Arcane season 2 remains searingly beautiful and devastating in Act II (Episode 4-6 review)

This past weekend, the second act of Arcane season 2 dropped on Netflix. Act I ended with Caitlyn (Katie Leung) becoming the de facto leader of Piltover's new military state, under the watchful guidance of the Noxian warmonger Ambessa Medarda (Ellen Thomas). Meanwhile, Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) had a falling out with Caitlyn after their climactic duel with Jinx (Ella Purnell) and Sevika (Amirah Vann), which ended with Caitlyn going back up to Piltover and Vi disappearing into the heart of Zaun.

To top it all off, Jinx has now become a symbol to the people of Zaun, after her fight with Vi set off a series of colorful powder explosions which shot up through the ventilation system and covered the people and buildings of Piltover. Whether Jinx likes it or not, she's a symbol of resistance. That has some huge repercussions in Act II, as we see how the Zaunites are faring after Piltover's declaration of martial law.

We'll be getting into FULL SPOILERS for Arcane season 2 Act II below. But suffice to say out of the gate: the middle section of Arcane's final season is even better than the first, and set things up for what should be a thrilling third act next weekend.

Arcane Episode 204: "Paint the Town Blue"

Act II flips the formula of the first act on its head: this time, it's Vi who sits out the first episode instead of Jinx. "Paint the Town Blue" is all about how Jinx is becoming a symbol of resistance to the people of Zaun, who are suffering immensely under Piltover's new military crackdown. We learn this through another time jump montage. It's not exactly clear how much time has passed since Act I, but it seems like weeks at least.

The time jumps remain slightly jarring to me. Overall, I think they work and it's easy to understand why Arcane opted to use them: so it can spend more time on the meat of the story it's trying to tell. But it also does feel like we're missing a fair amount. Caitlyn's new romance with Maddie (Katy Townsend) is a pretty good example; we've hardly seen these two together at all, and now they're sleeping together as Caitlyn copes with her new position as Piltover's leader. I'd have liked to see a bit more development between them to set this up.

But overall, we don't spend too much time on the jump, because Caitlyn and Ambessa have a rebellion to put down. Once more, Arcane leans into its strengths at showing the power imbalance between Piltover, which is using Hextech and Noxian military forces against the citizens of Zaun, and the Zaunites, who just want to live with dignity even when they're being put through debasing search checkpoints.

"Paint the Town Blue" has a lot of heavy lifting to do, weaving together all the stories which set the stage for the rest of Act II. The most fascinating elements for me were Singed (Brett Tucker), Silco's old scientist who unleashes a monstrous creature against the forces of Piltover; and Jinx, whose resistance to becoming a figurehead is extremely compelling. Going into Arcane season 2, I assumed Jinx would continue to have a fairly straightforward arc of becoming a leader to Zaun, following her attack on the Piltover ruling council at the end of the first season. But Arcane did something much more interesting by having that traumatic event serve as another breaking point for Jinx. Now, her will to fight is much lower, and she really just wants to be left alone to tinker with gadgets and raise her new foster child Isha (Lucy Lowe). However, since Isha herself also wants Jinx to step up and be a leader to the Zaunites, it ends up pushing Jinx back into the spotlight.

The climax of this episode is a thrilling prison break where Jinx and Sevika break out a bunch of Zaunites who were captured at a rally, including Isha, only to have Singed's creature Warwick (JB Blanc) arrive a short while later and tear through the guards. Warwick is a terrifying force of nature, and I loved how Arcane experimented with some different animation styles to show the blood-drenched world through his eyes. I also need to shout out the scene where Jinx finally accepts that she's a hero to the Zaunites and they quietly move past her while placing their hands on her shoulders. It's powerful stuff which is only made more impactful when it becomes clear that Warwick murdered a bunch of them minutes later because he couldn't differentiate friend from foe.

This all leads to the big reveal: that Warwick is in fact Vander, Vi and Jinx's adoptive father who seemingly died in the first season. Vander's death was the inciting incident which tore their family apart; Vi blamed her younger sister for it, which ultimately drove Jinx to join Silco's crime ring. Now, we get to see how Vander's return brings them all back together in the following episode, "Blisters and Bedrock."

