After a three-year wait, Arcane returns with a brilliant, brutal final season

When The Last of Us dropped last year, it was hailed as that most elusive of unicorns: a genuinely masterful video-game adaptation. But to be honest, Arcane got there first. 

The IP for Netflix’s 2021 adult animated series is League Of Legends, Riot Games’ wildly popular combat MMORPG in which the men are jacked, the monsters are monstrous, and the women are basically composed entirely of boobs. That’s all well and good if you just want to log onto your PC and dole out a little street justice, but it doesn’t exactly scream compelling narrative television.

All of which makes it doubly impressive that Christian Linke and Alex Yee’s steampunk saga has some of the richest world-building and most compelling storytelling anywhere on the small screen, not to mention that swooningly gorgeous animation. It’s no wonder the first season of Arcane premiered to much acclaim and went on to dominate at the Emmy and Annie Awards.

Three years later, the show is finally back with a second (and, sadly, final) installment—and the long-awaited resolution to that devastating cliffhanger. To further build up fan fervor, Netflix is releasing the season in three acts, each comprising three episodes—the first on November 9, the second on the 16th, and the third on the 23rd. 

The first six episodes that were made available to critics fling us back into Arcane’s wildly imaginative dystopia, a city divided along sharp class lines: Piltover, a shining, wealthy metropolis built on technological innovation, and Zaun, the fetid city-beneath-the-city where the dispossessed struggle to survive amid rampant crime and deadly pollution. 

Arcane centers on a trio of complicated women: Vi (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld), a scrappy fighter from Zaun who’s doggedly committed to protecting the people she loves; her sister, Powder, a.k.a. Jinx (Ella Purnell), who grows up to become an unhinged loose cannon; and Caitlyn Kiramman (Katie Leung), the scion of one of Piltover’s ruling families and member of the city’s police force. There’s also Jayce Talis (Kevin Alejandro), an inventor who’s determined to harness the city’s latent magic for the sake of technological innovation.

Season one saw the dissolution of Vi and Jinx’s relationship in the wake of childhood tragedy. And as an adult, Vi is determined to save her sister from sinking into full-on villainy before it’s too late. She finds an unlikely ally in Caitlyn, who busts her out of prison so she can help her bring down Silco (Jason Spisak), a sinister crime boss who murdered Vi’s father and adopted her sister as his own. Along the way, the two develop a sexual tension that crackles brighter than Vi’s magical punchin’ gauntlets. In the season finale, a grief-stricken Jinx commits an act of terrorism that brings Piltover and Zaun to the brink of war.

The second season picks up in the aftermath of the attack. A conflicted Vi is skirting the edges of Caitlyn’s life as her mourning over the loss of her mother calcifies into a thirst for vengeance. Though Jinx has become a folk hero to the underclasses, she’s plagued with uncertainty in the fallout of her murderous rampage. Meanwhile, Jayce is searching for a way to keep his friend and business partner, Viktor (Harry Lloyd), alive after he’s grievously wounded in the attack.

After the long wait, fans won’t be disappointed. Season two continues to build on themes of class oppression, state-sanctioned violence, and found family while maneuvering its characters ever deeper into the moral gray. Vi is faced with an impossible choice when Caitlyn asks her to join the Enforcers, the organization responsible for killing her parents, in order to neutralize the brewing violence. And the pair’s budding romance hits a roadblock when Caitlyn’s quest for retribution takes her down a dark path. During all of this, Jinx starts to soften after she takes an orphaned girl under her wing.

Part of Arcane’s brilliance lies in the way it depicts horrific violence with gorgeous, stylish beauty. Every frame of the series is rendered in stunning detail by French studio Fortiche using a combination of traditional 2D animation and digital tech. The result is a precisely executed, painterly world populated by characters whose expressions and gestures pop off the screen. 

But the animators pull out the proverbial (and sometimes literal) big guns for the show’s fight scenes, which are each visual poems in their own rights. Take a neon-lit underground confrontation between Vi and Jinx in episode three, set to the dire strains of Woodkid’s “To Ashes And Blood.” The moment looks and feels fucking badass as sparks and blood fly between these two opponents. But it also frequently slows down the action to show us the emotional toll it’s taking on the two sisters. Even as it forces you to cheer like it’s a live boxing match, you never forget the dire implications of the outcome. 

Every act of war or reconciliation stems from deep emotional histories that have been carefully teased out over the course of the series. Arcane is all about transformation on a personal and societal scale, for better or worse. But it’s also about how, beneath every badass, there’s a traumatized kid who longs for solid ground under their feet. “Everyone in my life has changed,” Vi tells Caitlyn in an emotional respite between ass-kickings. “Promise me you won’t change.” In a world this volatile, that isn’t a promise anyone can keep.

Arcane season two premieres November 9 on Netflix