Honestly feels like Caduceus should have a moment like this too after E96 when half the party disrespected his whole family, shame the man is too nice

I think the best part about this scene is right afterward, the exchange with Scan / Grog 'Grog - Can I ask you a question? Scan - No, I will not go whoring with you one more time Grog - No, I was going to ask what your mothers name was. Scan - It was juniper... thank you for asking Grog- Im sorry I didn't know that Travis and Sam were the undisputed goats of C1

My players: When will you start DMing like Matt Mercer? Me: When you start RPing like Sam Riegel.

When people say 'Beware the wrath of a gentle man', this is what they mean.

“What’s my mother’s name?” Fucking. Chills. Sam Riegel, Emmy Award Winning Actor.

Hearing Scanlan asked "What's my mother's name!?" to test them, just to be met with silence. Man, that gets me...

One of the most shattering parts of this is Matt. He doesn’t say anything he lets it happen, but when Laura says they got the figurine and she looks to Matt for confirmation and he just shakes his head. In every session he has the final say, and he just confirmed to Laura the fear of not caring about Scanlan enough to do that simple thing for him and making sure Matt knew.

The "Why the fuck would you do that?" is such a cold shower, every time

Listing off everything they have done for all the other members of the party before ending it with "Whats my mothers name?" Fuck man This whole monologue is so powerful, they're all such amazing actors

I mean in fairness, they covered him in pudding as a lark and then showed him off to his daughter after he expressly told them how much his relationship with her meant to him... so this has always had a real strong feeling of party consequences to their fuckery.

When Scanlan went dark all of a sudden, this show just went to a whole other level. Sam's character arc and character GROWTH skills are insane

I hope that The Legend of Vox Machina continues to air until the entire campaign has been adapted, 'cause dammit, I wanna see this moment fully brought to life in animation.

I still can’t believe this wasn’t scripted. Like, holy shit

I love how when Sam asks "what's my mothers name", if you look at the faces across the table, you see genuine looks developing across the others faces as they try to remember if they know or even even asked and all just go "oh...shit"

Everybody: shocked and traumatized by the sudden outburst Taliesin: "damn this guy is good, I'll drink to that"

I'm pretty sure this scene violated the Geneva Conventions.

That little “f-ing hell” from Laura gets me every time. Because as someone who has been on both sides of conversations eerily similar to this that absolute blindsided feeling- gosh. That hits different

This legit made me cry...like the emotion is too real...and it's actually pretty spot on with the guy who wears the biggest smile also has the biggest demons...and is usually fighting them all on his own while the set of his friends set their shit on his shoulders thinking out of everyone he is the most put together..but in reality he's the one falling hardest apart...and they don't even know him...but to be fair Scanlan really is secretive, he doesn't share often and he doesn't show his true feelings often..he's always acting like the funny guy...

the fact that none of them could really answer his questions... says more than anything... he always asked them but he was never asked

Sam knew someone would challenge is "what's my mother's name" So I assume he remembered every single one of theirs

when liam takes off his glasses you know it's over

4:35 me when I wake up and my dog isn’t on my bed

The fact that Scanlan didn't hear Grog's words breaks my heart

4:42 Honestly maybe the most underrated part of this scene. Scanlan's inner monologue is probably "Really? Good fucking job you've asked me my age once? Do you remember the answer though?"

This scene was so fucking good I forgot Matt was the DM.

Easily my favorite moment from Season 1. It’s just so heartfelt, tense, and emotional. Sam is a legend

Poor grog... Delivers the most heartfelt speech he's ever given and Scanlan doesn't even remember it. 2:00

When this gets animated, it’s gonna hurt

I love it when “comic relief” characters get to get loud and mad at being relegated to “comic relief” it’s got to be one of my favorite tropes/trope subversions of all time and this is one of my favorite examples of it

All this, and he whips out Tarry of all people.

If I'm ever a casting director, I'm looking at Sam Riegal first.

"Is that all you heard? :C" grog realizing that his low persuasion role when they were reviving meant it didn't go through... And marisha fucking laughing at him lol

All of this makes percys "What's kaylie's mothers name?" And scanlan NOT KNOWING when it's actually been said before. PERFECT

That "No we didn't" from Travis was so defeated, wow. Knowing Sam Riegel as the funnyman, this hits even harder. Beware of the moment when the jester doesn't feel like joking.

You've got to wonder what it's like DMing a moment like that. Letting one Character completely turn and knowing it's going to be so much extra work but yet, it's so good that the hardwork is worth it

I love Sam so much. You know what's fucked up though? This wasn't ever really properly resolved in the campaign. He came back and they went right back into the final arc without really talking anything out. Realistic, perhaps, but narratively there was still a lot to be explored here. Oh well.

