Midnight
For Cinder, it's time... for vengeance.
Written and directed by Kerry Shawcross
Cinder: I won’t have to run now.
Rhodes: That’s all you’ll ever do.
Rhodes: That’s all you’ll ever do.
Once upon a time, Cinder was forced under a lifetime of slavery by an uncaring stepmother. Little did the stepmother know, this would change Cinder for the worst...
Tropes in this episode include:
- Acquired Situational Narcissism: Mercury gets a promotion and now works directly for Salem, making him Cinder's equal. He stops showing her respect altogether and condescendingly scolds her for disobeying Salem. However, he still demonstrates some concern for Emerald when he points out Cinder doesn't care about her.
- Adults Are Useless: Part of Cinder's Dark and Troubled Past. Throughout her childhood, she was abused by her guardians and other children in the orphanage. Adults only seemed to intervene when she lashed out in retaliation. As a result, she's associated her own pain with success, which Salem is all too willing to use against her.
- Affectionate Gesture to the Head: Rhodes pats Cinder on the head a couple times in what is heavily implied to be the only affection she's ever had. When he knocks out her Aura he goes to do it again and she stabs him, but he still completes the gesture.
- All There in the Script: The Huntsman who trained Cinder as a kid is shown to be called Rhodes in the credits. Given his Semblance involved him turning his skin into metal, he's inspired by the Colossus of Rhodes.
- Armor-Piercing Response: When Hazel reveals his belief that working against Salem is like trying to stop a force of nature only for Ozpin to fire back that she's Not So Invincible After All and can be stopped. Ozpin also gets out that getting the Relics means the world is doomed, which visibly stops Hazel, but Salem shows up right then which cuts off the discussion.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- With the scene rapidly switching between Salem torturing Cinder and Cinder's memories of the Madame torturing her, it seems that Cinder has finally drawn the connection between the two and might be about to strike back....then Salem ends the torture and puts all the blame on herself instead, promising to give Cinder the powers she wants and to lift her up instead of holding her back, and the flashbacks end, showing that Cinder has disconnected the two and is firmly back under Salem's control.
- The viewers are initially led to believe that the Grimm river is somehow going for Mantle. As it turns out, it instead launches into the sky like a geyser and begins the attack on Atlas.
- Beat Them at Their Own Game: While resting from the beatdown by Hazel's hands, Ozpin implores Oscar to let him take over and give the boy a break, and hopefully escape from their predicament. Oscar refuses, however, pointing that they're presented with an opportunity. Salem knows she can't take on all of Remnant at once, so she has her followers work their way in and sabotage from inside out instead. Now that Oscar and Ozpin are in her home territory, they can use the same tactic against her. Ozpin admits that this is indeed a golden opportunity and agrees to the plan.
- Bloodless Carnage: Even after stabbing Rhodes through the chest, Cinder's weapons are clean.
- Call-Back: While fighting Cordovin back in Volume 6's "The Lady in the Shoe", the heroes can't penetrate the mecha's Hard Light shield, so they shut it down by attacking its generator; two episodes later, the Leviathan does the same thing, blasting through the accessible generators after it fails to blast through the shields. In this volume's first episode, Ironwood is confident the shields protecting Atlas can withstand attack for a while; Salem never bothers fighting the shields, instead skipping straight to destroying the generators by sending Centinels to burrow beneath and collapse them. In the final scene, Ironwood can only watch in shock as the shields collapse.
- Call-Forward:
- During her duel with Winter and Penny in the previous volume, Cinder rants that the habit Atlesian elites have of hording power just makes the rest of the people hungrier, and that she refuses to starve. This flashback reveals that part of the abuse and torture the socialite hotelier inflicts on her includes starving her, forcing her to steal the scraps from the trays she collects from guest rooms.
- Whenever Cinder is in trouble with Salem, she appeases Salem with the phrase "Without you, I am nothing." This flashback reveals that the hotelier who owned her forced Cinder to repeat that phrase whenever she was tortured, indicating this is a learned response to placate abuse.
- Cinder has always favoured falchions as her swords, from her original weapons to the blades she later manifests with her Maiden powers. This flashback reveals that Rhodes favoured a falchion and gave her a twin of his own blade. When she killed him, she took both blades. While all her blades are clear variations of Rhodes' weapons, the blade she uses during the Battle of Haven is almost identical in shape. The name of the original blades "Midnight" also alludes to the moment she killed Madame, her daughters and Rhodes, which happened at midnight.
