The Legend of Vox Machina, Season Two: Even Better Than the First
Hold on to your hats! The Vox Machina crew are back better than ever in their second season! The stakes couldn’t be higher and the villains are virtually indestructible!
Watch as Percy (Taliesan Jaffe), Grog (Travis Willingham), Vex’ahlia (Laura Bailey), Vax’ildan (Liam O’Brien), Pike (Ashley Johnson), Scanlan (Sam Riegel), Keyleth (Marisha Ray), and Trinket (Matthew Mercer) battle, scrape, run, avoid, narrowly escape and plot against the most powerful group of dragons they’ve ever met, The Chroma Conclave.
Enter the dragon
It’s seemingly just minutes after they save Eamon from the clutches of the evil dragon Brimscythe of Season One, that the Chroma Conclave blasts onto the scene and Season Two savagely roars into view. Lead by the powerful Thordak (Lance Reddick) the dragons burn, freeze and melt their way through the town, pillaging every last object of value to fulfill Thordak’s greed and lust for power.
Source: Prime Video
Having heard of their brother Brimscythe’s demise, the group are fixed upon finding and ending Vox Machina and intent on making every village suffer until they do. The dragon Umbrasyl (Matthew Mercer) leads the dragons on this hunt after the siege, while Thordak keeps watch over his new conquest and its people.
When the group finds the dragon’s power to be overwhelmingly devastating, Keyleth uses her powers to transport them out to regroup.
The Quest
The group then retreats to Vasselheim, a city long protected by isolation and neutrality, to ask for weapons and soldiers to aid them against the Conclave. When their requests are refused, a servant of a Vasselheim Highbearer secretly tells them about a seedy place called the Slayer’s Take, where they must speak with its patron to get help with the dragons.
Source: Prime Video
The patron, a living sphynx called Osysa (Alanna Ubach), tells them that, in order to defeat the dragons, they must go on a quest to find the Vestiges of Divergence. The Vestiges of Divergence are ancient weapons created to kill the Gods, that were scattered across the land in obscure locations, so as not to allow just anyone to wield their power.
Each of the Vestige quests have puzzles; tests of strength and dangers unto themselves that require the unique talents of each Voxer and challenge them to their individual limits. Will the team be enough to defeat the wrath of the Chroma Conclave?
In all honesty…
The Legend of Vox Machina, Season 2 is nothing short of breathtaking.
All that Season One built is but a drop in the ocean of the vastness that awaits in Season Two, which, considering most “seconds” of films and tv usually don’t compare, is genuinely refreshing.
Source: Prime Video
Season Two delves deeper into the personal lives of each character, showing us the foundations they were built on, to how they have each been challenged and how they’ve grown in the end. We see layer upon layer of their fears; what haunts them; their pasts; their families; their weaknesses and how each of them overcomes them.
It also dives into the vastness of the meaning of human friendships; how each person is an irreplaceable cog in the unending machine that is life and what it truly means to work together.
The animation is top notch blending 2D and 3D almost seamlessly in every scene. The creativity and richness of the different worlds truly sends the viewer on a fantastical trip, heightening the experience and introducing us to a lushness not seen in many, more recent animated series. It’s definitely up there with the likes of Castlevania and other shows of that ilk.
The best part of it, for me, was the careful attention paid to almost every character. Vax, Vex, Grog and Scanlon are front and center this season, but the stories require the individual talents of all of them. They even share the reticence and downright awkwardness of the possibility of blooming love stories between them.
Source: Prime Video
Though some of the fight scenes still seem surreal due the nature of how much the team can take (yes, I get that it’s a fantasy), there is also a focus on their limitations and their need to ask for help, making the characters more relatable so that audiences can further bond with them.
As a big Percy fan in Season One, I’m hoping that the writers delve deeper into him next season. As a writer and critic, I’m hoping that the Vox Machina team continues to execute the same regard and meticulousness to all future seasons as they have in this one.
There is no doubt of the passion, thus far, involved in this and I’m so thrilled to see it.