Mighty Nein - Caleb, Beau, and the Bowl

So I've been watching Critical Role while at work! Ok, more listening to it while I work. I'm not watching Vox Machina, instead I jumped right to Mighty Nein. Don't worry about it! I'm watching the animated series for Vox Machina instead!

Anyways, today I listened to episode 21 of Mighty Nein, and there was a particular incident at the end that I have thoughts on. I imagine this is a conversation that fans have had to death, I've already seen a few... highly uncharitable takes out there. So I just kinda wanted to briefly ramble about my own thoughts.

For this episode they had the guest character Calianna, a half-elf 10% dragon sorcerer who was looking for a magical bowl. In an underwater cavern, they were able to find it! Yay! Problem is, this bowl is used by a cult to commune with their evil deity.

Calianna wanted the bowl. As a former member of said cult, she claimed to want to destroy it. Caleb, upon realizing how powerful the bowl was after finding it, elected to hide it. Calianna is someone he had only met 10 hours ago, as he says. He has no clue if she can be trusted yet.

When the party regroups, Caleb pulls out the bowl and says effectively (paraphrasing) "I have it, I do not know if I can trust you. If you are willing to stay the night, our party member Jester will be able to cast a spell to see if you can be trusted with this bowl."

This! Is a very reasonable course of action I think! It is so reasonable that Calianna fully agrees with it.

Beau, another party member, does not agree. She gets very hostile towards Caleb for this, confronting him and yelling at him for not trusting anyone, for making this decision on his own, etc. She demands he simply hand the bowl over to Calianna and let her be on her way, and if it's a mistake then oh well, they can learn from it.

Obviously, this is not the most rational of decisions that Beau wishes to make. They can test to see if Calianna is trustworthy right now! There's no need to "learn a lesson", Caleb already wants to do... exactly what they would do if they had "learned the lesson"! So what the heck, Beau?

A lot of comments seem to agree with the above statement, lambasting Beau and criticizing her and being extremely hostile and uncharitable to her. Not a fan of that, because I immediately picked up on exactly why Beau is being like this, and she actually isn't being as unreasonable as the situation as presented would make it appear.

Her real problem isn't that Caleb doesn't trust Calianna. Her real problem is that Caleb is making unilateral decisions about what the best course of action is without allowing others to have input.

Just a few nights prior, Caleb confessed to Beau and Nott that as a child, he had been groomed and brainwashed by an evil, evil man, and had been made to do horrible things. That very same man that groomed him, the party had just met earlier that day, and he very clearly set his sights on recruiting Yasha, another party member of theirs.

Caleb refuses to let this information reach the group at large, threatening to leave, etc., should this information be revealed. It (seemingly) does not matter to him that Yasha is at risk, he does not want anybody to know his past if at all possible. His telling Beau was only to get Beau to help him with something, and his telling Nott was only because him and Nott are extremely close and he would feel terrible telling Beau but not Nott. Caleb wants to take this secret to the grave, and has decided - without accepting input from anyone else or providing them relevant, important information - that the best thing to do is for him to deal with it on his own.

The problem is not Caleb not trusting Calianna. The problem is not Caleb wanting to use a spell to test if Calianna is trustworthy. The problem is Caleb withholding information and making decisions that involve the group on his own. (This is emphasized by the fact that a few minutes after all this, Yasha is able to destroy the bowl, and surprisingly easily at that). Beau is very understandably pissed about this! Unfortunately, between her anger and her doing her best not to leak Caleb's secrets even by mistake, she does not do a great job of communicating this!

It's genuinely really, really good character writing. I'm quite saddened to see... seemingly nobody? in the comments actually picking up on this. I cannot wait to see where this goes next in the campaign though. Tensions are building and there's no way it's not going to boil over. There's a party member completely unaware that she is in potentially active danger! There's going to be consequences, and I cannot wait for them to arrive!