Source: Entertainment Weekly

Travis Willingham of The Mighty Nein said it best: “There’s not an award given for the most traumatic backstory, but if there was, Caleb is certainly a very strong contender.”

That backstory plays out on the adult animated show’s fifth episode, titled “Little Spark,” marking another reshaping of Critical Role’s original live-streamed tabletop campaign with the TV adaptation.

Voice actor and executive producer Liam O’Brien gives The Mighty Nein its meatiest hour yet through a series of flashbacks that explore Caleb’s humble beginnings as Bren, a young man from a poor family in the Dwendalian Empire’s Zemni Fields. Interspersed throughout the main storyline, sequences depict how Trent Ikithon (Mark Strong) recruited the promising fire mage to join his magic academy, submit to painful experimentations to enhance his power, and eventually groomed him to become a Volstrucker assassin to hunt down dissidents.

Two such dissidents he’s tasked with executing are his own parents, who burn alive, trapped within Caleb’s childhood home in a blaze of his own making.

“I wanted something that I could really sink my teeth into, the kind of role that I had chased and didn’t really feel like I’d gotten enough of in my life,” O’Brien tells Entertainment Weekly of formulating this backstory for the original campaign. “So I kind of made my own Hamlet to explore. All the curves and angles of existence and what matters to us in life, redemption…It could have been spun into a complete revenge story, but at the table, the loose picture was to make my own character be the villain in his story that he had to grapple with.”

In essence, “I wanted to give myself the largest challenge of my career,” he says.

Back in the days of the writers’ room, O’Brien was admittedly precious about how the story was handled, but ultimately felt secure in the hands of his two Critical Role colleagues, Willingham and Sam Riegel, who serve as chief EPs, as well as showrunner Tasha Huo.

In preparation for the recording sessions, he pored over the material, specifically Caleb’s German dialogue. “There was a lot of German spoken in that episode,” he says, “and while I love the German language and do a pretty good German accent, I’m not fluent in any way, shape, or form.”

One of O’Brien’s final scenes in the episode is also his most haunting. Caleb isolates the Volstrucker assassin that’s been stalking them after a botched interrogation. The two have a strained history under Ikithon’s torturous tutelage, and he finally gives in to the guilt and rage that’s eating him alive. O’Brien lets out scream after scream as the mage burns the assassin alive.

The scene was “a big hefty load of catharsis,” O’Brien describes. “He’s been bottling up since he was a teenager. We all have smaller versions of these feelings in our lives, feeling like we’ve been cast aside or we’re less than or we’ve done wrong — and guilt. We all feel guilt for different things we’ve done. Knowing that he had a dam that just built and built and built with pressure behind it and letting that moment be a complete break of the dam, I just tried to give myself over to it.”

The actor gives props to the animators at Titmouse for bringing this scene, and the episode at large, to life. He points out the visual continuity of Caleb’s spell-casting motions as a troubled teenager and as a tormented adult.

“I look back at it all and I still go, ‘God damn! Why’d I do this?’ Because it is such a dark-toned story, at least at the onset,” O’Brien says. “If we’re blessed with being able to tell this story to the very, very end, you watch someone climb from the lowest place they could possibly be to equilibrium again.”

O’Brien ultimately believes the TV audience, much like the one that watched Critical Role’s campaign, will empathize with Caleb’s story. However, while he may understand the character’s plight as someone groomed and programmed by an adult he trusted, O’Brien says it doesn’t absolve Caleb of his choices, which speaks to the complexity of this story.

“I would say that episode 5 shows you one of the Mighty Nein at their most broken, bottom-of-the-rung moment,” he continues. “He’s had a lifetime to choke on guilt and regret, and it is only through the friendship and the bonds that they forge over time that allow him to offer himself any ounce of kindness. So enjoy seeing him at the bottom and root for him as he climbs up to the top.”

New episodes of The Mighty Nein drop weekly on Amazon’s Prime Video on Wednesdays.

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