Arcane’s final season puts an even finer point on its story about revolutionary war.
Netflix’s League of Legends-based series rocked my world when it first came out in 2021 — and I didn’t even know the first thing about League! But despite my lack of knowledge of the source material, I found that Arcane had everything I wanted in a fantasy series: a richly developed world, distinct factions full of nuanced relationships, and breathtaking magical powers and action sequences. Plus, there’s no beating that animation.
With Arcane Season 1 setting the bar so high, I was worried there was no way its second (and tragically final) season would live up to that standard. Thankfully, Season 2 measures up in every conceivable way and then some, with the first six episodes made available for review raising the stakes to stunning, often unexpected new heights. Brutal, gorgeous, and absolutely devastating, Arcane Season 2 demands to be seen right when each new batch of episodes drops.
What’s Arcane Season 2 about?
Let’s start with the primary reason for wanting to watch Arcane Season 2 as soon as possible: to find out who lived after the explosion at the end of Season 1.
For three years, we’ve wondered whether Hextech creator Jayce (voiced by Kevin Alejandro), Piltover Councilor Mel (voiced by Toks Olagundoye), and inventor Viktor (voiced by Harry Lloyd) survived Jinx’s (voiced by Fallout‘s Ella Purnell) shark rocket attack on the Council of Piltover. Arcane wastes no time informing us that there were, in fact, survivors (I’ll give you time to learn their exact identities for yourself). However, there were also several catastrophic casualties, and these losses drive Piltover’s reaction to the blast.
Arcane’s second season picks up in the immediate aftermath of the attack to emphasize the sheer amount of destruction Jinx caused in her crusade to make Piltover pay for its history of injustices. With so many of Piltover’s political leaders dead, the city’s priorities and its balance of power have to shift in ways that feel necessary to Vi and other survivors like enforcer Caitlyn Kiramman (Katie Leung). But while the new season takes some time to make you appreciate the magnitude of Piltover’s loss, it pushes this act of Arcane’s story into motion by exploring how oppressive societies create the monsters they ultimately come to hate and fear.
Everyone suffers as Arcane moves its characters into a new phase of conflict, but the show uses Vi and Jinx in particular to highlight how profoundly war can unmoor people from their senses of self. It’s easier for the sisters to let one another go than it is for either of them to see themselves in the other’s face. And when presented with chances to channel their feelings into action, it seldom occurs to them how fighting just to hurt the other side is guaranteed to cause self-inflicted wounds.
Arcane repeatedly echoes that idea as it briskly shifts focus to the rest of its cast and brings the devastating danger of Hextech into sharp focus. Inventor Jayce Talis (Kevin Alejandro) and politician Mel Medarda (Toks Olagundoye) can understand the gravity of the escalation her warhawk mother Ambessa (Ellen Thomas) is hungry for. But that foresight can only do so much to keep the calls for a full-on invasion of Zaun at bay.
Arcane Season 2 is a brutal and emotionally charged journey into the horrors of war, and much more.
That Vi-Jinx showdown, when it comes, is a perfect encapsulation of what makes Arcane‘s approach to conflict so brilliant. Yes, there’s an undeniable cool factor here: We’re watching two great fighters pummel each other with supercharged gauntlets and guns, complete with prolonged slow-mo shots to emphasize the badassery on display. Yet all the character work that has led us here is on display too, with Jinx and Vi’s every move informed by the love they once shared and the horror at what the other has become. It’s the tragedy that wins out over the coolness, and that’s the same with Arcane‘s larger portrayal of war in the League world.
That’s because war pushes every Arcane character to an extreme, sometimes taking them in the total opposite direction from Season 1. Vi joins up with the Enforcers, even though they killed her parents, because she thinks it’s an unavoidable necessity. A grief-stricken Caitlyn becomes a destructive monster in her pursuit of Jinx, unleashing hell upon the Zaunites. The latter is particularly painful to watch, as chemical warfare and police brutality become the norm in Zaun, and as characters we’ve grown to love grow corrupted by power and the need for vengeance.
But as much as Arcane‘s marketing pushes that this season is all about war and how it links to the rift between Vi and Jinx, Season 2 actually makes some strides into more cosmically weird territory. Innovations in the Hextech space push the boundaries of what is possible in Piltover, igniting discussions about transhumanism in ways that are both disquieting and utopic. That these conversations are happening alongside the Piltover-Zaun war is a reminder that the world of Arcane is so much bigger than these two cities — and so much stranger.
