Arcane season 2 was worth the wait (Episodes 1-3 review)

After three long years, Arcane has finally returned on Netflix. The first three episodes of the hit animated show's second and final season have dropped, returning viewers to the twin cities of PIltover and Zaun, which stand on the brink of a brutal war. And now that it's airing, we can safely say: Arcane season 2 was very much worth the wait.

Based on the video game League of Legends, Arcane made waves when it first premiered in 2021 with its sweeping storytelling, stylistic animation, and top-notch soundtrack. It became the first animated show on any streaming platform to win the Emmy for Best Animated Series, and in my opinion, the hype has been very well-deserved.

Arcane season 1 ended with a massive cliffhanger. As the gathered nobility of Piltover met to discuss whether to grant the undercity of Zaun sovereignty, Jinx (Ella Purnell) launched a rocket across the river and directly into their audience chamber. Who survived? Who died? These questions and more have lingered, and now we finally have answers.

Arcane season 2 is releasing in three "acts" of three episodes apiece. The first dropped on November 9, which means we can get into all the details. Read on for our review of act one, but be warned: there will be SPOILERS.

Arcane Episode 201: "Heavy Is The Crown"

Unlike shows like Cobra Kai or Stranger Things 4, which released new episodes in chunks seemingly because Netflix felt that was the best way to keep viewers coming back over a period of weeks and months, Arcane being split into three acts for its final season feels driven by creative decisions. If the first three episodes are any indicator, there's no doubt that it was a good choice.

Each of the three new episodes focuses on a different part of the escalating conflict between Zaun and Piltover, and had me gasping at my screen by the end. The first, "Heavy Is The Crown," is all about the fallout from Jinx's horrifying attack on Piltover's elite at the end of the first season. She shot a rocket into a room full of people. Surely, not all of them made it out alive?

It's a huge credit to Arcane that it managed to maintain the mystery about whether characters like Jayce (Kevin Alejandro) and Mel (Toks Olagundoye) survived the blast. I honestly thought one of them might have bitten the bullet, but when the dust settles, both are shaken but alive. Others weren't so lucky. Caitlyn's mother, Cassandra Kiramman, is the primary loss of the episode. This gives Arcane ample room to explore the emotional fallout for Caitlyn, as she struggles with her mother's death while being vaulted into a position of even more responsibility within her household.

Then there's Vikor (Harry Lloyd), Jayce's partner in scientific experiments on the Arcane, aka magic. Viktor is another character who is at death's door following the explosion. However, after Jayce brings Viktor back to the lab and allows the Hexcore to fuse to him, Viktor is left in a striking magical stasis, leading to a huge transformation in the second episode.

Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Caitlyn (Katie Leung) are the heart of "Heavy Is The Crown," as they each deal with the knowledge that they almost stopped Jinx from blowing up the diplomatic meeting and failed. Arcane has always had a good eye for character development, and the second season makes it clear that there's no dip in quality on that front. Vi's back-and-forth about whether to join Caitlyn as a law enforcer is compelling, and leads to a great payoff by the episode's end.

Of course, the storytelling itself isn't the only star of Arcane. The animation is jaw-dropping, flush with style that adds to the emotion of the story. Arcane is one of those rare stories that feels like it's making the absolute most of its medium; there is a reason this show won an Emmy, and it's wonderful to get that reminder right out of the gate. Few other animated movies or shows come close, outside of Sony's Spider-Verse films. The voice acting and music are also excellent throughout.

The first episode ends with an exciting assassination attempt on Mel at the funeral for Caitlyn's mother, which gets even more dangerous because none of the good guys brought their weapons to the memorial service. Ambessa (Ellen Thomas) and her Noxian soldiers eventually show up to put the bad guys down, but there's a feeling there's more to the Noxian warlord's actions than meets the eye — something which I'm glad Arcane confirmed by the chilling ending to act one. Ambessa is easily one of the most interesting characters in the show at the moment, and I'm extremely curious where her story is headed.

