Alright, fuck it. That was good. All the payoffs in this episode were actually built up beforehand and I can't complain about the protagonists using their noodles after months of complaining about them being retarded. They very cleverly cut the Gordian knot and actually used all the resources at their disposal. I still hate Emerald and hope she falls into the eternal abyss.
Now for the unintended consequence.
1. Atlas is toast. Not just the city, but the kingdom as a political entity will not survive this fiasco. That's not our heroes' fault, the major Grimm incursion and Ironwood burning the leadership to ash did that, but Remnant's geopolitical situation was just scrambled like an egg in a nuclear reactor.
2. For some reason we're sending all these refugees to Vacuo. From a Doyalist perspective this makes sense since this is the only kingdom we haven't visited yet, but if I recall the world-building correctly Vacuo is the poorest and least stable of the kingdom's outside of Menagerie. Not a great place to evacuate an entire metropolis' worth of refugees. (I cynically look forward to the subtle and even-handed depictions of refugees and immigrant issues in the next season)
3. Ironwood, his loyalists, and his bomb are still out there. That's going to haunt our heroes for certain.
4. The whole world knows about magic, or at least portals, now. There's not a lot of easy scientific explanation for the void road. There's going to be a lot of questions asked and our villains will undoubtedly find a way to utilize this themselves. As the genie guy said, you kids are either brilliant or foolish.
5. And finally we now have two relics in the open. The end of the world is closer than its even been. Cinder is taking competence lessons from Watt and we only have so long of a break before Mother Boringest pulls herself back together.
Its pretty clear that next season is going to be our Vacuo adventure followed by a return to Vale and the final relic. The question is just what the road getting there will look like. There's enough time to salvage what's left of the series, but the RT team will need to write a lot of episodes on the same level as this one and episode 10 to make that work.
Also I will give them 100 free points if they bring Phyrra back. I really don't care about the narrative cohesiveness of this series anymore than the writers do, so can I get something out of that?