When I watched episode 7 of the second season of Arcane, I was in awe. Not necessarily due to the content of the episode. That made me feel more … complex emotions. I was in awe of the writing and the directing. How did the creators manage to make me feel such complex emotions?
That’s the question I want to explore in this article.
Full disclosure: I don’t know the lore of League of Legends. And although I have watched season 1 of Arcane it has been three years, and I didn’t rewatch it before watching season 2. So, all the payoffs and parallels to season 1 there might have been went over my head. And yet, the episode still managed to stir
my emotions in a way few pieces of art had done so lately.
What exactly did I feel?
To figure out, how the show made me feel, what I felt, first I need to define what I actually felt. I find that rather difficult, because I think in the subtle realm of emotions words and terms that create static definition lose their power. Yet, to communicate what I felt to you, I need words under which we understand roughly the same.
I think melancholic or wistful best describes the mood of the episode.
But there is also an underlaying tone of eeriness. There is some sort of paranoia of a looming danger that never lets the viewer fully ease into the pleasure, which Ekkos side of the story is pretending to show us.
Lone wanderers in estranged worlds
I believe in the notion, that the simpler a message is in the way it’s portrayed, the greater is its emotional impact.
In that sense I think great visuals and good music find their way directly into a viewers heart, while the subtleties of story first need to be understood by the mind. However, once it they arrive in ones heart they can help elevate the simple feelings into more complex emotions.
Episode 7 focuses on Ekkos story in an alternate universe, but the visuals that stand out to me are the ones from Jayce’s journey that interrupts Ekkos’s now and again. The image of Jayce’s first encounter with a hollow, petrified hextech-body is great. It immediately tells you something terrible has happened, that stopped that person in their tracks. Throughout the whole journey we explore a desolate, dead city. The world Jayce is in, is an unchangeable fact. There is no hope anymore. You can’t change the world for the better if everything’s dead. And the visuals show that.
The genius thing about Jayce’s interruptions of Ekkos story is, it allows the creators to show what logically can’t be shown in Ekko’s journey, even though metaphorically it is there. Let me explain. As much as the two storylines serve as juxtaposition – Ekko is in heaven, Jayce in hell – there are similarities. They are both lost wanderers in an estranged world. They are confused, on edge, they feel out of place, and seek for a way to escape that false reality. Ekko landed in a bristling city, where all his dead pals are alive and everything is great. That backdrop doesn’t allow for visualizing his feelings, which is where Jayce’s visuals come in. I don’t think I’m just inventing the similarities. The montage over which Heimerdingers song plays is meant to highlight that similarity, I think.
Never a moment of joy
Jayce’s journey is not the only thing that interrupts Ekkos supposedly merry time with Powder and the gang. Notably there are three instances in Ekkos story, that take us completely out of the wholesome world. When he crosses the bridge, he gets a flashback of his fight with Jinx in the real world. When he arrives at the place, where the job went wrong, we get a flashback to when Vii died in little powders arms. Lastly, right before the party starts, Silco appears and for a moment both shocks Ekko and us viewers. As much as Ekkos story seems like heaven at a first glance, there is never fully uninterrupted bliss in this episode.
The same is mirrored in the characters reactions. As viewers we often adapt the emotions, the characters we root for display. Ekko never fully feels at home. His reaction to seeing his loved ones again is not pure joy, but confusion. He is suspicious of Powder, even sees her as Jinx in a reflection. There is tension between the two. And just as it gets diffused, an apparently wholesome montage of the two of them building the time-loop-machine gets undercut with Powder being suspicious towards what they are actually building.
The episode does a great job in displaying a bright and wholesome alternative to our main story, with just enough interruptions from a parallel story and suspicious moments in that supposedly wonderful place, that it creates an eerie feeling of something being wrong.
So much about the eeriness. But where does the melancholy come from? This rather complex emotion is maybe better explained by the use of story, rather than visuals. In short: Ekkos experience in the alternate universe pretends to instil hope in him and in the viewer. Hope for a better Powder, hope for a better world in the main reality. The only problem is, the show just spent three episodes to show the viewer, that this exact hope is not real.
