[S2 Spoilers] So Did The Writers Change? What Happened?

I can't be the only one who's missing the tighter ship and emotional heft that the first season had.

SOME of the... what I can only describe as cognitive dissonance, makes sense. Vi and Cait have really only known each other, what, a week? 5 days? Their relationship and feelings and motivations towards each other don't make much sense and move WAY too fast, but they strike me as kids in love who've never done it before. Sure - I'll buy that.

And we really don't know that much about Cait in general - the idea that she's carrying her mom's death around with her is plausible enough to inform her character oddities (like going from "reluctant/mourning idealist" to "I am now Military Dictator and/or Bad Cop" without any arc whatsoever), even if it is pretty one-dimensional. Even if I don't really agree with it, I get it.

But the emotional heft that Jinx carried seems to have completely died with Silco, and nothing took its place. Vi seemingly decided on the drop of a dime that her sister is no longer worth saving and is now bent on arresting and/or killing(!!!) her. Jayce and Viktor are arguably the two characters with the most to say, with Jayce experiencing Unforeseen Consequences harder than Gordon Freeman and Viktor struggling with guilt, grief, and a full body conversion he didn't consent to but which saved him nonetheless, and all of that emotional heft was completely sidelined in favor of fight scene #5643, somewhere or other. It seems like the season is relying way more on action scenes in general - and I mean WAY more, it felt like there was more action in these first three episodes than in the entirety of season one. Maybe it's just because the first season's action served a point in a way this season's, uh, hasn't.

And things feel... idk, wackier? Heimer's character feels flanderized compared to everything surrounding him in Season 1. The arm Jinx made for Sevika was neat to watch, sure, but so completely over the top and confusing to track (and impractical... that scene is 100% so jumbled because not even the animators knew how to make it work, note how she's completely sidelined/barely animated in the next fight) that it felt like it was put into the show to sell a toy of some kind. The motley crew of "villains" that are all meeting their grisly end feel completely out of left field, not to mention totally shoehorned into affairs in the first place. And the tone surrounding them is completely out of wack - I'm not sure if the rat guy's death was supposed to be funny, or disturbing, or... what?

What about the enforcers following Vi and Cait around, whose names I don't even know? Why are they there? One of them was, like, a drunk, washed up rando enforcer, I guess, and wasn't the perky redhead introduced as a junior cadet or something? Why are they suddenly being portrayed as the crack team and these important characters when I'm not entirely sure either of them actually have more than three speaking lines? Did Vi's Protagonist Aura just so happen to rub off on them through bodily contact? She DID shake the girl's hand and lay on the guy's leg.

A good parallel to the difference in quality: the scene where Caitlyn's squad is in the arcade looking for Jinx. It mirrors a very similar beat in Season 1 - when the no-name enforcer raids Vander's basement looking for Vi and her friends. The basement scene has GREAT tension, primarily because you had no idea what's going to happen. The entire story is building up to it, the music absolutely nails the tone, and despite fundamentally being... not really that interesting (a guard who probably can't see very well out of his helmet searches an empty room while very deliberately not looking up) you're on the edge of your seat. Combined with Vander's chat with the deputy upstairs, it held the tension of the entire conflict of the season up until that point. It was PALPABLE.

The arcade scene, in comparison, does have a COUPLE things going on (what was Jinx making? And what's up with the smoke suddenly being anthropomorphized - is it magic, or just a metaphor?) but the tone is so... confused. Jinx is suddenly the underdog we're supposed to root for (even though she is very clearly painted as the season's villain without any nuance whatsoever), but ALSO the enforcers pursuing her (who are the heroes and people we've spent most of the time with so far) are now the faceless stormtrooper thugs that were the problem entirely through the series up until now. And they're just... in the undercity, somehow, despite that notably being A Big Deal up until this point. Oh, and offscreen they apparently went from "most of the undercity people are victims, war is a last resort" to "but what about mustard gas?" And then Jinx just kinda... almost kills her sister... doesn't, for some reason despite seeming fine with it an hour later... leaves... and the enforcers vanish despite the next over-the-top action scene (because seriously, there's so many) happening literally 100 feet away without any pause or even an attempt to, like, address how Jinx is handling what just happened (or maybe to examine Vi going from "I won't wear that damn badge, you Bougie types are the worst" to "but what about mustard gas?"). There's so much less happening here, and so much more confusedly, than in the parallel scene in the first season.

Why were Mel's mom's manipulations made out to be so completely transparent? If the Black Rose is the primary villain of the season, why isn't it being treated like it? Why are the Doctor's efforts to do the thing to the person being sidelined and relegated to the end of the episode like a Marvel movie post-credits scene where they totally defuse any emotional beats that could've possibly hit before that point, instead of being given dedicated time?

I could go on.

The first season of this show wasn't perfect under scrutiny, but it won awards amid tough competition and remains one of my favorite animated features of all time. Even going back through and rewatching it over the last few days, the emotional beats still hit at the end of almost every. Episode. Nothing like that has been on display here. Any appeal to emotion, where they have appeared, has been mired in confusion, and introduced so suddenly that it's over before you can figure out what happened. I would've felt it if Mel died, but Cait's mom was kind of part of the problem to begin with - you can see Cait's in pain, but it certainly didn't tug my heartstrings like Vi mourning Vander, or Jinx killing Silco, or even watching Heimer get voted off the island, no matter how justified.

The show is still gorgeous, the music features still slap, and the art and character designs still kick ass, but the writing feels like it fell off a cliff. Am I the only one who's noticed? What the hell happened?