The Mighty Nein premiere showed the members of the adventuring party beginning their personal journeys and meeting up in small groups, only for them to crash into each other by episode three. This week’s episode gives them their first real taste of collective teamwork, and it doesn’t exactly go well.
Last we left off, the six of them were jailed after the catastrophe at the circus that saw Mollymauk’s entire carnival troupe killed after they and some of the guests transformed into monsters. Enraged at each other for their predicament, the imprisoned group decide to bust out together and prove their innocence by rescuing Toya, the young elven singer in control of Kylre, the nergalid responsible for the previous night’s carnage. Like in the early episodes of the actual play, the party finds Toya in his thrall and has to separate the two.
But unlike said actual play, they’re only halfway successful here. While the fighters eliminate Kylre, Jester and Nott are unable to save Toya, and she dies. They give her a funeral that night, with the loss having clearly affected each of them. It’s a notably grimmer conclusion to the opening arc of the campaign and speaks to how the creators want this animated adaptation to honor its live show counterpart and be different from its animated predecessor, Vox Machina.
Changes like these, voice actor Matt Mercer told io9, are born from “revisiting the logic and intent” of the arcs and sequences the show is pulling from. Since the circus is where the Mighty Nein came together, it made sense to put them in a situation where “danger and loss are even more impactful.”
A darker tone was always “the intent out of the gate” for Nein, and one he’s glad they got to do, especially since longer episode lengths give them time to “lean into the tone shift of the series.” Future episodes will further lean into that darkness, which was part of showrunner Tasha Huo’s original pitch. As a self-professed fan of the campaign, she already knew the characters would go to “dark places,” and of the “risks” she took making the show, its tone wasn’t one of them—in fact, the creators felt the same way as her about making this tonally distinct, further underlining how much this is the show they wanted to make.
To say Critical Role’s many founders are hands-on with the two shows would be an understatement: along with voicing the main (and some minor) characters, they executive produce and write them. This episode, titled “The Mighty Nein,” is co-written by Nott and Fjord’s voice actors, Sam Riegel and Travis Willingham, who’ve also written episodes for Vox Machina, as have Marisha Ray (Beau) and Liam O’Brien (Caleb). And if there’s any episode this season where the cast members would take charge and pen the exploits of the titular adventuring party, it would sure be this one, where it starts with Jester collectively dubbing them “The Sensual Seven” and ends with her giving them their official branding.
During our interview, Willingham said any writer can take any episode they have “a really strong viewpoint” on and pursue that, after which the Critical Role team provides input on their characters upon seeing completed scripts. Ray loves all scripts and the assembled writers but said the cast-written ones often have a tell—a character will have an “extra bit of x-factor” that lets you know who was behind them, from a character’s dialogue choices to having a few more jokes than normal.
Riegel explained that it makes sense for them to take the reins for “specific plot points or storylines we were there for when they were invented and improvised.” While not all of the founders have the “time and energy” to handle an episode, he’s hopeful that everyone will have “a script or two” to their names when all these shows are said and done.
But that’ll be a while, as The Mighty Nein has its first season to finish on Prime Video, followed by season two in the near future.
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