- Cliffhanger: As the Grimm river reaches the kingdom, it suddenly launches itself upwards, blowing a hole through the Hard Light shield to enable Centinels to burrow into the floating rock that Atlas sits on, destroying the remaining shield generators. Everyone in the kingdom watches in shock as the giant Grimm whale lands on Atlas's farmland and summons a swarm of Grimm.
- Denied Food as Punishment: Cinder looks malnourished at the farm, and when the Madame brings her to Atlas, all she can do is stare at the platter of food. Madame contemptuously throws a small loaf onto the floor in front of her. The subsequent montage established that Cinder was regularly deprived of food as a child, with one of the sisters mockingly eating a strawberry in front of her and her scarfing down the crusts and remnants of food on a serving platter.
- Department of Child Disservices: Cinder is raised in an orphanage that is based on a farm. Madame comes to the place for the express purpose of buying an orphan that she can use as a servant in her hotel, which the orphanage doesn't hesitate to agree to. It results in her becoming Cinder's legal guardian, allowing her to abuse Cinder and treat her as a slave with no legal consequences.
- Didn't Think This Through: When Cinder steals his sword, Rhodes decides the best way to handle it is to teach Cinder to fight so that she can pass the Huntsman Academy entrance exam in seven years time, thereby giving her a better future than spending her life on the run for killing her adoptive family in revenge. However, this requires Cinder to endure seven years of abuse and torture; she manages for several years until her step-sisters find her sword, leading to a confrontation that finally snaps Cinder. The confrontation ends with Cinder killing the entire family and Rhodes attempting to apprehend her for doing so. However, his own training has made her so skilled that she is able to shatter his Aura and kill him. His intervention therefore only prolonged the inevitable by a few years and resulted in his death on top of it.
- Dissonant Serenity: Cinder is openly smiling after she kills her adoptive family, and proudly states to Rhodes that she's free, clearly expecting him to approve of her actions.
- Dramatic Irony: Hazel accuses Ozpin of being a monster who hid behind Oscar and let him suffer. The previous scene established that Ozpin has been advocating to take over since the torture began and Oscar is the one insisting that he continue to handle it because Hazel is holding back with him.
- Dramatic Necklace Removal: Cinder rips off her shock collar after offing her stepmother, demonstrating that she is now free from her.
- Enemy Summoner: Salem's giant whale Grimm is capable of spewing forth a massive pool of black ooze from which multiple Grimm can spawn. By doing that on Atlas's farmland, the whale creates an army of Grimm to invade Atlas. The whale Grimm's ability has only been seen once before, during the Battle of Beacon when the Giant Wyvern dropped puddles of ooze over Vale to spawn multiple groups of Grimm all over the city.
- Et Tu, Brute?: After snapping and killing her adoptive mother and sisters, Cinder expresses to Rhodes that she's finally free with a broken smile on her face. Rhodes however makes clear she's just signed up for a life of running, and that he intends to bring her in for triple homicide. This causes Cinder to attack him and break his Aura, but he manages to break hers and seemingly beats her. When he goes to give her an Affectionate Gesture to the Head however, she fatally stabs him in the gut with his swords, refusing to let him take away her freedom.
- Fantastic Racism: A sign on the front desk in the Madame's hotel clearly states that the establishment does not serve Faunus.
- From Bad to Worse: Salem camping the largest Grimm army the world has ever seen on the doorstep of both Atlas and Mantle was already a terrible situation for the kingdom, but Atlas at least had a protective shield to keep her forces at bay. To counter this, Salem enables a Grimm river to flow through the tundra until it reaches the kingdom, whereupon it shoots upwards like a geyser. Then, the sustained force blows a hole in the shield, allowing Centinels to burrow into the rock and destroy the shield generators. Finally, Salem lands her Grimm whale ship on Atlas's farmland so she can prepare her full-scale invasion.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: Cinder was just a random orphan living in desperate circumstances on an isolated farm. Then she was bought by a socialite hotelier and regularly abused in an establishment that regularly catered to Huntsmen, one of who decided to secretly train Cinder to become strong enough to escape her fate. The hotelier's abuse and the Huntsman's training helped forge Cinder into the power-hungry and combat-capable killer she became.
