Season 4 reunites Vox Machina after a year apart, with new songs, new creature work prompting a new monster pipeline, and a long-slumbering evil pushing the fractured heroes back into action; the animated fantasy series now streaming on Prime Video.
Doty, take this down. Another season of The Legend of Vox Machina has released on Prime Video. The raucous team of unconventional heroes has split up—some to noble castles and others to less noble pubs—and there’s a new party member to boot.
So, naturally, there needed to be a recap song. And while Sam Riegel’s salacious bard character, Scanlon, has typically been the bringer of musical summations, fellow Critical Role member Travis Willingham, who voices the barbarian Grog in the series, says he threatened his friend Riegel with physical violence if he didn’t get to sing the recap number for Season 4.
“Scanlan got to do a recap at the end of one of our previous seasons,” says Willingham. “So, I petitioned Sam and said I was going to kick him in the shins every Thursday if he didn't give me a song.”
Riegel adds, “And he’s got big muscles. So, I feared those as a threat.”
Season 4, which rolled out last week with its first three episodes and streams weekly, takes place a year after the Chroma Conclave. Vox Machina has separated, searching for love, family, and purpose. But as always, the call to adventure is close at hand. When a long-slumbering evil awakens to threaten the realm, they must reunite to take on an epic foe.
Check out the trailer:
The series from Amazon MGM Studios, Critical Role, and Titmouse stars Critical Role founders and cast members Liam O’Brien (“Vax”), Taliesin Jaffe (“Percy”), Laura Bailey (“Vex”), Marisha Ray (“Keyleth”), Ashley Johnson (“Pike”), Willingham (“Grog”), Riegel (“Scanlon”) and Matthew Mercer. The Critical Role cast also serve as executive producers alongside Chris Prynoski (Metalocalypse), Shannon Prynoski (Fairfax), and Ben Kalina (Big Mouth) of Titmouse. The show has already been renewed for a fifth and final season, debut date not yet announced.
And Riegel, in addition to being an EP and cast member, has also written most of Vox Machina’s musical numbers with his brother-in-law and music producer Peter Habib.
“A couple of times a year, we all get a text from Sam with a voice memo of him parked in his car going, ‘Okay, I think it's going to be something like this…’ and he’s doing his approximation of himself or one of us singing beautifully because he's got a great voice,” shares O’Brien. “And then we hear it two years later, fully mixed, though it all started as this bare-bones little diary entry.”
Now that Riegel has created a mix for Grog, his shins will survive another season.
“God, I wish I had the ability to compose a song,” says Willingham. “It always comes down to the genius of Sam, Peter, and our amazing composer, Neal Acree. I think, for Peter and Sam, it was about dumbing down their intelligence enough to come up with a song that Grog would sing, and also a range of notes that your boy could hit as well. And then it was also our partners at Titmouse going, ‘What would a music video from Grog look like?’ And we were like, ‘Crayons. It’s all going to be drawn in crayons.’”
Titmouse also had their work cut out for them animating monsters this season, particularly the massive kraken. According to Ray, “After several seasons of the Chroma Conclave, these giant dragons that required Titmouse to basically rebuild their entire pipeline to accommodate [producing] higher quality dragons than what we saw in the first season, they came to us a little out of breath after Season 3 and were like, ‘Okay, so we’re good? No more huge monsters, right?’ And we were like, ‘Actually….’”
Ray adds, “We never avoid giving flowers to Titmouse because they just absolutely crushed it. You’re talking about one of the largest, most immense creatures in the monster manual, and they nailed the immensity.”
While not every member of the Vox Machina party has gotten their own song, almost all have contributed to the sounds of these monsters—big and small.
“Most any creature that comes on this show is either a combination of me or some of the other actors doing some sort of temporary audio that ultimately becomes non temporary in some degree,” shares Mercer. “Some of it is me voicing it, as well as maybe Travis or Liam. And then when it gets into the actual audio mix, our really talented sound mixers go in there and either boost the noise, tune that to its nth degree, or filter in other sound effects to layer on top. I mean, it's how Trinket came to life through this whole series. It’s still me making all the bear noises, and they layer in actual bear noises at other moments and maybe overlap them, or just plus up my sound to make it sound more bear-like. And even that we've refined from season to season. I love doing creature work.”
And like Riegel, Mercer is often creating monster mixes in his car. “I spend a lot of time trying things out in traffic on the freeway and just looking like a crazy person,” he says. “It's great.”
Perhaps the craziest cast member this season—and the biggest personality—is Taryon “Tary” Darrington, voiced by Wayne Brady (Whose Line Is It Anyway?). Tary is a self-proclaimed adventurer, author, tinkerer, and alchemist, intent on joining Vox Machina on their quests. He arrives out of the blue with a robotic scribe that documents his every move and thought. Tary, previously played by Riegel at the table, could easily have become the most hated character of the season. But Brady has managed to make him the star of the show.
“I think Tary truly tries to move through life like he is [the star],” says Brady. “He has main character energy all the time, but the cool thing is that it’s covering up somebody who truly is this little boy at heart. And I think that that is a really cool dichotomy of somebody to play. It's the best of all worlds in terms of a voice-acting role. You get the highs, you get to be the disruptor, and then you get to play someone that has heart.”
And of course, he gets a song.
“I've known guys like Tary, people who step into every conversation like, ‘I'm here!’ and you're like, ‘I wish you weren't,’” says Brady. “So, I knew immediately what I wanted to do with him. He doesn't mean ill. He truly wants to be part of the team. He wants to fit in and, later on, you find out his backstory. I won’t give anything away, but you learn why he’s the way he is.”
Bailey adds, “To Wayne’s credit, he came in and blew us all out of the water with his talent. He absolutely steals the show. And he really meshes so well with the rest of the cast. It feels like he’s been part of the story all along.”
So at least behind the scenes, the cast considers Tary one of the crew. That’s why they created every episode summary in his voice, one of the many tongue-in-cheek easter eggs in the show alongside hidden “Mr. Mercer” characters, animated versions of Sam’s wife and cinematographer Quyen Tran, and adoring Percy fans that serve as winks to the actors’ experiences at conventions.
Pike also gets a literal tongue-in-cheek moment in Episode 1, when her character forces a kiss on an innocent bystander. “Pike is a contradiction,” says Johnson. “Playing a cleric at the table—a woman of faith who also wants to have fun with your friends and do naughty things—is fun. Pike is having a really rough go this season. I actually forgot about that makeout scene. How could I forget? Why was that the choice?”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
