Amity
"Prepare for launch, please."
Written by Miles Luna
Directed by Paula Decanini
Directed by Paula Decanini
"Once we passed into broadcast range, we’ll activate stabilizers, re-establish global communications, and boost the message we’ve recorded out into the rest of the world. After that, we just have to pilot Amity away from all this mess."
— Dr. Pietro Polendina
Team RWB and their friends must stabilise Amity so they can inform Remnant about Salem's assault as well as Atlas' plight.
Tropes in this episode include:
- Atlas Pose: The effort of trying to stabilise Amity in lieu of one broken stabiliser forces Penny to shift through different positions as it becomes increasingly difficult for her to maintain its weight. At one point, she ends up turning to face away from it to use both her robotic thrusters in combination with Maiden power from both her feet and hands, balancing Amity's weight on her shoulders and back.
- Boring, but Practical: In Volume 6, Maria warned Ruby not to rely on her silver eyes but to always remember that her best tools in battle were her Semblance and combat training. Unlike most of the teenage heroes, who have all tried to fight Neo on Neo's athletic and acrobatic terms, Maria doesn't bother with anything fancy. By relying on her Preflexes Semblance and using simple blocking, parrying and deflecting skills, she is able to counter one-handed everything an increasingly frustrated Neo throws at her.
- Call-Back: When Watts is about to hijack Penny on Ironwood's orders, he notes that her weapons are programmed on the same principle as the original CCT itself - none of them will work if they aren't all communicating together.
- Children Are Innocent: As Terra and Saphron watch Ruby's broadcast with horrified faces, Adrian is happily squirming and reaching for the image of Ruby in Saphron's lap.
- Cliffhanger: After the broadcast, Yang's team hear an explosion outside their shelter that is described as the second one they've heard. Upon investigation, they find themselves staring at a "river of Grimm" that is flowing through the tundra. When ice cracks and falls into the river, it vapourises, and the entire thing is making its way through the ice towards the kingdom.
- Combat Pragmatism: Cinder and Penny are equally matched as Maidens in terms of Maiden power. When Cinder realises that Penny is trying to lead her away from Amity, she stops chasing her and returns to the tower. She then tries to destroy the tower supports, creating the dual threat of bringing down the tower and killing Pietro in the process. Penny is forced to chase her back to Amity and then leave herself open to Cinder's attack by trying to stabilise the tower supports.
- Crucified Hero Shot: As Amity's signal tower starts to collapse, Penny plunges her swords into the arena floor, using the wires to pull the floor back upwards. She then fires ice at the two melting support pillars to reinforce them. This leaves her trapped in mid-air in a crucifix pose as she sacrifices her ability to defend against Cinder in favour of protecting the only chance they have of warning the world about the Ancient Evil that's coming for them. Even when Cinder takes advantage of the situation to attack her, Penny still makes sure she's finished reinforcing the towers with ice before dropping the pose to fight back.
- Curse Cut Short: During the fight atop Amity Colosseum, Maria blocks an attack from Cinder and screams at her, "Get away from [Penny], you bi—" before being interrupted by an attack by Neo.
- Double-Meaning Title: Amity is a word that means having friendly relations and cooperation with others, which is the exact purpose of Amity Colosseum when used for the Vytal Festival Tournament — to bring kingdoms together in peace, unity and shared beliefs. The episode title follows this spirit. It refers to the episode focusing on getting Amity Tower into broadcast range so that it can send a message asking the world to come together and face Salem's threat united. The subversion is the focus on Ironwood, the Ace-Ops and Watts all working together in forced, unfriendly cooperation to hack Penny for their own ends, thereby disrupting the ability of everyone else to work together in genuine cooperation.
- Exact Words: Watts disabled Penny's weapons as Ironwood requested. It's too bad that his hacking caused Penny to fall out of Remnant's high atmosphere. Despite the obvious conclusion Ironwood makes about what Watts has done to Penny, the latter does point out that her systems are probably rebooting.
- History Repeats: Once again, Cinder attacks another Maiden with the intent of stealing their power for herself, only to suffer a humiliating defeat.
- An Ice Person: When Cinder uses her fire magic to melt the support beams above Pietro and Maria, Penny uses her ice magic to freeze them back into place.
