 I'm not going to beat her on the bush. If you're looking for a great animated show to watch and you happen to have access to Netflix, watch Arcane. This is one of the great perks to having a YouTube channel. You get viewers that watch regularly that know your kind of style, they know what you like out of a film or a TV show, and they'll suggest things based on your preferences. Arcane was one that was brought to me by many people in the comments, and what really sealed the deal to give it a shot was seeing my brother and sister over the holiday break, and they said, you know what, Adam, this show is incredible, you have to watch it. So what did I know about this show going in? Virtually nothing. I knew it was animated, I knew that it was based on a video game franchise. That's about it. I assume based on what I saw from the show, it's a free to play type of game, third person shooter probably, with a bunch of quirky characters that have different specialties. You might have a gunner, you might have a sniper, a medic, a mage, things like that. I'm going to be completely wrong, I've never seen a single piece of footage on this video game. And thankfully I didn't need to when watching this show. What the first season of Arcane provides is a rich story following a bunch of different characters over the course of nine episodes. They range from about 40 minutes each to, uh, 40 minutes each, I think is what all of them are. I guess I didn't really pay attention to that, and I kind of walked myself into a corner here. This show follows the playbook of a lot of dramas you've seen over the years on television. Lost was kind of the first one to really pick up this style, then you have Walking Dead, where you have a focal character, in this case it's Vi, played by Hailey Steinfeld, who's I guess just doing everything these days. But then there's also these other major players that come and go, sometimes the focus goes to them, and Vi's not even in the episode at all, or very scant amounts. It's her dynamic with powder that's the most interesting to me and how that plays out over the course of the season. And the way these characters change due to the circumstances around them is really interesting to watch play out. It's funny because this show follows a lot of themes and just basic story telling that we've seen time and time again. You have the upper world, the utopian society, looking down or ignoring, dismissing the underground dwellers below. They don't want anything to do with them. They want to skirt them under a rug, sweep them away. So of course we get storylines from both the perspective of the wealthy, of the upper management, and then those down below. The bottom feeders just trying to scrape by, and they want that power. They want a taste of the life up top. So there's this back and forth, push and pull between these two forces, and they hit hard when this show starts to wrap up. Now I will say Netflix and The Creators of Arcane are very confident. This first nine episodes doesn't put a bow on things. We get a little closure to some stuff, but it's very much a series that's going to continue on. No going in. You might not get a satisfactory conclusion. I was very satisfied all around with this show though, if that means anything. The character design of Vi is another Ben there done that. She's basically the entire starter pack of a strong female lead character in the 2000s. She's got the side buzz with the hair hanging over the eyes. She's very butch, very strong. And even though we've seen all this before, they so expertly and confidently execute it. There's not a single portion of this show where I thought, man, that could have been done better or I really wish the story would have gone this way. I've done that plenty of times with other properties, but not here. And that's just telling of how well the story was written. I'm treating this review like it's someone that hasn't seen it and I'm trying to convince them to watch. But it's been out for a couple weeks and I think that's pretty much an eternity when it comes to streaming services. If you haven't watched it, this is an absolute recommendation. The visuals are absolutely stunning. The animation quality is top notch. It reminded me of the Telltale Walking Dead games. I don't know if you're familiar, but the video game franchise has a cool art style to it. And I feel like if they were to make one for the PS5 or the new Xbox, they would kind of mirror the arcane style because that looks like something that Walking Dead could become if they ever changed their crappy engine. We have music in this thing too, kids. Billie Eilish or Eyish or whatever the hell her name is, Eyelash. She's in this. She's got music here. We have Imagine Dragons kicking off the theme song, which is Absolute Fire. Every time I hear it, it's hard to skip it. It reminds me of the Game of Thrones theme song. Dilly, dilly, dilly, and a man. You don't skip that shit. You watch that map unfold every single time. It's a must. And this did remind me of Game of Thrones, a more PG-13 version. No one's safe here. People will die, you don't expect. Things will happen that shake up the show. That kind of make you go, whoa, I did not see that coming. And that's exciting. That shows that the creators are willing to take a chance. They'll take risks. Top Tier Animation, a phenomenal soundtrack and score accompanying this picture. Plus, we have characters with depth. It's wild to think. We're not just Wayne Johnson running around here. We have villains that have motivations other than I want to take over the world. They have actual layer to them. And you can sympathize with even the worst person in the show. You can say, you know what, I know how you got here. Or I can kind of see why you are this