Gargoyles S1E1-5: "Awakening"

This review was commissioned by @krinsbez, @The Narrator, @Arkytark, and @Cosar.


The year was 1994. Walt Disney had made some significant progress in taking back a slice of the TV animation pie they'd all but seeded to WB and HB earlier in the century, but they still weren't quite where they wanted to be. One day, two Disney animators sat down together and had a conversation.

"That Batman animated show is really popular right now," said one of them, "we should try to make something similar."

"That's an interesting idea," said the other animator, "but there also hasn't been a really good Nina Turtles wannabe since, well, Ninja Turtles. What if we made a Ninja Turtles wannabe, but we made it actually good?"

"Do you think we could try doing both?" The first of them replied, holding up his glass of warm milk and swishing it around in his cup. "Make a good Ninja Turtles clone that also takes heavily after Batman?"

Before the second animator replied, a third one suddenly threw the door open - startling the first man into spilling his milk - and shouted "You idiots!"

"Why are we idiots?" The first and second Disney animators asked, quite aggrieved.

"Because," said the newcomer, "you aren't realizing that our new show needs to be a Star Trek: the Next Generation cast party."

"Huh," said the first animator, wiping up his milk.

"Huh," said the second, opening the phone book and flipping through in search of Jonathan Frakes' number.

And then they made Gargoyles, and it was pretty good.

...

As you can probably tell, this isn't going to be a blind review.

I didn't see ALL of Gargoyles on reruns in my teens, but I did see a good amount of it. With a few exceptions, I liked what I saw. I never did happen to catch the pilot, though. The show is mostly episodic, and does a good job bringing new viewers up to speed in most episodes even during the longer arcs, so I never felt like I really *needed* to seek it out. However, I was still always passingly curious about it, so this was a long time in coming for me. "Awakening" is a five-part pilot, and it has plenty to talk about.

So! It has its weaknesses. There were a couple moments of almost intrusively bad writing that pulled me out of the otherwise very well executed story, and a bit of typically vapid 90's-cartoon moralizing near the end that tried my patience. However, outside of these frustrating scenes, this pilot didn't just live up to my teenaged memories, but actually exceeded them. Rather than the show benefitting from rosey goggles, I may not have been old enough to fully appreciate Gargoyles as a kid. Really impressively clever and effortful, except for those couple of wallbanger moments.

Structurally, this entire pilot is a series of subversions and fakeouts that serve to build its themes of mistrust, misunderstanding, and betrayal. The first episode teaser is a fakeout that makes it seem like a completely different kind of show. After that, a historical flashback throws two rugpulls in quick succession, reframing everything twice in a row. Then, after we finally understand what genre of show this is and what it's all about, a series of betrayals twist the plot into a totally different shape within that genre and ends on a note of very temporary respite and a status quo that might easily turn out to be illusory.

The show does all of this without ever actively tricking to the audience; in good mystery novel fashion, every twist is completely "fair" and within an audience member's potential ability to predict. The misdirection relies on the camera being zoomed in too closely to see the bigger picture, and on the audience's own likely presumptions filling in the blanks with the wrong thing.


Fakeout

On a stormy night laden with thick, low-hanging clouds, Near-Future Cyberpunk New York is shocked when explosions light up around the top of a tall skyscraper. Seen from ground level through the lower edge of the clouds, the blasts look eldritch, magical, and menacing. Rubble is blasted off of the rooftop and tumbles into the streets below, smashing vehicles and sending passerby running for their lives.

The police arrive after the explosions seem to have stopped. A detective looks at the rubble, and sees bestial claw marks torn into a chunk of solid rock.

She's immediately characterized as a brave, intelligent woman, and she makes very protagonist-coded snarky asides to herself while getting paralyzed civilians back to a safe distance and investigating the debris.

This is the intro for a mystery-horror series. Like a cartoon X-Files. We have our brave and savvy investigator, and we have our monster in the dark wreaking havoc.


Rugpull #1

The impact of this is lessened by some of the visuals in the intro, and presumably by whatever advertising the series had leading up to its debut, but it still manages to carry some surprise.

We flash back to tenth century Scotland, where a castle's defenders are struggling to fend off a besieging Viking army.

