RWBY S6E6: “Alone In the Woods” (continued)

So, team RWBY are all paralyzed by the scream of the redeads.

Fortunately, at that moment Granny Cybereyes comes running up the tunnel behind them and shouts for them to run away, which unfreezes them (for some reason...) and allows them to stagger back down the tunnel after her. They're still slow and stumbling, but the redeads are even slower, so they manage to put distance between them. They're in no condition to climb back out of the well like this, and worse still another pack of redeads seem to have come up behind them and cut off the well, forcing them to run in another random direction.

A rather well done chase sequence ensues, of them turning corner after corner only to be cut off by more gaggles of redeads. The music is excellent here. Like, not just "decent" or "passable," it's really good. There are also some intercut first person sequences as they run through the hall that contribute to a tense, desperate atmosphere.

I guess the direction has gotten better, at least sometimes. Comparing this to the way other action scenes earlier in the show were put together, the improvement is substantial.

They eventually find a staircase leading up to some metal shutters; presumably the other side of the spooky sealed door they found in the wine cellar.

Unfortunately, the redeads corner them before they can get to it, and this time their screams stop them from fighting OR running. Everyone collapses down to the damp floor. The redeads finally make it up to them, and one starts leaning down and stretching its claw toward Blake.

And then Ruby uses her silver eyes and kills them.

That sounds like a joke. I'll bet that sounded like me just throwing a random snark in there. But no, that's actually what happens.

Everyone gets back up. Weiss runs up to the shuttered door, and forgets that she has a swordvolver full of explosive dust and a semblance that can do anything, causing her to despair at it being locked. So Yang, apparently the only member of the party capable of breaking through steel barricades in this episode, starts climbing up the stairs to handle it, but then another crowd of redeads catch up and scream at them. This time Ruby doesn't use her silver eyes, because of reasons.

As the redeads close in, Granny Cybereyes leans over Ruby and asks her what color her eyes are. I guess those prosthetics of hers don't have very good color vision. Ruby weakly replies that they're silver. GN thought that's what she saw Ruby using a second ago, but she hadn't been sure.

GC tells Ruby to forget about the redeads closing in, and just focus on her friends and family, how much they care about her, and how they make her feel, and some platitude about how beautiful life is and how much it needs protection. This causes Ruby to sit back up and release an even bigger eyeblast that kills this group as well.

Wait, didn't it turn grimm to stone before instead of disintegrating them? Oh, who cares...

And that was the moment that I realized that Ruby's silver eye attack doesn't look the same way that it did in all previous instances. See, in seasons 3 and 5 when she used it (or rather, when the plot decided it was time for it to activate) before, it looked like these giant feathery wings made of brilliant white light erupting out of her eyeballs. In THIS episode, it's a much softer, shapeless silver glow that just sort of manifests all around her.

Like the way the Patronus scenes looked, in the movie adaptation of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban."

...

I'm going to denounce that previous statement of mine even more strongly now. Somehow, this mashup of Harry Potter ripoff and Legend of Zelda ripoff is exponentially MORE cringey than the sum of its parts.

...

Yang punches the shutters open and they run back upstairs, and the music gets tense and urgent again. They find Qrow passed out at the bar, and work together to drag him to his feet over his own protests.

I guess there's a reason Ruby can't just think her happy thoughts yet again and finish off the next wave? I guess?

Before they go, Weiss says there's something she "has to do first." She takes some of the more potent alcoholic beverages and tosses them onto the floor around the broken shutters. And then, as the next group of redeads start climbing out, performs a slow, over-elegant little sword-dance thing to ignite the alcohol, taking it for granted that the redeads won't use their scream again while she's doing that. She was right to, of course, that lucky guesser. Does her semblance let her know these things? I'll bet it does.

The redeads look pretty cool emerging through the fire, I'll give them that.

The fire doesn't appear to be hurting them much, which I suppose is unsurprising if bullets were ineffective. But I guess the main reason Weiss did that was to burn down the house and prevent any other travelers from being lured to their deaths.

...although...it seems like just wiping out the rest of the redeads wouldn't be that much harder, at this point? I don't know, maybe Ruby is running low on eyeball points or something.

...also, that's just the central house. There are a few others. It's snowy and damp outside, so it's likely that the fire won't spread to the other buildings. Weiss isn't doing anything to burn the others. Travelers would still be attracted to Kakariko Farms, and the tunnels would still be underfoot. So, um. Why did she set the big manor house on fire? What did she think this would accomplish?

They run out of the burning house (which appears to be burning from the outside in. Somehow. Like, there are little bits of fire already out on the balcony when they exit the door) and hop onto the flatbed whose tire Oscar has just finished replacing. Yang takes the wheel of Shipbait, and off they go. The tense, panicky music is still going on, after having stopped when Ruby used her eye-patronus.

