OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)In the aftermath of Jinx’s attack on the council, Piltover begins to shift in a dark direction.OUR TAKEArcane returns after THREE YEARS for its final season to conclude the tragic story of Vi, Jinx, and the people caught up in their destructive falling out. If you need a brief recap of how the first season, Jinx, formerly Vi’s sister Powder, killed her abusive mentor Silco and then fired a magic rocket at the council that was just about to probably leave most of the impoverished undercity they came from alone. Now that a few of them are grievously injured and a few others are dead, among them the mother of Vi’s special friend Caitlyn “Cupcake” Kiramman, they are naturally not so willing to leave well enough alone and are now on the warpath, especially Caitlyn herself. Vi meanwhile is really only looking for her sister, and while she teams up with Caitlyn and the increasingly armed Enforcers to find her (a major decision considering the Enforcers killed her and Jinx’s parents), she ultimately ends up being too conflicted to stop Vi from stopping Jinx (or rather the people she was working with) from spreading poison factory gas through the city. Essentially, tensions are continuing to rise within both areas of the city and Vi is going to have to come to a decision on how to deal with her sister by the end.Though let’s not forget that Arcane sports a pretty robust cast of characters who all have their own fleshed out subplots, plenty of which I don’t know if I’m going to be able to cover here but I’ll do my damndest. There’s Jayce and Viktor, the former renegging on his deal to destroy the Hextech core that was starting to change the latter in order to save his life, leading to the two parting ways and Jayce ending up with his old mentor Hiemerdinger (who he previously got thrown off the council) in order to understand the corruption that Hextech, something he spent years trying to make happen, is doing to not just their city, but reality. And then there’s Mel Medarda, who helped Jayce rise to power in the previous season but is now having to deal with her mother Ambessa trying to seize control of Piltover, which she seems to be doing by orchestrating a false attack in order to encourage Martial Law. But you came for my thoughts on this premiere, not a recap, so I’ll mainly say that this is a pretty strong start to the second half of this story. Like last time, this season will be releasing in three episode chunks known as “Acts”, so we’ve got two more weeks of this to go before everything pops off.
