The Mighty Nein: The Mighty Nein (1x04)

The gang's all here, y'all! Well, not all, but we're getting there.

Cons:

I've seen a lot of people feeling upset or even just ambivalent about Essek's characterization so far, and I have to admit that, yeah, I do have some real concerns about how this is shaking out so far. For one thing, him spilling the beans to Trent about his mother is just like... how stupid are you? I could buy the idea that over a long period of time, Trent sort of tricks Essek into revealing hints about his mother, as Trent feeds on his loneliness. But this was just like... my dude, what part of Trent Ikithon's whole deal makes you think you can trust him? Why are you confiding in him like this?

The second, bigger, issue, is that they're already making him so conflicted and so horrified by the evils of what he has done. He literally says "what have I done" after he helps Trent to learn how to access the power of the beacon. I just... man, I don't know. I know all of this stuff was happening "off screen" in the campaign version, but it feels pretty important to me that Essek be... pretty evil when we first meet him, you know? So to have him explicitly say that he's only working with Trent "to help save [his] mother's life" and to have him really upset about the dead prisoners and regretting it all already? I don't know! I feel like I want his regret to be a slower poison, I want him in denial about the impact of his actions, I want him to think he's making rational choices even if they are a little cold-hearted, and then slowly come to realize the full extent of his wrongness. I guess what it comes down to is that when The Mighty Nein accept Essek and bring him into the fold, it's as powerful as it is because of the true radical hope of that acceptance. And for that to be true, Essek can't be a kind of conflicted mama's boy who made a bad choice and then is sorry for it right away.

It's too soon to fully say, and I'm not furious about it, I'm not saying it's all crap, I'm totally willing to trust the process. I just definitely see a lot of signs at this early stage that they're wanting to make sure Essek is redeemable and sympathetic, and I think that might ultimately blunt the impact of him in the long run.

My only other very small detail for the "cons" section is that I didn't get why that was the moment they chose for Beau's first "pop, pop", it felt kind of weird and unmotivated and shoe-horned. That's a small nitpick though. 

Pros:

Before I get to our core story, I will pay a compliment to one thing about the Essek subplot: the ending, with Verrat and Deirta. This is more what I was hoping Essek's first guilty stirrings would be like. His worst nightmare, someone finds out about his mom, and then it turns out that his friend is loyal and won't say a word, and then he's out the door with "welp, because the beacon is missing and we can't find it, I have to go to war now" and Essek tries to encourage him to argue back against the Bright Queen's decision to go to war without the beacon there to protect everyone from perma-death. Tough luck. Essek's actions have global consequences. I want this to be troubling to him, as it should be, and I like the anchoring of this war with personal stakes for Essek right from the jump.

The main plot with our core cast of characters, I honestly thought every moment of it was pretty damn brilliant. There is SO much juicy shit going on here, and it's a blend of these characters as I'm getting to know them in animated form, and how they are from the campaign, that's providing this really cool viewing experience for me.

First off, I love the way we're playing around with the idea of leadership in this episode. You've got Beau, who has the most authority and station in life at this stage, she's on an actual mission from a real and established place with people who could back her up. You've got Fjord, who has Vandren's voice in his head telling him he could be a leader someday. The two of them are at odds through the episode about having a softer touch, as Beau is pretty abrasive with the group and Fjord wants a kind but firm hand to be leading them instead.

The stuff with Nott and Toya was juicy as fuck, for those who know what's coming. The unsettled ambiguity as to Nott's age is really well done. You have Fjord calling her Caleb's "daughter" and have Beau saying "I know you're just a kid", and then on the other side of that you see Nott's care for Toya, calling her "honey" and grieving over her in a way that seems to come not from a place of childlike shock, but something else. I just love the line they're toeing here and I can't wait for things to happen that develop this even further.

Speaking of Toya, it's so wicked sad that she dies! They really used the carnival incident, a thing that was the relatively low-stakes entry-level adventure in the stream, to set the darker tone of this story as a whole. Molly really loses fuckin' everything, and is completely disconnected from the one community that gave his life purpose and meaning. It makes sense, as much as I miss Yasha, to have her not around for this, as it really puts Molly in this position of isolation as he adopts a new group of weirdos to run with. It also says so much about his character that he is able to give such a lovely speech as they burn Toya's body and pay their respects. None of them knew this little girl, but her death was a thing they all experienced together, and the pain can fuel them to create something new and good. Circling back to the leadership thing, while it seems like Fjord and Beau's arcs are more concerned with it at this point, I also love the idea of positioning Molly very much as the heart of the group, the one who speaks the words that bring them all together. That's juicy for lots of reasons coming up.

We have these little moments of connection across the pre-established pairings of characters, such as Caleb and Beau talking about libraries and learning, and how nothing in the books prepares you for the real thing. And Jester trying to bond with Nott, telling her she's beautiful and asking her questions about why she drinks and what she gets out of it. I also loved the moment when Jester was trying to heal Toya and calling on the Traveler for help, and Nott was like "please don't be imaginary". Like, she does want something to believe in, so bad!

In this first proper group combat, we see how Beau, Molly, and Fjord all stall for time and create an opening for Caleb to take the killing shot. I really like this as an adapted way of making Caleb's magic perhaps more powerful and dangerous than anybody else in the group; he's way more studied and way more practiced with it than anybody else. And yet you need to balance that, so between the necessity of acquiring components, and the idea that each spell takes a lot of time to set up and deploy, you create this great concept for combat, where everybody gets to get involved, but a lot of what they're doing is protecting their glass cannon wizard so he can go boom at just the right moment. Feels true to D&D party composition stuff, feels true to Caleb specifically, and it creates more opportunities for the various different types of magic to get their time to shine.

That's all I've got for this one: I'm so impressed with everything in the main story this week, that even my qualms about the Essek subplot are not enough to dissuade me from saying this is a really, really strong episode! And we've got the group name there at the end, along with our visiting volstrucker, here looking for Beau and accidentally snagging a much bigger fish in her net...

8/10