Arcane (part 2: episodes 4-6)

From the plotting angle, act two of "Arcane" is flawed. There are an awful lot of unlikely coincidences, unconvincing outcomes, and really weird timeline-compression issues, at least compared to the previous arc. On the other hand, the thematic strengths of arc one only get stronger here. So too does the show's nuanced and empathetic (yet ruthlessly critical) social commentary, without ever losing sight of the individual actors or dropping the story's character-driven structure. Overall, I'd say its higher highs and lower lows average out to the same mean quality as arc one's.

Also, fair warning: this show gets depressing. That's often true of the middle part of a trilogy, but in this case I'm not sure at all that there will be light at the end of the tunnel. Also, unlike some of those stories, this one gets depressing in a very real way that maps pretty closely to a lot of people's real-life circumstances.

If the key word of act one was "rebellion," then act two's is "corruption."


Where we left off, Vander and most of his found family were killed, along with the slightly-less-bad-than-most police chief who made the mistake of getting between Vander and Silco. Vi, alone and wounded by her sister's experimental bomb, was quickly found by the police and arrested for her role in the burglary that started it all; she got all the pain of the sacrifice she'd been planning to make, but none of the benefits. Powder, meanwhile, was adopted by the guy who she had literally just been trying to kill. In the upper city of Piltover, Jayce's hextech breakthrough has transformed him overnight from heretic to celebrity, with doors being opened into the highest echelons of the government for him and (to a lesser extent) his colleague Viktor.

We now skip ahead several years. I'm not sure how many. Around five, I think. Powder is now a little older than Vi was in act 1, and has taken on the criminal pseudonym of "Jinx." Silco has established himself as a near-hegemon over the undercity of Zaun, and he's both refined and (massively) expanded his alchemical operations. Most importantly, Jayce's research has had a lot of resources thrown its way now, resulting in some absolutely breakneck advancements in the newborn field of hextech.

This last detail is one of the timeline issues I mentioned earlier. Not only has Jayce's "we can use this crystal to reliably turn off gravity in one room" invention progressed to an almost-literal-mass-relay-from-Mass-Effect-but-for-airships in just a handful of years, but apparently multiple cities have now built their own relays and international trade is already taking them into account.

And by "taking them into account," I mean that people are already secure enough using these things that entire fleets of cargo-blimps are having their routes planned around them. Like I said, feels like some timeline compression in the interest of making certain plot events line up later on.

Once again, I'll be taking this one plot thread at a time. This time though, I'll be following relationships rather than characters, as it just so happens that each of act 2's subplots follows a duo. And, once again, the catalyst for all the action is Powder blowing up one of Jayce's laboratories.


Silco and Powder

God, this poor schmuck.

Silco kind of defaulted to the antagonist role in arc 1, mostly for want of a name and face to put on the more directly villainous city government. It almost sounds like a joke when I say that now, AFTER the human experimentation and attempted child murder, we are seeing his moral fall. But that really is what happens.

In the time between acts 1 and 2, he's basically turned into another version of Vander, just without the redeeming qualities. He has a nicer office than he did before. The upper city knows him as a successful industrialist, albeit one with a sketchy reputation. He's still talking about a glorious revolution, but he's holding his own agents back from making too much trouble in Piltover "before we're ready," and Powder is chafing under his restrictions just like Vi once chafed under Vander's.

Really, the peak irony here is Silco's cordial-but-antagonistic relationship with the police captain. The somewhat-reasonable lady who Vander used to deal with got killed in the action near the end of act 1, leaving her Maximum Acab second-in-command to be promoted into her place. When we saw this guy in act 1, he was chomping at the bit to burn the entirety of Zaun to the ground. Now, he's doing exactly what his frustratingly-complacent predecessor used to do. And Silco is doing exactly what his frustratingly-complacent predecessor used to do.

In a weird way, this is also a moral fall of Captain Acab (even if the end result is less bad for the world in a consequentialist sense). His stated principles in act one were terrible, but at least he had them.

The status quo is one sticky, seductive motherfucker once you get your hand on it. No matter which side you came at it from.

