Arcane Season Two: Finale
Okay so remember when I said that these last three episodes are better than the rest of season two? Well, I was kind of speaking in shorthand. It was a 66.67% true statement.
If you came here to see an animated adaptation of League of Legends, then this finale should please you. Here we finally see an army coming up the lanes and passed the defensive structures trying to bring a key individual to a key location, and other key individuals in tandem with the static defences trying to prevent it. The action is pretty good, for the most part. The animation and art are as impressive as always. The two problems are:
1. If what you wanted out of Arcane was a faithful adaptation of League of Legends' gameplay, I don't think you would have made it this far.
2. If you've made it this far, then there are probably a lot of other things you'd rather get from the finale than a faithful adaptation of League of Legends gameplay.
Viktorhive and Ambessa's troops are attacking. An alliance of Piltover-Zaun forces are defending. For the former, I barely understand what they're are trying to achieve. I don't understand why Viktorhive didn't just send one of its instances to the mass relay tower's engine on his own, stealthily, using that impressive mobility and infiltration capability we saw in the previous episode, before giving Jayce and Mel a warning.
For the latter, I don't understand why Zaunite militia forces are aiding in the defense. I don't know why they'd believe Jayce and Mel that Viktor is a threat that needs defeating, after Viktor has just spent months setting himself up as a benevolent god in the undercity while Jayce and Mel garnered reputations as oppressors and then vanished off the face of the world for a while. True, the Viktorhive is allied with Ambessa at this point, and nobody likes her, but after all that Viktor's been doing I feel like this would be more of a PR coup for her rather than a loss for him. Especially with Jayce making big public speeches denouncing him. I don't know why Powder and Vi are committed to the defence, after their own experiences with Viktor. I don't know why Ekko thinks he understands the situation well enough to take sides in it at all after where he's been.
I also don't understand most of the tactics. Arcane has enough fantasy weapons and magic systems in it already without dropping in all this new stuff that we haven't seen before. The action is good-looking, but the tactical ramifications of much of it is totally opaque to me.
There were some parts I really liked, to be fair. For instance, when Ambessa is about to breach Piltover's inner gates and her daughter comes out to fight her with the newfound power of the gold shit all over her face, we hear Mel's new leitmotif. And it has these opening drumbeats that sound *exactly* like the initial cords of "Only Time" by Enya.
It's perfect. 10/10. Move over Imogen Heap, there's a new sherif in town.
Also, uh. This fight turns into some kind of royal duel, with Ambessa's soldiers all standing back and waiting to salute the winner. Even when Ambessa starts fighting Mel and Catelyn two on one. Because that makes sense. Also, the battle is ended by some surprise assistance from Mel's mysterious Black Rose benefactor, only for Mel to chase HER away too while shouting something about how she knows this deceiver's true face now and won't be tolerating its presence anymore.
Too bad I don't know the deceiver's true face or why Mel won't tolerate it any more. When they parted ways last episode they seemed to be on pretty good terms. Oh well.
Another favorite moment of mine is when Jayce has a final confrontation with Viktorhive at the tower, and tells him that his problem is that he keeps trying to fix things. Like, his new transhuman ideology of fixing humanity with his hive mind. It's just like how he always wanted to fix his original sick, dying body, but he should have realized that being in a sick and dying body is what motivated him to greatness in the first place.
No, really. Jayce actually says that shit to Viktor. And it's framed as this profound revelation that's meant to carry real philosophical weight and make both the audience and the characters pause.
I'm not making this up.
Kinda makes me root for Viktorhive even more strongly than the incredibly badass images of his new primary avatar in arcan-o-vision do.
Slay, queen.
I had thought that Viktorvanderwolf was his new primary avatar, but apparently not. In light of that, I'm honestly not sure at all what the point of Viktorvanderwolf is. It doesn't seem to play any important role in the battle, aside from just being a generic heavy combat unit. It seemed like a lot of importance was being placed in Viktor merging with it in the last episode, but there's zero payoff for that, and Viktor's primary consciousness is zooming around in a totally different custom body doing the high-concept stuff and tolerating Jayce while Viktorvanderwolf just fights.
Well, actually I do know what the point of Viktorvanderwolf is. It's to give Vi and Powder a boss fight. And also to make them sad again. They need more sadness.
I didn't think this was possible, but I actually didn't care about this fight at all. Vi and Powder. Our two original main protagonists. The emotional cores of the entire series, who the entire tapestry of Arcane has folded out around from. This is there final scene, their final struggle...and I couldn't bring myself to care even one iota about it.
They've already had to deal with the trauma of Vander's mutated resurrection. Now they have to deal with an even more mutated version of him that has even less of the original person in it, and the show seems to think it can get the same intensity out of it a second time. The Vanderwolf plot WAS able to make me feel things the first time around, despite its silliness, especially during the time when he and the sisters were trying to save him with Viktor's help. But that card is played. This is just hollow repetition at best, and lazy trauma porn at worst. It's not even a very good fight imo.
