Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow-

Episode 23

Our heroes came to the island with one main objective: to defeat the ant queen. With this done, no more ants would be born and the remaining ants would die off in a few years. At best, the swarm would become leaderless monsters to be picked off one by one. At worst, it would be a battle of attrition to keep them on the island until nature took its course.

So much of this episode is spent showing things going to plan. The elite Korean hunters break into the hive, wade through wave after wave of guards, and spectacularly finish off the queen. There's just one issue: the other half of the episode is all about showing that this is a completely pyrrhic victory.

The key to the queen's extermination plan was that time was on the human's side. However, with the queen's final child (who I'm going to call the "Ant King" for simplicity), this plan is doomed to failure.

This episode is all about showing how powerful the Ant King is—mainly by showing him tearing apart the Japanese hunters with little to no effort. It proves to be a great narrative juxtaposition; even as our heroes score their greatest victory, dread and tension continue to build for the fight destined to come after.

Then, in the confrontation between the Ant King and the Korean hunters, we see quite clearly, that even a full party of S-Rank hunters has no chance against the monster—especially with its human-level intelligence. This means that, with him in the lead and an army of thousands of ants that each match an A-ranker in strength, their few remaining years of life might be enough time to wipe out every human on Earth. And even if that proves impossible due to the sheer scale of the task, there certainly wouldn't be enough hunters around to conquer all the dungeons appearing across the world. The Ant King is, frankly, a world-ending threat.

Yet, what's interesting is that none of this seems to be enough to get Jinwoo off his butt and into the fight. He doesn't come to the rescue when the Ant King begins attacking the Korean hunters—not when Cha's side is caved in or when their sole healer is killed. He doesn't step in when it goes off to fight Goto either. No, Jinwoo only shows up when the normal ants begin to swarm the near-dead Korean hunters en masse.

This is far and away the most inexplicable aspect of the episode. Honestly, the Korean hunters were in more danger from the Ant King (who could kill each of them in a single hit once Byung-Gyu was dead) than from the swarm. So, as we didn't get to see anything in this episode from Jinwoo's point of view, I'm dying to know what exactly caused Jinwoo to change his mind—and hope we get an explanation of this next episode.

Despite this quirk of the episode, this is a great episode of the series. The aforementioned juxtaposition of an exciting, flashy victory with the looming dread of an inevitable defeat is fantastically realized. Now all that's left is for the big climax where Jinwoo pulls out all the stops and shows the world who's truly the most powerful being on the planet.

Rating:

Random Thoughts:

• Byung-Gyu raised so many death flags in these past few episodes that I would have been truly shocked if he had lived through this episode.

• I hope Byung-Gyu managed to heal Cha at least a little bit before he died because she's got to be suffering from internal bleeding in addition to her crushed arm and ribs.

• Good to know the jamming worked. Imagine how badly things would have gone if the Ant King had known about the attack on the queen right as it started.

• I wonder if the name/setting changes for the Japanese broadcast of this series were due to the Japanese government backstabbing the Koreans in this episode.

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Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow- is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.