The Mighty Nein 1x5 | Full Length
Comments (8)
Yeah, there's no excusing what Caleb did, but it's not hard to figure out an explanation of why it all happened. He was raised in seemingly a very patriotic family with parents who were very supportive of him doing his 'duty' for the Empire, to serve the Empire. He's taken away and isolated from his family, surrounded by other ambitious students, led by Trent, who (as we see in this episode) uses exercises to train the moral compass and empathetic instincts/reactions out of his pupils, asserting they must be willing to push past any doubt or obstacle to complete their tasks. Caleb is brought into this selective 'special' group to become wizard assassins, and is tortured in the process, with Trent using language framing himself as a father to Caleb, entrenching loyalty to him as well as playing on the already conditioned loyalty to the Empire. Over time they go out on missions, killing and robbing and surveilling for the benefit of the Empire, their trauma-bonding growing stronger and stronger with each more horrible task. And after years of this, Trent, who he's been conditioned to trust more than anyone in the world, tells him his parents are a part of the rebellion, they're trying to harm the Empire, go against everything Caleb's been taught to protect and serve. And so he is tasked to go pout out the rebellion, and he does what he's told, bypassing any instinct that might tell him to take a beat and question what's going on. And he locks his family in, setting the farmstead ablaze, and he was so certain, so certain...until he wasn't. And he'll have to live with that guilt and grief, and find a way to pay off some of that debt he owes to society for what he did. It won't ever make it right, but he can try to prevent others from being made into child soldiers like he was. He can try to become someone his parents would have actually been proud of. We can blame Trent for the brainwashing and child abuse without letting Caleb off the hook, he knows he deserves to spend the rest of his days on the hook for that.
I like how we are also shown the layers and levels of politics too. As an audience we're seeing thae political climate in thae present, but we're also getting glimpses from backstories of how it progressed to right now. From Nicodranas to the Kryn Dynasty, to the Dwendalian Empire. Even when we meet Trent thae first time, we see what students are being told about what they'll have to do for the Empire. Take what we know of thae Cobalt Soul from earlier eps and look what young Bren, Astrid and Eadwulf did to one of their places without blinking, combined with the Zemni Fields 'mission.' Which I would argue was just to take the last attachment off 'thae board' while also testing the extent of their unwavering loyalty as Volstrucker. With this ep, we're seeing Caleb owning and being accountable for his participation; recognizing the brainwashing/grooming that happened yet also owning his actions but also showing how complex having untreated trauma is- so far, both times he flashes back to that night in the Zemni Fields? It was setting fire to Toya's funeral pyre and neutralizing Orwelia wi Arcane Fire. All this reminds me of how we find where Bucky is at in the Falcon & The Winter Soldier series.
Facts. Even the casual way with which Bren's parents "hail the Empire" when Trent first arrives shows how deeply embedded nationalism toward the Dwendalian Empire is throughout their culture. Bren (and Astrid, and Eadwulf, and Owellia) didn't just become a crazed cultist overnight—that attitude was already bred into him by his family. Trent only stoked the fire of an already existing spark (pardon the insensitive analogy, it just happens to be very effective). There's also a lot of subtlety in the way that Trent "teaches" his classes. We only get to see one lesson, but, based on how unbothered the students were by seeing their classmates presumably die before Trent released them from whatever magical effects he set upon them, we can assume that it was pretty standard fare. And the lesson he taught them in that class, both figuratively and literally, was that they would need to step on each other to get ahead. He only ingrained toxic codependency into the pupils he wanted to take all the way to the top as another way of preventing them from stepping out of line against him. Everyone else was disposable and was made to know it. And not just in the nationalist way of, "You should devote your life fully in service to the Empire." They were taught that they were disposable because they weren't willing to do whatever it took to succeed. We see that in the absolutely deranged way that Owellia pursues both Beau and Caleb in the present. That isn't just her having a personal vendetta—that is the remains of a young woman who had the lesson of, "If you don't go farther than you think is 'far enough', then you will lose, and you will be worth nothing," beaten into her (potentially literally).
I think this was such a wonderful way of showing even greater depths of Trent's evil. We got the direct stuff episode one and Vox Machina, and saw hints of his manipulation with Essek. But this? Years of indoctrinating and grooming these kids into a cult? Raising them as child soldiers that will have to do things that seem questionable? And as awful as this backstory is, imagine how much worse this world would be if Bren didn't snap out of it, even if too late? His classmates stayed with it, he at least did see - if too late - how messed up they were.
Welcome to Caleb Widogast, the fantastical answer to the question, "What would happen if a Nazi realized too late that he was the bad guy?" I think you're the first reactors I've seen who hold him accountable for what he's done while acknowledging that his acts of cruelty mentally destroyed him and brought him to the place he's at now. It's all Trent's fault, full stop, but that doesn't make Caleb less guilty, and they did an AMAZING job of making you sit with everything he's done. Percy 2.0 is completely right. With a little Grog thrown in. Grog used to kill people for fun thanks to his uncle's influence before Pike's family. Percy would have become Ripley under the influence of Orthax if not for the rest of Vox Machina. Caleb was saved by no one. Caleb went all the way on his own, had to reckon with it all on his own, and it broke him.
Been waiting for this one
Your reaction to Caleb’s backstory was amazingly accurate
There’s never a “correct” take when I comes to art. BUT psychologically it’s the correct thought process.