way and doing the things you're doing. It's incredible. I really, this was really well done all around. Okay, I'm gonna jump into spoilers now. So if you haven't watched this show, shut this off, walk away and go finish or start it for the first time. This is a glowing recommendation for me. It's one of the best shows I've seen in a very long time for a first season. And I really hope they continue this momentum and keep firing, keep hitting those beats, keep pushing the envelope. All right, I'm gonna talk about spoilers for a little bit, not too much. I just wanna get a couple of things off my breast. The flip the script moment in episode, I don't know if it's three or four, where powder, just freaking powder kegs, that whole building kills her friends, basically kills her father, the man who raised her. Just insanity, did not see that coming. It was the moment when I was like, oh my God, this show is not playing around. And we've seen this happen with other properties recently, other cartoons, other animated stuff that I won't get into, because you might not have seen it. But Invincible comes to mind though, as a recent one that really shocked me and wowed me at the same time. And this is really right up there with that. And then to go further with it to the time jump, I don't know if they give an actual amount of time, whether it's 10 years or 15 years, you can just kind of figure it out. There's probably some dialogue that you can do the math on. But to see powder back, now transformed as Jinx, AKA Harley Quinn, was quite a sight. That was, my favorite character in the show is Jinx. I just love her, just a complete spitball wild card. V, or Vi, I guess it's Vi, short for Violet. She's one that started out more interesting, but in the second half, she goes a little too brooding for me, a little too moody, she's missing some of that spunk. And it makes sense though, it makes sense for the story and where the character would be. So I'm not knocking at the writing here, I'm just saying character-wise, I really, I loved watching whenever that little powder keg was on. And Jinx really accomplished what the first Suicide Squad failed to do. They made a character that makes sense, making that transition from innocent little girl that clearly had a little bit of a baggage to a grown-up woman that is completely unhinged. You know, Harley Quinn in the show, she's like, she was a psychiatrist and then she fell in love with the clown prince and then she became crazy. Like what, where's the transition there? How did she even fall in love with this douchebag? Full disclosure, I am a visual person, I am horrible with names, I'm terrible with numbers. I can't remember almost anyone's name in this show. I can tell you exactly what they look like though. I thought all the diplomatic stuff was incredibly well-handed. It's something that George Lucas attempted to do with the Star Wars prequels and completely dropped the ball on. This is how you do it right. And I guess to be fair, maybe George Lucas just needed more time and a TV series to accomplish it with. It sounds like the Star Wars Clone Wars did that very well. Arcane effortlessly does this though. It's even kind of the same idea. There's trading going on that they wanna shut down and it'll cause a bottleneck which will lead to no money being given. I mean, it's the same stuff but here it's done very well. The way they melded science with magic was very interesting too. You get the dude carving freaking glyphs on his arms so that he can heal himself, become something better. It's one of the times where a TV show really justifies itself too. There's so many different channels for dialogue that I could have with people. All the different ideas, the consequences, the kids that grew up from the beginning to become leadership roles. They have their own tribes. They have their own underground railroad systems. It's rare these days when I get to gush about something. I apologize if I sound like I'm some page shill that's doing this. I just really like this. I watched it with my family, my wife, my daughter who's 12 and my son who's nine. He's borderline the age that probably should have watched this. I'd recommend maybe the lower teens could start watching this thing. There is some pretty violent moments. They do have the one swear word mandatory fuck word in episode. It seems like they can't do more than that. So I do think this really is kind of a PG-13 just skirting the line on an R. Again, we're in the spoiler so I assume you've seen this. So I don't know why I'm now giving the heads up, but whatever. Anyway, and then of course that insane final moment where she launches the missile right at the council members and we don't know what's gonna happen next. It's anybody's guess really because as this show has proven, it's not pulling punches. All right, it's going all in. Those are my thoughts on Arcane. Let me know what you thought in the comments if you saw it, if you loved it as much as I did or if you think I'm just way off in this movie's trash. I can't believe that's true for a lot of people but there's always outliers. I've been there before. I've been those people. All right, thanks for watching. Like the video if you had a good time. Subscribe if you haven't and hopefully I'll see you soon. Hey, if you like the occasional show review I wanna let you know I am watching Hawkeye right now with my son. We are only on the third episode. We'll plan on doing a full season review once we're done as well. I don't do this episode to episode crap. I just don't have it in me to break down a single individual episode and talk about the pros and cons. There's other channels for that. This is movie focused mostly but we do dive into shows once in a while and that one is on the radar.