a scraggly, bearded Jayce suddenly shows up and kills Victor during the borg vs. cops battle.

The episode ends with Jayce and Ekko - armed with the knowledge of what could be if they tried, and what will be if they don't try - returning to the series' present. And, unfortunately, this is Heimerdinger's last appearance in the series.

In the final shot of the episode, we see that this version of Powder still has all the other magi-crystals from Jayce's apartment that didn't explode. She's been sitting on them all these years, keeping them in her little shrine to Vi, as she managed to hide them before her arrest and the Piltover government never learned that they had anything to search for. She could use them now with what she's learned from the other two. Perhaps she will. Perhaps that's a good thing, perhaps it isn't.


This was an excellent episode of a different show. If this episode had been a full season, I might have felt like it belonged, but it isn't. On one hand, I get that they had a limited run of episodes to work within.

On the other...if they were so short on time, why did they spend so much of it on those artsy music video sequences earlier in season 2?

While the drama was good, the character work compelling, and the visuals (especially for the Jayce portion) astounding, I also feel like this episode is being...how to put this.

The ending with Powder and the other crystals; is that meant to be inspiring, or foreboding?

IS hextech actually a problem in and of itself?

...

What would have happened if the robbery went the way it did in the pilot, hextech was invented, AND the Piltover government started fixing Zaun?

Those two changes are independent of each other. And all of the good outcomes seem to be the result of Heimerdinger Prime changing the policies. The lack of hextech doesn't really seem to have made any of the difference. But the characters act as if it did. They talk about this timeline as if its main differentiating trait is the lack of hextech, rather than Heimerdinger Prime's actions in it.

And hell...even if the hexcore is inherently dangerous, and Victor's giger cult is a genuinely bad thing despite its ostensible good intentions, that's still only one specific hextech invention. Everything seemed to work fine before the semi-artificially intelligent hexcore thingy came online and spread its fractal weirdness to the nearby devices. The teleport towers and the antigravity and the robotics...you could keep all that stuff while still avoiding the fractalocalypse, right?

But Jayce walks away with the understanding that hextech as a whole was a sin that needs correcting and atoning for. And it seems like we're meant to agree with him.

So, what IS this episode trying to say? And WHY is it trying to say it?

...

Really though, I think my biggest disappointment is Heimerdinger.

The *one thing* that I was most hoping to see from a second season of Arcane was Heimerdinger trying to fix the broken situation as it exists. Seeing him have to fight against the system he created, to become a man of the people again just as he was in centuries past when he founded his refuge from the ravages of wizardry.

Instead, he gets an easymode timeline reset.

And then literally vanishes from the story before things can catch up with him again. It's ambiguous as to whether or not he knew that tinkering with the wires would vanish him before he did it, which makes it hard to know how to feel about it.

If his vanishing was framed as deciding he's too much of a coward to face his real consequences and running away from them, that would have worked for me as a tragic moral fall. If his vanishing was a sacrifice he knowingly made in the hopes of Ekko being able to fix his mistakes at the cost of Heimerdinger's own life, that would have worked for me too. Neither of those would have been as satisfying as seeing him actually have to go back and fight for a better world - to be pitted AGAINST his own system instead of being able to course-correct it from within without confronting the fundamental causes of the injustice - but I'd have been okay with them. This, though? I'm not sure if ending Heimerdinger's story this was down to laziness, cowardice, or both. I'm leaning toward both.

So, as a standalone work this episode was excellent. As a part of Arcane though? I'm not sure.