The truth is they never really thought about scanlan that much up until this moment, they never tried to talk to him about his past or see how he was doing.

4:11 you wondering why Marisha is taking notes like a mad man in campaign 2?......... when scanlan asked the question "whats my mothers name" i bet she also didn't remember his mother's name. and idk if she was in the scene or not.... but being that close to such a scene.... and the look on her face of wanting to know the answer but being mad at herself for either not knowing or not being there in character probably gave a little push to why she takes so many notes in campaign two. and i could be wrong, maybe her character in campaign 2 just likes to take notes and remembers thing more easily. or maybe marisha likes to take notes.... but i bet this is ones of those things that kinda pushed her over the edge to take more detailed notes.

i love Taliesin's little smirk, you can tell he's like "this is good"

Scalan going down the list of things theve done for each other but not for him hits hard

i hated how proud percy seemed at the prank ‘that was me’ while smirking

(This is not a critique of anyone at the table. I just wanted to explore in depth what was happening on a storytelling level, and why i this is so powerful to me) It feels like a matter of role in the group. Vex, Vax, Keyleyth and Percy feel like main characters, the way their characters are tortured by their past, and the tropes they represent. All four of them have something unresolved in their backstory that we know will come up at some point. Plus Vax often behaves as if he's the group leader, protecting everyone from the shadows and always making promises of said protection. Vex is the femme fatale with a dark sensuality to her, Percy the tortured intellectual who tries to shield others from himself, and Keyleyth the closeted child who needs to gain assurance and embody the role she was born to fulfill. I'm not trying to belittle them when saying this. What i mean is these are tropes that we're familiar with, and so we know to expect big character arcs for them. As a dm, i know if a player gives me a story like this, i can "easily" (it's never easy) build an arc around that. Then you have people who are okay with being supporting characters. But even then, there's an underlying hierarchy for these tropes as well. Grog is a big guy with a big heart and a small brain. Sweet, lovable, does stupid things like a puppy would do. Pike is the sweet, somewhat innocent (although she's very intelligent), caring mother figure of the group, who is very powerful but her power comes mainly from her devotion, an arc that's already done when the show first airs. She's also a moral compass to push the group towards good, in a benevolent way. Again, very lovable character. Scanlan's tripe is last in the hierarchy. He's the buffoon and the anomy people like, but from a distance. But of course he's not just that. Like many buffoon tropes, he has an innee depth, but that depth can never be expressed to others, because he is, by essence, chaos and the other. To be clear, none of this is bad. But that last trope is rarely the hero in the mainstream media we're used to. And his problems reflect that : they feel way more real, less videogamy, than those of his peers : loneliness, regret, melancholy, addiction, all hidden away. So it's hard to build a big action arc to solve that, because it is so intimate and psychological. In other wordsw beating the bbeg won't help Scanlan; that's just something he needs to figure out on his own. That's why Matt really did a good job in introducing a new dynamic with his daughter, giving him an antagonist that challenges him deeply on that level. That's also why he needed to have this realization about his place in the group and what he wants out of life, and to go his own way for a while. In short, it's great that they all acted they way they did. Of course high level characters will lose some sense of reality when their daily routine is dealing with monarchs or cosmic entities. If only for a while, Scanlan's plea brought a sense of reality that had been eroded, because his problems, like ours, won't go away by beating the bad guy. He didn't care about being the one to kill the dragon. He only cared about keeping his promise to his daughter.

The silence after "Whats my mothers name" speaks loads. Absolutely brilliant.

Watched campaign 1 all over again not too long ago. All I could remember leading up to this episode was the disrespect from the other party members (cough cough vex cough) towards scanlan and then scanlans self destructive behavior (trying to smoke the spice and almost dieing, etc. etc.). Like the dude was obviously in a dark place and the rest of the party just kind of laughed about it?!?! No one to one sit downs and trying to figure out what was wrong just "Haha funny man being funny and almost died, don't do that again!" It really brings into light everything that leads to Scanlan finally snapping. While it was sad to not have him around, I think it was the shift the rest of Vox Machina needed to experience.

Sam Riegel is a hell of an actor

The moment for me when Scanlan went from being a memelord character to an actual person.

Me watching with knowing they are all friends outside the game makes this rp so much more intense

The best part of this how it's really used to set up Taryon Darington being introduced later in the episode :D

3:12 your people did this

1:19 Ah Vex, trivializing promises.

I plan to watch the first campaign after I catch up with the second one (at at 98) but just from this clip a lot of the jokes that Sam makes as Nott fall in to place. I didn't understand why the whole table laughed when they asked Nott what her mothers name was.

me clicking "play" on this for the 47th time, tears already streaming down my face: just fuck me up sam riegel

Anyone else feel like scanlan in this moment...well minus the being dead part?

