Gargoyles S1E1-5: "Awakening" (continued)
From here, the pilot slows down. Plenty still happens, but there's a lot more filler material of the teenaged goofgoyles being silly in between the important stuff.
...Heh, I just realized that, at least for the pilot, this show is almost as much like a TMNT/Batman TAS crossover as it is a synthesis. We split time almost evenly between Goliath being Batman, and the youngsters being the ninja turtles. Amusing. Anyway!
The twists and recontextualizations keep coming, but they're both thinner on the ground and a bit more predictable (with a single, very effective, exception).
There's also another derp moment, but it's fortunately nowhere near as bad as the previous one.
Minor Twist!
The weird lightshow and explosions that we saw in the teaser were not a side-effect of the curse being lifted. When the clouds come down beneath the top of the skycraper, the gargoyles awaken from their millennium-long imprisonment with no more drama or kinetics than they would after a normal day's sleep. Xanatos is right there onhand, looking very relieved that his huge expense wasn't for nought after all, and ready to greet them with a friendly smile and an eloquent welcome to the new world.
We're just handwaving away the language barrier. Either that, or gargoyles have a magical language-learning power. Either/or, whatever, the show understandably didn't want to waste time on it.
Xanatos claims to have awoken them in the spirit of interspecies friendship and cooperation, and also in the spirit of mutually profitable quid pro quo. Mostly the latter. Actually only the latter, but, manners. Goliath thanks Xanatos for their revival, but is understandably very reluctant to make another pact with humans after what just (from his perspective) happened. Xanatos takes this in stride for now, and tells them that they will be well provided for and protected for as long as it takes Goliath to make his decision.
Like I said, it's not really that much of a twist that Xanatos isn't what he's trying to paint himself. He's a cyberpunk CEO making a large, risky investment, and everything about his behavior, body language, etc when he isn't speaking directly with the gargoyles plays into that. That said, from the gargoyles' side of thing, he really did go out of his way to help them, and is continuing to aid them before they even agree to anything without apparent resentment. Also, in total fairness to them, it's just really dang hard not to trust this face:
Before much of anything can happen though, a squad of 'runners airdrop onto the castle and quickly infiltrate the building below, opening fire on anything - human or gargoyle - that gets in their way. There's a thing Xanatos has up on the top floor that Mr. Johnson dearly wants, and this crew has nothing in it but street samurai so they have only one way of getting him it. The gargoyles fight back. So too, rather impressively, does David Xanatos.
This battle is the true source of the explosions seen from the street below in the teaser, as well as the falling rubble loosed by grenade and energy weapon blasts. Refreshingly, this series has its combatants use both bullets AND lasers, with the latter being treated as rarer and more destructive than the former. Not a censorship thing for once! The fight also serves to demonstrate to the gargoyles how much more dangerous humans are in the 21st century than they were in the 10th. Their bodies are tough, but if Viking swords could draw blood than high-powered bullets can do considerably more. Likewise, the runners' advanced body armor and curated martial arts training comes as a nasty surprise.
When the attackers get away with the package, it's a miracle that none of the gargoyles have been seriously hurt by the high-powered weapons they didn't know to avoid. Really a miracle. Exceptionally convenient.
Xanatos has them all hide while he talks to the police, led by the savvy detective lady from the teaser. Remember her? She seemed like she was going to be the main character. Then we forgot she existed. Now she's back, and will be the deuteragonist for pretty much the entire series. Her name is Elysa Maza btw. Anyway, she doesn't quite buy his innocent act, and after taking a statement about the attack she sneaks away back into the upper floor and ends up running into Goliath up in the castle. Unfortunately, she runs into him up on the parapet while standing near the edge, which is a really bad place to be standing when a hulking demon-looking thing startles you. Goliath is even less charitably disposed toward humans than ever after that sudden violent attack, but he's still not quite eager to be responsible for an ostensibly innocent one's death.
