RWBY S6E5: “The Coming Storm”
This episode opens in a bar somewhere, with a woman in an early 1900's madam outfit with a spider motif talking to a mysterious hooded someone. Spider-madam is an information broker, as characters with spider motifs who aren't Peter Parker tend to be. She also identifies herself as Ms. Muffet, because that's not missing the entire point of the nursery rhyme or anything.
The individual purchasing information from her soon turns out to be Cinder, who has...I don't know, maybe episodes 1 or 2 of the season explain how she got from "bleeding out at the bottom of a miles-deep subterranean pit" to here, but given the lack of explanation for how she's supposed to have gotten away from Beacon at the end of season 3 despite being unconscious and IN ENEMY CONTROLLED TERRITORY RIGHT UNDER QROW'S LITERAL NOSE, I wouldn't bet on it.
Cinder apparently is paying Muffet for intel on where the Fellowship of the Cringe headed off to after taking the genie lamp, and the latter has determined that they were last seen boarding a vehicle Atlas. I guess something must have happened to said vehicle, if they're currently wandering through a desolate snowy forest on foot, but if so Muffet doesn't seem to know it.
Muffet has a southern accent, which...hmm. You know, come to think of it, seasons 4 and 5 did have other characters from rural mistral sound like sooooome variation of American Southern, so this might actually be consistent ethnography. Holy shit!
On another pleasant auditory note, Jessica Nigri has kinda sorta learned how to voice act over the years. I wouldn't call Cinder's voicework particularly good in this scene, but it's so much better than in the early seasons that I actually felt compelled to pause and look it up to see if they'd changed VA's. So, while the writers of this show might be immune to learning through experience, it's heartening to see that that doesn't extend to the rest of the team.
Cinder turns to leave with this information in hand, but then Ms. Muffet calls out her name, which stops Cinder in her tracks. Apparently she never told her that, and had taken pains to prevent her from learning it, to no avail. Cinder turns slowly around, and Ms. Muffet says that it isn't often that one client brings her twice as much business. With that cryptic statement, there's a sound from up in the rafters, and Cinder looks up to see Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie smiling confidently down at her.
Um...okay, I guess?
Cinder looks even more perplexed than I am as to what she's doing here. This is understandable, because Cinder doesn't know about the legions of psychotically obsessive fan artists and cosplayers who had been screaming for more ice cream for the previous two years, and I do. Some unfitting screamo butt-rock song starts playing, and Mango & Keylime Sorbet raises her umbrella and, still smiling, attacks Cinder.
Um...okay, I guess?
Ms. Muffet leans back and instructs her minions to put the expensive dishes away in back as she watches the fight, seemingly amused. Cinder asks Mint Chocolate Chip what the fuck this is all about, but the latter just ignores her and keeps attacking. Cinder is just defending herself at first, but then starts losing patience and hitting back. Generic forgettable screamo song continues. I know the lyrics for all of RWBY's fight songs are different, but musically most of them sound the damned same. Not bad, per se, but samey to the point where they really might as well put the same amount of effort into a smaller number of more distinct pieces and reuse them where tonally appropriate.
Also, Haagen-Dazs and Cinder appear to be evenly matched, because every pair of RWBY characters are evenly matched until they aren't. Cinder isn't using her Maiden powers though, so...maybe she lost them? Or just doesn't want Muffet and co to see them? Whatever. The fight is animated well enough, but there's not much reason to be invested unless you're thirsty for Comic Con dressup bait, and there's the usual RWBY issue of the fight not having a clear tactical objective for either party. I guess it's slightly above average for this show, all things considered.
In a break in the action, Cinder manages to get enough distance between herself and Haagen-Dazs to ask her the question of what she's attacking her for. In response, Haagen-Dazs pulls out Torchwick's trilby (or another one like it; it's doubtful she'd have been able to recover the same one, but then again Tomah was able to recover Pyrrha's armor after Cinder completely vaporized it so who knows) and puts it on her own head, glaring at Cinder. Okay, I guess she blames her for the grimm suddenly remembering that they're supposed to be indiscriminate man-killers and attacking him during that airship duel. Given that Cinder at least appeared to be kinda-sorta controlling the grimm during that sequence and was able to keep them from attacking all of her minions BESIDES Torchwick (including Haagen-Dazs herself when she literally rode her umbrella through a giant flock of them in the very same scene...), I suppose it's not an unreasonable accusation to make. Cinder assures her that she had nothing to do with Torchwick's death, but she just gets more ice cream thrown in her face for her trouble.