Thank you so much for saving this scene, I've been looking for it everywhere!

I love this cause it’s basically scanland is basically all of us who are alone and think we have people who care about us but probably truly don’t . He shows all that emotion and says everything that we have always wanted to say

While he probably played it as a joke the drug stuff kinda makes sense when you think about it. Scanlan has a lot on his shoulders and no one to really speak to. When he held onto the 8th or 7th spell just to convince Jaret to get drugs and the story he used to convince him was probably a truer story he never told.

And to think... Scanlan was a spur of the moment diner napkin character. :-P

holy shxt. not only is this top class role-play/acting, it invokes me to check back my own relationships with my friends. we all have that one jokester in the squad, and damn, that just hits. I just feel bad.

sooo much passion

This episode was nuts when I watched it. So tense and so emotion filled.

What is your name? What is your quest? What's my mother's name?

Its disturbing how much this hits home for me.

That's a big yiiiiikes: when the bard gets angry, ya done fucked up

if this part of the campaign ends up getting animated i don't know if i'll be able to cope. when i was watching c1 for the first time i went into this episode knowing scanlan leaves but having no other indications or spoilers about what was coming. i cried harder during this scene than any other time in campaign 1, second only to vax's farewell and the end of dalen's closet

Best moment of campaign 1 other than the last two episodes.

Before I watched any shows or played any games knowing these guys were in them, this scene taught me the caliber of actor they are. Especially Sam.

'What's my mother's name?' 'Uhhh...Is it Martha?'

and to think this is "just" acting...the commitment... the sentiment... Damn

The best critical role scene of all time, you can't change my mind

I joined Critical Role for ExU1 (and now C3), and I don't have the time to go back and watch hundreds of hours to catch up on C1/C2. But this clip... damn. I really hope LoVM lasts enough seasons to make this scene happen.

The fact that Laura is not voice acting in this scene just shows how immersed they are in the emotional scene.

even when listening to this whole thing the first time around, i thought it was in such bad taste to dress a dead body up in a nightgown and smear stuff on it.

Beautiful. Simply beautiful. Thank you Sam Riegel.

I’m a D20 guy myself, but this scene with Sam is the best RP I’ve seen come from DnD

Such a powerful moment. Wonderfully executed. Keep notes people, that will help in making something that is at least 1/10 as impactful as this.

So this is why Marisha started taking notes of everything

Almost 50 episodes in campaign 3 and I still come back to this one moment...

Man I'm gonna cry when this scene happens in the show

it was all serious for me until he just shouted 'Where's my fucking dog!?' and then i lost it xD

I honestly cannot wait to see this moment in the animated show!!!

Dude, I always wondered what this "what was my mother's name" thing was about (besides a possible jab at BvS) but this is gold. I can completely understand Scanlan because unfortunately I've been that guy in the group. (Minus the awesome lymrics and magic)

Thank you for making this.

I will never forget the moment I pulled over to watch this instead of listen. One of the best moments in Critical Role, as far as I am concerned. What a group of actors we have to enjoy..

Closest thing to party infighting we've ever seen on critrole.

I feel this....so much. My character is going through this. And it sucks. It’s so rough to watch your character go through this. Heart breaking.

Ya know. If they went on adventures for everyone else's issues and individual journys...and didn't even know my mother's name. Something so important to the character. I'd lleave. I would no longer be part of the adventuring group.

4:35 yooo the fact she actually has the balls to say that, the level of denial

When this gets animated it's over for y'all

Love this scene but man, looking back, if scanlan's self-isolation wasn't really his own fault in the end. His friends used to try and ask if he was okay, or just innocuous questions about him and his past, but he always joked, lied or otherwise deflected so they never knew if something was ever actually wrong or not. Honestly this moment is even more powerful when you realize this is the anger of a man who is just starting to realize he's the reason his friends treat him the way they do, and he takes out that rage on them instead.

Who else thought mat camera signal dropped and froze until he responded to the dog question

There's so many layers in the opening dialogue alone...

When I was younger I never understood this moment, I never understood why he was hurt. But after years, gods, gods alive, I truly understand this now

My word. Sam is amazing.

Cant wait season 3 if this scene include..

I can't wait to see this in season 3 of the Legend of Vox Machina!!!

I cant wait till this gets animated

This sits so hard, because out of all the crazy shot that happens in the campaign and the other pcs backstories, Scanlans just has normal, human, mundane issues, and because they are mundane they are considered lesser or not as important.

Awh grog's little "Was that it?" AWWWH

this goes to show you that even when you're with friends and in good company, you can still feel alone, and thats valid.

Holy fucking damn. Sam is the goddamn man.