In the wake of the rescue, the writers pull out the most elegant, adaptable, and convincing piece of ass-covering I have ever seen in anything, ever. I'm not even joking when I say I was awed by this. Like, I only wish I could come up with ass-covering of this quality. See, after gliding her to the safety of a neighbouring building's balcony, Goliath reveals that gargoyles can only really fly when there's strong wind and high air pressure. They can glide anytime, but they can only gain altitude on the wing in the right environmental conditions.
Yes, that's right. Whenever the writers need them to be stuck on the ground for a while, they can be. Whenever the writers need them to be able to get somewhere fast or escape through the air or something, they can do that as well. And no one can call bullshit.
Like I said. Awe.
Once she's gotten over the shock, Elysa proves extremely friendly. And not just in the way you'd expect from having her life saved by Goliath. The instant she learns that the gargoyles aren't hostile, a switch flips in her brain, and she basically stops being a police officer and starts being a highly enthusiastic and motivated diplomat.
I remember really liking Elysa when I watched this show as a kid. I think she might have actually been my first 2D crush, come to think of it. She's easily the best filler of the April O'Neil/Commissioner Gordon role in this type of show that I can readily recall. A big part of her charm is that her main motivation is xenophilia. In the sense of "the opposite of xenophobia," I mean, not in the sexual way (don't get me wrong here: she absolutely IS a monsterfucker as well. But that's only a tertiary aspect, and I don't think it's a big factor in her decisionmaking until later on). She's just met a nonhuman intelligence, and she feels strongly enough about how amazing that is to immediately be invested. It's not just an altruistic desire to help. It's primarily a self-justifying love of the foreign and the unknown.
Now, you might be asking: "how the hell did someone like this end up in the NYPD?" The answer is that 90's cartoon cops are a mythological creature that bears only coincidental resemblance to anything in real life. They are much like the gargoyles themselves in this way.
So, making their way back to Xanatos' building without being seen gives them time to talk. Goliath doesn't have much respect for human laws and institutions at this point, but Elyse makes a good enough impression on him as an individual that he agrees to meet with her again tomorrow night when she's off work before they part ways. As he discusses with Hudson upon making it back to the castle, Goliath also thinks this is a good opportunity to learn more about the new world without it being filtered through Xanatos, and she's willing to help preserve their secrecy until such a time as they decide to become known, so he shouldn't pass this up.
Meanwhile, the ninja turtle gargoyles break their promise to not fuck around in the city and go fucking around in the city. Resulting in some people spotting them doing their dopey teenaged shenanigans and freaking out. The group takes these reactions as a sign that yeah, secrecy is definitely better for now. Also, in addition to this being when Hudson names himself after the river, the three jokers all themselves and their dog-thing after neighborhoods and streets. These guys are pretty much all interchangeable during the pilot though, so no need to bother with the details in this review.
Bringing us too...
Much Bigger Twist!
After another polite, but unproductive, meeting with Goliath, Xanatos has a little chat with another person who's been lurking around the penthouse out of sight.
I knew Demona was a recurring antagonistic character from the episodes I'd seen before, but this reveal STILL shocked me. I hadn't known how she ended up surviving the betrayal, and I definitely didn't know that she and Xanatos were in cahoots even before the others unfroze.
Troi is nothing if not faithful to her imzadi.
The following night, Goliath meets Elysse and takes her for a glide around the city with her guidance. They also stop an assault and battery in progress and send the perps fleeing in terror from the winged interloper; Goliath is Batman, you see. Unfortunately, not long after this, while walking through Central Park in the predawn, the two are attacked by the runner crew! Turns out Mr. Johnson was fascinated by those gargoyle-things they said they fought and gave them another job right then and there. Also, turns out gargoyles aren't immune to tranq drugs. Resistant, but not immune.
And, this is where Elyse gets to demonstrate her badass credentials. Like, bigtime.
She manages to slip the noose, distract the guys wrestling Goliath long enough for him to ALSO break free, gets rid of the tracking chip she finds stuck to Goliath's back, lead them on a chase through the park until dawn when she finds a hidden spot for Goliath to freeze, and then spends the morning fucking dismantling the entire crew with a series of devious ploys and booby traps.