On the sidelines, Muffet's henchmen move to break it up, but she tells them to hang back.
The fight continues a little while longer. More random punching and jumping around on the furniture. At once point Cinder uses a fire punch thingy that misses, but otherwise no sign of her powers other than being good at hand to hand combat, and they continue to seem evenly matched. Then, at a seemingly arbitrary point, Ms. Muffet decides that that's enough after all and tells them to take it outside.
Not sure what made her change her mind at that point, specifically, as the duel hadn't been seeming to get any more destructive than before. Maybe she just finally got bored or something.
External shot of the bar, and Cinder being thrown out the window, shattering it in the process. I can't help but wonder how Muffet will react to the biggest bit of property damage to her bar being done right after she told them to take it outside, but I'll just have to keep wondering because we don't see her again for the rest of the episode. After throwing Cinder out the window, Haagen-Dasz jumps out after her and then...shatters. Because I guess she sent an illusion of herself jumping out the window after Cinder and then dispelled it while she herself went out the door? Or...something? I don't see how that would be a functional distraction though, because the version of her that jumped out the window didn't exist for long enough to draw any fire. Cinder was still busy picking herself up by the time it shattered.
Are we SURE her semblance isn't teleportation with some ill-defined illusion power tacked on on top of it?
Cinder looks at this and says "impressive trick." Whatever that's supposed to mean. She's fought alongside Cookies & Cream before, repeatedly, so I gueeess this version of teleport-and-illusions is different from what she's used in the past? I guess? I legitimately can't tell.
Cinder walks through the foggy evening street, looking for her opponent. "You've gotten stronger," she says, "but so have I." True, Cinder got more Maiden powers since their last meeting, but she's made little to no use of them so far. Baskin Robbins reappears, the fight continues, the song starts up again.
The fight between these two bad guys continues. Cinder again tells her that she didn't kill Torchwick, go mess with Ruby if she wants to avenge him.
Heh, okay, that's actually a clever little touch for Cinder to lie about this. She has a grudge against Ruby herself for using the deus ex machina eyeblast on her, and it's doubtful that anyone knows the exact details of how Torchwick died except Ruby herself, so Cinder is free to just invent this detail and it'll probably seem plausible.
Haazen-Dasz doesn’t listen and just keeps attacking, though. Finally, Cinder loses patience and displays her Maiden powers, which gives her opponent pause.
Avatar state! Yip yip!
Not sure why she waited so long to do this, but okay.
She repeats again that Ruby is the one who Haagen-Dasz should want revenge on, and it so happens that Cinder wants the same thing herself. So, maybe we should work together instead of fighting, huh?
Haagen-Dasz seems like she's ready to believe her now. Even though, by admitting that she herself wants revenge on Ruby, she's kinda given away the fact that she has every reason to lie about Ruby having killed Torchwick. So, Haagen-Dasz actually has less reason to believe that Ruby was the culprit now than she did before.
It works though, so whatever. There's an unfunny moment where Cinder says "let's talk about this" and Baskin Robbins has to remind her that she's mute. Then cut away.
...
This isn't THE worst case of "let's have a fight scene just to have a fight scene" in all of RWBY so far, but it's definitely in the top five.
...
Cut to the snowy abandoned village that the Fellowship have sheltered in. Ruby muses on how strange it is for a completely intact town to be abandoned. Usually there'd be battle damage, or the town would be visibly unfinished. I...don't think that really holds up to all previous instances of abandoned settlements we've seen in the show, but I'm not going to go looking back through seasons 2, 4, and 5 to confirm that, so I'll take Ruby's assertion at face value out of sheer exhaustion and apathy.
Weiss muses that the people might have abandoned the town in advance of an overwhelming grimm swarm headed their way or something, and just never got a chance to resettle it afterward. Qrow reminds them to not let their guard down as he kicks in the door of a building so they can investigate inside.
The inside of the house still seems to be furnished. Sparsely, but still with enough personal items present (including family photographs on the walls) that an orderly evacuation seems unlikely. If the people fled, they appear to have done so in a hurry.
