Board Thread:Episode Discussion/@comment-14138255-20160214165601/@comment-92.236.194.211-20160214192801

Pyrrha got her Pyrrhic victory... Cinder was beaten, but the cost was pretty devastating. And if you pay close attention, they said she was gone - not dead. Possibly, with all that "Believing in destiny" talk, she's done a Ben Kenobi. Gone, but not gone. And it looks as though somehow both she and Cinder understood it, which is why Cinder was crying. Maybe they both know that they are simply tools being used by powers that neither of them could ever have controlled. And Ozpin is definitely not dead. At least part of the woman's speech at the end was directed toward him, so I'm betting she knows he is still out there.

Emerald, Mercury and Neo... all absent. And quite possibly it's their trail that is leading to Haven, and which Ruby's little team of mismatched survivors is now set on following. Qrow must have told Ruby more in the passage of time between Autumn and Winter, before he set out. With the havoc around the tower, it looks unlikely that they took Cinder with them. She either left by herself, or is maybe still trapped up in the tower, along with the Grimm Wyvern/Dragon

It's going to be the best test of Ruby's abilities to lead - she has little experience of working with Jaune, Nora and Lei, and is going going to have to learn to lead all over again - assuming that leadership is ever going to be an issue again. With the fall of Beacon, the entire tradition of how hunters work might have gone with it.

I think the cardboard stiffness of Weiss's father was deliberate, in a way. It's how he is - stiff and unbending as a person. We saw hints of that before, when he cut off Weiss line of credit. Daddy's little girl is going to have to learn to stand up for herself, and I doubt that she will stay caged up back home for long.

Blake hasn't exactly run very far, has she? Sun might have got it wrong. Blake is distancing herself from the others until she can get over her fear of losing them to Adam. But she wasn't far from where Glynda was trying to rebuild, and someone has to mind the shop whilst the others are away. There's a city to rebuild, and plenty of Grimm to hunt, and the White Fang pulled out. Maybe Adam realised at the end that he got played. Roman told Ruby what the stakes were, so perhaps he knew more about it than Adam did.

I'm betting on Penny V2.0 in Volume 4. Something to show Yang that even the worst loss can be rebuilt, and that will get her confidence back slowly. And when she finds out that Ruby has headed off she will eventually want to follow her little sister. There's no way that Yang is going to let Ruby face all that alone, and besides, Yang has a score to settle with Mercury, and a bigger score to settle with Adam

They took three steps forward, and then got knocked back, big-time. They learned to work as teams at Beacon. But Beacon's fall was the most important education that they could ever have received. The hunters are going to have to learn to find their path the old way, before the establishment of the schools.