It’s the end of an era after three long years and two seasons. What is arguably Netflix’s best show in terms of combined critic and audience scores over two seasons, Arcane, is now over as of today.
The series finale is three episodes that have gone live on Saturday, joining two batches of three episodes that aired the previous two weekends, a release structure the creators had to “fight for,” they said, given how non-traditional the release of Arcane has been.
I haven’t watched them just yet (it’s 9 AM!), so no spoilers, but the audience score dipped just slightly now that these episodes are live from a 96% to a 94%, though critic scores remain a perfect 100%. So, Arcane will end its run with all-time Netflix scores based on the number of critic reviews, audience reviews and number of seasons.
No, there is no season 3 of Arcane by design. It’s not cancelled, it’s just that Riot wants to move on from this batch of characters and over to some of the other 169 League champions for new stories. Here’s what co-creator Christian Linke said about the plan for future shows:
“Yeah, we’re currently developing a bunch of follow-up projects. Really, Arcane was always considered the first step, kind of like the trial by fire. You need to figure out, “Can we do this? Do we have the chops? Do we have the characters? Do we have the storytelling?” So, now we’re working on the follow-up projects and it’s it’s really fun to start to look at some of the other characters and regions of our world.”
The question, of course, is what these projects would be and how long they would take to arrive. There were three years between seasons of Arcane, longer than almost all shows even in the streaming era, so it could be 2027 or later until we see a new series, whatever it might be, if they’re still using this painstakingly beautiful and time-consuming animation style (which they obviously should). Though, given that Arcane season 2 was worth the wait, I’d be thrilled to see another series this good, even if the wait is interminable. At least we don’t have a cliffhanger or half a story needing resolution this time.
I’ll watch these final three episodes by the end of the day, and we’ll see how things turn out. It’s hard to imagine they don’t stick the landing, but there are admittedly a large number of storylines that need to be wrapped up. Regardless, I can’t wait to see how it all ends.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
