Okay what the FUCK actually though this is so good I'm crying.
Cons:
Uhhh... I guess I'm going to say what a lot of people are saying, which is that a 22-ish minute runtime feels very short? I don't care that things are changed/shortened/removed, and I'm already getting a little peeved with seeing people criticize along the lines of "but Vex got two natural twenties in the stream, she should have had this epic moment yada yada..." this show wouldn't be sustainable as a story if they actually followed the role of the dice in every instance. Of course Delilah doesn't fall on her ass in her opening villain reveal fight, y'all. But even though that's not at all my gripe, I will say things happen so quickly that I do wonder how people new to the story will react! Percy has like two lines of dialogue about the Briarwoods. One, "they took everything from me", and two, "they killed my whole family". I mean, sure, that's the important information to impart, but it certainly doesn't leave a lot of room for these reveals to breathe.
Very minor clunky moment that felt like they had to cut something for time, when they realize Vax is in trouble and Pike says "ugh, we lost the ticket?" to get their weapons back from coat check... there should have been a beat where the Matt Mercer NPC refused to give them their stuff without the ticket, but it wasn't there so I kind of blinked at that moment. Super minor, but there you have it. I can't spend the whole review in utter adulation, that would just be embarrassing.
Pros:
This episode was perfect, holy shit! If after the two-part opener I was having a good time, pleased with what I was seeing, now I'm hyped. Now I think this show is worth recommending to those not in the know, now I think this might be a way to get people intrigued and wanting to go back and watch the stream. Now I'm in the place where I'll be pretty upset if they don't get to make as many seasons of this thing as they want, as many as will let them tell the whole fucking story. It's really good, y'all. It's really, really good.
There's so much to talk about, but let's start with some of my favorite small moments, things I only caught on my second or third watch-through (because yes, I've seen this episode in full three times already, and watched the fight scene at the end more than that). You've got the Easter eggs, particularly the tapestry in the keep that shows the legendary cow episode. You've got the shot of Sylas and Delilah walking by a mirror, and only Delilah's reflection is visible. You've got the broader Critter references, the way Scanlan's outfit is a reference to Sam's ridiculousness at live shows. You've got Simon the belt, with a little eyepatch, so adorable.
And I could probably list a hundred of these, but a few of my favorite smaller character beats, the little details that make these people seem like a real group of friends. Things like Vax and Grog's prank war, Vax calling Pike "Pickle", Scanlan asking Grog to pick the code word, Vex and Vax both immediately closing ranks with Percy and asking what they can do to help when they see him freaking out, Keyleth being worried about Percy during dinner, and Vex jumping in to smooth things over, moments during battle like Pike healing Vax, Pike making Grog's weapon super-charged, Grog saving Percy and taking on Sylas one-on-one, Keyleth's plant magic saving Pike, Keyleth helping Vax to walk after his injuries... I could go on, there's just so much going on here that makes the characters come alive. These tiny moments that would be hard to miss if you didn't know they could have been there, but that add so much life to the characters. I feel like I'm getting to know them again, that I truly have the sense of them as friends, and complex individuals with all their group dynamics and one-on-one dynamics within that group. Truly impressive how much of this they're able to include, even with the extremely short amount of time they have to tell the story. I think I was worried that we'd lose this flavor, that there would be so much plot to get through that the characters would feel like pieces on a chess board, just going where they needed to go to move things along. I'm delighted that this is not the case, and that everyone feels truly alive to me already.
Shout-out also to my favorite comedy moments of the episode. The first coming at the very beginning, where Keyleth does her Disney Princess routine with the plants and the animals, walking into a kitchen where everyone else is clearly exhausted/hung over. It pairs so well with how we saw Keyleth handling her drink in the opening episode, the fact that she's the only chipper morning person. My other favorite joke was thanks to Sam's line delivery, when Grog suggests "Chenga" as the safe word, and Scanlan says "Okay. My safe word's 'Mommy'". That cracked me up. I don't know what it is about Sam's delivery as Scanlan, but Scanlan is funny to me in a way specific to himself, that's slightly different from merely being Sam's brand of comedy on the screen. He really is playing a character, and to be honest I'm surprisingly enjoying Scanlan quite a lot overall!
Let's talk villains, babeyyyy. God, Sylas and Delilah are hot, and their voice actors are blowing it out of the water! Matt as Sylas is properly sinister and sexy, and Grey DeLisle-Griffin as Delilah can step on me. They're really relishing in the subtle torture of Percy in this episode, clearly knowing who he is and enjoying making him squirm. There's also this obvious affection and devotion between them from the jump. You know they're a team, and they're all the more scary for it. Sylas biting Vax was... a lot... in the best way, and Delilah's line where she calls Percy a "pup" was such a good version of what Matt did in the stream at that moment! I'm already so excited to see the story play out with them. It still feels like a dream come true that I'm even getting to watch this.
