Review: RWBY: Search and Destroy (Episode 9, Season 2)

 

Spoilers Below

This week saw the girls off on their first officially recognized mission. Following  Professor Oobleck as they explored a failed expansion of Vale that was over run and left abandoned, named Mountain Glen. Although this was supposed to be something other than what the girl’s real motives are, finding the base of Torchwhick, even the stuffy history Professor knows the real reason they are going to this place, so at least they don’t have to pretend or duck and dive away from him to look for what they are really after.

Although nothing huge comes along to advance the story, the one big thing you get from this chapter is Motivation. Through Oobleck, we literally get the motivation of the members of Team RWBY told to us, a least partially.

First things first. As everyone sets off, we find that while RWBY are off to the Grim filled urban wasteland, team JNPR are off to shadow the sheriff of a local village outside the kingdom, while Sun and Neptune are off on a similar mission as well. Things sounds like the other teams aren’t going to be too far off from where team RWBY will be and all seem to have similar goals in mind, even if they weren’t expressly told so. Sounds like we will end up seeing the others again in the near future before this mission is done.

Seeing as he is leading the mission, we see a lot of Oobleck and all his quirks. His is a very stuffy  man it seems who doesn’t exactly get to the point of what needs to be said.  What is interesting is Weiss tells the professor that he doesn’t seem much the fighting type, and he responds that he is. Only once the mission begins, he’s not. The girls do all the actual fighting, while he off studying something like plants, seemingly oblivious to the battle between the Grim and Team RWBY. Yang is the one who takes offence to this first, but the Dr. quickly explains that not every mission is full of daring and peril. Oobleck however is not someone who is incompetent or lazy though. He quickly starts to ask the members of team RWBY why they are doing what they are.  Yang explains that she is a thrill seaker that wants to travel around getting into adventures, and better if she gets to help people along the way. When asked why she would give up a cooshy job and come out to fight as a Huntsman, Weiss answers that she has a family legacy to upload and it was never a question of what she wanted to do. Blake’s conversation with the professor is interesting. She tells him that there is to much wrong in the world and someone has to stop it, but when the professor asks ‘How?’ she doesn’t seem to know. A very telling responce and a bit more insight into what goes on in her mind. Ruby however doesn’t get asked the question. Oobleck shows her a marching pack of Mammoth Grim, who resemble a pack of elepants. He explains that these grim are not out to kill humans, since they learned if that if they did more humans would come and kill them. Ruby turns things around by asking him why did he want to become a huntsman. He explains he is best served to save lives with knowledge and teaching others lessons how to save lives. There is nothing else he’d rather be.

This episode served largely as an introduction to the newest plotline within the season, and although it didn’t lay the seeds of any direct action (We didn’t see any of Cinder’s group at all) we did plant the seeds of character. Other than Ruby, the other three girls all seem to have thoughts of uncertainty when asked the question about why they are doing this and why they wanted to be a Huntress, even if they thought they answered the question directly. Makes you wonder not only what this could end up leading to for the girls, but what was Oobleck’s game in asking. Was this something he did with all the new students on their first mission or was this something Ozpin could have wanted out of the group that seems to have their own ideas of what they think the need to do? He himself said that he was personally instructed to lead this mission, so either could be the case. Oobleck knows the real reason why they are going, so maybe he wanted to know more the motivation of these girls before they got any deeper into things than they already are.

This episode told an interesting story, or more precisely, an interesting part of the story.  We didn’t find any clues to the bad guy’s hideout, but more about what really makes these characters tick, as well as opening up possibilities for more self discovery. It was still able to inject the RWBY style of humor with word play (The Tussles conversation) and Ruby’s personality, along with Zwei (kind of answering what happened to him in the last ep) as well. It served its purpose more as the ball was just starting to roll so there is still a lot of find out and see as far as this storyline goes. It makes me want to see more where this is headed.

Visually there were a few noticeable notches against Rooster Teeth in this ep. The big one being during the scene where the group is taking off in the carrier. While they got the motion of wind passing by the characters right for Yang and Weiss, it came across as very awkward on Blake and ESPECIALLY Ooobleck. He is supposed to be wearing a suit and coat, but the way it was animated for the motion, it just looked like he was wearing a large nightshirt with a suit, tie, and jacket painted on it. Looked really silly and not what they wanted to achieve. The other big knock was the scene with Ruby and Oobleck watching the Mammoth Grim. The animators tried really hard to make the scenery around them look really cool, but it just looked like a soundstage with a painted on backdrop to me. Like the land only extended past a few feet and then everything was just a curtain hanging there with what was supposed to be the background. I’m not sure how to fix either of those problems, but they were both very noticeable and something the animators might want to keep in mind down the road.

All around it was a pleasant if somewhat uneventful episode. It was more to establish things than any great leap in the story, And there is nothing really wrong with that. It brought up a good point to the girls and made them think about what they are really doing and why, and also established a pace with Oobleck and what was going on with his place leading the girls. Animation issues aside I think it was just a small step in a much larger journey.