One thing I really like about this cat-and-mouse battle is that despite their role in the story being textbook "nameless mooks," the shadowrunners have distinct faces and personalities, and the show remembers them from scene to scene. These are the same half dozen individuals from the last fight scene, and their action dialogue here is informed by their individual past experiences with the gargoyles. As a result, they don't FEEL like nameless mooks at all.
...
I'm reminded of - of all damned things - Mad Max: Fury Road. The way they had the camera zoom in on each war boy's face as they realized they were meeting their end was just a small detail, but it totally changed the tone and weightiness of the violence.
This Gargoyles sequence is way lighter and less lethal of course (it's the kind of cartoon gunfight that somehow results in people consistently being knocked unconscious rather than killed), but it does the same thing for making it feel *real* in a way that fictional violence often doesn't.
...
The following night, when Goliath makes it back home, he's much more inclined to help Xanatos retaliate against Mr. Johnson's corp than he was before. That feeling intensifies when Xanatos reunites him with Demona, who he had thought smashed to rubble eleven hundred years ago. According to them, Xanatos already had her in a private collection, and only thought to bring her up to the castle to see if it would revive her too while Goliath was away last night.
I feel like the pilot might have been better served by not revealing this lie in advance. Demona is vociferously anti-human and against revealing themselves or trusting anyone, but she also weirdly talks up Xanatos as a rare exception...despite ostensibly only knowing him for a night or two. In the ensuing conversation, Demona and Xanatos slip up and hastily redirect troublesome questions enough that the audience should be able to figure out that something is up on their own. And it would strengthen the general theme of uncertainty and mistrust, if we ourselves didn't know for sure until Goliath does.
...
On an animation note, watching Goliath and Demona walk down a hallway side by side is when I noticed the birdlike loping movements they do with each step. I hadn't even noticed until then that the gargoyles have double-jointed legs, but they do, and the animators did a really good job at capturing that kind of bouncing step in a humanoid frame. Really impressive.
...
For now, desperation for this to be real ensures that Goliath falls for it. And, he agrees to take part in a counterattack against JohnsonCorp to steal back the research data their runners took. For some inane reason that the gargoyles are encouraged to not ask too many questions about, the three stolen discs have been brought to three different facilities around the NYC area. The three will need to be hit simultaneously to avoid lockdowns, so the gargoyles split into small teams. All three are successful, though the two that aren't Goliath and Demona's target are mostly just played for heist comedy. Those two, though, well.
Goliath and Demona's target is aboard a JohnsonCorp airship, and when they board it Demona is taking even more joy in battle than last time we saw her fight. Like, sadistically terrifying the guards, straight up dropping dudes out the hatches to fall to their deaths, and trying to kill unconscious or subdued enemies in cold blood (that last one being an exceptionally big no-no by traditional gargoyle ethos). When Goliath asks her what the fuck, she says that they shouldn't care about humans since humans will never care about them. And then tries to gaslight Goliath and convince him that he's gotten softer in his millennia of dormancy and that he wasn't always like this. Over his objections, she brings down the entire airshift to cover their escape once they have the disc. Full fledged That Guy behavior.
It ends up being a water landing, which means the death toll is probably only in the low tens rather than the low hundreds.
Also, when she makes her anti-human rant, Goliath once again points out that Xanatos is a human, and that the existence of one good human necessarily means that there could be others. He doesn't let her deflect, this time. So, instead, she just storms off.
Goliath is feeling almost like he lost Demona all over again by the time he has his next meeting with Elyse.
Not Really Much of a Twist This Time
It turns out that the tracking chip the shadowrunners used to find them was attached to Goliath long before the encounter, and was manufactured by a subsidiary of Xanatos' corp. That...doesn't really prove anything, since corporations sell their shit wherever they can and mercenaries buy their shit wherever they can, but in cartoon logic this means they were under his employ.
Mister Johnson was David Xanatos all along. You'd have never guessed it looking at him.