Arcane Episode 205: "Blisters and Bedrock"

"Blisters and Bedrock" opens with an incredible montage of Vi, spiraling as she drinks herself into oblivion and fights in Zaun's underground fighting rings. She's now sporting black hair and a leather jacket, rather than her typical reds. We saw this section in some of the earliest trailers for Arcane season 2, and it lived up to the hype. While the time jumps this season haven't always gelled perfectly for me, this one with Vi stands out as one of the best — probably because it actually shows the passage of time, with flashes of various matches and drunken benders as Vi passes her days in a rage.

Arcane wastes no time reuniting Vi with Jinx, who interrupts her sister's wallowing to inform her that their father is still alive. I'll admit, I wasn't expecting this quick reunion, and it does once again feel like Arcane is skimming over events pretty quickly — how did Jinx and Warwick escape the prison in the last episode? When did Jinx decide to track down Vi? — but it's easy to forgive when the show's this good. Vi and Jinx's reunion is a high point of the series, as they finally work through their issues while they hunt for Vander/Warwick in the tunnels beneath Zaun.

Their story includes by far my favorite part of the episode: a flashback showing young Vander, Silco, and Felicia at their bar in the undercity. Felicia was Vi and Jinx's biological mother, who died when they were young. Here we get to see her on the night she broke the news to her two best friends that she was pregnant, and how Vander offers up the name of "Violet" because Felicia is stressing about names. I won't lie, I teared up in this scene. It was so cool to see these characters in their prime, when Silco was a quiet bookworm and they were all close friends. That it leads directly into a big ol' group hug as Vander regains control in the present and Vi buries the hatchet with Jinx only adds to the emotional weight of the scene.

There are other highlights in "Blisters and Bedrock." Singed joins forces with Ambessa and Caitlyn, putting them onto Warwick's trail now that the beast has gone missing. Mel (Toks Olagundoye) is seemingly reunited with her brother, only to find out that he was an illusion sparked by the witches who captured her during Act I. They reveal a terrible truth: Ambessa sacrificed her son to them as part of a horrific deal; Ambessa have them a child with the powers of a witch in exchange for their aid in her own quest for dominance. It turns out Ambessa was pulling a fast one on them though, and they know it: Mel is the child they wanted, and now they have her. We don't see Mel again in Act II, but I imagine the payoff for that storyline is coming. I also imagine that more of the details of Ambessa's proverbial deal with the devil will be explored in author C.L. Clark's upcoming tie-in novel Ambessa: Chosen of the Wolf.

Then there's the final scene, where we see Jayce re-emerge from the strange Arcane anomaly he found in the depths of Zaun during the end of Act I. He's been gone for weeks, now has a beard, and seems like he's on the verge of insanity. His conversation with Salo (Josh Keaton) is haunting in the best way. Salo was previously wheel-chair bound, and the Shimmer drug he was using to fight his affliction was losing its potency. So he sought out a mysterious healer in Zaun — Viktor (Harry Lloyd) — who was able to miraculously restore his health. Viktor possesses Salo's body to talk to Jayce in a great sequence. But Jayce doesn't take this well. Changed by whatever he experienced during his absence, Jayce murders Salo. And that's only a glimpse of the carnage to come in the final episode of this act.

Arcane Episode 206: "The Message Hidden Within the Pattern"

We've talked a lot about the story events so far, which has been needed because things are getting extremely twisty in this middle section of Arcane's final season. But all the other elements that make Arcane so good are still on ample display. The voice actors are fantastic, the music is filled with bangers as well as eerie scoring, and the visuals are mind-numbingly amazing.

Nowhere is that last point made clearer than in "The Message Hidden Within the Pattern." This episode revolves around Jinx and Vi bringing their father Vander/Warwick to Viktor's commune in the depths of Zaun, where they hope he can work his miraculous healing to bring the man back out from the beast. The commune is stunning, filled with whorls of color and atmospheric light, and Viktor's journey into Vander's subconscious is composed of scenes that look more like fine art than the sort of thing you'd expect out of an animated series based on a video game. Arcane also does incredible work with close-ups of characters in this episode, with an amazing level of detail for Vi and Jinx and all the rest. I don't say this lightly: I genuinely can't think of any other animation I've seen recently that is even close. Arcane deserves awards for this episode.

