Review: RWBY: Dance Dance Infiltration (Episode 7, Season 2)

RWBY

 

The dance party continues in this chapter as the stories between the kids of Beacon leading into the dance wrap up. This episode did quite well in bringing a lot of these storylines to a conclusion and STILL left you wanting to see next week’s episode.

Juane’s issues finally come to a head. In fact we see him mature a bit in this episode. At first he gets mad when he finds out Neptune turned Weiss down, but he delays going after Neptune to help Pyrrha. She finally tells him that the reason she likes him so much is that he treats her like everyone else and doesn’t put her on a pedestal, even becoming friends which, it turns out, is hard for her. Juane gives Neptune the business, asking if he even cares what the girls think when Neptune hits on them. Juane finally gets the truth out of the blue haired guy. Neptune can’t dance. He was too afraid of looking like a fool to say yes to Weiss (“I can’t dance man!”). Juane shows his growing maturity when he tell Neptune he doesn’t need to be cool ALL the time, in fact he would be better to be less cool. In giving Neptune the same advice that Pyrrha gave him, Juane shows he has grown as a person and learned from others. Juane finally brings things together with Pyrrha when he makes good on a promise he made a long while back.

He shows up in a dress.

Decked out in a white strapless gown and high tops, he asks the red head to a dance. Nora ends up pulling Ren onto the dance floor as team JNPR launches into a epic dance scene (if you look closely you’ll see Penny doing the robot, of course). Turns out Juane is a good dancer, the result of having seven sisters as he claims. Not only did his part of the episode wrap this story up for him, it showed his maturity too. Although he really cared that Weiss was turned down, he moved on and told Neptune how to approach her. With her cards on the table, Juane finally knew what Pyrrha thought of him. Hopefully it leads to a growing relationship between the two.

This scene also helped define Neptune more as a character instead of just a sidekick to Sun. I’m not sure I would consider him to be completely shallow, but he does put a lot of thought and effort into being “cool” for others it seems, Even at the expense of Weiss’s feelings (at least at first). Obviously Juane’s talk had some affect on him but to what degree I’m unsure since they never really defined him much other than being cool. This was a look into his personality and how he thinks of himself. Self centered, yeah, but not to an overbearing and completely harmful way. He wasn’t a character meant to annoy or drive you away. At the same time though that made him ill defined so far this season. This was a good way to show more of him as a character and have him learn some lessons as well. The fact he got it from Juane just made the show even better.

The second half of this episode looked at what Cinder and her group of Mercury and Emerald. We finally see the fruit of their infiltration plan as Mercury and Emerald are at the party keeping watch while Cinder is off ready to sneak into the computer and communications hub. As Cinder thinks everyone is tied up dancing, Ruby happens to spot her sneaking across the rooftops and goes to investigate. Cinder tears through a number of guards, sometimes with sneak attacks and sometimes blatantly making her presence known. Cinder hacks into the computers and appears to download something into the system just as Ruby arrives. They have a brief scuffle before Ironside arrives, but Cinder takes the moment of distraction and disappears, changing her disguise and joining in on the dance.

This explains away why those three have been into the school, at least in part. I have a feeling if it was just to download a virus they would have just left when the job was done, so the idea this was only part of the plan is not far fetched. We also got to look at Cinder’s abilities and her attitude. She is a skilled fighter and assassin, and she knows it. The scene where she just calmly walks into the elevator with two guards in it, even thought they know she’s not supposed to be there, and still kicks their ass is a sign that she has a lot of confidence. She doesn’t panic when Ruby shows up, or even Ironside. And after the deed is done, she just walks into the dance and enjoys herself like nothing happened. She is going to be a real handful when things hit the fan.

This was another great episode from this series. They used their time extremely well and splitting the episode into two parts worked much better than it would have if they had cut back and forth between the two. We got to see the end of all the personal stories leading up to this as Juane and Pyrrha got to dance, Neptune finally just dropped the cool and talked to Weiss, Blake let loose and danced with Sun, and the sisters enjoyed themselves as well. We also got a better look into what Cinder and her running buddies were up to, at least in part. We shall see if they stay at the school for the tournament or just take off when the dance is done and go back to their base. Great way to bring this part of the story to a close and focus on the next part of the story and that is the tournament.

Everything else fit together perfectly. The animation was great as usual. Again I give mighty props to the animators for all the fleshed out dance scenes where not only did they animate everyone, but snuck into little things like Penny dancing. This episode here is proof positive that they have improved their animation by leaps and bounds over last season. The timing and the use of humor was spot on as well. All around this was a great episode.

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