- Good Scars, Evil Scars: This episode reveals that Cinder has a scar on her neck from childhood that she always hides as an adult. This scar comes from when she was a child receiving abuse and torture from her stepfamily that she didn't deserve, and it can be successfully hidden by clothing and accessories such as chokers. All her remaining scars have come from her villainous actions against the heroes and entire cities of innocent people, and are impossible to fully hide even when she tries to cover them up.
- Guile Hero: Oscar and Ozpin both get the idea to turn Salem's manipulative ways against her by placing doubt amongst her agents; they agree to start with Hazel.
- Ironic Echo: Whenever Cinder is tortured, her abusive step-mother insists she repeat the words "Without you, I am nothing." When Cinder finally kills her, she throws the words back in Madame's face by saying "You were right. Without you, I am nothing. But, because of you, I am everything!"
- It Amused Me: Cinder's step-family often abuse and torture her for their own amusement. Whenever Cinder is punished for doing something wrong, or whenever their step-sisters devise plans to torment her or think they've uncovered her wrongdoings, they giggle in delight or grin triumphantly. After Cinder cleans the lobby ornaments, Madame holds up the shock collar's trigger; only when Cinder backs down does she smile with satisfaction and leave.
- Logical Weakness: The Huntsman who trained Cinder, Rhodes, has a Semblance that allows him to turn his skin into metal. However, Cinder's Semblance allows her to super-heat whatever she touches. When they fight, he tries to use his Semblance to defend himself until he realises this makes him even more vulnerable due to how thermally conductive metal is.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": Atlas's inhabitants are left in shock when the Grimm river suddenly launches itself upwards to blast a hole through the kingdom's shield. They then watch live television with increasing horror as Centinels leave the river to burrow into Atlas's rock and bring down the rest of the shield, while the Grimm whale lands on Atlas's farmland and spews forth a Grimm army for invasion.
- Motive Decay: When she was younger, Cinder only desired to be to be free, and trained under Rhodes so that, when she came of age, she could leave her life of torment and build a new life as a Huntress. After being pushed too far and killing her abusers, she even went as far as to kill Rhodes too, so as to not lose her newfound freedom. In the present however, she's merely traded in one abuser for another via Salem, and now only seeks power, willingly serving Salem while deluding herself into thinking no one controls her so long as she can get the power of the Maidens.
- Neck Lift: Cinder kills her adoptive mother by crushing her windpipe while lifting her off the ground.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Years ago, a Huntsman named Rhodes decided to train Cinder and gave her one of his own swords for her to use. He was rewarded by being killed by Cinder, after he tried bringing her in for murdering her adoptive family.
- No Name Given:
- Cinder's original surname isn't given before or after her adoption. It's not even made clear if Cinder was her original first name either.
- Cinder's adoptive "family" are only ever credited as "Madame" and "Step-sisters."
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Yang managed to fix up the last hoverbike and got herself, Jaune and Ren close enough to Atlesian communication range for Winter and the Ace-Ops to hear their warning and locate them - all before the break of dawn.
- Older and Wiser: Rhodes decides to secretly train Cinder to become a Huntress because he can see she's itching to kill her family in revenge for the abuse she's suffered. He tries to teach her that, if she does kill them, she'll spend the rest of her life running and if she becomes a Huntress she can make a clean break from her past and be free of the family forever. The training works out for a few years, until the family discover the sword Rhodes gave her. The confrontation leads to Cinder killing her family after all, and then Rhodes who tries to arrest her. While Cinder thought she wouldn't have to run now, Rhodes told her that running is now all she'll ever do. When the flashback ends, Cinder winds up being tortured by Salem, who can use Cinder's Grimm arm the same way Madame used the Shock Collar, causing Cinder to start having flashbacks to Madame's torture and making it clear that Rhodes was right: Cinder never did find the escape from her abuse that she thought she had by killing her abusers — and Salem can't be killed anyway.
- Pet the Dog:
- Cinder's only source of kind treatment as a child was a Huntsman named Rhodes, who regularly visited the hotel her abusive adoptive mother owned. It was he who trained her as a Huntress and gave her a sword to use for her first weapon. In a cruel twist of fate, she ends up killing him after he tries to bring her to justice for murdering her adoptive family.
- Hazel is revealed to have been holding back on Oscar during the beatings and tries convincing Oscar to just tell him the password so they can stop - and actually starts to listen to Ozpin when the latter begins to reveal what bringing the Relics together will do, before Salem cuts him off.
