Review: RWBY “Tea Amidst Terrible Trouble”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Still an emotional wreck, Ruby (with Little tagging along) wanders through a weird forest until she is captured by Neo’s illusion, which places her in a mansion surrounded by people who have died, whether in front of Ruby, indirectly because of Ruby, or just people Ruby knew to some extent who later died. Among them, Roman Torchwick, who Neo uses to speak through and taunt Ruby about her lack of purpose and holds out a cup of weird colored tea. In her already psychologically fractured state, Ruby struggles to fight against the hallucinations of her friends and mentors, but is saved by the Curious Cat, who reveals that they’ve been after a mortal shell to find out why “their makers left them there”. Before this can happen, Little fends the cat off, but then Neo stomps on them, bringing the tea back to Ruby. Just as the rest of her still living friends arrive, Ruby drinks the tea and ascends to the tree. Neo, however, starts to break down after finally fulfilling her vengeance, which the cat uses to take her body and head towards the tree.

OUR TAKE

Another week of RWBY and another week of having a WHOLE lot to talk about. And for a rather short episode (less than fourteen minutes without opening and ending credits), they sure knew to pack plenty in. It’s actually hard to decide where to start, but since the main focus of the plot is Neo finally going for her revenge against Ruby, let’s start there. Neo’s been pretty elusive this whole season, getting a couple of solo scenes where we see her Semblance leveling up so she can create multiple clones, but now we see, and HEAR, that they can all talk in multiple voices. And they make great use of making that disturbing by bringing back several dead characters, some twice over like Penny, to torment Ruby before Neo can go for the killing blow. But as much as this was effective at shocking me and going into darker territory than this show has ever managed, let’s take a look at Neo’s plan here:

It seems to hinge mainly on getting Ruby alone (how she was planning to do that without knowing Ruby would want to leave is unclear), lure her into an illusion house, and as mentioned, torment her with people that, as far as Neo knows, are dead. Penny and Pyrrha are natural picks for this since Neo knows they were both Ruby’s friends and are both dead (I guess she overheard about Penny’s second death or was just hedging her bets). Ozpin is an understandable one since, while Neo doesn’t seem to be up on the Ozpin from Beacon not being totally dead, having someone who was no doubt a cherished mentor to Ruby beating her and verbally tearing her apart was a sure bet to be traumatizing. But then it gets dubious. Clover was definitely an ally Ruby knew and KIND OF a mentor, but he and Ruby were never really that close. Then there’s Ironwood, whose death neither of them should be aware of, but him throwing words about well intended acts going wrong in her face was definitely long overdue. And lastly there’s Lionheart, who I think maybe shared a couple of lines with Ruby, she barely got to know him at all before he betrayed them for no clear reason, and Neo knowing about any of that is questionable at best, so I think she just needed to fill a seat. And then the goal was to get Ruby to drink tea and ascend instead of killing her?

But most if not all issues I have with the logistics and priorities were tossed aside (at least temporarily) by the surprise (at least to me) reappearance of the show’s first major villain: Roman Torchwick, voiced in part by Christopher Wehkamp and the late great Billy Kametz. I forget if it was announced prior to his death, but Kametz was initially cast to play Roman (replacing original voice Gray Haddock) for Ice Queendom, but only managed to record some lines before his death from colon cancer. When Ice Queendom’s dub came out and new NEW voice Christopher Wehkamp covered Roman’s few lines, I remember wondering if Kametz had managed to voice anything at all. Some held out hope he would show up here, which I found unlikely, but to my pleasant surprise it seems the lines he did record were saved for this, interspersed with Wehkamp’s to further add to the reality distortion. As a cancer survivor myself, losing anyone beloved by many to that disease hits home for me, so it was nice to hear Kametz one last time in a role I know he would’ve nailed if he had the chance.

As for the vital last few moments of the episode, we seem to be finally finding out what the heck ascending is all about now that Ruby is on her way to the tree, as well as now seeing the cat’s true plans now that they’re possessing Neo. It is a shame that Neo’s abilities had to wait this long to go to the next logical step and right before her possible death, or that her flimsy motivation of chasing Ruby for revenge is lampshaded in a rather annoying way, but I guess I’ve got to repeat my mantra for this season: “Better late than never”. The general consensus I’ve been seeing about the season thus far is that it’s frustrating that the show could have been this good the whole time but is only now getting here, in a season that incidentally is pretty far away from the Maiden and Relic plots that have taken up the past few years of the show. But with two episodes left and still quite a bit to cover, I’m eager to see how far down this rabbit hole goes. Oh and Little might be dead? Or maybe just ascended? Sure hope they circle back to that, but if not, I won’t be too torn up.