Piltover is celebrating a special anniversary…

Act 2 takes place several years after Act 1. How long is not clear but from the opening frames we learn that the characters we left at the end of Act 1 have largely continued on with their lives. However, their trajectories have been very different, with Powder becoming Silco’s protégé and Jayce rising like a new sun over the city. With the exception of Vi, who is largely absent in these early scenes, we are shown how each of them have found their niches in a city which rejected them in act one.

The corruption remains though, lurking under the surface and the weakness of just a couple of those characters means we can already see that however each agent makes their choice there are fault lines running through everything they do.

Arcane explores this in a lot of detail, showing how no matter what we choose, sometimes only the wrong result comes from out choices. That can be because of how other people respond, it can be because of events entirely beyond our control. It can also be because to fight our way to success requires us to hold it together under pressure, and fault lines are most likely to crack wide open at exactly those times.

All through Act 2 we get the sense that whatever the characters choose they’re trapped by where they come from, the trajectories they launched into because of what happened earlier in their lives. The show isn’t quite fatalistic but it makes a strong case for saying that freewill only gets you so far because we’re all bounded by the people and events around us and the histories we bring with us.

In Arcane’s context this means tragedy for everyone in some form or another.

Take Vi – when we meet her again, she’s been in a deep dark hole for a long time and is set free not to live her life but because someone wants to use her for their own ends. Vi has an agenda and tries her best to make it happen but the world’s moved on and all her attempts end in frustration because she’s a woman out of joint with the times she finds herself in.

For me the close of the second act lacks the gut punch of emotion we got at the end of the first but this feels inevitable – we’re experiencing the consequences of that first gut punch, of the decisions made there.

I had some concerns about the portrayal of mental health in the show – especially around Powder/Jinx’s post traumatic lived experience so I went talking to some people who know. I spoke both to those who’ve experienced this kind of trauma and those who help others with it. I was surprised when they told me the portrayal of invasive memories and triggers was largely one they recognised. It felt heightened to me, unrealistic, so I was somewhat glad to find it seems care and attention was taken in making this portrayal, if not easy to watch, certainly in line with enough people’s experiences that they were saying it struck them as positively authentic.

Last, but far from least, I want to talk about how this show puts politics on the screen. The interactions between people who have differing agendas is fantastically done, with the gentle but clear presentation of how long arcs of choices can be coherently driven by people who know they can’t achieve their ends in a week or a month or even a year, no matter how powerful they are.

It’s done really well and elevated above the usual mediocrity of ‘courtly relationships’ that passes as politics in so many genre stories. There are even well drawn threads of how different people have very clear ideals and that it’s these driving them as much as their own personal ambitions or flaws. Political ideologies are never going to take centre stage in a show like this but that they’re there at all, driving at least some of the characters? For me it’s yet another example of just how smart Arcane is.

Verdict: Act 2 is just that, a moving around of the pieces on the board but it comes with none of the flab so often associated with the middle part of a story. The movement of the main characters remains compelling, is smartly written and really well paced. Add to that how the show has been greenlit for season two and I am quite, quite satisfied with my viewing right now.

Rating? 8 street rats out of 10

Stewart Hotston