Season Review: Arcane Season Two

Arcane: League of Legends, the first major attempt to bring the world of Runeterra to viewers who aren’t willing to destroy their social lives playing League, has wrapped its second and final season. This was a confusing move when they announced it would conclude with this season, especially given the first one seemed to be pretty well acclaimed and left a lot still unresolved for at least a couple more seasons to clean up. But while we can speculate until the end of the multiverse as to why this decision was made, the fact is that the show is over. There may be another related show on the horizon eventually, much like Castlevania (another video game adaptation for Netflix) was replaced by Nocturne, but we’ll get to that if and when it comes out. In the meantime, let’s just focus on the second season of Arcane, how it compares to the first, and what these two seasons together will say about the show’s legacy going forward. And to answer that last one in metaphor, if the first season was Jinx’s missile taking off, the second is that missile hitting its target in a glorious and destructive explosion, amazing to behold but leaving a huge mess and definitely killing off at least a few shipping fans.

If there is one word to explain what ultimately brings down this season, it’s Pacing. The first season wasn’t always the best in terms of keeping things going at an even clip, but it clearly knew what to balance at what time and, in my opinion, resolved enough by the end to feel like meaningful progress had been made, and left off on Jinx attacking the Council in her anger, indicating an incoming major status quo shift. The second season picks up immediately where that left off and the impact on all involved, with some not making out of the explosion, giving Mel’s mother Ambessa a chance to seize power, something set up just before. And going by the first three episode drop, it seemed like enough new things were being mixed in with the established plots that it would be easy enough to follow. Then, the second third came out, and it became a rapid fire of plots that were introduced as fast as they could be shuffled away, including Vander being resurrected as a giant wolf man only to be killed again, Viktor making a Hextech assisted commune that is swiftly blown up, Jinx getting a mute kid sidekick who gets a pretty corny send off, and other threads that blow past almost too fast for me to even know what the hell just happened, let alone get emotionally invested.

The third act, being what has to decisively close the book, fares a bit better for a couple reasons. Regular movie goers may remember a bit in Avengers: Endgame where Hulk is revealed to have learned to maintain his intelligence while being buff and green, which many agree is where his character arc was meant to go, but have issue with him having achieved this catharsis off-screen. Arcane has a similar problem, where the way this season finishes does feel like where everything was leading (give or take a few deaths that feel a bit forced), but just way too rushed to get there for it to hit as hard as it really should. No idea if a third full season of spacing out these plot points would have helped, but what we got ends up being more of a carpet bomb than a precision strike, if you’ll allow more explosion similes. Fortunately, it still has everything else that everyone loved about the first season, so you may not even notice the pacing if you binge for all I know. While this ends up making the show as a whole feel like it missed the mark just enough, it’s still far and above many current animated shows on pure style points alone. Hopefully this encourages future stories in this universe and animation style, even if we have to wait another few years to get it. But if I may make a single request, can we PLEASE get a different band to do the theme song? I can’t imagine any more dragons.