As they drive away through the mismatched CGI woods (there apparently is a road for them to drive on), GN tells them what she learned in Bartleby's diary. Apparently the entire plot was spelled out in detail there, and they'd have known everything yesterday evening if she hadn't had the galaxybrained impulse to read the entire thing from the beginning instead of, you know, looking at the last few entries like an actual person trying to figure out what happened to the author would.

Kakariko Farms was bleeding money in recent years due to grimm attacks rising in frequency and the huntsman protection getting more and more costly. Right, huntsmen are freelance mercenaries who get completely state-funded training and then zero obligations or oversight, I remember now. Bartleby, being a bit of a whacko with constant get rich quick schemes and the like, decided that he might be able to get by without needing huntsmen by just finding a way to muffle their negative emotions. So, he went out and captured a pair of redeads (which...apparently were just another grimm variant that could be found in the area?), which he locked in the cellar.

Um...that was a "cellar?" What?

Okay, then it turned out that the rest of the missing pair's pack followed them via the "water tunnels." Wait, hold up. So, that entire underground complex WAS excavated by the Brunswick Farms crew? That must have taken five times more work than building the damned farms! Why the hell wouldn't they just build closer to the damned water source in the first place? I guess you could make an argument for the tunnels acting as a reservoir or the like, but a series of winding tunnels is not exactly what I'd call an efficient reservoir design either. Like, even if Bartleby was an idiot (which in fairness, the show is acknowledging that he was) how the hell did he get everyone to put that much work into...

Wait. Also. If the detail of the pack following its missing members into the tunnels is in the diary, then that means that Bartleby must have known about it. So, he locked the first two in the cellar, and then waited for the others to try to get to them through the ridiculous water system.

How could he have known that they wouldn't just approach overland?

Were they in a cave connected to the water tunnels to begin with? I don't think so. Apparently, a huntsman had "pointed them out" to him in the forest at some point prior to this. And, if they were already down there, shouldn't they have already been crowding around under the village on their own initiative? Don't grimm try to attack people?

Well, somehow he did this, and somehow they came through the tunnels, which he then sealed behind them. All without the knowledge of the rest of the townsfolk. Apparently, these grimm induce apathy and emotionlessness in nearby humans, which he thought would make them invisible to other grimm. That doesn't align at all with what we saw in these last few episodes, though; the redeads weren't making the characters unfeeling, they were making everyone depressed, irritable, and despairing. Exactly the emotions that DO attract other grimm. So...yeah, no idea.

...

So, going back to "if RWBY actually gave a shit about its own worldbuilding," I can see the potential for these redead-grimm having a terrifying niche.

Grimm are attracted to negative emotions. The human societies of Remnant employ a variety of strategies to exploit this. Drugs, social norms and rituals that improve harmony and reduce strife, etc. There may even be special fortresses or bunkers where people go to let all the negativity out behind super thick walls, and when people go there you have hunstmen camping on the battlements using this opportunity to thin out the local grimm population as it comes crowding in. Maybe huntsmen are also trained to be able to wallow in misery (to lure in grimm) or shut it out (to sneak past them) on command, letting you include as much edginess as you want in a story about huntsmen.

The redeads are a recent evolution of the grimm designed to counter the human strategies. They're the *scouts* of the grimm hordes. They wander around an area and "scan" for humans by causing them to experience despair and depression, which both lights them up on other grimms' radar and softens them up a little for the attackers. Dealing with redeads requires some more esoteric tactics; perhaps that was part of the impetus behind the recent development of combat robots etc.

But no.

...

Anyway, Bartleby sealed the whole pack up in his ridiculous water tunnels, and delighted to see his employees turn into zonked-out zombies the very next day. There's a commentary to be made here about a tyrannical business owner trying to dehumanize his employees to squeeze more profits out of them. It also makes a good parallel to Ozpin, keeping secrets and making insane and reckless decisions behind the backs of people who looked up to and trusted him. But, I'm not sure if the show realizes that that's what it has on its hands here. For one thing, it was really vague about the nature of Bartleby's relationship with the other residents to begin with, except that he was in charge and lived in the biggest house. For another, the dialogue for the rest of this scene is all just generic shit about hope versus despair and the importance of not giving up, which...yawn.

Granny Cybereyes tosses the diary out into the snow as they drive. Because it's not useful evidence or of interest to nexts of kin or anything.

GC apologizes for not realizing earlier that they were dealing with redeads, as the signs were all there. Okay, yeah, again, these are apparently just a known grimm species. A fairly obscure one, but still, very much documented.

And frankly, that just makes me wonder why the hell none of the others thought of them being around either.

