Review: Arcane Season Two Act Two

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Jinx’s reputation grows out of her control, a previously dead character is revealed to be alive (and then dies), and everyone converges on Viktor’s hextech sanctuary.

OUR TAKE

Last week gave us the long awaited return of Arcane after several years of waiting, though with the bittersweet reminder that this would be its final season. In that first batch or “act” of episodes, we saw characters pick up the pieces from the literally explosive first season finale and begin setting up their plotlines going into this second half, and I had every confidence they would be able to manage and resolve it all within the remaining six episodes. By the end of this second “act” I am no longer confident of that AT ALL because things have WILDLY gone off the rails. For one, it’s been at least a few months since the end of the third episode, where some characters have hit the fast forward on some things pretty drastically only to then hit reverse on those changes just as fast. Caitlyn has almost fully embraced her new position as evil head of the Enforcers with a vendetta on Jinx…but then quickly goes back upon realizing how power hungry her new mentor Ambessa has been this whole time. Vi goes from Enforcer, to goth fight club participant, to her old self. Viktor pretty quickly got his own religion and now is dead. Jayce went searching for info about the wild runes with Heimerdinger and Ekko but is now back without them and on a manhunt for Viktor which he completes by killing him.

And among these whiplash changes, we have Jinx, who I guess just needed some time to herself because she’s the most lucid now that she’s ever been, even more so than some of the characters who started as the sane ones. This act starts with her apparently becoming a folk hero and people copying her look in kind of a more wholesome version of the new Joker movie, only for that to get mostly dropped when she finds out that Vander, her and Vi’s foster dad, has actually been alive this whole time and turned into a giant wolf man (apparently a nod to a different League of Legends character). He is then taken to Viktor’s community of Hextech fused citizens (among them one of the council who was crippled by Jinx) but is then killed by Jinx’s new sidekick Isha when he goes out of control. Also Isha is now dead, if you were thinking of getting attached to her at all, played out to a song in Chinese if you want to be completely pulled out of the scene like I was. Oh yeah, and Mel is…somewhere with some Black Rose entity who I’m not sure is connected to any of the dozen or so plotlines happening at full blast. There was so much just introduced in these three episodes that seems to have just as quickly abandoned, it makes me wish we just got another season to give them some room. But all that’s left is the final three episodes next week so let’s find out how it all wraps up.