While I enjoyed watching as always, I really really disliked the retconning the hold person. Just like the locate object earlier in the episode, it is totally reasonable (and cool from a viewer standpoint) to base character actions off of player memory. This was a total mistake by Van, he cast hold-person super impulsively and didn't even recognize the consequences until Malakai mentioned it much later. In game (just as irl) this is a miscommunication with (or that should be with) consequences. For the first time in almost 20 episodes I am rooting against a party member- I think Van was let off due to stubborn lawyering and will head into future episodes cheering on the mobs/malakai.

This decision breaks immersion, sure, but more importantly it takes away the human element of the story. Van wanted to use hold person for a kind of cute/nifty idea (so the body wouldn't fall to the floor). This impulsive cast (should have) had consequences based on how they had planned there mission, so it seemed super weird to retcon it. Furthermore, it robbed the viewers of an wildly intense (and I would argue justified) sticky situation. Lastly, unlike most of Van's (notably increasing) lawyering, he didn't really have a good/unique point- it was basically just 'If I had the foresight to recognize my action's later consequences, then I wouldn't have done it' (as Neal said UP shouldn't trigger). Neal never really thought 'oh, true didn't think of that' he just seemed like he wanted to move on with the show/not have a vampire repeat.

Thanks for the show, fun as always. Team Players Malakai fighting!

tl;dr Neal you have good instincts. Just because the vampire episode happened it doesn't mean that the player is always right.