Silco's alchemical inventions have brought a lot of money into Zaun's economy. It's a louder, livelier place than it used to be. He's done a lot for his people. However, "his people" is not an all-encompassing demographic within Zaun. In Zander's time the bars and inns were modest, but open to everyone. Those establishments are now impressive, glamorous, and exclusive. There's an underclass within the underclass of people who Silco doesn't find useful, and this group has it worse than ever, being pushed to the margins of Zaun as the centers are, essentially, gentrified by Silco's rising elites. Zaun always had public health problems due to pollution from Piltover's steam engines, but now the volume of alchemical waste from Silco's projects is making those issues even worse for those near the dumping sites. Furthermore, while his super-soldier serum has been stabilized and made safer to use, repeated use over multiple years will eventually leave you horribly twisted and disfigured, and burned-out users and addicts of his own products are among the new underclass.

...

While Silco has definitely been a victim of his own success in terms of ideological fervor, I wonder if part of the problem actually was a difference in ideals to begin with.

For all his failings, Vander was a man OF the people. He knew them and worked with them, day in and day out. Silco has high hopes and takes great personal risks for Zaun, but he never really seemed to care that much about individual Zaunites.

They don't map perfectly to real life ideologies, but I think you could make a strong case for Vander being something like a socialist, and Silco being something like a nationalist. A revolution for the people of Zaun, or a revolution for Zaun as a national entity.

...

Within this framework, Powder acts as sort of a representative of Zaun itself, with Silco's method of parenting mirroring the problems with his method of governing. That he cares about her isn't in doubt. The show has made it clear that he really has come to love her as a daughter in the time since act 1. But it's a kind of love that makes him want to see her become powerful and materially successful without addressing her emotional problems. Her mental health has not improved since her childhood, and he's been handing her power and resources while treating her serious underlying issues with (at best) benign neglect. She doesn't let him see how much she's suffering from guilt and trauma, on top of the preexisting problems, and he never thinks to pry. He mistakes her occasional outbursts as mere youthful recklessness that merit her an early bedtime and no dessert, even as his minions repeatedly warn him that she's becoming unsafe to be around.

By the time act 2 begins, Powder/Jinx is almost like a magitech Harley Quinn in demeanour and level of (in)sanity. Childish flair, occasional conversations with herself out loud, etc. Honestly, the cribbing from Harley (and...Harley's whole archetype in and of itself, tbh) annoyed me quite a bit. It still worked to tell the story of what she is and isn't getting from Silco, but...well, I'll go into this more in part three.

She has a pretty sick looking junkyard-lair laboratory, though.

The glowing Tiny Tina doodles make me groan a little, but other than that I dig the vibe.

At the beginning of episode 4, Powder acts to defend one of Silco's smuggling operations from a gang of Green Goblin-ish raiders called the Firelights. Seeing an enemy fighter who bears a passing resemblance to Vi gives her a kind of panic attack, leading her to not taking enough care with the bullets and explosions...even though she has friendlies nearby and nearly kills them as well by accident...and even when fighting in the Piltover airship docks on the eve of a national holiday. Silco gets chewed out by his own lieutenants AND by his police frenemy, which means Powder gets sent to bed early without dessert. Instead of, you know, mental health care for the post-trauma episodes she's suffering.

Encouraging her to never take no for an answer comes back to bite him, though, when she decides that the best way to make up for her earlier "misbehavior" would be to steal something important and bring it to Silco. And also kill some cops in the process. Silco hates cops who aren't the one officer guy he's chummy with, right? He'll be happy about her killing a few of them! The object that she steals ends up being the next big breakthrough that Viktor and Jayce had been working on; a stabilized version of the hex-crystals that can be safely used to power handheld devices and civilian appliances. She does this ON the big national holiday. And also blows up the building she stole it from, after luring half a dozen police enforcers inside. The fallout from this, once again, is what drives the act's ensuing plot.

