Let's Talk About RWBY Volume 8 Episode 6 - "Midnight"
The sixth episode of RWBY’s eighth season is now available for Rooster Teeth First members. I’ll be honest, it’s not my favorite episode, but we’ll get into that later. If you haven’t watched the episode yet, this is your warning that spoilers abound ahead!
It's time.
The first part of this episode was all about Cinder’s backstory. I did not like it. It was written fine, but it does have me begging the question of why. Why do I care about this? I hate Cinder. She’s an awful person who is very shortsighted and just a jerk. I guess the team wanted to show some of her motivation, but it would’ve been nicer if the flashback had ended with Cinder being found by Salem and showing a bit of why Cinder followed Salem. We learn that Cinder was adopted by a wealthy woman who abused Cinder. The woman’s two daughters also tormented and abused Cinder. She’s in a very crappy situation and a huntsman helps her a little by teaching her some of what he knows. Eventually she snaps, though, and kills the woman and her daughters (without using the sword I want to point out) and then bests her teacher in an anticlimactic fight. Cinder feels like an evil Mary Sue. Sadly, this also feeds the idea that Cinder will be redeemed in the end. If you remember from last week, I am not a fan of this idea. We need to let even important bad people be bad.
After the flashback, we get Mercury coming to summon Cinder and Emerald to a staff meeting. He also takes the time to point out that he follows Salem, not Cinder. This is another blow to Cinder’s power. At the meeting, Oscar (we’ll get to him a bit more later) tries appealing to the bad guys to no avail. Salem is not terribly happy with Cinder, but then gives her another chance, saying that she needs to nourish Cinder instead of just shut her down all the time. This is a little interesting since it’s a direct contrast to the woman who adopted Cinder.
Back to Oscar for a bit. He and Ozpin talk for a bit and hatch the plan to try to divide Salem’s forces. I’m not too optimistic, but this could be how Cinder defects and gets some kind of redemption arc \gag\.
The last little bit to talk about is that Jaune has been sending out a distress call to try to find help for dealing with the literal river of Grimm. Of course the ones that answer are the Ace Ops who are looking for Penny. The Ace Ops immediately ask where Penny is, and I can’t help but completely relate to Jaune whose reaction is more or less, “Really? There’s a literal river of Grimm that you can see if you take 20 steps to the left and you’re asking where Penny is?” At this point, the Grimm river shoots up and actually connects with the floating island of Atlas. The Grimm bring down Atlas’s shields and so Salem has Monstro crash into the island, surprisingly not wiping out the city in the process. Things are really not looking good. I do think that this is when we’re really going to see some things change in the Ace Ops ranks as they’ll have too much to deal with.
What did you think of this episode?