"The Message Hidden Within the Pattern" contains a number of beautiful scenes, but also some of the most horrifying of the entire show. All roads converge on the commune; while Vi and Jinx are working with Viktor to help Vander, Caitlyn and Ambessa arrive with their Noxian forces to capture him, and Jayce also appears at the eleventh hour to throw it all into chaos. Caitlyn and Vi once more joining forces was an excellent moment which results in the rare instance of someone getting the one-up on Ambessa. I loved all the backstabbing and betrayal in this episode; it had me on the edge of my seat.

But ultimately, things get very dark when Jayce seemingly murders Viktor at the behest of whatever malignant power is controlling him. After that, we see that Viktor's death seemingly also kills every single person who he had healed, who were linked to him by magic. The resulting sequence reminded me a lot of when Ceres Station was taken over by the Protomolecule in The Expanse, as Vi and Jinx and Caitlyn realize they're in the middle of an unfolding horror while people fall to their knees screaming around them. If all of these people can be so adversely affected by Viktor's death, his healing may not necessarily be a good thing after all.

But we don't get too much time to dwell on it, because then the episode devolves into a brutal battle as Ambessa brings her Noxian forces to bear and Vander is driven to madness by Viktor's death. The battle scene is beautifully animated and terrible to watch, and ends with a heart-wrenching scene where the child Isha seemingly sacrifices herself to save Jinx and kill Vander before he can harm anyone else. I think it's easily going to go down as one of the most memorable parts of the season, and it has me so excited to see how Arcane wraps things up in its final three episodes.

Arcane Bullet Points

• We didn't see Heimerdinger or Ekko at all in Act II. They went into the Arcane warp dimension with Jayce but never came back out. They also don't show up in the preview for Act III, so at this point I'm starting to wonder if Arcane actually killed them off. I'd be disappointed if that's the case, but it would also be pretty shocking. Hopefully we get confirmation one way or the other in the final stretch of episodes.
• Theories have abounded for a while now that Vander survived Arcane season 1 and would return as Warwick in the second season. Warwick is a werewolf-like champion in League of Legends. The version we see in the show looks pretty different, but the captions of Netflix's images from these episodes confirm that the beast we see is the show's take on Warwick.
• One thing I do hope Arcane makes a bit clearer is the exact details of what's going on with Jayce and the Hexcore that melded with Viktor. Viktor seems to be doing good by healing people, but his death seemingly causes hundreds of people linked to him to also perish, which is pretty bad; conversely, Jayce seems like he's possessed by some evil force, but if he's purging the world of Hexcore magic, it may not be as terrible as it seems. It's hard to know who the good guys and bad guys are in this situation, which works really well. But I do think Arcane needs to give us a bit more clarity in the home stretch in order for the ending to be fully comprehensible.
• In case you missed it, Singed is the person who created Shimmer, the drug which ran rampant through Zaun. And lo and behold, he was actually a Piltover scholar forced to stop his studied, presumably for inventing the drug.
• If Vander is actually dead, it'll be an interesting course for Arcane to have brought him back only to then kill him off again so quickly. It seems like he's mainly around to bring Vi and Jinx back together.
• Credit where it's due: Arcane has not been shy about killing off main characters. That's especially notable considering that a lot of these characters are based off beloved video game characters about whom viewers may have outsized expectations.
• Speaking of deaths, we've got to shout out Rictus, Ambessa's right-hand man who was mashed to a pulp by Warwick. Now that he's dead and Ambessa is on the outs with Caitlyn, it's going to be very interesting to see what happens in Piltover and Zaun in the series finale.

Verdict

Act II of Arcane's second and final season ups the stakes considerably, digging deep into the emotional core of the series to reunite the wayward sisters Jinx and Vi. The story has grown even more complex, and while there are a few beats that the show skimmed over a little too quickly, it's hard to begrudge it considering the massive amount of storytelling it needs to fit into its nine episodes. Combine it with animation that is absolutely jaw-dropping, and it feels safe to say that Arcane season 2's second act is even better than the first.

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