Let's take a moment to talk about Taliesin Jaffe. Dude deserves an award for his performance in this show, and we're only just getting fucking started. God, I couldn't believe how good he was with every line. The dream at the start, Vex asking him if he had a bad dream, and his delivery on "is there any other kind" was just so perfectly emo in that very Percy de Rolo way. His innocent and earnest excitement about attending the banquet, and then the moment of truth when the Briarwoods of Whitestone are announced... chilling. And then everything at the dinner table, the way he growls out the barest of explanations to his friends... his ferociousness during the fight, and then of course "you fool, now your soul is forfeit"... chills. Just. Chills to all of it. I think he's doing an incredible job. I'll repeat what I've said before: the Briarwood arc is such a strong part of campaign one, and that's in large part due to Matt, of course, and his crafting of the story. But I really think that in the hands of a less skilled performer playing Percy, we wouldn't have the extremely fond memories we have of it today. He is so, so good at playing the dark, brooding young man out for revenge. He is the platonic ideal of that trope and he is taking it to new levels here in the animated version. I'm dying of happiness over it all.
So after I watched the full episode three times, I went back and watched the courtyard fight and the No Mercy Percy part like... five times in a row. It's some of my favorite stuff that I've seen in any show ever; I can already tell it's going to be imprinted on my mind for a long time.
I think what impresses me is how intimidating the Briarwoods managed to be, and it's making me look back more favorably on some aspects of the first two episodes. Because we saw these guys get their asses kicked by a dragon, but then we saw them rally, strategize, and kill said dragon in the very next episode, once they had their shit together. But here? Grog goes one-on-one with Sylas, and while he briefly seems to be making an impact with Pike's help, ultimately he's no match for this single vampire. Delilah bats away Keyleth and Vex's attack like it's nothing. Even after Keyleth does the cool plant magic thing, easily the most intense magic of the fight, the Briarwoods only decide to run off because they realize their fight has been noticed and they don't want to blow their cover and position with the council. You get the sense that had they not been worried about being caught, they would have cut through those vines and taken their sweet time murdering every member of Vox Machina, if they'd felt like it.
And just like in the Brimscythe fight, the characters all have a chance to do the things they're best at. Only this time, none of it works, and not because they're unprepared or fucking up, but because Delilah and Sylas are just that powerful. Percy shoots Sylas in the chest, and it doesn't matter. Keyleth shape shifts, and throws powerful nature spells at them. Doesn't matter. Vex makes a perfect shot at Delilah. Grog is going ham on Sylas' ass, swinging his axe with everything he's got, and yeah, you've guessed it, doesn't matter. That's so scary, it ups the stakes in this very obvious, dramatic way, and then the Briarwoods drive off before we get any sort of real resolution. I love that we start off our relationship with these villains by getting a big fight scene, because we're building up to some even more intense stuff later down the road, and this gives me such high hopes for how it's going to go.
Along the same line, I love how hurt Vax was, how seriously imperiled he was. While I've heard some criticism that the gore in the show feels a bit gratuitous, and while I might even agree with that in some moments, one thing that it does do is make you understand the physical stakes in a very clear way. In a lot of animated shows, characters look weak, they're lying on the ground, but they don't appear to be bleeding, and it's just sort of through context/inference that we know how worried we're meant to be about them. Here, Vax gets bitten in the neck by a vampire, and then he jumps out a window, and then he stands and tries to fight and is immediately slashed through the chest. We see the blood clouding in the water when Grog is getting cut up by Craven Edge (shout out to the sword, the design is awesome and I'm so glad it got its moment to shine, in a one-on-one against Grog, which is significant for those of us in the know!). It's an immediate sense of peril, and while we can be sure that Vax isn't actually going to die here and now, it sets the stakes for how fucked up these characters might become in later episodes, how injured and weak and scared and in pain.
The fight was high octane and intensely animated and fun all the way through, and then there's Percy, turning and yelling at his friends, which is not in the streaming show but I love as an addition, showing that he's so off-kilter he can't be trusted to be reasonable with them. And then my favorite bit from all three episodes thus far: Percy reloading his Pepperbox, cocking the gun, kicking Desmond down flat onto his back. Pointing the gun at him. Putting on the mask. Black shadow curling up from around him, his shadow on the ground forming... something clearly inhuman. Shooting Desmond's hand. "Fool. Now your soul is forfeit."
Just... chilling. Everything about the way this was shot, animated, voice acted, the soundtrack, the script... absolutely brilliant and bad-ass and untouchable.
For me personally, this fight and the fallout with Percy was as near perfection as one could hope to get in an animated telling of this story. It doesn't bother me even a little bit that things have changed from the stream to now; it set the stakes, and it's telling its own version of the story so many of us already know in another form. If I could give some of my fellow viewers one piece of advice, it would be to try and let go of the stream just a little bit. I purposefully chose not to do a Briarwood re-watch as the animated series came up, and I think that was the right call. Is every single moment I loved going to be animated exactly the way I pictured it in my head? Nope! Not even close! But so far, especially with episode three, I'm finding it very easy to love what I've been given, and not stress so much about what's not there. The stream is always going to be there for you to go back and watch. That version of the story isn't dying, or being replaced. This is just a new version of that story, and I think it's pretty dang outstanding so far.
My rating for this third episode is pretty dang high. I can't remember the last time I felt so immediately sucked in and invested in a story.
9.5/10
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