"Arcane," Season 2: review

Jinx (L) versus Vi (R)

I'm torn between writing a short, one-paragraph review and a long rant. While I didn't like Season 1 of "Arcane" nearly as much as I enjoyed "Blue Eye Samurai," I did think the story was well written and beautifully rendered. Season 2, which is also supposed to be the final season for the series, was always going to have big shoes to fill: the bar had been set pretty high by Season 1, and there was a risk that Season 2, for a pampered audience, would feel like merely more of the same. That is, in fact, one problem I had with Season 2 of "Arcane," and that's purely on the visual level. You get used to all the animation—the slam-bang, the pizzazz, the boom and whoosh of it all—and that leads to detachment instead of engagement.

The story picks up where Season 1 left off, but as Season 2 unfolds, it becomes increasingly abstract and philosophical. Viktor, nearly killed by Jinx's RPG at the end of last season, is rescued by Jayce, who places Viktor into an energy sphere of the Hexcore, which is a combination of scientific technology and magic. As a result, Viktor doesn't die from his injuries but is instead taken over by metallic body parts until he becomes more of a machine than a man. Viktor's thinking, which had already been oriented toward solving major world problems like why humans (and other sentient life) are constantly warring with each other, becomes even grander as he realizes his time in the Hexcore has given him new powers and abilities, both to see space-time reality in new and godlike ways and to perform Jesus-like healing miracles for the downtrodden population of Zaun, a.k.a. the "undercity" that sits physically beneath the bright, rich, and privileged city of Piltover. Meanwhile, Vi and the insane Jinx, the two warring sisters, continue to dance around each other as frenemies. Vi's romantic relationship with Caitlyn is complicated by Jinx's having killed Caitlyn's mother in her rocket attack against the Piltover council. Elsewhere, Ekko and Professor Heimerdinger find themselves in an alternate universe, having traveled too deeply into "the arcane," the magical realm that seems to offer both blessings and dangers to the citizens of Piltover and to the whole of the planet Runeterra. Alternate-universe scenarios lead Ekko to meet a variant of Jinx who isn't insane, and with whom he falls in love. Jayce also finds himself sucked into an alternate universe (or future timeline) in which Piltover has turned into a blasted ruin, and Jayce's lover Mel Medarda discovers she has heretofore-latent magical powers, which she employs against her militaristic mother Ambessa, a Noxian who has taken control of Piltover. Jinx and Vi's adoptive father Vander has been turned into a wolf-like killing machine, and the unethical scientist Singed has been trying to bring his daughter back from death.

"Arcane," Season 2 is a massive tangle of subplots, and while I've followed plenty of complex stories before, the problem for me was that the series didn't do a very good job of explaining the cause-effect relationships propelling the story forward. In any fictional universe that contains magic, for example, there have to be ground rules as to how the magic functions. Without rules, there's no consistency, and while people themselves can be unpredictable in their motivations and decisions, the physics (even magical physics) of their fictional universe should be firmly consistent. Instead, we're left with nothing but confusing and annoying questions. How did Jayce know to place Viktor inside the Hexcore? If he didn't know anything for sure, why was the Hexcore his first instinct? Through what alchemy was Singed able to change Vander (already partially transformed in Season 1) into a vicious werewolf-like beast using wolves' blood? And later, why does he try to rescue Vander's humanity? What exactly is the arcane? Why would the now-detached Viktor have any interest in solving humanity's problems? Did Jinx recover her sanity at the end or not? Did she end up dying or not? While Season 1 was fairly easy to follow and understand, Season 2 of "Arcane" was hard for me to follow, and I began to suspect that the season would make more sense if I played the game the series is based on, League of Legends. This has, in fact, been a long-running flaw in both seasons of the story: the world-building in "Arcane" is woefully incomplete. Are the nonhumans in the story from other planets, or are they simply different homegrown, sentient races? What exactly is the relationship between science and magic in this universe? Why does the "anomaly" appear and seem to be rotting out part of Zaun? What exactly is the Black Rose, and what is the long-standing history between that society and Ambessa? A lot gets thrown at us, and little is explained to my satisfaction.

At the same time, despite how bizarre and incomprehensible the series was, there was also something blandly conventional about its ideas and tropes. The multiverse subplot, for example, is very much a been-there-done-that contrivance at this point. And when Viktor, who lies somewhere on the spectrum between the ultimate villain and the ultimate hero, posits that choice is an illusion, he aligns himself with every powerful villain before who has felt the same way—the good guys believe in freedom and possibilities; the bad guys believe in fateful inevitability. Viktor's "solution" to mankind's problems also seems to involve another hackneyed trope: the hive mind. And the defeat of this hive mind comes, as per usual, by attacking the hive mind's core, thus destroying the force unifying everything into a single consciousness and, in splintering the core, rendering all beings into individuals again. But for me, why any of this was happening made precious little sense, and the suddenness with which the story went from rollicking adventure to cosmic god-battle left me cold. I grew more and more impatient with Season 2 as each episode unfolded sloppily, and in the end, while I followed the story's emotional beats, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you why this person did that, and how this event led to that consequence. Am I just getting too old for modern storytelling, or did "Arcane" really just get sloppy, relying on people to know the major elements of League of Legends in order to follow along?

All in all, I genuinely didn't like Season 2, and I don't trust that this is, in fact, the show's final outing. I appear to be in the minority, too: most reviewers seem to love this second season given the bukkake-shower of praise I've been seeing on YouTube and elsewhere. Well, if you want to try to untangle this story for me, feel free. Maybe I should give the season a second viewing, but right now, I have to admit I'm mentally worn out. I blame the French team (animation house Fortiche) that was at least partly responsible for bringing this story to life. The French, God bless 'em, have a love of paradox fused with whimsical nonsense, an alloy that they deem truth. (There is, in fact, a nightclub scene in which a French song is playing, and the lyrics speak of how someone is "the worst friend and the best enemy." How French, right?) Otherwise, my complaints about Season 2 match my complaints about Season 1. Ultimately, despite the headily cosmic themes that make themselves apparent at the end of the nine-episode arc of Season 2, I found "Arcane" impossible to relate to, which made it hard for me to care what was happening. The only relief I found was in the all-too-brief, passionate lesbian tussle between Vi and Cait, when they finally get it on in that dungeon. Nothing beats a pair of good-looking women going at it. Really, the show should've been nothing but that.