Arcane Episode 202: "Watch It All Burn"

The second episode of Arcane season 2 shifts focus to Jinx, more than making up for the fact that she was entirely absent from the season premiere. Believing her to be the largest threat to Piltover's security, the nobles of the upper city place a hefty bounty on her head meant to entice the other criminals of Zaun into turning her in. Ella Purnell remains a blast to listen to as Jinx, infusing the character with a Harley Quinn-like chaotic energy as well as a sharp edge of emotional turmoil. Jinx doesn't necessarily regret her actions, like seemingly killing her foster father Silco in the first season, but it's obvious that they've been eating at her nonetheless.

This episode plants a few interesting seeds, such as the introduction of a child named Isha (Lucy Lowe) who witnesses Jinx kill a bounty hunter and begins to look up to her. Jinx isn't yet the symbol for Zaun that the trailers have teased she'll become, but she's well on her way. While various petty criminal lords come after her, she manages to gain the allegiance of Silco's former right-hand woman, Sevika (Amirah Vann). Sevika comes to Jinx's rescue late in the episode, leading to one of the most stylish scenes of act one as she utilizes her newly constructed mechanical arm to beat the somewhat ridiculous crime boss Smeech (Lenny Citrano) to a pulp.

With the inclusion of characters like Smeech and Jinx, "Watch It All Burn" is probably the most fun episode of act one. Jinx may have a bounty on her head, but she's still reveling in the chaos. The manhunt for her also gives us a glimpse at how Caitlyn, Vi, and the rest of the enforcer strike team are scouring Zaun, using the toxic smog known as "the gray" for cover. We'll learn more about that in Episode 203.

Jinx isn't the only main character to get a substantial story in "Watch It All Burn." The other highlight is Viktor, played by Game of Thrones veteran Harry Lloyd (Viserys Targaryen). Viktor finally awakens in his magical stasis, pulling himself out of the gel-like substance to find Jayce asleep at his work desk. The changes in Viktor are massive; his voice is different, his skin is infused with magic, and from the way he talks it's clear his mind is no longer entirely human.

He's also none too pleased that Jayce broke his word to destroy the Hexcore, and instead let it infuse Viktor so completely that it's now essentially a part of him. But Viktor is seemingly above mortal anger. He doesn't rage at Jayce; instead, he leaves, telling his old friend that he can no longer work with him.

Viktor eventually makes his way to Zaun, where a group of desperate shimmer addicts try to mug him. Rather than fight them, Viktor seemingly sees right through their tough facades into the immense pain they're suffering. As one approaches, he uses his newfound magic to heal the invasive shimmer side effects which were twisting their body. The visuals are striking, the scene emotional in a messianic way. It's clear that Viktor has a strange and epic journey ahead of him. We don't see him at all in Episode 203, but he's right up there with Ambessa as one of my favorite characters of act one.

Another highlight of the episode is Heimerdinger (Mick Wingert) and Ekko's (Reed Shannon) journey to Piltover. Ekko has established a beautiful underground safe haven in Zaun, where people can seek refuge away from the drug war that ravages most of the undercity. But there's a strange ailment afflicting the tree at its center, which Heimerdinger believes could be cured by some of the research he left back up in his Piltover workshop. The two sneak through the vents to get up to the upper city, which is a funny little sequence that leads to them crossing paths with Jayce.

Arcane Episode 203: "Finally Got the Name Right"

The third and final episode of act one brings a few of the disparate plot threads together, ending with a gut-wrenching change to the status quo. We learn exactly how Caitlyn and Vi's strike team has been getting around in Zaun in their quest to find Jinx: they're releasing the toxic smog, "the gray," into the neighborhoods of the undercity to use it as cover and keep people inside. And the way they're doing it is by utilizing the ventilation system and gas masks that Caitlyn's mother designed to help improve the lives of people in the cities.

Arcane has always had a sharp eye for how it portrays societal disparities; it needs to, since that conflict is the beating heart of the story. It's this tension that led to Vi and Jinx having such a traumatic upbringing and ending up on opposite sides of this terrible struggle. "Finally Got the Name Right" drills down on that theme in powerful ways, both by showing Caitlyn's slide into authoritarianism as she's eventually named the leader of the martial law effort in the city, and through Jayce, Heimerdinger and Ekko's discoveries about how the magical experiments are negatively impacting the undercity.