Silco tries to patch over the problems like he always does. In this case, by incriminating his own enemies - the Firelights - in the theft and twisting the police guy's arm into helping him do it. The city government REALLY wants that crystal back, though, so Silco gives Powder and ultimatum. She's going to be suspended from any and all field operations unless she can figure out how to use the crystal before he runs out of delaying tactics and ends up needing to return it. And, in an incredibly cruel irony, tinkering with the crystal gives her EVEN WORSE flashbacks to the events that followed from her tinkering with the previous, less stable version.

Silco does try to help her, this time, at least. The best way he knows how to do this, unfortunately, is by lovingly encouraging her to try and let go of her entire previous life and stop caring about anything other than what she has now. I think that he really believes that this is good fatherly advice. In fact, it's strongly implied that this is similar to what he himself did before creating his organization and starting on his new path to power, and that he believes it has worked for him so far.

Trying to build his castle out of broken pieces without fixing them. Just breaking them even worse as he jams them together and deludes himself into thinking it'll hold. He's become an angrier, edgier version of Piltover's own regime, sitting atop a throne of sand and sprinkling water on it.


Viktor and Jayce

This one is a little bit less relationship-focused than the other subplots, but Viktor and Jayce's friendship(?) is still the core of it. Most of the reason it's so busy is because Jayce's thread was by far the slowest in arc 1, so now the series needs to scramble a bit to develop his supporting cast. The end results are definitely worth it, though. This subplot of act 2 is where the setting of upper Piltover finally comes into its own.

First, a couple of minor characters from act 1 that now merit proper introductions.

This dog-goblin creature is Councilor Heimerdinger:

For the most part, Arcane's use of nonhuman characters as occasional background flavor has felt sort of perfunctory to me. Heimerdinger is an exception to this, as him being a 400 year old goblin is actually quite important to his character and role. Heimerdinger has been part of Piltover's government since its foundation, but he never intended to do nationbuilding. He was just one of several scientists and alchemists who wanted to build an independent research center far away from the sorcerer-kings' domains. He only does any real governing when it directly concerns Piltover's academic institutions, otherwise acting as a somnambulant rubber stamp dispenser. He retains his place on the council mostly by virtue of being a living civic artifact that it would be scandalous to remove.

You could say that he dislikes what Piltover has become, but I think it would be more accurate to say he never noticed what Piltover has become.

The other important factor here is that as a member of a long-lived species, Heimerdinger doesn't value time the way that the city's human majority do. His default answer to any dramatic or disruptive proposal is always "not so fast" or "our institution isn't ready for this yet." And, for him, that mentality makes sense. But most of the people around him don't have the luxury of waiting, and he refuses to internalize that fact. In act 1, he basically was Jayce's slightly-disapproving mentor who was willing to stick out his neck for him a little, but ONLY if he agreed to stop pushing so hard. In act 2, he serves to embody the progressive foundational ideals of Piltover, and how everyone pays lip service to them while doing the exact opposite of what they say to do.

Then there's this lady:

Councilor Medarda. Scion of a foreign dynasty who clawed her way onto the Piltover ruling council by virtue of her commercial influence. If Heimerdinger is what Piltover sees itself as, then Medarda is what Piltover actually is.

To its credit, Arcane manages to humanize her despite casting her in a more straightforwardly unsympathetic light than Silco. She has vulnerabilities, jealously hidden though they might be. Her maniacal demand for MORE, MORE, MORE is down to having been the least favored of her siblings, looked down on by her plutocrat elders for some unspecified failures early in her life. But still, if this story has a real villain - if the antagonistic force of "Arcane" has a name and face to represent it - then it is Medarda.

In act 1, Mederda took a gamble on Jayce, helping him surreptitiously continue his research while the investigation was underway. Hoping to take credit for him if things worked out, and leaving herself room to throw him under the bus if they didn't. Things worked out, and now she's grown significantly in influence.

So. Act 2.

Jayce (and his oft-overlooked lowborn colleague Viktor, to a much lesser extent) is now the Piltover national hero and a household name the world over. For this year's Progress Day ceremony, Jayce is expected to give a public address, and he wants to use the opportunity to unveil his and Viktor's new, refined power crystals. There's a bit of a controversy over whether or not he should do this just yet, and I swear to god this is one of the best scenes in the series.