Then Granny Cybereyes yells at them to close the door already, it's just "getting colder and colder in here." While she's still standing outside on the porch. She then enters and closes the door behind herself.
What this tells me is that the writers and animators still aren't talking or even looking over each other's shoulders until it's time to upload the new episode. If ever. Zero post-production. The consequences of this aren't anywhere near as hilarious in this case as they were in the opening of S3E10 "The Battle of Beacon," but it's very obviously a result of the same production...well...I guess "process" is technically accurate. Technically.
Well, nothing for them to do for now but secure the building and wait out the snowstorm. Qrow goes to quickly scout out the neighboring buildings. Weiss and Yang head upstairs to the bedrooms to look for warm blankets, and the rest (Ruby, Blake, Oscar, and Granny Cybereyes) search the ground floor to find fuel for the fireplace.
Ruby takes a moment to inspect a picture on the wall, showing a group of happy-looking townsfolk standing outside the village entrance, while creepy music plays.
Shouldn't these little outland villages have walls? That obviously won't stop all grimm variants, but you'd think it would be essential for dealing with the more common types which tend to be ground-based swarmers. Every village in my DnD setting has an anti-monster palisade, and most of those monsters aren't anywhere near as numerous or relentless as the grimm supposedly are. Eh, whatever.
Blake asks Ruby what she thinks about all this. Ruby just says that it feels wrong, and not in the way that they're used to things feeling wrong. And, to the show's credit, things actually DO feel ominous and forbidding for the audience as well. Then, suddenly, a scream from upstairs brings them hurrying to help Weiss and Yang, who have been terrified by...um...
Believe it or not, I actually don't WANT to complain about this. Aside from that one moment of derp with Granny Cybereyes and the door, this sequence has actually been remarkably good for RWBY. If I were watching just these few episodes in isolation without knowing what happened in the previous seasons, I'd probably be praising this very shot instead of criticizing it. But.
Yang and Weiss screaming and hyperventilating on the floor in horror at the sight of dead bodies?
After everything they've seen and done in seasons 1-5?
They've all seen death. They've all seen dead bodies, killed in a variety of ways. They're exploring an abandoned village in a world where such villages are often slaughtered by monsters or raiders or the like, so it's not like the presence of bodies HERE specifically should be shocking. This reaction doesn't fit the characters and scenario.
Maybe if this was back in season 1 or so, screaming and collapsing in horror at something like this would have fit. Assuming that Weiss had already checked to see that the bodies lacked horns and therefore counted as people, and Yang was pretending to have empathy for the others' benefit, of course.
Cut to the gang downstairs in the living room, sitting around a fire they've just made. Weiss, along among the others, still looking traumatized. For some reason. Yang looks more like she's disturbed, but managing to put on a brave face. Which...again, both of these reactions might fit for (what the authors probably intended to be) season 1 Weiss and Yang's characterization, but not now. After some silent fire-watching, Qrow returns from outside and reports that the other houses are all the same. People who appear to have died peacefully in bed.
I'd assume a plague, or some obscure grimm species that can blanket an area in poison gas.
Weiss says that if everyone died in their sleep in these buildings, then sleeping here themselves might not be the best idea. She has a point; there's still flesh on those bodies, so they must have died recently, probably just earlier this winter if the cold has been keeping them preserved, which means that whatever effect caused this might still be active. Unfortunately, the blizzard outside is only getting worse, so they have the choice to either sleep here and risk the kill-in-your-sleep effect, or make camp in the blizzard and let the blizzard chip their auras away until they freeze.
The soundwork here is excellent. Bits of ominous music where appropriate, but mostly just silence save the crackle of the fire and the howling of the wind outside.
Really, if you just fixed the two or three outstanding RWBYisms that bring it down, this whole sequence so far is really atmospheric and effective.
Qrow makes the first sane proposal I've ever heard from him, and suggests that the less experienced combatants stay in pairs while continuing the search for supplies. He'll do a more thorough sweep of the grounds and look for any more evidence of recent activity, human or grimm. Blake and Yang will search the sheds to see if there's a motor vehicle they can get working again. Ruby and Weiss will search for canned food in the pantries and cellars. Noncombatant Oscar and only-actual-old-person-in-the-entire-world Granny Cybereyes will stay here, Oscar keeping the fire fed while GC looks through the bookcases for any journals or diaries that might contain clues.