“whether everything’s blurry or clear”
“Ever since you dropped into my life. It’s like I put on glasses. Except I can’t tell whether everything’s blurry or clear.” Jinx drops this line in Episode 6 to her new friend Isha. Up to that point we viewers, have witnessed a situation that is essentially similar to that of Ekkos in episode 7. In Episode 4 Jinx becomes a symbol of the resistance against the topsiders, and in the end even becomes a real hero, as she frees the prisoners and fights the monster. In episode 5 Jinx seeks reconciliation with Vii – and is successful in doing so. The two sisters even get their father back. In Episode 6 they even talk about a future together, start trusting each other and Vander is in the process of being healed. In act 2 of Arcane season 2 We are being shown a glimmer of hope, that Jinx/Powder can be a good person and her relationship to Vii can be saved. In a large part this is thanks to Isha, the little girl that attached herself to Jinx. She looks up to her, because Jinx saved her.
The line she says feels wholesome at first glance. It seems clear to the viewer, Isha made Jinx view clear. She brings out the best in her and lets her see her potential, gives her the hope of escaping the identity of Jinx. There can be good things in her life. Except the end of act 2 shows, that hope is false. Reality is everyone close to Jinx seems to die. The few good things that happened to Jinx, since Isha came into her life made her forget that reality. She saw the world blurry. The end of episode 6 takes us back into reality.
So, when we follow Ekko into the alternate reality in episode 7, we viewers are already primed to feel suspicious of any sort of hope surrounding Powder or Jinx. We have just learned, that that is not reality. That’s why the whole episode feels wrong. We see the potential of happiness and already know that it is not attainable. It feels like the Ekko story only exists to torture him and the audience alike.
“Always a dance with you”
Then there is the dance between Ekko and Powder.
Even though we know it’s false. Even though it can’t be and it won’t last, the dance gives us release. We enjoy the moment. Ironically, the dance is shown to us as a memory, which adds again to the melancholy feeling, yet it is also Ekko living in the moment. He is letting his guard down, just as we are. We forget what happened in the past episodes and stop fearing about what will inevitably happen in the future. It’s just a pure moment, we enjoy. Just as Ekko wants with the kiss, we too can pretend that there is no history between them.
I think the show does a great job in this scene of letting the chronological order go. They trust the viewer to understand, what happened when, and instead focus on arranging the footage of the dance, the talk on the roof and the kiss for maximal emotional impact. I do think a lot of the show is written or directed in a way that focuses on eliciting a reaction from the audience, sometimes even stopping the plot for it. But that’s maybe an article in its own right. Of course, the French accompanying the dance elevates the bittersweet emotion already dominating the scene.
A critique of the consequences
As I’ve written above, a moment lives not only from the context leading up to it, but from how it affects the story following after it. However while consequences can make a scene greater or worse, they can’t add emotion to the scene during a first watch through. They could on a subsequent watch, but unfortunately, I think here is where Arcane’s greatness stops short.
Interestingly the duality of episode 7 – between Ekko and Jayce – has opposing effects on Jinx. It is Jayces return from what he experienced in episode 7 and subsequently his need to destroy Viktor, that destroys all the hope for Jinx that has been build up in the second act. At the same time, Ekkos return from episode 7 seems to give Jinx that hope back. The beginning of episode 9 is another gut punch, but luckily Ekko can save Jinx. It’s the first direct consequence from Ekkos story out of three, but the last great one.
In the end Jinx sacrifices herself to save Vii and Ekko is left alone. This is important to underline the message of episode 7. The happiness there is unattainable. Unfortunately, there is no reason that Robot-Vander is still alive at the point of her sacrifice. We have been shown and told explicitly, that the robot army and Viktor are one. And if Viktor and the rest of the army cease existing, Vander should too. So Jinxs sacrifice feels forced. Lastly Ekko plays an important part in defeating Viktor – also thanks to the time-loop-device he has built with Powder. It makes for a cool moment and exciting battle. However it is undermined by again being needless. We have been shown before that Viktor shares the consciousness of all unified people. So, he should have seen Jayces memories of the hell he is about to create as soon as Jayce is caught in his unifying beam. Ekko shouldn’t have needed to free Jayce. Almost more importantly, Ekkos help in the endfigth, doesn’t add any thematic argument that would explain Viktors defeat.