...

Totally aside from anything else, I was blown away by this sequence's commitment to historical accuracy. You see any horns on those helmets? Nope! The only one with a goofy helmet is the commander, and his helmet is goofy in the way an actual ostentatious nobleman's might have been (you can see ones like it in museums). These are 90's childrens' cartoon Vikings who look and act like actual Vikings. Specifically, they look like they're from the Danish settler-kingdom that carved out a chunk of Great Britain in this time period.

There was a moment where we see them firing catapults at the castle, and I thought "I don't think the 10th century Danelaw actually had those, this might be generic pop culture medievalism." But then I looked it up, and the Vikings actually introduced catapults from Europe to the British Islands a few decades before the date the show provides for this battle.

The creators did not need to care this much about historical fidelity for this relatively small part of their SatAm cartoon. But they did care. If you want to know where the bar was for this genre and medium, remember; this show debuted in the same year as Street Sharks.

Think about that for a second.

...

Anyway, the rugpull comes when the Scots manage to hold the line until sundown, and the gargoyles perched on the castle turrets shed their stony outer skins, come to life, and join in the defence. We see the claws that can tear through stone in action, but they don't belong to monsters at all. The gargoyles fight to defend the castle, coordinating with the Scots and being pretty forgiving in terms of letting scared or wounded Vikings retreat from the battle.

I'll also give credit to Jarl Megahelmet, who - after managing to draw blood from the apparent leader of the gargoyle army - tries to regroup his men with an almost word-for-word repetition of "If it bleeds, we can kill it!" Heh, you might be a one-off cartoon villain, but being uncommonly brave AND dropping the sick mey-meys all at once forces me to like you, Jarl. Granted, considering you're probably the literal grandson of one of the anime villains in "Ballad of the White Horse," I suppose such charisma is only to be expected from your lineage.

Turns out making them dead is a lot harder than making them bleed, though, so the Vikings are eventually forced to retreat. The gargoyle leader walks over to speak with the Scottish commander, leading us to...


Rugpull #2

They're just people.

Not ancient spirits bound to defend the land, or divine guardians called down to aid the weak or anything like that. These gargoyles are normal, rationally self-interested people who just happen to have an alliance with this particular group of humans.

Now, they are MAGICAL people, to be fair. Turning to stone when the sun comes up and having unnatural strength and toughness (and aerodynamics) even while flesh speaks for itself. But, they still need to eat (very large amounts of) food, which the Scots provide them with in exchange for their military assistance. They have their quirks and friendships, both among themselves and with particular humans. We soon learn that they reproduce biologically, laying eggs in underground cavern-roosts, and that while they are long-lived they do eventually age and die. In term of fantasy archetypes, they're basically winged, nocturnal elves with slightly more alien aesthetics.

We quickly (and with surprisingly minimal dialogue or overt expositional text) get characterization for individual gargoyles, along with (again, incredibly natural show-don't-tell explanation) the gist of their culture and social structure. They don't generally have names, instead referring to other members of their small clans by current contextual identifiers. The clan's leader has taken on the name Goliath for the sake of easier interaction with their human friends, but he's the only one who's felt the need to. It also seems like a gargoyle clan is almost like a wolf pack in family structure, with a breeding pair supported by siblings, offspring, and the occasional past-their-prime elder.

Character-wise, we learn that Goliath is the stern, overly-idealistic honorable sort, his mate (who will later take on the name of Demona, so I'll just call her that for now) is a bit more impatient and bloodthirsty and sometimes needs Goliath to reign her in, the elder (eventually Hudson) is something of a humanaboo (as evidenced by him having taken on ethnic Scottish mannerisms like those of their human friends where none of the other gargoyles did), and the three younger ones we get to know well are goofy teenagers who provide the mandatory cartoon comedy shenanigans. They also have a quadrapedal fish-dog beast that shares most of their magical traits, but mentally is a pet rather than a person. Maybe a different "species" of gargoyle, maybe some odd biological caste thing.

