‘Everyone doesn’t know how to deal’ (exclusive)

Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Legend of Vox Machina season 3, episode 7.

There are many stages of dying in tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, and the same applies to The Legend of Vox Machina, the animated series based on the D&D campaign by the group Critical Role. As actor Taliesin Jaffe explains, there’s the “they’re not breathing” phase, in which case it just takes someone with CPR training (and a Nat 20 dice roll) to resuscitate. There’s the “on the brink of death” phase, where it’d take a miracle to bring someone back from the edge. Then there’s the “they’re too far gone” phase.

Sadly for Jaffe’s Percival “Percy” Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III, he’s in the latter.

The team behind Critical Role and The Legend of Vox Machina teased in advance that season 3 would raise the stakes exponentially for Vox Machina, a crew of once-disparate hooligans-turned-heroes fighting to save their world from an all-powerful collective of dragons known as the Chroma Conclave. But after Percy faced the demons of his past — one metaphorical, Dr. Anna Ripley (Kelly Hu); one literal, the shadow demon attached to her, Orthax (Matthew Mercer) — an epic shootout, culminating in an explosion, claimed our favorite bespectacled gunslinger’s life.

The remaining members of Vox Machina, including Percy’s love this season, Vex (Laura Bailey), is now “crumbled” by this event, Jaffe tells Entertainment Weekly in an exclusive interview. “Everyone doesn’t really know how to deal with this. Everyone is mourning this moment of mortality and not coming together the way they should. The back half [of the season] is a lot of figuring out how a family reacts to tragedy. The right death in a family can mean that no one ever talks to each other ever again. Just suddenly some gravity vanishes and there’s a whole bunch of people who were linked who suddenly aren’t. Sometimes it’s the opposite, and that really is the question.”

Episode 7, featuring the tragic moment, arrived Thursday alongside the release of episodes 8 and 9. (The Legend of Vox Machina releases three episodes at once every Thursday on Amazon’s Prime Video.) Even though previous skirts with deaths for our main characters, including a moment with Vax (Liam O’Brien), always got figured out, Percy’s death seems to be sticking… for now.

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The loss of the character was a story point within the original Critical Role campaign, so Jaffe wasn’t completely blindsided. His colleague, Scanlen voice actor and series executive producer Sam Riegel, pitched him this moment for season 3, which he responded to for multiple reasons. First, “it’s just so cruel to new fans and old fans alike,” Jaffe says with a devilish smirk. And second, he was eager to revisit this moment and possibly explore it further in animated form.

“[Percy] was stuck in a place, certainly a place that I understand, which was that place after you’re forgiven for doing something absolutely awful, but you haven’t forgiven yourself for it,” Jaffe muses on the moment. “So you’re still nervous, you’re still apologetic, you’re still f—ing up because you’re desperate to erase the memory of how bad it was — especially with the giant PTSD metaphor that was the end of season 1, and then getting sloppy and almost killing somebody, and just a series of bad choices and mistakes directly connected to a feeling of unworthiness. We were able to run that a bit longer in the [Critical Role] game, but he had to do something to let all that go.”

For the shootout with Percy and an Orthax-powered Ripley, Jaffe was hoping for a true Spaghetti Western and the animation team at Titmouse delivered. “I really wanted Young Guns,” he says, referring to the 1988 movie starring Emilio Estevez as Billy the Kid. “Hiding behind objects, reloading, having conversations over the shoulder, and then breaking between… It had all of that.”

Perhaps that’s the silver lining to Percy’s passing: a really cool animated fight scene.