Arcane
“The Dirt Under Your Nails”, Season 2 Episode 9
Author’s Note: I’ve been sick all week, so this post might not be up to my usual standards. Thank you for your understanding.
What do I know about this series going into it?
I’ve heard numerous people raving about how good it is but I know nothing about it.
Recap
A woman with extremely long blue hair is lying on the floor in what looks like a church. She gets up, leaving most of her hair on the ground around her. As melancholy music plays, with heavily stylized animation, she pours gasoline everywhere and lights it.
So far I can’t tell if this is the show’s standard opening credits or the actual start to the episode.
Her arson complete, she takes out a grenade and pulls the pin, grasping it tightly to herself. It explodes and kills her. “Wait!” comes a shout from the side.
The scene rewinds a bit; turns out she only imagined pulling it, she hasn’t done it yet. And another woman, Ekko, has entered the church to stop her from killing herself. The first woman doesn’t care, though: she pulls it anyway.
The scene rewinds again. Aha: the previous rewind wasn’t imagination. Ekko has some kind of time-reversal device she keeps using to stop the first woman, Jinx, from killing herself.
Now it’s the opening credits. The animation style is referred to as “Fortiche” or something like that in the credits, which also say that the show is based on League of Legends (which I haven’t played).
A strategy planning session in a castle. The “Enforcers” need to buy time so this guy can “shut down the hexgates” before Viktor (clearly the bad guy) reaches them. The conversation is punctuated by flashbacks or flashforwards; I can’t tell which.
Outside, the battle begins1. A purple-haired woman, wearing armor, is running through the fray carrying an armored man on her back; the weaponry being used around her include arrows, guns, and magic. She reaches a safety room and puts down her wounded colleague – when the armor is removed I see he’s a woman – but it’s too late to save her; she’s dead.
The leader of the bad guys, I assume Viktor, tears through the Enforcers using an axe on a retractable chain, killing everyone in his path. The blue-haired woman from the strategy meeting spies him from above and fires her sniper energy rifle, but he deflects the bullet with energy shielding. When he turns towards her I see this is a woman as well – so where is Viktor?
Ah, maybe this is him: slowly approaching the stronghold, as the Enforcers lose ground, is a massive humanoid beast dragging a boulder behind it. I’m having trouble understanding the geography, but when the enemies take over a building two units of Enforcers, including Blue Hair and her colleague Ginger Hair, escape out the side and loop around to prepare an attack from behind. They launch smoke grenades as cover and charge inward, but one by one they fall. One Enforcer has a ZPM tied to her back that is clearly important; when she dies, a blue elf Enforcer grabs it and attaches it to the humanoid beast, then activates it. Duck and cover for it to explode… but at some point a nail damaged the mechanism, and it doesn’t activate. The blue elf, Caitlyn, blacks out when somebody hits her.
Fade back in: All the good guys have been captured and held captive. And surprise! Ginger Hair has been a double agent all this time. All the Enforcers are on their knees ready to get executed, and Blue Hair is first – but the moment she fires, a magic reflective bubble appears around her and the bullet bounces around and kills Ginger Hair instead.
Before either side can react, a white-robed woman comes out of the stronghold: “If you care for me at all, spare their lives,” she tells the lead bad guy, so I think they’re sisters.
Suddenly, reinforcements arrive: a pastel steampunk hot-air balloon accompanied by lots of people on flying skateboards. One of them mans a cannon that fires shipping containers and launches one at the beast dragging the boulder.
Both are destroyed, but everyone is surprised to discover the boulder was hollow. Turns out Viktor was supposed to be hiding inside it2. So where is Viktor?
Turns out he’s just entered the room with “Jayce”3, who is trying to do something with the hexgates – I forget what – to stop Viktor from using them for evil.
Outside, the tide has turned again; the enemy has managed to defeat the flying skateboarders thanks to a swarm of white aliens, and have lifted enormous red flags for some reason. Somehow this phase of the battle didn’t affect any of the three characters we’re following, as White Robes contains to banter with Chainaxe, whom I discover is her mother, though I still don’t know any of their names.
