The Legend of Vox Machina: Let the End Begin (4x11)

Okay, I actually quite liked that episode on its own merits! I'm going to try and be a little more brief.

Cons:

My one big "con" is a continuing issue with the Pike arc, and I'm going to try not to repeat myself here. Pike makes this speech to Grog's corpse, and she lays out how she feels like she and the rest of the group have failed in their task to protect people, by leaving so much suffering in their wake. She feels like Percy and Vex, Keyleth and Vax, and Scanlan, all abandoned her in some degree, and this feeling is manifesting as anger, more so than guilt about her own culpability. Love it, great, makes perfect sense. But then she says that everyone thinks of her as perfect Pike who has the Everlight's blessing, and she says she's not: the Everlight left her.

When? When did the Everlight leave you, Pike? This is the crux of what is so frustrating to me! In the first season, Pike felt this uncertainty about the Everlight, she visited the temple, and she got to talk to her goddess. The Everlight told her that she didn't have to be any certain way in order to serve her and serve others with her healing. And Pike seemed to be at peace with that. In season three, we don't see the Everlight "leaving" Pike. If anything, we see Pike rejecting the Everlight, in a moment that I found quite confusing where she throws away her holy symbol while facing down Thordak. The vibe is that she doesn't need to turn to her goddess to make her own decisions. I complained at the time that this felt very fuzzy to me, because the Everlight never asked her to be blindly obedient? And then in season four, Pike has been grumpy and avoidant whenever the Everlight comes up.

What frustrates me so much about this is that I don't think it would take much to make this all make sense. All you'd have to do would be to show Pike reaching out to the Everlight early in the season, and getting no reply. She feels lonely without her friends, she tries praying to her goddess, and it doesn't work. She finds out about the old Everlight priestess turning to this new cult, she tries to check in with the goddess about it and gets no reply. She asks the Everlight for help with Wilhand, and the dragon's lung. And each time, she doesn't get a response. Then, in this final moment of despair, looking at her best friend's ruined body, she begs one final time for the Everlight to talk to her, please, anything! And she doesn't respond.

But that's not the story told here. If the Everlight is absent from the story, it doesn't seem like it's a rejection of Pike's constant requests. It seems like Pike left her, not the other way around.

Also, this is more in the realm of nitpick, but I will reiterate that that ending of the last episode where Vax's blight starts glowing is extra weird to me now, especially since we start the episode with him doing the actual real glow-up. Why do the little tease of it in the last episode at all? 

Pros:

Sorry, I went on about that longer than I meant to! Over-all, I really did like this episode a lot.

So, I do like the twist with the blight. I do think it works. I wish it had been handled a bit differently, and Vax had been able to explore and articulate his trust in the Matron a bit more, but I like that it was a twist, I like that she was setting him up for success, while still maintaining his ultimate fate is to be her champion and stay by her side. Like, there's an inevitability to what's happening to Vax, but the Matron wasn't punishing him out of spite or anger, and that does make it better for me. It's a tragedy, the story of Vax, in many ways, but it's not a tragedy that involves a mean villainous god taking away his choices, ya know? That's not the story, and I'm glad they landed in the right place there.

Also, despite all the complaining above, I do not at all mind the idea of Pike being pushed to the breaking point and joining the Whispered One. I wish the Everlight's "abandonment" had been demonstrated some way to lead to this point, but even without it, yeah, okay: Pike is at the end of her rope, and this one guy is saying he has the answers, that he can save the day, he can ease suffering. Of course Pike would be drawn to that. I like the idea that she has been in such a bad place all season, and Grog is kind of the only one who noticed and tried to help. I don't blame the others; I think Pike is in the wrong to be angry with her friends for living their lives. It's not like Vex and Percy weren't trying to help protect the world and the people of Whitestone during that year off, and it's not like Kiki and Vax were just going on a gap year; they were working towards Keyleth's Aramente and her own journey of leading her people. But at the same time, it makes sense emotionally why Pike would feel hurt and abandoned.

The biggest thing I loved about this episode was the epic combat stuff, first with Vax, Percy, and Keyleth in an air battle trying to rescue Vex, and then later Vax sneaking in to get to Pike while Vex, Percy, and Keyleth fight the Whispered One's main lieutenants. There were just so many creative and interesting moments here, from Keyleth taming the undead mounts even though it goes against the way the magic is supposed to work, and the three of them doing the fake-out of Vax "dying" in order to lure everyone into a trap, and everyone just worrying about each other and doing everything they can to protect each other constantly... such cool aerial action sequences, underpinned by real emotional and physical stakes.

I also liked that Keyleth asks Vax not to go for the Whispered One: just rescue Pike and get out. And Vax in fact agrees to that pretty readily. Pike has bought into what the Whispered One has said about the Matron and the other gods being the cause of mortal suffering, and she's not able to hear or process the fact that her friends literally came here to rescue her. And it's a lose-lose situation in terms of what Vax says, because if he came here to kill the Whispered One, then Pike is going to process that as more abandonment. And if Vax came here just to rescue her, then he's doing what Vox Machina always does: fuck shit up without thinking about the larger consequences for anybody else. I really do like how this conflict is presented and how Pike responds to it. There's nothing Vax could have said in that moment to get through to her.

That's where I'll stop with this one. Just the finale left. I fully expect Grog to be resurrected by the end of the episode, and I also have a... theory... about the cliffhanger they might leave us on, which will just be, like, the height of irony and tragedy and... yeah. I already have the sense that I will look more kindly on season four of this show when it exists as a full story, once they get to wrap things up in season five. There is definitely a lot to love, here.

8/10