Rooster Teeth’s RWBY is now on its third episode of its sixth season. With S6E2 freely available on Rooster Teeth’s website and S6E3 behind the paywall that is Rooster Teeth First, here are my thoughts on these two new episodes. Spoilers follow.
Indeed, while I previously tried to restrain from spoilers while an episode was behind the paywall, S6E2 — titled “Uncovered” — was spoiled for me as I was scrolling Twitter or Instagram. Granted, this was my fault, as I did not watch the episode immediately after it became available. What was spoiled for me was Jinn. When I first saw the image of her, I was convinced it couldn’t be real, that somebody had inserted some poorly drawn fan art into the new episode. As I’m new to the RWBY fandom, and as people are always shipping this character and that character, I wasn’t sure if creating new characters was common practice, and I rushed to then watch the episode to see what was really going on. I guess I assumed there was this new character named Jinn, but she couldn’t look like that. Rather, the art I had seen was somebody’s interpretation of what this new, off screen character could look like. I was wrong. How a series which I’ve praised for its character design could introduce the lovechild of the Great Fairy from Breath of the Wild and the Genie from Disney’s Aladdin to it, I fail to understand. What were they thinking?
Fortunately, the episode has some high points in the struggle that Oscar is going through trying to maintain control of his body. That point gets very little attention in the series, and its such a disturbing piece of Ozpin’s reincarnation that I was glad to finally see some time devoted to it. I was with Oscar as he raged against Ozpin’s possession of his body and tried to get some information out to Ruby. The episode could have been about that conflict and it would have worked. However, Jinn’s appearance upstages Oscar. Furthermore, the revelation of Cinder’s return could have waited, seeing as the scene with Little Miss Muffet is indicated as taking place nearly two weeks after the train wreck. Why they’re telling the story so out of order is baffling. Oh, and what about Maz Kanata, I mean, Maria Calavera? She was just introduced in the previous episode. Maybe something more on her before introducing Jinn? At any rate, the most intriguing character in “Uncovered” was Oscar, and I’d like to see more of that tension between him and Ozpin.
Currently behind a paywall, S6E3 is titled “The Lost Fable,” and it’s a horrendously long piece of boring exposition. I can understand the desire to want to tell some backstory about other characters, but this is a tale of Salem and Ozpin covering a period of what must be thousands and thousands of years and narrated by Jinn. Team RWBY, Oscar, and Qrow make appearances on occasion, but it’s usually just to see their facial reactions to some event, and, occasionally, to utter a word. And where is Maria Calavera? Did she not get sucked into this flashback? Rooster Teeth could have told this tale as a webcomic mini-series, for instance, with each issue concerned with one of the many time periods we jump across. Or, they could have labeled it a Salem character expose and released it independently of the main series. As it stands, it’s an expositionary tale out of place at the beginning of a new season where most of us, I’m betting, just want to see the reunited team RWBY fight.
I’m not exactly pleased with Volume 6 of RWBY so far. The episodes are getting longer, but the worthwhile moments are diminishing.