Everyone acting sensibly. Weird, huh?
Blake and Yang start their search with a large barn-style storehouse. There's a combine harvester in it that might still be functional, but that's not the kind of vehicle that's going to be of much help. Still, there might be fuel among the paint and plaster cans in the shack, so they search the shelves.
As they search, they wonder aloud about what happened here. Blake suspects water contamination. Yang isn't sure, and also starts seeming a little more introverted and unresponsive than usual. Blake asks her if she's okay, and Yang says that she's fine, just a little more tired than she realized. Blake stares at the back of her head suspiciously, as if suspecting that whatever caused the townsfolk to sleep themselves to death might already be getting into Yang.
They cross the shed, and find a flatbed trailer that might be useful. Then, suddenly Yang sees a reflection of whatsisname that goat person who cut her arm off in the window for a split second, and jumps back in alarm.
She's been having this happen occasionally throughout the last couple of seasons.
Blake asks her what just happened, and Yang confesses that she hallucinated seeing Adam. Right, that was his name, Adam the goat. Yang asks Blake if she thinks Adam is still out there. I don't know why he wouldn't be, since he got away more or less uninjured the last time they encountered him and this wasn't very long ago. Blake muses that it's unlikely the White Fang would want him back after that embarrassing (for him, me, and most especially RoosterTeeth) debacle in the season 5 finale, and even if they did it would be in a demoted role that he would probably not be willing to accept anyway. Um...if you say so I guess. In season 5 he murdered the previous White Fang leader seemingly with unanimous support from her underlings, but I suppose the fauni are fickle beasts. Blake goes on to say that Adam's real power comes from his ability to control other people and drag them down to his level, and when he can't do that he's more likely to withdraw and lick his wounds. Obviously speaking from personal experience after her stint as his titninja.
Then, out of fucking nowhere, Blake grabs Yang by the hand and assures her that she's not going anywhere and that she'll protect Yang from Adam in the future.
Yang responds by asking her what the hell this is supposed to mean, turning her back, and walking indignantly away.
I mean...Yang's reaction was actually pretty natural, considering how out-of-the-blue that was. True, Blake did drag her away from Adam when they were both injured by him back in season 3, so there's precedent for her protecting Yang from him I guess, but the way she says it here along with the handholding is just WEIRD.
Oh, right, season 6 is when they supposedly actually did the lgbt representation they'd been promising since before the show came out, I've been told. Blake and Yang had what I guuuuuueesss you might consider a moment back in season 2, but otherwise Blake's come-on (if that's what this was supposed to be) doesn't seem to have had much buildup or groundwork. She and Yang hadn't even seen each other for all of season 4 and most of season 5. Maybe there was some character stuff with them in the first two episodes of 6, but, well...the problem there is that Yang's reaction is completely fitting if they DIDN'T have any such progress in their relationship. So...what is Blake doing here? Just being incredibly awkward and off-putting?
Well, this is a product of the brilliant minds who gave us "connect the hots," so who even wants to know what they think a budding romance is supposed to look like.
I guess it's still better than nothing, though, so...go Miles and Kerry? I think?
...and then as she's walking away Yang says that they'll try hooking the flatbed up to her motorcycle, "bumblebee," in the morning. Bumblebee being the fandom ship name for Blake and Yang.
-_-
It's just bizarre to me that the writers are dogwhistling a romantic arc.
I can't even say if I like it or dislike it. It's just too fucking weird for me to assess.
...
To be clear, the name of the motorcycle was established earlier, I want to say in early season 5. But the placement here feels really deliberate.
Like I said, it's too weird for me to even say if I approve or not.
...
Cut to Ruby and Weiss. They enter a dark storeroom with some unlit candles scattered around. Weiss conjures some fiery sparks from the tip of her dust-scimitar and levitates them onto each of the candle wicks to light them.
Right, Weiss' semblance is fine-manipulation telekinesis. I forgot that somehow.
The room is full of alcohol, which leads Ruby to tell Weiss to avoid letting Qrow find out about it. He's under a lot of stress right now, and letting him drink would be a very bad decision in this situation. Reasonable, I guess. And it also doesn't seem to be making a joke of Qrow's alcoholism, which is certainly a step up from how the show usually approached the subject in season 3.
