The joy of playing a tabletop role playing board game like “Dungeons & Dragons” isn’t the overall outcome of a campaign, but rather creating characters with your friends who can develop over a series of adventures. To quote that old cliché, the real treasures are the friends made along the way, and no quest is ever quite as memorable as the dynamics between a ragtag bunch of characters thrown together in play. It’s a feeling that movies and TV inspired by “D&D” struggle to recapture in a different medium; although beloved by many, I was lukewarm on the 2023 blockbuster “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” for how it needed to look down at its source material in its attempt to try to translate the chaos of a campaign.This isn’t an issue the Critical Role team has had across more than a decade of elaborate “D&D” campaigns, and the second Prime Video series adapted from one of those — set several decades after “The Legend of Vox Machina” — is at its best when simply letting us hang out with its band of eccentric misfits, whose relationships wind up ranging from co-dependent to destructive. It takes until Episode 4 of “The Mighty Nein” for all the characters to finally meet, and it’s a delight to watch them bounce off each other. As the season continued, I found it best to approach the overarching story about retrieving a magical entity known as the Beacon as nothing more than a Hitchcockian MacGuffin; an excuse to keep these characters together as the story itself is not particularly engaging when taken at face value.
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An expansion of Critical Role
The Mighty Nein posing together in a dark room – Prime Video
In its prior incarnation, “The Mighty Nein” was more directly connected to “The Legend of Vox Machina,” but those ties are underplayed here, allowing for a cleaner entry point for newcomers. Don’t think that rescues them from the fate of an introductory exposition dump though, as the theft of the Beacon leads to the direct threat of war between two dynasties on the continent of Wildemount after it lets out a destructive blast. Investigating the damage, human monk Beau (Marisha Ray) notices magical crystal residue, uncovering a conspiracy she sets out to investigate further, much to the irritation of her superiors. Elsewhere, the grieving wizard Caleb (Liam O’Brien) meets goblin Nott the Brave (Sam Riegel) after he tries to steal from him; Nott winds up helping the tortured Caleb conduct a magical ritual that falls flat, leading them to forge an unlikely alliance.
Elsewhere on the continent, an Orc-Warlock sailor who survives a shipwreck (Fjord, voiced by Travis Willingham) gains unexpected magical powers before bumping into Jester (Laura Bailey), who immediately idolizes him as a real-life action hero. She’s a cleric who claims to be followed by an invisible, all-seeing entity known as The Traveler, and has a gradual breakdown as she begins to lose her faith in his eternal companionship. As their fates all lead them toward a carnival where they all finally meet, Mollymauk (Taliesin Jaffe), a tarot card reader with a broad Irish accent, is introduced as the final member of this group thrown together by circumstance.Ultimately, these characters prove far more engaging than the story around them, which doesn’t hide the fact it’s built from expansive lore that threatens to appear impenetrable to anybody without a prior awareness of the past decade of Critical Role podcasts. This is a large part of why I felt my patience tested every time we moved from members of the group and their current mission to the wider story; the members of the Mighty Nein are richly drawn from their character flaws, and next to them, a fantasy tale about warring factions can’t help but feel as generic as you can get within this genre.
The best & worst of adult animation in one series
Beau holding Nott the Brave up near Molly at the carnival – Prime Video
This is an adult fantasy series, but is at its weakest whenever it attempts to lean into the lack of restrictions that come with this — every utterance of a curse word, or action sequence with a higher volume of blood spilled, only distanced me further from the character drama. It doesn’t help matters that the animation style is partially reminiscent of a Saturday morning cartoon, making every awkward attempt to emphasize its “adult” nature feel like an outdated idea we’ve seen done to death; the outwardly family friendly show that hides a foul-mouthed sense of humor inside.It’s particularly distracting here because even the characters who are built from the most over-the-top genre archetypes — such as a jester and a goblin — are very quickly revealed to be damaged and unable to stop circling back to their old, destructive habits. What makes this series distinctly for older audiences is the depth it affords these characters and how their newfound family often only serves to bring out their worst traits; with each episode of the series averaging out around 45 minutes apiece, this is afforded more space to be explored than within the typical animated series. When punctuated with childish curse words in the dialogue, it feels like an adolescent attempt to remind you that this show isn’t for kids.
Take Nott, for example, a character introduced as either comic relief or an annoying sidekick, depending on your perspective. An unruly rapscallion with a penchant for devising a low-stakes criminal plan, and a human mask always at the ready for when the authorities come looking, they would be the uncomplicated wild card of the group in any other series. In “The Mighty Nein,” however, the battle with the bottle is at the core of the character, their every move defined by a desperation to have one more drink and shut out any darker thoughts. The characters who share their scars more openly — such as Caleb or Beau, once her take-no-prisoners facade starts to slip — are no less complicated for seemingly wearing their emotions on their sleeves, with none of the principal group lazily defined by a single, traumatic issue. They feel like they’ve been around for as long as this world has, and when the stakes remain at their level and not on the fates of an entire kingdom, the series truly soars.
“The Mighty Nein” streams on Prime Video starting on November 19.
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