Jayce and Viktor pitch their new breakthrough as a way to finally bring the benefits of hextech down to the working classes rather than just the shipping magnates and merchants. Look at these labor-saving devices that will make the common man's life easier, thanks to the absolutely SAFE new power crystals. Like this powered gauntlet that lets you punch through stone as if it were paper mache! You lucky construction worker, you! Or this backpack-mounted robotic arm with a laser drill on it, perfect for doing precision-welding work from up to ten meters away!

The responses they get from the councillors are absolutely *chef's kiss.* Heimerdinger is worried about it falling into the wrong hands, and so insists that access to and knowledge of these crystals be made available only to trustworthy people like Piltover's police forces. Medarda is shocked at this stifling conservativism from a so-called man of progress. This technology needs to be trademarked and exported at once, surely you all can see that! Jayce and (especially) Viktor appear to be completely blindsided by both sentiments.

It's perfect.

...

It also occurs to me, after watching this scene, that Piltover is basically a more realistic, less caricaturized version of Jonathan Swift's Laputa. Putting the head-in-the-clouds scientists' research in the pocket of a profiteering third party makes those same exact negative outcomes happen much more naturally than they would under a genuine technocracy. It also makes it much more pointed social commentary directed at the real world than Swift's version (even the real world at Swift's own time).

It also reminds me of some arguments I've seen about the ethics of pursuing transhumanism within a capitalist world. Coming up with, eg, life-extending or cognition-enhancing cybernetics under current conditions will most likely result in the elites making themselves even more powerful and the majority even more exploitable and unfree. Is it therefore immoral to pursue those technologies, even though the ability to make people smarter and longer-lived is an inherently good thing? I actually really don't know the answer to this question. I've seen really, really compelling arguments made for both positions.

The conditions that Viktor and Jayce are working in - the conditions that made their work possible - are ones in which their inventions CAN'T be net-beneficial. The social inequality of Piltover/Zaun guarantees that these easily weaponizable power tools will be IMMEDIATELY weaponized by gangsters and terrorists if made available to the public. The already-abusive power structures of the city will be able to abuse the Zaunites with even more impunity if the government has exclusive access. Letting the new technology further enrich the merchant princes, of course, will just further entrench and empower the forces that make the local power structures so abusive in the first place. Viktor and Jayce are stuck with a brilliant invention and nothing good to do with it, and for them it just *does not compute.*

...

Jayce disappoints Medarda by keeping the hex-battery under wraps for now. But then Powder steals it, and shit gets crazy. Crazy as in "they create a new government agency, the Department of Hextech, just to ensure the security of these inventions." And, at Heimerdinger's recommendation that they go back to Piltover's technocratic roots and appoint a scientist with relevant expertise to fill the new position, Jayce is made a member of the ruling council.

Cue Jayce undergoing a speedrun of Piltover's own history, politics ensnaring him and pulling him away from the lab and away from Viktor. This is made more poignant by the reveal that Viktor isn't just handicapped; he has a degenerative condition, and it's not clear how much life he has yet. Viktor, who was born in the more coal-polluted Zaun (that probably has something to do with his health problems, come to think of it), is doing everything in the hope of seeing people like the ones he grew up around have easier lives. Heimerdinger, who has all the time in the world, looks at him and says "not yet." Medarda, of course, looks at him and says "not ever." Now Jayce, the real brain pushing their research and development forward, is being pulled away from him as his body fails and his time grows short.

It's also very heavily implied (ie, I'm pretty sure now that it's NOT just my yaoi goggles) that Viktor has an unrequited crush on Jayce. Which just makes it *absolutely brutal* when Jayce and Medarda start banging.

In fact, the first time he ever nuts in her happens to be at the exact same time that Viktor is suffering an internal bleeding episode alone in the lab with no one readily on hand to help him. He survives, and in all fairness to Jayce he leaves the disgruntled Medarda's bedroom and runs to the hospital the instant he hears what happened, but still. The progressive vision left dying on the floor while the people in power are seduced by capitalism. It's pretty damned raw.