- I Want Them Alive!: Ironwood dispatches Winter and most of the Ace-Ops to find Penny after they lose contact with her.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: Emerald knows she can't take on Penny on her own, and with Neo's Aura broken and Cinder incapacitated, she takes the opportunity to flee in the airship with them rather than continue the fight.
- Logical Weakness: Emerald is very effective at producing such realistic illusions that her victims can't distinguish between reality and illusion until it's too late. However, when her illusions make Penny believe she's completely surrounded by visually indistinguishable clones of Cinder, Penny simply gives them all a quick scan with her electronic thermal sensors to identify the real Cinder. Emerald's illusions are hallucinations that affect biological senses; they don't give off body heat like a living being would so they can't fool thermal vision.
- Magic Enhancement: Penny mostly uses her Maiden powers this episode to boost her existing abilities, such as supercharging her Wave-Motion Gun to the point where it wastes Cinder with a single blast or powering up her thrusters so she can lift the Amity tower.
- Mini-Mecha: Maria uses one both to set up Amity Tower and briefly in the fight, though Neo sideswipes it with the airship they came in with and soon manages to wreck it. Though destroying it backfires on Neo, since Maria proves to be a more effective fighter without it.
- Never Mess with Granny: Despite being elderly, visually impaired and having spent decades out of practice, Maria doesn't surrender to Neo and holds her own commendably in the ensuing fight.
- No-Sell: Emerald's illusions are shown to work on the mechanical eyes of Penny and Maria, but they're both still able to see through her power better than anyone has before. Penny finds the real Cinder in a crowd of illusions by using thermal vision, and Maria can tell via her Semblance that an invisible Neo is about to strike.
- Out-Gambitted: Ironwood's plan is to have Watts hack Penny and make her open the Vault so he can access the Staff of Creation. Watts does hack Penny but she isn't brought under control, instead seeming to short out and go inactive. Watts claims it was a hardware error on the other end that he couldn't account for but his next actions imply it was deliberate. He discretely gets his hands on Ironwood's broken scroll that the general threw at him in anger, hinting that Watts set him off for that exact outcome, and some tools to repair it. He's escorted back to his cell with no one any the wiser.
- Psychological Projection: When Penny demands to know why Cinder serves Salem, Cinder retorts that she doesn't serve anyone and that Penny would be the same as her if not for the fact she's a programmed robot. Cinder was ordered the previous episode to stay on board the ship and made a choice to defy Salem's order to check out Amity. Meanwhile, Penny protests here that she's making a choice to protect the people that care about her. While both Maidens reject the idea of being servants to others, Cinder clearly believes that other Maidens would automatically share her own desire to do as she pleases without consideration for others but are trapped by extenuating circumstances that prevent them from manifesting that desire.
- Shout-Out: Maria getting between Cinder and Penny with her cargo-lifting Mini-Mecha and shouting “get away from her, you bi-” is a clear reference to Aliens, in which Ripley says the same thing while protecting Newt from the Alien Queen in a Mini-Mecha of her own.
- Single Tear: Emerald's distraught when Penny blasts Cinder into a far wall and rushes to her side to cradle her. When Penny approaches, Emerald furiously turns around and shoots at her. Penny avoids the bullet before realising that it was aimed at the broadcast signal tower and missed her father by inches. As Emerald angrily admits she can't defeat Penny but can riddle the signal tower with holes before Penny can kill her, she sheds a single tear from her left eye.
- Stuff Blowing Up: The abandoned Dust mine is blown up to give Amity CCT a boost into the sky.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Penny twice uses her Wave-Motion Gun, usually reserved for entire ships or giant Grimm, on a single human target. First she uses a brief shot to slam Neo against a ship and evaporate her entire Aura, then she uses a magically enhanced, sustained version to defeat Cinder.
- We Interrupt This Program: The broadcast Ruby sends out starts off by transmitting to every screen that happens to be plugged into the network.
- The World Is Just Awesome: When she decides to become Amity's stabilizer at great risk to herself, Penny takes a moment to gaze at the tundra below her and the aurora in the night sky in front of her with a smile.
"What... is this?!"