Anyway, three high-profile and high-casualty thefts took place last night with survivors all ranting about winged demon creatures. The 'runners took an empty briefcase from Xanatos' building. The proprietary data he had the gargoyles steal was never his.
Then...um...this part seems kind of rushed, but when Demona senses the emotion of great anger and betrayal from Goliath and the others, Xanathos decides to go ahead with the plan. Apparently, the data he stole from that other corp, combined with his people's studies of gargoylekind, have - in less than 24 hours - allowed him to build a squad of robot gargoyles. And they all look like Goliath for some reason.
Yeah I feel like there are multiple somethings missing here, but okay lol.
Anyway, since the gargoyles are about to turn on him, Xanatos has his knock-offs strike first. Along with Demona, who turns out to be quite proficient with human weapons on top of her gargoylish strength and toughness.
And, in the final dialogue between Goliath and Demona, we get a final big rugpull that goes all the way back to the first episode.
The Final Twist
The warmaster and Demona were in it together. They both hated the new lords, for their own reasons. They were both willing to let everyone else around them be killed or enslaved if it meant the warmaster's clan would be allowed to share Castle Wyvern alone with the gargoyles after the Danes finished their harvest. That's why Demona, just like the warmaster, was pushing so hard for ALL the gargoyles to go chase the decoy camp.
When Goliath took Hudson and told her and the others to stay at the castle and stand guard, Demona wasn't able to concoct a good reason to get everyone out of the way without telling them (and risking them siding with Goliath over her and probably getting herself exiled or something). So, she held her tongue and hoped the Vikings wouldn't smash them.
But she herself, notably, was nervous enough about this to spend that day elsewhere herself.
She could have reunited with Goliath and the other four survivors the following night, but she was too ashamed. Thus allowing the following events to unfold as they did. There's no telling if she did anything to care for the eggs after Goliath's freezing, or if she just ran away and avoided thinking about her responsibilities.
She tells her story in a much more weasely, self-pitying way than that, of course, but reading between the lines isn't hard.
Anyway, being betrayed and losing her kin to one human actor after another taught her to hate all humans and never forgive them. At least, that's what she says as she stands beside Xanatos and hefts an RPG launcher against her last few remaining kin. When Goliath points out that literally every bad thing in the entire backstory happened because of her, she just flies into a rage and rants about how she KNEW his long sleep had changed him.
She also reveals that she was given the name Demona at some point in the last millennium (how long do gargoyles live, anyway? She doesn't look any older than she did before, but we know from Hudson's example that they *do* age. I think there's something going on here...). On account of her demonic behaviour. Not yet clear how and why she ended up teaming up with Xanatos, but frankly, I don't think much explanation is really required.
...
For all that this show handles themes of the unknown and the fear or love of it, it's notable that neither of the main antagonists are actually bigots. They might use or hide behind bigotry, but they aren't really motivated by it at all.
Xanatos is - in a weird narcissistic, greedy way - a xenophile. He's fascinated by the gargoyles, both in how to profit from them and just for curiosity's sake. He's basically a rich, evil version of Elysa. Attracted to otherness, but with the desire to own and exploit rather than empathize. Like a Victorian nobleman looting artifacts from a foreign culture he "appreciates."
Demona is a really interesting case. She rants about it constantly, but I don't think she actually is speciesist at all. She gets along just fine with humans, when she feels like it. She only pulls out the grudges when she needs a justification to kill someone who she already wants dead for other reasons. Her motive, both then and now, appears to be plain old greed and megalomania.
I wonder if she actually has convinced herself that Goliath has changed and gone soft. The flip side of it is that...well...even though she's been alive and active while he was dormant, I don't think she actually changed that much more than he did. She just forgot how much she needed to mask around the others, back in the day. She was a manipulative narcissistic sociopath then too.
At the end of the day, Xanatos and Demona are both equally dismissive of human and gargoyle lives. Neither of them really treat either species with more respect or camaraderie than the other. The only difference is that Xanatos is honest with himself about it.