That said, one outcome of this is that the device Viktor had been experimenting with - an attempt at a kind of pseudo-smart hextech engine that more closely mimics the way that actual wizards use magic, at least in theory - absorbs a drop of his blood and whirs to renewed life. And seems to give Viktor some kind of cosmic vision he can't quite parse while he's unconscious.

In the wake of this, Viktor starts looking into ways of prolonging his own life in order to complete figuring out just what the hell it was he saw. Including getting in touch with an old mentor of his; an ancient undercity alchemist who looks like he might have been one of Silco's own teachers in the field, and who Viktor stopped associating with years ago due to differences of opinion regarding animal cruelty. The old alchemist just COULDN'T find it in himself to tolerate Viktor's kitten-burning hobby. Erm, I mean, Viktor saw that the old man was extending an animal subject's life despite its immense suffering out of desire to preserve such a unique mutation, rather than out of affection for his pet like Viktor thought. This little subplot is a bit more Laputa Classic in its themeing, heh. Anyway, he only catches up with the old man again at the very, very end of episode 6, so whether or not this will be Viktor's own moral fall remains to be seen.

Also...there's a lot of technological motifs around Viktor, of a very "the flesh weakens, but steel is eternal" sort, during his grappling with mortality scenes. Sort of implying that he might end up turning himself into a hextech cyborg or something.

On the other hand, the machine he'd been looking into had been a "wizardry approximator," more or less. And it appeared to awaken something in him spiritually when it tasted his blood. Which implies that he might actually be about to become one of those original-flavor wizards that Piltover was founded as a reaction against.

Could be either. Could be both. I kind of hope it's the latter, though. I'd like to see Jayce's reaction to that, what with him having an unusually high opinion of wizards thanks to his own childhood experience. It would also both justify AND condemn Heimerdinger's reservations about playing with magic back in act 1; yes, hex crystal research will lead to a rise of the wizards Piltover hates, but this is only true because Piltover has become too corrupt to work with in any way besides that, and this happened under Heimerdinger's own watch.

Speaking of Heimerdinger's powers of observation, there's another amazing scene a bit earlier, when Jayce tries to temporarily shut down the new relay-towers in order to deal with evidence of MASSIVE smuggling operations and safety corner-cutting issues. In response to this, Maderda takes Jayce to see an opera, and points out each of the other VIP boxes being inhabited by superelite businessmen, nobles, and even a few other Piltover council members, who are eyes-deep in the smuggling and safety-skimping. And makes it clear that if he gets in all of their ways, he's as good as dead, nothing he OR she can do about this. And, in the middle of everything, alone among all the other elites engaged in scheming and furtive whispering in their dark corners, Heimerdinger is sitting by himself and enthusiastically watching the opera with a dopey grin. Totally oblivious, as he has been for so many decades.

At the end of act 2, while Viktor looks into immortality, his own research into more traditional magic comes to light. Heimerdinger puts his foot down, and also, finally, gives a speech to his fellow councilors about how Piltover has lost sight of its raison d'etat. Finally acknowledging the inequality, the profiteering, the appropriation of science by powerbrokers who care nothing for knowledge for its own sake.

Too little, too late.

With Maderda's backing, Jayce - who Heimerdinger himself promoted to the council - calls a vote for Heimerdinger's removal from it. All the other councillors, who had only been tolerating Heimerdinger as a national mascot as long as he stayed out of their ways, all vote in favor. On one hand, Heimerdinger is genuinely unfit to lead any kind of organization besides a university. On the other hand, the people taking over from him are much, much worse. Jayce, though still well-meaning, is well on his way to being the new Heimerdinger; the token scientist with great inventions to his name who sits on the council to rubber stamp everything the plutocrats lay on his desk. Heimerdinger was well-meaning too.


Vi and Catelyn

The final plot thread centres on new character Catelyn and her unusual partnership with Vi. This one is by far the most typical "fantasy adventure" part of the series thus far, and also much more optimistic in tone than the rest of act 2. Not *very* optimistic, but comparatively.

Also, I guess Catelyn isn't technically new. Remember this screencap?

