Arcane’s second season was never going to completely satisfy its audience. Most television is not guaranteed to make the people who watch it feel fulfilled season after season, but Arcane was destined to fall short of expectations the moment it was announced that its second season would be its last. Season one’s complex characters and themes were woven together in an incredibly balanced three act story that concluded with one of the best cliff-hangers of all time, and when all was said and done, there was no sense that the series would end with just two 9-episode seasons to show for it.
This is not to say that all of Arcane season two was wholly disappointing or poorly done. With Fortiche at the helm of the animation, Arcane will always look incredible no matter how good or bad the writing is. As beautiful as the show continues to be, there are conclusions to character arcs that, had the series gone on for another season or two, would have likely stayed the same. Almost everyone lands where they are supposed to by the time the series concludes, but it is how they reach those conclusions that feels a little hollow in the wake of a far superior first season.
Keeping track of large ensemble casts as a screenwriter is difficult. The lack of ability to do so is the bane of anyone who has been in a committed relationship with a long-running network TV show, but Arcane managed to give all 13 of its main characters proper allotments of its limited screen time in season one. It is an impressive feat that not many writing teams can pull off, so it is not completely surprising that things started to fall apart a bit in the second season. Storytelling cannot be perfectly even all the time, but in its quest to make sure that Arcane concluded in a true ending, many of the characters we loved fell to the wayside, and the thematic importance they carried fell with them.
Most egregiously left behind by Arcane’s end are Sevika and the Zaunites. We see how Piltover has taken advantage of the undercity time and time again in the present day, we know how they have taken advantage of the undercity in the decades past, and yet there is no true resolution to the inhumanity that the Zaunites have faced at the hands of their oppressors. The undercity faces even worse under Caitlyn and Ambessa’s regime this season, subject to Enforcer checkpoints if they want to move between certain parts of the city. Anyone accused of dissent is imprisoned without a trial so that Piltover’s hold on Zaun is left unchallenged. Caitlyn, despite knowing what Vi has faced at the hands of Piltover and the Enforcers—the death of her parents, imprisonment as a teenager, abuse at the hands of her jailers—willingly puts every Zaunite under the same subjugation just to get her hands on Jinx for personal revenge.
Jinx, now a symbol of Zaunite revolution and Piltover’s insecurity against her will, is encouraged by Sevika and Isha to take her place as the face of Zaun’s growing but fractured revolution. Sevika spends all of her time before the second act of season two jumping from leader to leader. She stood behind Vander until she realized he was no longer the radical he once was, she took up with Silvio until he died, and she sticks herself in the middle of the warring chem-barrons in order to keep some semblance of peace between the people filling the power vacuum Silco’s death blew wide open. It takes Jinx refusing to step up for Sevika to attempt to come into a leadership position in her own right, and even though she is only successful in rallying the people because Isha appears to impersonate Jinx, she implicitly becomes the leader she had always been looking for while Jinx goes off with Vi in search of Warwick.
She ends the series with a seat on Piltover’s council, and though that is a solid conclusion for the Zaun narrative, it is hardly satisfying when we didn’t get to see Sevika fight for it. Aside from freeing the imprisoned Zaunites with Jinx—who only comes along because Isha is in danger—Sevika’s time at the forefront of Zaun’s revolution is completely forgotten until her final, dialogue-less scene where she takes her seat on the council. Her place is earned, but unlike many of the other characters Arcane features, we do not get to see her earn it, nor do we get to see Zaun carve out its autonomy as its own city and community in the face of Piltover’s increasing fascist behavior, and the show is worse off for that.
Though she does get significantly more focus than Sevika and the plight of Zaun, Mel is also unfairly sidelined this season. After making it out of Jinx’s attack on the council unscathed with Jayce, she turns her focus to her mother. Ambessa did arrive in Piltover unannounced after all, and Mel is pulled into her mess as she tries to get to the root of Ambessa’s behavior. As fearless as she seems, Ambessa is embroiled in a conflict with the Black Rose that has caused her to run right towards the one thing they want out of her–her daughter.