...
RWBY might be as stupid as ever, but based on these last couple of episodes it seems to actually, legitimately be doing a better job of handling sensitive topics now. If the White Fang plot really is over and just doesn't get mentioned again, that'll of course be the biggest improvement yet, but in the meantime these two eps really are scoring better than I was expecting when it comes to representation.
...
They explore deeper into the pantry, hoping to find food as well as ill-advised drinks. They're not going to make it to Atlas without more rations, as Ruby points out. Weiss asks her if they're really still going to Atlas. Ruby asks her why the hell they wouldn't be, and Weiss says that if Boston is immortal then what's even the point?
...KILLING BOSTON WAS NEVER YOUR GODDAMNED OBJECTIVE!
You didn't even KNOW SHE EXISTED when you guys started on this quest!
To be fair, Ruby looks surprised at her and asks her if she's feeling okay after Weiss says this. But, on the other hand, *all* of the characters had this same reaction last episode, and while Ruby chides Weiss for her pessimism here she doesn't make any actual arguments. So, I don't know who's supposed to be in the right here.
In any case, Weiss confesses that she's feeling more tired than she realized, and that this may be making her grumpy. Looks like she's also starting to be hit by the sleep effect too. The pair move on into what appears to be the very extensive wine cellar (did Brunswick Farms largely a vintner community, before everyone died? That would make sense), at the back of which is a steel vault door that seems conspicuously spookier than the rest of the room.
"Do not open."
Before they can take much note of the vault door, Ruby spots some canned beans on one of the shelves and goes stop-motion-animation over it. It's somehow even more jarring than the superdeformed bits in early FMA:B, but it's still nowhere near as bad as previous art shift gags in early RWBY, so that's good at least.
Anyway, beans, yay. Weiss complains about having to sink to eating canned food like some peasant. Weiss, what the hell else did you think would keep this long? What did you think that you and Ruby were even looking for? I gueeeess the corpses upstairs still having flesh on them might raise the possibility of other food having been frozen by the weather, but...I know I personally would be very reluctant to trust that lol. Anyway, they leave the cellar with two armfuls of canned food. Behind them, something bangs against the inside of the locked steel vault.
I doubt anyone watching this episode was surprised by that, but it was still nicely eerie even if it was predictable. End episode.
That was the best RWBY episode I've seen. And I've seen all of the ones before this besides two, so that would probably make it the best episode of the show up to this point.
I've pointed out plenty of the usual facepalm-inducing gaffs in this episode, and it doesn't do anything particularly well. But still, aside from those few, mostly self-contained bits of stupidity, it WORKED. It felt like an episode of an okay show. It built the creepy atmosphere well. It had reasonably good cinematography, and honestly better-than-average sound and music usage for this type of sequence. The characters' words and actions make sense, except when they're talking about plot stuff from earlier episodes. The mystery of the town actually got me invested! Like, no shit, it's actually gotten me curious to see the resolution.
There's potentially a catch, though.
It's been many years since I've seen Firefly: Serenity. I don't remember much about the sequence of them exploring the Pax-ravaged planet. But I do know that Kerry Shawcress was really proud of himself for lifting it for this cluster of episodes.
Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic. Like I said, I don't remember much about how that movie looked or sounded. But given that the episode before this one was business as usual, and the one before that was exceptionally bad even by RWBY standards, the timing of this sudden uptick in quality strikes me as a little suspicious. If the better aspects of the cinematography, characters' lines of reasoning, etc of this episode are copied 1:1 from Serenity, I'd be disappointed but not even remotely surprised.
STILL. Like I said, it's been forever since I saw that film. Maybe the RWBY creators just took some inspiration from it but were wholly original in the implementation, in which case they deserve full credit for it.
Even if not though, there are still enough little background things that feel tighter than previous RWBY in ways that I don't think could be attributed just to a one-time ripoff. The animation and art are a little cleaner than seasons 4 and 5. At least some of the voice actors have gotten better (Cinder's being the most significant improvement, but others too). These minor improvements were also visible in the episode before this one, so I don't think it's just a broken clock thing with this one ep.*
So, we'll see how the next two hold up.
*Except for the sequence with Cinder and Neapolitan. That scene was 100% just RWBY being its same terrible old self.