I'm pretty sure this is our first time seeing grimm with supernatural abilities beyond just their obvious natural weaponry, aside from some dragon-fish-thing in season 4 that shot lighting and season 5's arbitrarily deadly jellyfish. This is the kind of thing I'd actually been WANTING to see since season 1, so on one hand it's nice for it to finally be a thing. But the late introduction, lack of foreshadowing, and also lack of *character knowledge* creates issues.

Are redeads the only grimm species with a telepathic-ish attack? If so, they should be really notorious, even if they're rare and only found in certain parts of the world. Certainly, anyone who's taken literal classes at grimm-fighting academy should have had least heard of them, if not been taught exactly how to recognize their effects. Are there other known grimm types with non-physical abilities like these? No idea.

But okay, even if team RWBY might not have had a chance to learn about them yet due to their studies being cut short, shouldn't experienced huntsman Qrow have known about them?

This would work much better if the redeads were a novel species that had only just started appearing in the last year or two, and only just in this one region. Bartleby's notebook would be the first time any of the characters heard about them, and no one has developed teachable countermeasures for them yet.

Ruby asks Granny Cybereyes how she knows so much about the grimm. Even though all she knows about the grimm is that "redeads exist," which she apparently wasn't alone in. She also asks how she knew how to activate Ruby's eye lasers again.

GC explains that she had silver eyes once too.

...

Full disclosure: I was spoiled on this detail a couple of years ago. I didn't know who the character was, just that the team meets an eyeless old woman who turns out to have once had silver eyes before Boston sent a crocodile person with a bad Australian accent to cut them out.

I suspect that the next and finale episode I have commissioned will go into that backstory. I have opinions about it based on what I've heard, but I'll wait until I actually see it before confirming any judgements and putting them to text.

...

For now, I'll just say that it feels like this should really have a name other than "silver eyes." It's the kind of thing people WOULD invent a name for, and it also is just extremely awkward to have the characters say constantly. Anyway, end episode.


So close, RWBY. So damned close.

First things first, if there'd been a series of episodes of this quality back in the first three seasons, it would have done a lot to preserve my optimism for the show going forward. On a technical level, this is far better than anything that's come before it, and even the writing is - despite having a few wallbangers here and there just to make sure you don't forget which show this is - moderately better overall. If this was RWBY's usual, average quality, I'd still think it was a fairly bad show, but it would have enough redeeming qualities for me to actually *want* to watch it at least occasionally. At the very least, I wouldn't dread the prospect of having to see more of it.

I'm really not confident that this is a sign of lasting improvement, though. For one thing, "The Lost Fable" was right before this, and holy shit was that one bad even by RWBY standards. For another, the fact that this was resolved by Ruby's iris-ex-machina out of nowhere is just doubling down on previous mistakes. Like, it's making it seem like now Ruby's going to learn how to use her eye powers at will thanks to finding this new teacher, but you just KNOW they're never going to actually do that. It's *going* to keep being an intermittent deus ex machina, and forgotten about besides that.

Personally, if you handed the story to me at this point, I'd just accept that grimm are no longer an issue whatsoever when Ruby is around, and only try to build tension around non-grimm opponents. The silver eye powers being that overwhelming was a bad idea from the start, but if Ruby has them, she has them.

As it is, their handling in this episode really just had all the same problems as their introduction in season 3, writ small. Especially the pointlessly convoluted bit about Ruby using them on her own, but then needing coaching to do it again a few seconds afterward, and then acting like using them a third time after that wasn't an option despite there being no apparent reason why not; that REALLY doesn't do much to suggest any greater consistency going forward. Also, what the hell was all this about "think happy thoughts of your friends and loved ones" shit supposed to mean? Every use of the eyebeams so far has been brought on by Ruby seeing a friend (or an alleged friend; she really had barely ever interacted with Pyrrha...) in deadly peril or (again, in Pyrrha's case) having just died. It's related to her friends and loved ones, obviously, but...the happiness they make her feel? Really?

This is on top of the various other issues I've already pointed out involving how the Brunswick Farm arc fits into a larger setting and narrative. Including how the characters all seem to be weirdly naïve, sheltered, and underpowered for how late this is in the series. Like, we're doing a horror sequence now, so they need to act like bedeviled horror movie characters and not like experienced monster-hunters who have seen war and death repeatedly firsthand.

...the title of the episode is a knock-off of "Alone in the Dark," isn't it? Only without even making sense, because no one is alone in this episode. Just cram in another reference no matter how inappropriate it is. Goddamnit.

I'm willing to accept some background technical and production values improvements, and some sliiightly greater polish when it comes to character writing. But, the really good parts of this arc are looking like monkeys with typewriters. Maybe the next episode will change my mind.