Mel is taken by the Black Rose in the third episode of season two, we don’t see her again until the episode five (where she is decidedly not the main focus), and even though this is the first time she has had a storyline to herself in the entirety of Arcane’s run, it is cut off at the knees by a cliffhanger that is not resolved until episode eight. Mel has come into her powers as a mage by then, having made her way out of the Black Rose’s prison, but has she? She is certainly aware of her power, but she has never consciously used it before. Later, Mel tells Jayce that she had begun to suspect that something was going on after they survived Jinx’s attack, but we have no sense of that until she flat out tells us that.
Were there another season of Arcane around the corner, or at least three more episodes waiting in the wings, there may have been space for Mel’s storyline to stretch across the narrative more organically instead of it coming up like an afterthought every other episode until the series finale. Mel could still pursue the mystery behind her mother’s appearance while trying to figure out how exactly she made it out of the explosion okay. There are plenty of other characters—Vi, Jinx, Caitlyn, Jayce, and Viktor, to name a few—who deal with multiple story threads at once, so why not Mel? She, like Sevika, ends the series exactly as she should. She is a powerful mage, she has overcome Ambessa’s doubts, claimed her family’s power, and defeated the Black Rose after being pulled into their web. It is unsatisfying, though, that we do not get to see her learn about this new version of herself before we see her in action. She openly admits to Jayce that she is still confused about her powers, but is somehow in tune with them enough to be god-like on the battlefield. It is hard to accept that she has progressed so far without seeing her journey.
It is clear that the bones of her story were there, but the finished product has none of the meat that we are used to sinking our teeth into in Arcane. There is a chance that Mel could be a significant part of one of Arcane’s future spinoffs, and if that means her story will finally be explored the way that it should have been here, that would be a dream come true. However, no potential spinoff should have to make up for the work that Arcane failed to do with Mel. She should have gotten her due this time around, and so should a lot of other characters.
Instead of continuing down the meter-long list of things that were not properly addressed by Arcane’s final season (What happened to the Firelights’ tree? Do Jayce and Viktor know that Heimerdinger died?), let’s focus on some of the positives. Despite Viktor’s enmeshment with the arcane dominating the season—and choking out other storylines—it is one of the only storylines that gets the proper amount of room to breathe.
Viktor takes his desire to fix everything he believes to be wrong with the world so far that he uses the power of the Hexcore—the thing that “fixed” him by saving his life and healing his leg and disease—to strip away the free will of other people seeking solutions to their physical ailments. Ultimately, he decides that every person in Piltover and Zaun does not deserve to suffer the simple condition of existing as a person and attempts to suspend everyone’s souls in eternal nothingness with the idea that if there is nothing at all, there will be peace. He projects his own self-hatred onto the rest of society and takes their fate into his own hands without their consent.
It is fitting that Jayce, the one person who never looked down at Viktor for the things he disliked about himself, is the one to pull him off the path of magical authoritarianism and remind him of who he is. Jayce tells Viktor that he was never the broken person he saw himself as, he was merely as imperfect as the next person, and that Viktor’s imperfections were a part of “everything [Jayce] admired about [him].” Whether it is platonic, romantic, or an unquantifiable third thing, Jayce always loved Viktor unconditionally. He never saw him as a thing to be fixed, only ever taking extreme measures with the arcane when it came to saving Viktor from the grip of death, something he would likely do for anyone else he cared about. Of course, it takes Viktor seeing that another version of himself realized this and orchestrated Jayce’s entire life to lead to the moment he and Viktor would eventually implode into each other to truly understand that Jayce means what he said, but hey, we got a great montage out of it, so who can complain?
Even with Arcane’s conclusion being so crunched for time that significant elements are suffocated or flattened, the aspects that get the same attention they got in season one are as well executed as anyone who loves Arcane could expect. That does not excuse the shortcomings that plague the rest of the season, but they are proof that there was a stronger ending for the series that was lost in the decision to keep the series confined to the 18 episodes we are now left with. An Arcane that was allowed to complete its story in three larger acts would have had its own imperfections, but it may have allowed the series to remain the dense, detailed show we call came to love in its first season. At the very least, we will be getting more from the team behind Arcane, and that grants them the rare opportunity to learn from their mistakes, adapt to whatever limitations they may be restrained by, and improve upon the magic that they created with this show.