The eventual showdown between Caitlyn, Sevika, Vi and Jinx is exciting stuff, with incredible animation and a banger of a song to accompany it. It's cross-cut with Jayce, Heimerdinger, and Ekko going deep into the magical system that Jayce designed for experimenting on the Arcane to create Hextech weapons, like Vi's gauntlets. That system pipes energy from the depths of Zaun up to Piltover, and in order to prevent any accidents in the upper city, Jayce placed a failsafe for it down at its base. It turns out that failsafe was responsible for the corruption of the tree in Ekko's hidden village, because it was forcing any issues with the Arcane system to spill out into Zaun.

But they don't get too much time to debate it, because something goes wildly wrong with the system. What follows is more animation that is absolutely wild, as Hextech weapons malfunction across the city while Jayce has some kind of horrible realization about how his experiments have gone awry. We don't find out exactly what the repercussions are yet, but you can bet it'll be relevant in future episodes.

My main qualm with these first three episodes of Arcane season 2 is that, at times, it feels like things are moving extremely fast. Arcane has a fantastic soundtrack, and sometimes it leans into that by interspersing the show with music videos that serve as montages. I enjoyed that as a rule, but it happened enough over these first three episodes that I sometimes wished the show slowed down a bit more to dig through some of the meaty emotional material.

For example, early in Episode 203, Caitlyn and Vi share a kiss, and Vi asks Caitlyn never to change, an understandable fear since her sister underwent a psychotic transformation. But we see that Caitlyn is in fact changing only a few minutes later, when she nearly shoots a child in order to try and kill Jinx. It works, but I would have liked it to have a little more time to breathe. Vi and Caitlyn's raids into Zaun are summed up almost entirely in a music video sequence at the beginning of the episode, which, while striking, has the side effect of making it feel like these events are occuring faster than they actually are.

But really, that's a small nitpick. Any issues that Arcane season 2 has are far outweighed by its virtues. And those virtues are on full display for Ambessa and Mel's storyline in particular. We learn a lot more about Ambessa Merdada in this episode, such as the fact that she's actually lost power in Noxus and is being hunted by witches. Those witches kidnap Mel right as she's about to out one of Ambessa's allies at court for using the drug shimmer, and Ambessa hinted earlier that they were responsible for the death of her son. There's a lot more story here.

But the more immediate danger is what Ambessa will do next. The final montage of the episode, which shows how Ambessa actually set up the attack on the memorial in the season premiere in order to come to the rescue and instate martial law, is chilling. She's a terrifyingly good strategist with a secret agenda, and I'm very worried for Caitlyn after Ambessa handpicks her to lead the new martial law interim government in Piltover. The warfare between the upper and lower cities is probably about to go from bad to worse.

Arcane Bullet Points

• It's interesting that Jinx has a moment of quiet acceptance when she thinks Vi is about to kill her. Vi made her peace with her sister being "gone," but it seems like Arcane might be setting Jinx up for a redemption arc by the end.
• There are a few quick scenes of a deformed person who looks like Silco gathering up wolf DNA and working on some kind of experiment. So it looks like Silco survived. For the League players, it seems like he's turning into a champion known as Singed.
• I'd also be willing to bet that giant being we saw hanging at the end of the episode is another champion from the game: Warwick. It looks like the theories that Vi and Jinx's father Vander might return as the werewolf may pan out. Hopefully we'll find out more in act two.

Verdict

In our current era of limitless TV and movies to watch, it's a breath of fresh air to get a series like Arcane, which is so obviously a labor of immense love. Fortiche Production continues to do incredible animation work. Combine it with rock solid writing, voice acting, music, and visual storytelling, and it's easy to see why this show has captured so many hearts. The fact that this is the final season means we've got an emotional ride ahead, and I can't wait for it.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.