You know, you could even draw parallels to the Viking warlord. He really didn't seem to look down on the gargoyles, or to dehumanize them. His first ever scene had him pointing out that when you prick them, they bleed. His reasons for murdering the sleepers were a mixture of pragmatism and personal revenge. Unlike the dickhead noble couple, he never did anything to suggest he thought of them as lesser; in fact, in fearing they might attack him in revenge for killing their human allies and deciding to remove that possibility, he demonstrated a better understanding of them than their "friends" the nobles did. It's not like he was any less brutal toward human enemies.
The position the show seems to be taking is that bigotry creates an environment in which real monsters can camouflage themselves. The genuine xenophobes are basically just dumb rubes for them to manipulate, or pass themselves off as, or point to as an excuse.
Looking at the real-life relationship between big capital and rightwing populism, well...I think the show might have a pretty good point?
On a more critical note though; it's really a good thing that this show has Elyse, because the only other female characters are manipulative bitchy wife Demona, the manipulative bitchy wife of the attempted assault victim who Goliath and Elyse helped (there was a one-off dark comedy moment where she locks her husband out of the car to save herself), and the not manipulative but till very bitchy Scottish noblewoman who gets damsel'd. Erm...I guess one of the unnamed shadowrunners was also a woman, but I don't think that helps much either. Definitely feels like there are some weird unconscious biases slipping in when the writers aren't deliberately sitting down to write "heroic woman."
...
Anyway, the gargoyles fight the mecha-gargoyles, with some last minute support from Elyse doing a sneaky. The mecha-gargs end up being something of a disappointment to Xanatos; they're as strong, tough, and mobile as real gargoyles, and armed with modern weapons on top of it, but their AI isn't stellar. Use even mildly unconventional tactics against them, and their advantages become irrelevant. Xanatos might have jumped the gun a little on this project. The battle ends with the mecha-gargs destroyed, Demona fleeing on the wing, and Xanatos about to get thrown off the rooftop by Goliath.
And, the last eye-rolling bit comes now. Elysa convinces Goliath that...sigh..."killing him will make you just as bad as him."
On one hand, killing a subdued enemy in cold blood was earlier established to be a moral red line in gargoyle culture, so this does make sense as a moral test for Goliath. On the other...Elysa's actual argument is vapid. Especially when you consider that, as a billionaire corporate poobah, David Xanatos is going to be completely immune to prosecution. Unless you've got a way to separate him from his money, he is a perfect example of "too dangerous to live."
Xanatos gets arrested (hell, what is he even being charged with? The gargoyles are still laying low for now, and without acknowledging them I'm not sure if there's any wrongdoing Elysa can point to?). Even if I didn't already know that he and Demona will continue being co-BBEG's for most of the series, it would be pretty obvious that he's not going to spend more than a day in jail and that he'll be right back to his dastardly deeds the minute he gets out. Nice going there, Elyse. I like you, but considering how much better your understanding of the justice system is than Goliath's I'm going to have to blame you pretty much entirely for talking him down. Again, I like you, but that was pretty cringe ngl.
The pilot ends with the gargoyles just sort of standing around in the castle, wondering what Xanatos' staff are going to do with them without the bossman around anymore and what they should be trying to work toward themselves. Elyse is sure she can find the gargoyles a respected and secure place in human society, but it's going to be tricky and there are a lot of bad actors to consider. For now, keeping the low profile going is probably best. Elyse WILL make it work someday though, no matter how pessimistic Goliath is.
In a way, despite all the pain and loss he feels because of it, learning the depths of Demona's betrayal going all the way back to the time he thought he knew her and thought he loved her might have been good for Goliath. It's made him think anew about whether it's really "humans" who he should be wary of trusting. The other might not be any more dangerous than the self.
Like I said; barring a few really frustrating moments, this show holds up remarkably well. The production values are stellar. It has a lot going on with it on the thematic and subtextual levels, the story itself is pretty good on balance, and the management of twists and revelations is just masterful. There's more to appreciate about Gargoyles than I remembered, and I remembered there being a lot.