From her cumulative 20 seconds of screentime in act 1. But still, it existed. Anyway! Catelyn is the daughter of a minor noble house who funded Jayce's scholarship (and promptly redrew it when he got in trouble, putting him in the position where Medarda could easily snatch him. They tried to walk it back afterward lol). He always seemed to have a bit of a crush on her. She likes him, but doesn't reciprocate, on account of teh gay. Against her family's wishes, she has now joined the Piltover police enforcers. And, despite them pulling strings to have her assigned to "guarding" her family's pavilion on the night before Progress Day, she managed to slip off and join the common police riff-raff long enough to be the lone survivor of the squad drawn into Powder's ambush.

She recognizes Powder's shitscribble-covered homemade alchemical bombs and clockwork contraptions as matching some bits left at the scene of that weird inter-smuggler shootout at the airship docks that morning. Unfortunately, despite her attempts at negotiating information out of a captured gang member in the wake of the previous incident in exchange for amnesty, Captain Acab just had the man unceremoniously thrown in the high security nightmare prison across the river.

Up to you if Acab did that because he knew the suspect was one of Silco's and didn't want him talking, or if that's just what he always does in these situations. In any case, this is one of many unpleasant surprises for Catelyn the newly minted enforcer, and the fact that most of the other grunts aren't disturbed by it disturbs her even more.

The connection sees Catelyn getting authorization from her newly-appointed councillor friend to go check out the (really horrible, it's another disquieting eye-opener for her) prison and talk to that inmate. Unfortunately, he just had the shit beat out of him by another inmate, and is not currently capable of speech. So, smelling a rat, Catelyn asks to see THAT inmate, and, well.

She's been in jail since the end of act 1. She's bigger, angrier, and tattooier, and also the gayest woman Catelyn has ever laid eyes on. Like, Catelyn thought she was all gay and shit, but now she looks at Vi and just starts getting insecure.

Vi freely admits that she attacked that guy because of his affiliation with a crime lord she has something of a dislike for. But that any more detail will have to come in exchange for freedom. So, Catelyn secures a release for her, and is very, very glad to put the prison behind her and try to avoid thinking about it being where her department sends people on often very scant evidence. Vi is less than thrilled about having to escort a cop around, but she's very thrilled to be free and able to go after Silco. Catelyn is...insufferable in the way that people losing faith in The Cause often are right before breaking down and renouncing it, which Vi has little sensitivity to or patience for.

On the bright side, there's very, very obvious physical attraction, even if Catelyn tries to hide it.

They track down this "Jinx" character who seems to have been responsible for the crystal theft and covered for by both Silco's gangland minions and elements within the police. Catelyn realizing, with every step of the way, the degree to which she was One Of Them. Vi's insistence that the enforcers are just another gang getting more and more evidence in its support. Catelyn being forced to admit that she's been treating the Zaunite residents they interact with like enemies, or even inmates, rather than people under her ostensible protection.

Vi, meanwhile, has to learn the lesson she never really did the last time she was free; that she has limits, and she can't break the world over her knee alone. I guess being IN prison wasn't enough to teach her that, but better late than never. Catelyn having her back in battle, supporting Vi's close-quarters moveset with her own deadly aim with the rifle, helps her a bit with this. Really though, it's Catelyn who needs her mind opened; Vi is much more static, and has little thematic or narrative reason to not be.

Finding out that Vi is alive and free drives yet another wedge between Powder and Silco. And leads to Vi's hunt for "Jinx" being successful, leading to a reunion that actually had me tearing up a little.

It's a hard one, though. Vi did abandon Powder. Powder did stupidly get their foster family killed. Vi is working with a cop, Powder doesn't like that. Powder is working for Silco, Vi doesn't like that. Things almost go sour multiple times in their meeting, but - thanks in part to Catelyn prudently standing back and letting Vi do the talking, which is a big step for her in and of itself too - things seem to maybe be going in a positive direction.

Then those loser Firelight guys who have been getting clowned on and framed for things and thrown under the bus all act long show up in force, overwhelm the three of them, and manage to abduct Vi and Catelyn before Powder can drive them off.

Powder cries. I laughed. Well played, Arcane. Well played.


I did not expect this show to go 1/10th as deep as it has. Kinda floored.