The Legend of Vox Machina: De Rolo's Eleven (4x05)

This was a really fun episode!

Cons:

Okay. So. The Vax thing with the blight. I don't want to go into the full long rant about what I don't like about this, because I do want to see where we land a little later on, but in short, it really bothers me that Vax is dying from a punishment set by the Matron. Like, I think the Matron is... allegorically, symbolically, she is the inevitability of death. She cannot be avoided forever. But she's not vindictive, she's not punitive. In the campaign, Vax dies in a combat encounter just kinda by random happenstance, and the Matron gives him a short time back among the land of the living to finish up some things... but she's not the cause of his death in the first place. To me, this change kinda fucks with the theme. Even if you take away the randomness and say he's dying slowly of a magical terminal illness, sure, I can see why that's the direction they want to go. I don't mind a change. But it shouldn't be the Matron's doing. It makes her more straight-forwardly into a villain, which I don't think she should be. Vax can regret the path that led him here for a lot of reasons, but he shouldn't, ultimately, blame the Matron personally for the hard road he has to walk. I feel like that undercuts what is beautiful about the story.

I also... was never really a fan of "secretly married" Percy and Vex, even in the campaign... I think this one is a little more just me being selfish because it's just super fucking sad to me that Vex would get married without Vax there. I mean, ostensibly Cass got to be there for Percy, so... yeah. It just bums me out in a major way and I was kind of hoping they'd cut it?

Pros:

The odd thing is, though, I really loved the truth amulet stuff with the twins. Despite what I just said. I think it's a situation of, if we pretend these plot points were immutable, that they had to be in the story, how would you handle it, and I really, really loved the heart-felt twin moments in this episode. There's the comedic shenanigans of them realizing they can't lie, and then the quiet hurt and anger that Vax feels hearing about his sister getting married, and then the disbelief and horror that Vex feels at hearing that Vax might be dying... I just thought it was so good, and I love that they were both forced to say the the reasoning behind their lies and get things out in the air, to the point where at the end of the episode, they actually feel like they've worked through something important and are in a good place. That's just extremely sweet and tender.

And for the most part, the rest of this episode was fun heist-y shenanigans, which you just love to see! I love Percy's nerdy enthusiasm for the plan, and the fact that then he is the one who gets waylaid by a Scanlan Shorthalt super-fan and is just trying to get rid of the guy the whole time. You've got adorable Kiki in mouse form, the super clever plan of sneaking both Pike and Grog into the vault in a small crate by using the Trinket Poké Ball, you've got Tary caving to the pressure the minute Yudala Fon (heyyyy fun to see them here!) punches him one time. I loved the heist-y version of the theme song, I loved the ridiculous escalation, and I love that they "failed" to actually take anything out from the vault, but in fact still came out with the information about the Whispered One thanks to Grog's temporarily boosted intelligence!

Truly just the whole sequence with Grog having taken the intelligence potion and Pike getting big with the gauntlets was sooo fun. "I... would like... to READ!!!" really made me smile. And in the end, for all their chaos, they were in fact successful! It's interesting pacing-wise to have a whole episode just trying to obtain information on the Big Bad. I think it accurately conveys how serious and secret and unknown all of this is. It's a big fat secret and they had to go to a lot of trouble to get to the bottom of it. I'm super excited to watch them grapple with what they learn.

Although I do, honestly, really miss Scanlan a lot. I can't wait for him to come back...

8.5/10