The Legend of Vox Machina - “Taryon, My Wayward Son”, “De Rolo’s Eleven”, & “We Are His Blood” Review
Halfway into its fourth and penultimate season, The Legend of Vox Machina has answered the question that any long-running series must eventually face as it approaches its final stretch: does it still know what it is, and does it still care?
The answer, delivered across three episodes of escalating consequence, is an emphatic yes.
The fourth episode, “Taryon, My Wayward Son,” is the backstory installment that the new character has more than earned since his introduction in the season premiere. The visit to the Darrington family estate is structured as a classic dramatic irony – Taryon arriving with hopes of his father’s approval as the unspoken prize, the audience understanding almost immediately that the elder Darrington is not the idealized man his son has spent his life hoping to impress. Wayne Brady has been playing Taryon as a man armored in performative confidence, and the episode uses that armor skillfully: every moment of cheerful obliviousness reads differently once the shape of the betrayal becomes clear. When Taryon is finally forced to confront the obvious fact that his father is not merely aware of the shadowstone mining but its architect – that the son’s willingness to believe in his family’s innocence was the mechanism of his own self-delusion – it lands with the particular weight of a disillusionment that has been building since childhood. The episode ends with the poetry of a son trapping his father inside the mine that was supposed to represent the family’s legacy, and it earns every note of that conclusion.
Percy’s contribution to the episode – deploying Grog as comic muscle in a business meeting while the rest of the party conducts the actual investigation – is the kind of tactical absurdism the show does better than almost any other animated series currently running, and Taliesin Jaffe’s voice work throughout the season continues to find new registers in a character who began as an archetype and has accumulated genuine complexity across four seasons.
“De Rolo’s Eleven” is exactly what its title promises – a loving homage to the 2001 heist film remake Ocean’s Eleven, transposed into the world of Tal’Dorei with the particular anarchic energy that distinguishes Vox Machina’s approach to any plan that requires stealth. The Cobalt Soul library infiltration proceeds exactly as one would expect in this series: nothing goes as intended, everything is resolved through improvisation and controlled chaos, and the complications are more entertaining than any clean execution could have been. The truth spell exposing Vex and Percy’s secret marriage to Vax is precisely the kind of revelation this show saves for moments of maximum inconvenience, and it works perfectly. Grog accidentally consuming the intelligence potion intended for Pike – becoming, briefly, the only member of the party capable of comprehending the complex historical texts about the Whispered One – is a comic premise that the episode milks with complete commitment before pivoting, in Pike’s gauntlet-powered solution, to the kind of character moment that reminds you why this ensemble has sustained four seasons of genuine audience investment.
But it is the sixth episode, “We Are His Blood,” that announces most clearly what the back half of this season intends to be. Wilhand “Pop-Pop” Trickfoot’s death at the hands of the Whispered One’s cult – devastating in its abruptness, landing without warning – is yet another emotionally significant loss for our protagonists this season, and the revelation of Delilah Briarwood among the cult’s ranks transforms a grief scene into something with considerably larger implications. Meanwhile, Vax’s admission to Percy – that the secret wedding was simply the first of the milestones he knows he will never see – speaks of more lasting wounds to come.
The first half of season four has been a confident, consistently entertaining piece of animated storytelling. The second half now carries the weight of everything it has set in motion.