Blue Hair loses patience with the banter and just punches Chainaxe. “Shut up and fight!” They battle for a bit, and Chainaxe tries to spear Blue Hair, but the reflecting magic bubble sends it into one of her own mooks. I’m not clear on the rules of the magic bubble: is this one of Blue Hair’s permanent abilities? How reliable is it? Is she ever in real danger?
Meanwhile, the white robots attacking the hot-air ballon send it impacting into the steampunk clock tower at the apex of the stronghold.
Back at the Hexgates, Viktor gives his villain speech, of which I understand nothing. But Jayce’s response gives a little bit of context: I think Viktor wants to end human suffering by merging all of human consciousness into one. Curiously, he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to stop Jayce, even though Jayce’s entire reason for being here is to disable whatever Viktor plans to do with the gates.
Chainaxe has Blue Hair on the ground and is about to stab her in the eye, when again the reflector activates; this time I see that it’s actually being created by White Robes. As Chainaxe is pushed away from her, Blue Hair grabs a talisman off of her Chainaxe’s neck. White Robes activates it, pulling herself and Chainaxe into some netherworld, where they meet her4 sister. Something happens that I don’t understand and they return to the real world, with Chainaxe now dead. One of the three is named Ambessa but damned if I know which.
The soldiers all continue to stand at attention as their leader dies, apparently having no orders to kill the person who dd it. Or maybe their loyalty transfers to their leader’s daughter.5
Meanwhile, in the clock-tower, a purple-haired woman and the pastel balloonist are attacked by their father, a gargoyle-like monster named Vander.
Whatever Jayce was trying to stop Viktor from doing has failed; Viktor turns off the gravity in the whole area, and he, Jayce, and even Purple Hair and Pastel Balloonist outside all begin to float into the air. Viktor launches a glowing orb into the sky and activates it; glowing tendrils come out of it and start grabbing everybody in the world, except the alien robots, by the head. I have no idea what’s happening!
Jayce tries to appeal to Viktor: the latter always hated his imperfections, something about his leg, and something about a disease, that have led him to this place.
Outside, a skateboard-rider who hasn’t yet been grabbed by the tendrils flies through the swarm of white robots, trying to get to Viktor, but the robots tackle her. She pulls the chain on her time-reversal device (aha, so this is the woman from the opening, whose name I’ve forgotten) but in her second-fly-through she is grabbed again. She tries to pull the chain again and again, because the harder you pull the more you go back in time, but doesn’t have the leverage; she’s going back by less than a second, while still in the robots’ grasp.
Finally she succeeds in reversing time just enough, and throws some kind of device at Viktor. “That device can’t be!” he says calmly, just before it explodes in his face and breaks half of his mask. Jayce grabs Viktor in a hug.
There is a flashback to Viktor giving Jayce some kind of device in his wrist, which he will one day need to use to stop Viktor by proving to him that perfection leads to solitude; if you eliminate all free will of all other humans, there’s only you, which is a much worse fate than the suffering that humans cause each other. Past-Viktor6 says that Jayce is the only one in any timeline who can show him this, though I’m not sure how Jayce is showing him this. Still, though, it finally breaks through Viktor. Jayce pulls a gem out of his wrist and gives it to Viktor, and together they send all the white alien robots home and free humanity. I think. I still have no idea what’s going on.
Time outside the Jayce-and-Viktor bubble was frozen during all of this, but now it resumes. Everyone is freed from the brain tentacles - and fall from the great heights to which those tentacles had lifted them.
All the alien robots collapse and cease to work (so sending them home was conceptual, not literal). Jayce and Viktor are pulled into a black hole of sorts and cease to exist. Pastel Balloonist, finally identified by captions as Jinx (aha, so she was the other one from the opening scene) calls out to purple-haired girl: “Vi! Vi!” It’s a warning: the ledge that Vi landed on after her brain tentacle released her is collapsing, and she needs to get off the ledge quickly! But the monster they were fighting, Vander, wakes up too and resumes trying to destroy everything. In the battle, Vander and Jinx fall to their deaths.
As they fall, there are flashbacks to how good of a father Vander was before he turned into that monster, and the soundtrack is a hauntingly beautiful melody with words that glorify suicide; I’m not too thrilled about that message.
