Welcome all, to what may be the best week of Wolf’s Rain… well ever. We have a lot to talk about this week, and basically all of it is fantastic. So without further ado, lets dive into it!
Right away I need to talk about this, I absolutely love the Lost City. There’s just so much character, so much atmosphere, to what it really should be the blandest location yet. Something about how the blank-faced people go around and interact with the seemingly flat and repeating environment. Their blandly colored outfits making our leads stand out all the more. The repeated “There is no war in Ba Sing Se” style refusal that there’s any problem or that there’s something weird going on with the town. It comes together to really sell Jagara’s omnipresent, omnipotent nature within this city. The closer you get to her keep, the higher the tier you went up, the “better” it becomes. All in all just a really nice presentation for what I initially thought would be a really dull location.
It also really helps sell me on Jagara as an antagonist. Until now she largely felt… well she was an army basically, and nothing more. She didn’t have much character to her the same way Darcia did. Now though, Wolf’s Rain is selling her not as an individual but as a monolith. She is this city, the army, the keep. It’s all an extension of her will, her power. Mechanically we already knew this to be true, sure. She rules, people listen to her, that’s all rather straight forward. But it’s about how you sell it. Before she was just the General of an invading army. Now it feels like she is the army. It’s a weird distinction, one I’m not 100% sure how to explain. But suffice to say, I think these two episodes did wonders for how much I actually care about her.
Finally before we get into the episode specifics I want to mention how well the converging storylines were done. I was a bit sad that Wolf’s Rain split everyone up at Darcia’s keep, even if the groups were now slightly different. I especially think it was a missed opportunity to keep Quent on his own, even if he’s slowly coming around. But these two episodes did a good job of taking those separate journeys and matching them up again. Piece by piece everyone makes their way into the city, slowly moving up the tiers as they find their own routes, slowly running into each other while within. They get these one on one moments together as each of them struggles through their own personal journey. Again, it’s all sold by the Lost City itself, but it works.
Getting into the episodes themselves, first up is episode 23, “Heartbeat of the Black City”. As the name suggests, this episode introduces us to the Lost City and what it’s like. We learn that it’s tiered, with Ids allowing access to the higher levels. This requires each of our characters to find their own way up. The wolves of course say “Fuck the rules” and sneak up, either through pipes or a suspiciously placed elevator. Meanwhile Cher and Blue shake someone down, though I’m surprised those hallways don’t detect wolves. The only confusing one is Quent. I don’t quite remember where Quent got such an Id though. I think it was from that guy who fell backwards out of the truck last episode? If so, a nice small detail that I almost missed. Still, it was a nice excuse to slowly introduce us to how this city works.
Among the characters though, Hige and Toboe have by far the most interesting route. Somehow Hige just… knows where a convenient elevator up to the higher level is. And he just knows how to get around and get. We’ll talk about all of this, and what’s going on with Hige, more in a moment. The main thing here though is that Hige is finally getting his own personal arc, and I love it. For a while now he’s felt like the most neglected of the wolves. Tsume has slowly changed and come to care for them, Toboe has grown up and Kiba is literally our lead male. Hige though… He’s been chasing skirts, or tails I guess, and that’s about. So I’m really happy that he has such an important connection to this city and what’s going on here. And what a good connection it is.
The long and short of it, across these two episodes, is that Hige is bait. I don’t know how Jagara does it, what spells she uses or what, but she’s somehow mind controlled Hige/other wolves, gave them collars with trackers, and told them to bring wolves to the Lost City. And you know what? This explains a lot. It explains how her forces kept finding them, how they got into the city so easily, how Jagara has hunted wolves so effectively, what he was doing in Orkham’s city and why he was ok with following them on nothing more than a whim. I’m really glad that collar came back to be this important, and I think this further reinforces omnipotent feeling around Jagara I mentioned before. Hopefully Wolf’s Rain continues this, because out of the entire cast it feels like Hige is the most personally connected to Jagara now.
Oh and one more thing I forgot before I move on to the next episode, Wolf’s Rain did a really solid job of presenting this without outright stating it. The little cameras, the headaches, the questions of how he knew dismissed as “instinct”, the same “instinct” he’s used multiple times before. Wolf’s Rain set this up really well and I really appreciate that. This could have come out of nowhere, been a complete asspull. But Wolf’s Rain presented it in such a way, ending on the guards letting Hige go because he was alone and knew they could catch more by waiting, was just great. Again, as a setting, I love this city.
Moving on we come to episode 24, “Scent of a Trap”. As the name implies, this episode is all about Jagara finally making a move against the wolves. Toboe, Hige, Tsume, Kiba, all of them get caught in something. Starting with Toboe, he suffers directly and immediately from Hige’s “betrayal”, though we know that he’s a victim to. As he finds his way back to the elevator, surprise, the bait elevator was being watched. This was a nice touch, shows that Jagara’s soldiers are watching and taking this seriously. Really ups the stakes now that at least one of our leads has been picked up with no real way to escape on their own. Follow that up with Hige wearing the tracking necklace, and how he’s probably about to lead them right to Blue too, and you have a pretty grim outlook for the 3.
As for Tsume and Kiba, these 2 were lured into the keep. It almost feels like their route in, via the pipes, was left open on purpose. An entrance only wolves could possibly use, designed to trap them. Walls that snap shut to separate them, rooms filled with knights or stuffed wolves to terrify them. Of course credit to Kiba for fighting them all off and making it through anyways, goes to show how strong he is. But that feels like just the first of many trials. Jagara has made a sort of fun-house of horrors just to fuck with them and it’s pretty cool. It makes me wonder what other sort of things Wolf’s Rain has waiting for them. How else will Jagara try to mess with them, to scare them or Hubb or Cher when they inevitably get inside.
Finally lets talk about Quent and Blue. Wolf’s Rain gave us a pretty big revelation this week regarding them, though it’s something I’ve long suspected. We learn that it wasn’t wolves that attacked their town but Jagara’s soldiers. They burned it down hunting those wolves, and Quent and Blue were just the victims of it all. It makes sense, we’ve known Jagara was a warmonger for a while and Wolf’s Rain has long hinted that it wasn’t the wolves who did it. But what makes it work is how much it means to Blue, and will clearly mean to Quent. It’s just one of many things that Wolf’s Rain setup this episode that I’m looking forward to in the 6 we have left.
So yeah, all in all these were 2 absolutely fantastic episodes. I love watching how much everyone has changed, from Tsume smiling more and thinking of others to Toboe being more confident, Blue asserting herself and Quent holding back. Wolf’s Rain is setting up a lot of awesome things right now that, if handled right, should make for an absolutely stellar finale. My only regret is that it doesn’t seem like Darcia is coming back. I thought for sure that he was still alive, that we would see a glimpse of him at the end of one of these episodes. But every episode that passes the more I think he might really be dead. That’s a shame, because I felt like he had more story to tell. Who knows, maybe Jagara will give us a flashback or 2 to help flesh him out after death. Whatever happens though, I have faith it’ll be good.