Anyway, Powder appears to sacrifice herself to blow up Viktorvanderwolf and makes Vi cry again because Vi crying has always pulled ratings in the past, but the stinger reveals that she actually survived and escaped Piltover-Zaun. My thoughts on the subject? "Okay. Whatever." I didn't think I'd ever be able to say "Okay. Whatever." about the fates of Vi and Powder, but here we are.
...
A lot of mistakes had to have been made in order for this finale to exist, but I think one of the biggest ones was the handling of Viktor.
Apparently, in his original League of Legends incarnation Viktor is a plain old supervillain who wants to turn everyone into robots out of misanthropy. When they started planning Arcane, they seem to have decided to give him a tragic backstory and portray him as a sympathetic character who falls to evil. They started backward from him ultimately trying to do some MCU villain plot with the hex tower, and tried to set up a domino chain that would lead to there from the gentle, idealistic scientist they introduce in early season one.
But they just didn't do it. The dominos don't connect. As recently as S2E8, the episode *right before this one,* Viktor was telling Ambessa that he adamantly refuses to assimilate anyone who isn't willing to join the collective no matter what other quid-pro-quo they work out. Nothing happens since him making that statement that would suggest a reason for him to change his mind. There's a beat of his villain origin story that just isn't there.
There was some discussion between Heimerdinger and the others about whether the arcane was actively corrupting Viktor's mind, with some alien intelligence actually pulling his strings, but that discussion never reached any conclusions. Viktor's moral fall seems to happen offscreen between episodes 8 and 9, long after Jayce and others have started acting like he's had it. We never get any answers, or even hints, about how much free will the people he added to his network have, or what exactly happened to them after Jayce shot his main body in episode 6. No information that would let the audience draw an informed conclusion.
The most what-the-fuck detail is the revelation that a time-traveling Viktor was in fact the wizard who saved Jayce's life as a child and gave him his first hex-crystal. Apparently, he needed Jayce to be the messenger who could convince his younger self to not do the thing-that-I-still-don't-understand with the hex tower.
But...the only reason Viktor ever ended up joining with Ambessa and marching on the tower in the first place was because Jayce shot him and destroyed his peaceful hive-commune. And Jayce apparently did that AFTER having this conversation with Future Viktor and being sent back to the prime timeline.
So...the thing Viktor was trying to prevent himself from doing by sending Jayce was only caused by him sending Jayce in the first place. And Viktor was in position to know that this was the case. But he still did it?
-____-
If Viktor can time travel and move between timelines, why didn't he just go back and tell his younger self what to avoid? Or at least, tell Jayce to relay a message from his older self to his younger self, accompanied by details that his younger self would have to recognize as legitimizing his story?
You could try to say that the arcane is corrupting Viktor and will inevitably cause him to turn evil with or without Jayce shooting him instead of talking to him that one time. But...in that case, why is future, post-corruption Viktor trying to undo it? Shouldn't a future version of Viktor, from any timeline where he merges with the hexcore, be more corrupted, if that's how it works?
None of this makes any goddamned sense at all.
...
Anyway. Resolution.
Jayce and Viktorhive die in the process of undoing whatever bad thing the latter had been trying to do with the tower.
Ambessa dies or something, and Mel has to go fight the Black Rose or something.
Vi is living with Catelyn in Piltover. Powder/Jinx is implied to have skipped town to start a new career for herself outside the reach of Jinx's reputation.
The Piltover ruling council fills some of its many new openings with Zaunite representatives, including Sevika. Which I legitimately do like, because she was the one most persistently earnest revolutionary out of the whole cast, so her and others like her being part of the new government, using the bargaining power gained from Zaunite participation in the battle and Piltover's own economy being in shambles after the loss of the teleport tower, rings true to me as a vehicle for positive change. But it's just a few seconds during the ending montage, and like...remember when Piltover vs. Zaun was the fundamental conflict of the entire story? I remember that. I liked that show. This last little tiny glimpse of it, surrounded by all the other bullshit, just makes me miss it more than I already did.
Heimerdinger I guess is dead.
The end.
So. My thoughts on season two as a whole.
Season one had an almost perfect ending, aside from the one loose plot thread of Viktor and the hexcore experiments. Even at the time, that plot thread seemed like it was sort of going off in its own direction with little to do with the rest of the story and didn't quite fit. In season two, that ended up being an understatement.
I think there was room for a sequel series about Jinx finding a new version of herself after destroying the Piltover council chamber and possibly reconciling (or failing to reconcile) with her sister. It wouldn't be a necessary sequel, but it could potentially be a decent one.
I think another LoL show centered on high concept science fantasy shit with hive minds and timeline manipulation could have been fun.
Neither of those things would have been the same show, though. In this way, Arcane season 2 was conceptually damaged even before getting into the pacing and storytelling issues.
So, I guess ultimately I just have to repeat what I said at the end of my season one review. Great story. Great ending. Nothing after it is necessary. Some individual bits and pieces of the latter material are good, but another series set elsewhere in the League-of-Legends-verse that gave its new ideas room to breathe would have been far preferable.
I'm never going to be able to look at Mel Medarda without hearing Enya again though holy shit lol.