- Psychological Projection:
- Hazel accuses Ozpin of being a coward for hiding away in Oscar's mind while he was being beaten, and follows it up by outright admitting that he won't even try fighting against Salem because he thinks she's basically invincible, and would rather focus on an easier target that he can actually do something against.
- Harriet accuses RWBY and their allies of putting people in danger because of their selfishness. Two episodes ago Robyn delivered a "The Reason You Suck" Speech that visibly got to Harriet that accused her of not actually caring about what's right and just looking for excuses to avoid having to reflect on her own failings, particularly her selfishness in siding with the plan to raise Atlas while leaving Mantle and the other kingdoms vulnerable.
- Rank Up: When Cinder tries to threaten Mercury and Emerald into subservience again, Mercury makes clear he no longer works for Cinder, but now works directly under Salem, and as a result is now her equal. Fittingly, when Salem calls her meeting, while Emerald and Neo are off to the side due to being Cinder's subordinates, Mercury is with Cinder, Tyrian, and Hazel.
- Self-Made Orphan: Played with. Although orphaned at birth, Cinder was adopted by an abusive hotelier - and both she and her two daughters regularly tormented Cinder. This results in Cinder killing all three of them as a teenager.
- Single Tear: Cinder sheds a single tear after she murders Rhodes, the only person who ever showed her genuine kindness, in the process of resisting arrest for the deaths of her stepfamily.
- Slave Collar: Cinder is seen wearing an electric one as a child, disguised as a necklace with a yellow gemstone.
- Social Services Does Not Exist: After being adopted, Cinder is Made a Slave in all but name, forced to wear a shock collar and openly treated like crap by her adoptive mother and sisters. This kind of open mistreatment of a child would be grounds to take her out of this environment, but the only one who has any issue is the Huntsman Rhodes, but even he largely resolves to just train Cinder so that she has a line of work she can do when she's old enough to leave on her own rather than try to save her himself, and it's never stated if this was all he was willing to do, or all he legally could do.
- Special Guest: OK Goodnight, the band that Casey Lee Williams fronts, submitted their song "Awake" for use on the episode.
- Start of Darkness: Cinder's began with her snapping after years of abuse and killing her adoptive family, and her mentor when he tries to bring her to justice.
- Stunned Silence: Winter, the Ace-Ops, and what's left of Yang's team can only watch in silent horror from the tundra as Atlas is finally breached.
- Trapped in Villainy: Hazel indicates that he follows Salem because he genuinely believes that she's invincible and feels that the huntsmen academies are just senselessly endangering children and prolonging Salem's inevitable acquisition of the relics.
- Trauma Button: When Salem is using the Grimm arm to torture her, Cinder starts flashing back to being punished with her Shock Collar.
- Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Cinder uses her Semblance for the first time when the stepsisters stomp mud all over her freshly cleaned floor and laugh at her, prompting her to superheat the water in the brush and create a steam explosion.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: When she was younger, Cinder was a lot more mentally stable, and even though she was regularly abused, she was able to find happiness in the idea she'd eventually be free once she signs up to be a Huntress, especially after training with Rhodes, during which she looked genuinely happy. This ended up changing when she snapped and killed her abusers, as she bore a broken smile and proclaimed she was finally free to Rhodes, only for him to make clear he was going to bring her in now, leading to her killing Rhodes, and setting her on the path to become the monster she is today.
- Villain Episode: This episode focuses almost solely on Cinder, finally revealing her backstory after ninety-seven episodes, and her exact motivations for working for Salem.
- Villain Song: We briefly hear one during a montage of Cinder being abused by the hotelier that adopted her. Fittingly for the character, it sounds quasi-operatic and pompous with liberal use of Cinder's leitmotif.
- When the Clock Strikes Twelve: Cinder kills her abusive mother when the bell tolls midnight.
- Whole Episode Flashback: Downplayed. Cinder's origin story takes up the first half of the episode.
- Wicked Stepmother: Cinder's stepmother adopted her just to be a cheap worker in her hotel, and she along with her two daughters made Cinder's life miserable during this time. Very fitting given that Cinder alludes to Cinderella.
- Would Hurt a Child: Cinder's stepmother had no qualms about shocking her with a collar when she was just ten years old.
"It's time."
