The Legend Of Vox Machina Is Already Building Up To An Epic Finale
Season 4 marks the beginning of the end of the road.
In every good adventure story, there’s a moment when a band of heroes is torn apart and they have to find their way back to each other. This can be as simple as Grogu flying to Nal Hutta with the Anzellans or the Scooby-Doo gang inevitably deciding that splitting up is a good idea, but there’s usually some sort of event that makes the heroes remember why they’re a team.
In the Critical Role animated series The Legend of Vox Machina, this moment happened after Season 3. Scanlan (Sam Riegel) decided he was tired of adventuring and just wanted to be a rock star with his daughter, and the rest of the group split off into pairs. When we open on Season 4, everyone is living it up outside of the questing life. Vex and Percy (Laura Bailey and Taliesin Jaffe) are adjusting to life as nobles, Vax and Keyleth (Liam O’Brien and Marisha Ray) are pursuing Keyleth’s destiny to be the Voice of the Tempest, and Pike and Grog (Ashley Johnson and Travis Willingham) are hanging out and getting into bar fights.
But when each of these pairs encounters something evil, they all have to join together for an adventure that’s bigger than anything they’ve ever faced before, and they’ll have to bring in a new ally to do it — Taryon Darrington. Inverse spoke with the cast on The Legend of Vox Machina about this new face (with a new voice), the journey of these characters, and the beginning of the end of the road.
Self-aggrandizing rich boy Taryon Darrington was originally the creation of Sam Riegel, who switched characters in the original Critical Role tabletop game, but in the series, he’s played by Whose Line Is It Anyway?’s Wayne Brady. But Brady’s Darrington is quite different — not that he would know.
“To this day, because I want it to remain pure, I haven’t looked at Sam’s take on him,” Brady tells Inverse. “So to me, there are no changes because I have nothing to compare it to, and Sam never said, ‘Oh, that’s different.’ So I still live in the beautiful bliss of ignorance.”
This is actually one of the show’s strongest points: For longtime fans of the campaign, an unfamiliar voice may seem strange, but Brady’s theatricality and improv chops shine through in every moment. Riegel, who knew Brady for years as a voice director, was overjoyed by the changes.
“He changed all the words. He changed all the lines,” he tells Inverse. “Now we encouraged him to improvise, and he did quite a bit of improvisation, but he sang lines that we didn’t expect him to sing, and he added laughs, and he added all sorts of business that we ended up animating. He made it his own.”
Taryon Darrington (and his robot Doty) are the newest — if begrudgingly so — members of Vox Machina.
The changes may take a bit of getting used to, but Brady’s Taryon is the perfect comic relief to an otherwise pretty bleak season. “His Taryon Darrington is definitely not my Taryon Darrington,” Riegel says. “And what a joy, what a gem, what a sweetheart. He did such a great job. I hope he wins all the awards and thanks me in his speech.”
But for the Vox Machina we know and love, things are decidedly less joyful. If this season’s story has one theme, it’s faith: the dangers of having it, the comfort in trusting in it, and the grief of losing it.
“This season for Pike is definitely sort of the culmination of her crisis of faith, I would say,” Ashley Johnson tells Inverse. “It’s the ultimate trial. It’s something that we didn’t fully get to flesh out and explore at the table, and we got a chance to do that this season. And me personally, my favorite terrain when I’m doing scenes is emotional damage, and I like to cause pain. So we had to take Pike to the depths and the darkness to bring her back to the light.”
Pike’s story ends up being one of the most touching — and emotionally damaging — plotlines in the show.
There’s only one season left of Vox Machina, and while that means the end is nigh, it’s really a blessing for the series as a whole.
“It’s a gift,” Critical Role GM Matthew Mercer tells Inverse. “There are so many stories that people begin to tell in entertainment media that never get to finish. We want to land that plane in every possible way we can, but also it means that we have to really dig in to start that ramp and make this season feel as satisfying on its own without relying on the season to come.”
The Legend of Vox Machina is the adaptation of Critical Role’s first campaign. The Mighty Nein, the adaptation of the second campaign, is currently gearing up for Season 2. (“We’ll get to see some animals,” Riegel says of the new season.) So this Season 4 is a bittersweet moment for the cast: Vox Machina was the project this entire endeavor began with, the one that broke Kickstarter records and proved that even a familiar story can have a second life in animation.
Does that mean that we’ll see another series adapting the third campaign, Bells Hells, soon? According to Critical Role President Travis Willingham, that remains to be seen, but there is a way that fans can help ensure there will be no shortage of content for Critters ahead.
“I hope Bells Hells is next. I hope Calamity is next. I hope all of our EXU stories are next,” he tells Inverse. “If you like what you’re seeing and are a fan of The Legend of Vox Machina or The Mighty Nein, make sure you are there June 3 for the start of this show, because it really does make a difference. They pay attention to who watches this stuff. And if you watch it, it means that you have excellent taste. All of a sudden, you will become a member of high society by watching this show.”
