The End of "Arcane"

Moderate spoilers ahead.

The second season of "Arcane" is very good, but a clear step down from season one, which is one of the best seasons of any animated show that I've ever seen.  The production quality is as good as ever - a little heavy on the music video-style montages, but with plenty of stunning visuals.  It also keeps the same structure - nine episodes divided up into three arcs.  However, the story is much messier and way more rushed, probably because the creators decided that everything needed to be wrapped up by the end of this season.

What I found so distinctive about "Arcane" originally was that it operated like a Greek tragedy, with all these characters striving to do right, and often being stymied by luck, fate, and basic human nature.  Problems were huge and systemic, and most of the villains turned out to be anti-heroes.  These same forces are at play in this season, but with the opposite effect.  Suddenly the deck is reshuffled and major characters are handed new roles and new powers, some seemingly out of the blue.  Major themes and conflicts from the first season are dropped, or sometimes resolved so quickly that it's difficult to take the developments at face value.  Because everything builds to a final showdown, and we need most of the characters on the same side, a bigger enemy is introduced to help facilitate patching up some of the rifts between characters.  The "arcane" that powers Hex Tech shifts from being an energy source to an invasive entity, with Victor as its seemingly omniscient faith-healer/religious leader styled avatar.  

There are a few new characters, like Jinx's kid sidekick Isha (Lucy Lowe), and Caitlyn's love interest Maddie (Katy Townsend), but most of this season's major antagonists were introduced in the first season.  Mel's warmongering mother Ambessa (Ellen Thomas) quickly takes charge in Piltover, and ensures that Caitlyn is installed as the new head of the government.  We also see expanded roles for characters like Silco's old cohort Sevika (Amirah Vann) and the mad scientist Singed (Brett Tucker).  Ekko, who was being set up as a pivotal character last season, despite not much screen time, finally gets a big, consequential episode in the last arc, and an important role to play in the finale.  Conversely, major characters like Mel and Heimerdinger spend way too much time off the board.  And while the first season of "Arcane" was built around Vi and Jinx, they feel like a much less important part of the ensemble this time around, with their long standing relationship tensions solved fairly quickly.

Frankly, the second season of "Arcane" makes the stakes bigger but also far more conventional.  Fighting against a supernatural entity or a mysterious foreign threat offers far less opportunity for real character building and interesting relationship dynamics than everyone trying and failing to fix the intractable Zaun and Piltover divide in the first season.  The big finale follows the beats of so many anime series I've seen over the years, down to the last desperate attack that literally breaks the rules of time and space.  The most popular episode this season is the one featuring Ekko, because the action slows down enough to actually get some good character building done for Ekko and Jinx.  Meanwhile, I had a terrible time trying to keep track of what Jayce was doing trying to track down a "wild rune," why Ambessa was fending off a group of mages called the Black Rose, and how an unexpected heel-turn at the end of the second arc made any sense.  There was a lot of plot going on, but not much effective storytelling. 

This season of "Arcane" has far too much talent and ambition and willingness to go for broke to be considered a disappointment.  I love the opening sequence in particular, which shows off how strong the character animation is without the fancy extra flourishes of the effects work.  I did enjoy how some of the storylines wrapped up, and the endings that some of the characters reached.  However, this feels like a different show than the one I watched in 2021 - an unneeded sequel, maybe, trying to give us a happy ending that wasn't necessary.  "Arcane" is almost certainly going to be one of the touchstones of this era of animation, and I'm glad the fans got their closure, but I think the first half still works better on its own.      

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