Shorts Review: RWBY ‘Welcome to Beacon’ (Season 2, Episode 2)

 

Spoilers Below

 

So the new semester has begun at Beacon and we start this episode off in Ozpin’s office high above the school in the clock tower. Ozpin and Glynda are watching several ships land filled with the army as the Headmaster arrives. The headmaster greets Ozpin but Glynda is not pleased to see him as she walks away. The professor and the Headmaster talk about how bringing an army of troops to the academy is a bad sign in a time of peace, but the Headmaster says he is just being cautious during the festival.

The scene then cuts to the library where Team Ruby is playing Remnant, a card based army game. Yang and Ruby are right into the action while Weiss and Blake have no idea what they are doing and Blake even seems bored. After over dramatically crushing Ruby’s and Weiss’s army, it is Blake’s turn and she doesn’t seem to be interested. Sun comes upon their game and formally introduces everyone to Neptune. Neptune promptly starts sweet talking Weiss, calling her Snow Angel.

We then see Blake, alone in the dorm as she is mentally recounting the events at the dock at the end of the last season. We find after those events she had a conversation with Proessor Ozpin. Ozpin asks how she passed the rigorous entrance exam without any formal training, to which Blake answers where she is from you fight to survive. He asks her why she is hiding her Faunus cat ears and she explains that while the Professor is accepting, his species is not. She wants people to see her for who she is, not what she is. But when the professor asks who she is, she can’t answer. Ozpin flat out asks her how she knew the White Fang would be at the dock that night and Blake answers she was at the right place at the right time.

Back to the present and in the dorm as the other members of the team return. Blake goes to leave but Weiss confronts her (in an over the top manner involving standing on a chair). Weiss wants to know why Blake has been Quiet, Antisocial, and moody. Yang points out that it is Blake. Blake  finally admits that she can’t understand why everyone is so calm about the White Fang, Torchwhick, and everything else. She points out that she’s knows the White Fang better than Ozpin, and that she isn’t sure the Huntsmen can handle them. Weiss counters that they are just students and aren’t ready. Blake counters that the White Fang aren’t going to wait for graduation. It is then that the team decides to handle things on their own. Just as they find their resolve Ruby remembers she left the game in the library and dashes off to get it, smacking into the foreign students that look just like Cinder, Mercury, and Emerald.

Once again this episode was great. They only had 13 minutes but in that time they established quite a lot. Unlike last week’s episode which focused on the plans of the bad guys and showed the heroes goofing off, the focus is on the Beacon students and their motivations going forward. We saw the link between the finale of the last season and this with Blake’s conversation with Ozpin, and also got to see the differing frames of mind of Ozpin and the school’s headmaster. You are given hints for the rest of this season’s story with Team RWBY vowing to stick together but go off and handle things that are much bigger than they are ready for and in the end you see that the enemy is closer to them than they know. It would seem really frantic given they only had 13 minutes to do all this in but it is paced extremely well and doesn’t jump back and forth or pull away without an established reason. All the while, the series shows it’s charm and personality. You not only see the characters being themselves, but you are seeing how they interact with each other. Most of the character’s calling Weiss “Ice Queen” and then Neptune calling her “Snow Angel” is a great example of that. The characters can be goofy and have silly over dramatic moments, but this series doesn’t waste time either.

Story wise this episode is obviously not self contained. It plays only a small part in a larger group of story lines. That’s what this show does best. Unlike a traditional 15 minute series like say for Adult Swim, they don’t have to contain a beginning, middle, and end in that short amount of time so they don’t have to rush everything and sacrifice things like pacing or character to do it. This plays out more like a level of a video game or a chapter of a book than an episode of a show.

The animation is as it was for the last episode. It’s still an improvement over the last season but they have yet to really hit to full potential of the software they are using. There were some minor collision issues with characters hair and moving their heads, but that is something I’ve even run trouble with and not sure there is a perfect way of avoiding it with what they have at their disposal, so I’m not going to knock them very hard for it.

So, in all, I would say this episode is a great continuation for what seems like a great season for this show. Groundwork was laid for some major conflict down the road and foretelling of some really big story elements in the future. Great set up for hopefully a big payoff at the end of the season.