Between battling dragons and squaring off against vampires, The Legend of Vox Machina is no stranger to epic battles with monstrous stakes. However, in episodes 3 and 4 of Season 2, Critical Role’s series wrings tragedy and devastating consequences from one simple accident and the moments that follow.
The accident in question comes at the end of episode 3, “The Sunken Tomb.” Vox Machina have uncovered the Deathwalker’s Ward, the armor once worn by the champion of the Matron of Ravens, as well as one of the powerful Vestiges of Divergence. Eager to finish the mission, Percy (voiced by Taliesin Jaffe) reaches for the armor. When he touches it, it unleashes a burst of death energy that misses him, but strikes down the other person standing nearby: Vex (voiced by Laura Bailey).
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Vex immediately falls dead, prompting anguish from all her companions but especially her twin brother Vax (voiced by Liam O’Brien). He’d only been gone from her for 30 seconds, yet that small amount of time was all it took for calamity to strike. As episode 4 opens with multiple failed resurrection attempts, Vax sees a chilling sight: The Matron of Ravens, the goddess of death, coming to take his sister away from him. In the face of immeasurable loss, he stands firm and utters one fateful line: “Take me instead, you raven bitch.” Miraculously, this changes the course of the Matron’s actions, and Vex lives.
Vex’s death in the sunken tomb is an emotional turning point for The Legend of Vox Machina.
Characters have died and come back to life in The Legend of Vox Machina before. We’ve seen Percy’s sister Cassandra (voiced by Esmé Creed-Miles) and Keyleth (voiced by Marisha Ray) perish by enemy hands, only to be brought back through magical means. Vex’s resurrection feels different, though. Here, there’s a sense of desperation, of something offered by Vax and accepted by the Matron — we see this acceptance not just in Vex continuing to live, but in the Deathwalker’s Ward magically appearing on Vax’s body.
While we come to learn over the course of the episode that he has become the Matron’s newest champion, Vax and the audience have no true way of understanding what he’s just done in the moments following Vex’s death. But based on Vax’s visions of death and calamitous destruction, we can tell that this one line spoken to the Matron of Ravens will greatly impact his future.
“In the moment, [the Matron] is just an enemy who wants to take away his whole world, because Vex is his whole world,” O’Brien told Mashable over a Zoom Call. “At the table and in the larger story that we told [in Critical Role’s first campaign], that evolves and changes, and he takes a new perspective as time goes on. But in that moment, he’s just trying to eradicate a threat to the thing that he holds most dear.”
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Vex’s death and resurrection are among the most emotional moments in any of Critical Role’s livestreams, so it was crucial that The Legend of Vox Machina get it right. The show’s scenes include dialogue lifted right from the original campaign, including Vax’s “raven bitch” line. However, the show also deviates a bit from the linear narrative of gameplay to incorporate flashbacks exploring Vex and Vax’s time on the run together. We see how they decide to leave their father, how they survive alone, and even how they come across Vex’s bear companion Trinket.
Perhaps the most effective of the flashbacks is one in which the twins reconcile after a fight. The Legend of Vox Machina juxtaposes young Vax’s tears with Vax’s current grief over losing his sister. “Do not go far from me,” he pleads with her in the flashback — a line that has been repeated throughout the episode. After all that buildup, the line’s use in this context proves absolutely devastating. The flashbacks do wonders for emphasizing the close bond between the twins, to the point that there’s absolutely no question that Vax would offer himself up to the Matron in exchange for his sister’s life.
For O’Brien, nailing these moments was something the show had building to for a while. “What had happened at the table was really impactful for the game, for me,” he said. “And I’d just carried it inside my head and heart for so long that to bring all of us together with [animation studio] Titmouse and see it brought to life like that, it’s indescribable. The fact that we get to take this story out of the ether and boil it down to this refined adaptation is just magic.”
How does Vex’s death affect the rest of the party?
Credit: Courtesy of Amazon Studios
While Vex and Vax are certainly at the heart of this tragedy, none of the other members of Vox Machina leave the tomb unscathed. It doesn’t matter if you’re able to resurrect them; watching a close companion fully die is still fully traumatic! However, if there’s one member Vex’s death affects the most outside of the twins, it has to be Percy, since he triggered the trap on the Deathwalker’s Ward in the first place.
According to Jaffe, Percy’s actions throughout Season 2 — and especially this episode — stem from a desire to redeem himself from Season 1, which saw him on a demon possession-fueled quest for revenge.
“Percy is spending an awful lot of this season attempting to overcompensate for being the friend who was the problem,” Jaffe told Mashable over Zoom. “There’s always the friend who’s coming out of a bad space and who’s gone, ‘I have caused all my friends the worst time, and now I’m just going to keep trying to find opportunities to be the hero.’ And it goes the way these things go when you’re just acting in desperation. All he’s doing is making poor choices.”
After accidentally causing Vex’s death, how will Percy deal with his guilt?
“I mean, how can you not blame yourself for that?” Jaffe asked. “It’s his worst nightmare. Not only did he kill one of the people that he loves most in the world, but he also did it for the worst reasons, and rightfully gets quite a bit of anger from the appropriate people.”
Naturally, there’s some tension between Vax and Percy now, but the group dynamic has changed in other ways. With his bargain with the Matron of Ravens and subsequent visions, Vax is being pulled ever so slowly in a different direction from the rest of the group. Though Vex tries to tell him nothing has changed, he knows that he’s crossed some line into the unknown.
“Everything’s changed,” he tells her. And he’s right — we just don’t know how far these changes will go yet.
New episodes of The Legend of Vox Machina are streaming every Friday on Prime Video.
