Arcane: Season 2 (part one (part two (parenthesis)))
The Pursued
After spending half an episode mourning Silco in much the same slow, filler-y manner as Caitelyn mourning her mother, Jinx starts off on a new adventure. A surprisingly positive one. Or maybe not so surprising, given that there's really nowhere for her to go but up. She was already a wanted woman even before blowing up the Piltover capital building in front of living witnesses, and now bringing her in alive or dead is probably the single most lucrative thing it is possible for a person to do anywhere in the land. Chembarons, enforcers, and even just rando bounty hunters are all participating in the manhunt.
And yet, she manages to find companions for herself. The first being Sevika, previously a very minor character who now starts coming into her own.
Sevika was one of Vander's cronies who jumped ship to Silco early in season one. She helped him beat down some uppity chembarons at one point, and served as a miniboss for Vi during the latter's abortive attempt to go solo vigilante at another. She was one of the underlings of Silco who (justifiably) kept telling him to do something about his adoptive daughter's behaviour only to be repeatedly brushed off. She's feeling pretty vindicated right now...but ironically, one of the only people she can feel vindicated with is Jinx herself. They're two of the only surviving people who got to know Silco as a man rather than just a leader or a boss. They toss a metric ton of well-deserved shade on his memory during their mourning session together, and discuss how his mismanagement of Zaun is what caused everything to fall apart into warring gangs the instant he was no longer in the picture. But they still mourn him. They still believe he was (sadly) the last best hope for the Lanes, and that without him that hope is dead.
I'm not sure if Sevika knows the exact details of how he died, heh. If she did, she might not be as willing to reconcile with Jinx.
The two of them get one of the best fight scenes of the series thus far as they repel a group of bounty hunters, with Sevika using a prosthetic arm that Jinx remade in Harley Quinn style to garish effect and representing her new affiliation (she still had both organic arms when she was with Vander, and Silco gave her a chembaron-chic prosthetic after she lost one). Jinx also gains a second companion in the form of an escaped child laborer who she rescues from the thugs of whichever chembaron she'd been slaving in the mines of.
The kid tags along after them, and forces Powder to bemusedly take on the role of adult protector for someone that reminds her of her younger self. Even though she warns the kid from the beginning that she's called Jinx for a reason.
...
This actually makes me wonder a few things about Zaun's economy. And about its relationship with Piltover. Apparently there's mining going on in Zaun, but even before Silco and his chembarons took over the profits apparently weren't doing much for the place. Either just very low-value minerals, or there was always someone funnelling the profits away into Piltover through one means or another, whereas now the profits are being funnelled away into the local narco-aristocracy.
Yeah. I'd like to know more about what Piltover was actually using Zaun for. It must have needed it for *something,* if it was so reluctant to cut the place off, but so far the show has been pretty vague about what. The mining and perhaps some bulk manufacturing are my best guess.
...
I'm also glad that the cutesy little MPNG hallucinations in Powder/Jinx's scenes are mostly gone. This season's tendency to indulge in art-shifted asides seems to have lost out to the desire to treat her character with something closer to the sobriety it merits.
Well, mostly.
Anyway.
The act one climax comes when - after a couple of near misses - Catelyn and Vi's team manage to track Jinx to a lair just off of the ducts. Turns out that Jinx and her new buddies were sneaking around in unused parts of the vent system themselves this whole time. Jinx reacts pretty much the way you'd expect to seeing Vi in an enforcer uniform. And also (very satisfyingly) throws the fact that she's become *literally the poison that is killing Zaun* in her face and runs roughshots over her pathetic rationalizations about "clearing the streets" or whatever. There's a climactic battle that ends with Vi very nearly killing her sister, only for the little slave girl to put herself between them.
Caitlyn tries to take the shot anyway, heedless of the child in harm's way. Vi comes back from the abyss to block the shots, saving the child even though it means letting Jinx get away again. Aided by Sevika setting off a bomb in the airduct mechanisms nearby as part of a plan they'd been working on to send toxic smoke backfilling up the pipes and into Piltover.
Turnabout. Fair play.
Vi and Caitlyn have their most serious falling out so far. Leading to Vi leaving the force, no longer able to delude herself into thinking that the enforcers could ever be the lesser evil. And also leading to Caitlyn convincing herself that her mistake was in ever trusting a Zaunite to put the greater good over petty tribal affiliations, and becoming Ambessa's biggest fan and supporter once she gets back to HQ. Cue trenchcoat and fashy salute as she's promoted to sheriff and prepares to lead the classicidal crackdown.
A noblewoman, and a cop. It was always going to be a steep uphill battle. Oh well. At least Vi might have finally learned her lesson. What happens next with Jinx (who even Vi has learned to not call "Powder" anymore) is anyone's guess.
This is far and away the best subplot of the act, even if it's also the most depressing. Vi's characterization suffers from the late previous season's missteps, but judging these episodes on their own merits she's great. Seeing Jinx forced to finally mature into something broadly adult-like now that she's without an outside parent figure - even while continuing to struggle with mental illness and personal trauma - is a treat. Honestly, she actually seems saner now than she did at the end of the previous season; getting rid of Silco might have been better for her than either she or myself realized at the time. Or else blowing up the Piltover high council just did wonders for her peace of mind, that could also be.
