Shorts Review: RWBY ”Painting the Town…” (season 2, episode 4)

Spoilers Below

 

After last week’s episode that laid out the motivation for Team RWBY and has a story-line twist with the revelation of Penny, could this week’s episode follow that up?

You bet it does.

This week’s episode literally left off from last week and did a great job of moving things forward in the story again. Although a majority of the chapter was action as well as storyline base, we did get more character building for Penny and even some insight into Yang as well.

Finishing her conversation with Ruby we find that Penny was sent into town and the festival because her father and General Ironwood didn’t think she was ready to “save the world” as she puts it. She was sent to take part in the tournament to hone her skills. She never fully explains what her specific goal is or who she was supposed to defeat, but explains that the reason the military guard were after her was because she wasn’t supposed to be running around. More importantly though Ruby accepts her as a person with a heart and soul, even if she is made of nuts and bolts instead of squishy guts.  Ruby is sworn to secrecy about Penny being a robot to the others of course.

We also get to see more of Yang’s background as well. She and Neptune head to a club where she has some kind of history with. It doesn’t seem to be a good one as the guards of the club try to barricade the door and when they enter they have a group of guns pointing right at her. We are introduced to Junior, the head of the club. Yang asks Junior about Torchwick as she saw him in the club the last time she was there. Junior tells her he has no idea where he went since he paid a lot of money up front and hired a bunch of his men, but never returned. Although not a lot of information is given here, this really alludes to Yang having a background, possibly a wild lifestyle she lead before coming to Beacon. Junior seemed very surprised that Yang would return to the club and is feels like there was something big that she was involved with not to long ago. This also helps to introduce Junior as a power player in town with not only a cadre of hired goons, but we also see twins Melanie and Militia with his as well. Seeing what Junior has at his disposal it really makes you wonder just what Yang was up to before she arrived at Beacon.

And we also check in on Blake and her attempt to infiltrate in on the White Fang’s meeting, along with Sun. This also shed a little more like into what Torchwick is up to. He wants to over thrown the people in charge, and although he never expressly says it, he make heavy insinuations he means General Ironwood. Torchwich explains that he has gotten his hands on some of the new large security suits that Ironwood unveiled last week and that members of the White Fang would be using them to help with the plans to overthrow those in charge.

Everything comes together in the big fight scene at the end with Team RWBY, Neptune and Sun taking on Torchwick in the battle suit. Honestly I gotta say this battle was a lot closer than what I expected it to be. Usually in this situation the bad guys use their new tech and flatten the heroes the first time out, leading to another battle down the line where the heroes figure out how to destroy the new tech and ultimately save the day. This didn’t work out that way at all as although Torchwick gave quite a fight, he was clobbered by team RWBY and the suit was rendered into pieces. If not for the introduction of Torchwick’s newest ally, the umbrella carrying Neo, he could have been captured. But the fight scene also help expand on Yang even more than the earlier scene did. Ruby explains that Yang can actually take quite a beating since she has the ability to absorb the energy of her opponents attack and use it when she launches her own attacks. While doing this Yang seems to get very angry and her eyes even turn red as she is doing this. With the tournament coming up this is actually a key scene is it shows Yang has unique powers of her own and is not a person who will go down lightly.

This week’s episode was a good mix of action and kept the story going, and even more character development if you looked closely enough.  Even though it did jump back and forth a little bit, it didn’t do so in a ADD style so you could still keep up with everything that was going on nicely. We got introduced to some new characters and the possibly they could become major players in the story down the line. We found out Torchwick’s motivation and now we found what binds him as a human and the White Fang together. With what we know about Torchwick’s plans, Team RWBY’s motivation, Junior’s organization, and what is expected out of Penny, you can imagine that these things are all going to collide at some point later on in a big way. The hints of how much biger this thing is beyond just team RWBY have been laid and I just want to see more of where this ends up going.