Denouement. People are putting pieces of paper in an enormous bowl, which are set aflame and allowed to float into the sky in remembrance of the dead.
Caitlyn, whoever that is, gives a voiceover. Vi talks to Blue Hair, now wearing an eyepatch, and tells her she’s the “dirt under her fingernails”.
Unresolved questions
This episode was far more incomprehensible than most finales. I don’t feel I understood enough to even ask about what was left unresolved. There’s only one I can think of:
Where did Jayce and Viktor end up after they were swallowed by the black hole?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 7/10. As usual, I give the episode the benefit of the doubt: anything I don’t understand was probably executed competently. And it was clear that momentous things were happening throughout - none of which I understood at all.
There were clearly multiple threads happening within the generalized battle between good and evil. Viktor and Chainaxe may have been allies, but I’m not quite sure Chainaxe was on board with the whole “everyone loses their free will to me” plan (assuming I even understood correctly that that was Viktor’s plan). She had her own faction of loyal soldiers and her own beef with White Robes and Blue Hair. Then there was the subplot between Jinx and Vi. Plus the large number of clearly important characters met their permanent ends: Jinx, Vander, Chainaxe, Ginger Turncoat, and whoever it was that Purple Hair was trying to save in the first scene of the battle, plus possibly Jayce and Viktor.
Can you tell that my description of the plot is halting and disjointed? Sorry, but that’s the best I can do this week. I had no idea what was happening.
Writing: 7/10. Above average for television… I think. I loved the imaginative weaponry and devices that were being used: the time-travel device that works by pulling a lawn mower, the steampunk grenades, and so on. Viktor’s goal – again, assuming I understood it correctly – was more interesting than you usually get in a villain of this type. And the flashbacks to when Viktor and Vander were good guys were effective.
I can’t give it full marks. Some of the plot hinged on the bad guys being stupid: waiting for Blue Hair and the other Enforcers to wake up before executing them rather than killing them while they were still unconscious, or the dozens of guards politely standing by while Blue Hair and Chainaxe fought to the death.
Production: 9/10. My only criticism is that I had a lot of trouble following the geography of the battle. But this is a beautifully imagined world. The animation style was vaguely anime, with a steampunk aesthetic, but had a uniqueness to it that set it apart and above other shows with that type of setting. The design of the weaponry, the characters (especially White Robes), the creatures, were all extraordinary and set a perfect tone together. The voice acting was good. The song that accompanied Jinx’s death, despite my disapproval of the subject matter, was amazing, and the rest of the score was perfectly chosen as well.
Characterization: 4/10. This may be too harsh a grade, but I’ve seen many action finales do this and Arcane’s is no exception. Most of the runtime is taken up by the battle, which leaves very little chance for character beats. Viktor’s motivations are interesting and deeply explored, but I was exposed to very little of the personalities of anybody else.
I want to reemphasize what I wrote in the disclaimer above, though: I am talking about this episode only. The pitched battled that occupied most of this episode didn’t include any tea leaves to read, that might have given me hints as to Blue Hair’s personality, but that doesn’t preclude her and everybody else from being three-dimensional characters over the rest of the series.
Accessibility: 2/10. One of the least accessible finales I’ve watched so far. I know the names of maybe five characters, and I’m not even sure about all of them. I know who the bad guy is, but I’m not confident I understood his plan. The Hexgates, the rules of magic, what happened in Ambessa’s netherworld or in Viktor’s black hole, who the alien robots are – these are all opaque. The entire episode, from start to finish, was one big mystery.
Closure: 9/10. The main bad guy has been stopped; half the named characters are dead. I’m going out on a limb here because I understood so little but I think that there were no plot threads left dangling.
Do I want to watch the series now?
I do! Despite the negative characterization rating I gave to this episode, I get the feeling there is a lot more to these people that was explored over two seasons. And it really is a beautiful and unique world with great music. I want to see this from the beginning and then watch the finale again, this time able to understand it.
I can’t tell if this is simultaneous to the strategy meeting or much later
So who is the beast?
How did he get there with nobody noticing or warning Jayce?
I don’t know which her.
Though why they didn’t intervene before she died is a mystery.
Although, writing this footnote after the episode, I suspect it might actually be future Viktor.