The Pwuhhhhhh?
And now for something completely different.
Victor - already in poor health - was badly wounded in the explosion, and Jayce ran him to the laboratory containing the weird hextech-AI thing that he seems to have been slowly integrating with. Victor had instructed Jayce to destroy this "hexcore" after an incident with it resulted in the death of a lab assistant, but a) that's stupid, and b) contact with the hexcore seems to have been strengthening Victor in a weird way before, so Jayce didn't do it. Now, he lets the hexcore expand to wrap itself around Victor's comatose body completely.
He spends at least the better part of a day or so cocooned in eldritch mandelbulb shit before it revives him, having given most of his body an HR Giger makeover in the process of healing it. When Victor wakes up, he's mad at Jayce for not destroying the hexcore even after it proved itself deadly, which...bro, it was a lab accident, that shit happens. He also tells Jayce that he's been too corrupted by power and politics, and that their ways truly parted a long time ago, both of them were just in denial about it. Victor then rectifies Jayce's mistake by...erm...walking out of the lab and leaving the fractal coccoon shit behind him, and then disappearing into the deepest ravines of Zaun. Where he heals the shimmer addicts who try to mug him, turns them into more Giger pieces, and lets them start worshipping him.
Yeah I have no idea how any of the things Victor says or does in this sequence relate to any of the other things he says or does in it.
Meanwhile, in the Firelights' solarpunk oasis, Heimerdinger and Ekko notice that the big tree that the community relies on for food and air purification is having health problems. Its leaves are getting weird fractal patterns on them before wilting, and it reminds Heimerdinger an awful lot of the similar growths exhibited by the hexcore. Honestly, the hexcore fractals, the infectious veins of shimmer addiction, and the Black Rose magic all look way too similar to me, so I wouldn't have made that connection, but okay. Heimerdinger brings Ekko back to Piltover with him, breaks into his own lab (the neccessity of which Ekko calls into question, only to be comically brushed off), and runs into Jayce. After spending thirty seconds wondering where Victor went and what he turned into, the three of them form a Scooby Gang to start puzzling out the mystery of the hexcore fractal shit.
You know how it seemed like Heimerdinger was going to have to confront the socio-political realities of the nation he founded, and possibly even join in an uprising against it in an ironic reprise of how he once led an uprising against the tyrant magi? Well, maybe he's still going to do that. There are still two acts left in the season. For now though, he and his two human sidekicks are off to handle this totally abstract magi-technobabble problem that has fuck all to do with the main conflict.
Okay, I'm overstating my point a little bit. It's not COMPLETELY out of left field. It turns out that the hexcore - either on its own, or because of its new fusion with Victor - is reaching out through the arcane plane and infecting hextech devices.
The largest and most energy-intensive such devices are the teleportation towers, and the main working parts of those are located underground, near the pipes that bring clean water into Zaun, including the water that the Firelights' big tree feeds on, leading to its Colour Out of Space situation. When Ekko calls Jayce out on this, Jayce responds that they made sure to keep the experimental superengines away from populated areas, it's not his fault that no one told him there was critical water infrastructure running nearby.
So, in that aspect, this does tie into the main themes and political tensions of the series. Yet another kind of poison that Piltover's elites are pumping into the veins of its underclass even while punishing them for the spasms it causes. And I'm sure that once they start having to tell the trade princes that have come to rely on those towers about this, we'll have a nice climate change denial allegory. But even so, most of this plot is spent on virtually apolitical urban exploration and lab tinkering, and it snatched Heimerdinger and Ekko away from the much more interesting things that the story could be doing with them.
Also, when they poke at it a weird thing happens and they get the impression that the hexcore is either alive, or has become a conduit for some preexisting life form that resides in the arcane realm and is now reaching out into Piltover-Zaun.
Yeah, Colour Out of Space is right.
So I guess Victor was right, but like...not for the reasons that he said? I really don't know what the show wants me to think about that.
I guess this is why the series is called "Arcane." But like...I really just don't care about this eldritch abomination invasion plot that only tangentially overlaps with the Piltover/Zaun conflict. If the series is really supposed to be about this, then it should have been about it from much earlier on.
Like I said, this is act one of three. Maybe everything is going to come together in a satisfying way, and the hexcore shenanigans are going to resonate and integrate more elegantly with the rest of the series. I hope it is.
Also in the last postcredit's sequence we see that shady alchemist dude who Silco used to consult creating a cyborg werewolf.
Um. Okay?
So far, I'm really not sure how to rate season two of Arcane. The plotting and writing are mostly good, but they're either (depending on the subplot) too thin on the ground, too predictable, or too disconnected. A lot of it feels like a story that didn't need to be told, even if it's being told well. Other parts of it feel like a completely different story altogether.
I'm holding out for the creators knowing what they're doing here, and the rest of season 2 coming together. S2A1 will still have been the ugly duckling of the series if so, though, even if it had to be so to make the rest work.