Speaking of castes, there are some politics going on among the local humans that the gargoyles have been unwillingly tangled up in. The warmaster and some of the soldiers who fought alongside the gargoyles seems to be a bit of a gargaboo, in a way that sort of obliquely points at his family having had longtime friendship with the gargoyles and probably tying into Hudson's past. The lord and lady of the castle, unfortunately, seem to badly resent the aloof, food-guzzling creatures that they have to share their fortress with; one gets the impression that neither of these nobles were actually born in this area, and ended up ruling it as an accident of bullshit feudal politics. There's palpable tension between them and the warmaster. The refugees crowding inside the castle walls to hide from the Vikings, meanwhile, are terrified of the monstrous-looking gargoyles and react with fear and hostility.

The exact story of how this cohabitation and alliance situation came to be and what's gone wrong since then isn't explicit, but I think it's easy enough to infer.

I will make a criticism here, though, and say that the humans' dislike of the gargoyles feels very "off" in a familiar "nineties cartoon trying to tackle racism without making any incisive enough points to upset the kids' racist parents" kind of way. Think along the lines of Marvel Civilians, especially in the case of the frightened peasants. There's a layer of fakeness over all the manifestations of their bigotry, even in a situation where bigotry would be realistic.

After some very tense deliberation between nobles, Goliath, Hudson, Demona, and warmaster, it's decided that the following night they should launch an offensive against the Viking camp. They're still in the area, and likely will try to make another attempt on the castle sooner or later if not pushed back south. The warmaster wants Goliath to take the entire clan south to shock-and-awe the Vikings into not even thinking about coming back again, and Demona agrees with him mostly because she's in a bad mood after being insulted by the nobles and peasants and wants to bloody her claws on something. Goliath, for his part, is sure that one or two gargoyles fighting smart should be enough to intimidate the Vikings without leaving the castle itself with only human defenders. In the end, Goliath gets his way, taking just the old wise man Hudson along for the counterattack and leaving Demona and the others behind, but that turns out very badly for all involved.


Betrayal #1

The Viking camp that Goliath and Hudson chase down turns out to be a decoy! Jarl Megahelm Schwarzenegger arranged for a diversion that assured gargoyle counterattackers wouldn't be able to make it back to the castle by sundown when they turn back to stone. In the meantime, the real Viking camp has re-mobilized to attack at dawn...and this time, the humans' bows have all been sabatoged, and the castle gate falls helplessly open. Treachery, and the traitor is...the warmaster! Turns out he resents the castle's new overlords more than anyone realized, and cut a deal with the Vikings to get rid of them for him. They're free to claim the contested chunk of land and enslave all the refugees they've got in the castle, they just need to leave the castle itself standing when they're done.

Unfortunately, Jarl Megahelm doesn't end up honoring the details of the agreement. In particular, when he finds most of the gargoyles in their stone statue form under the sun, he and his forces smash them to pieces just on the off chance that they'll be a problem going forward and also as revenge for them killing so many of his dudes a couple nights ago. So, betrayal within a betrayal! Vikings murder the sleeping gargoyles over the captain's objections (notably, while he's enraged about this, he also doesn't put his life on the line to try to stop it, and when he leaves with the Vikings later he does not do so in chains). The lord and lady are taken to be ransomed. The commonfolk, to be enslaved.

It's also established here that the (ex) lord of the castle is a magician. Got a big spellbook that he's very proud of and everything. I guess either his magic isn't the kind that's useful against Vikings, or Megahelm had a wizard of his own counterspelling everything, whatever. We get a funny interlude of Megahelm being an absolute delight as he tears pages out of the book in front of him and burns them, while bragging happily about how he's illiterate and therefore sees no loss here.

It's really too bad this guy is a one-off backstory character. What a fucking king.

"Doubtless your sires were sword-swingers
When they waded fresh from foam,
Before they were turned to women
By the god of the nails from Rome;

"But since you bent to the shaven men,
Who neither lust nor smite,
Thunder of Thor, we hunt you
A hare on the mountain height."​

He doesn't actually say those words during this scene, but he thinks them really loudly.

It turns out that the three goofy teenaged gargoyles and their gargoyle-dog survived the massacre, on account of having been sent to time out in the egg-clutch cave by Goliath after an earlier incident with the Marvel Civilians. The following night, they regroup with Goliath and Hudson, mourn their murdered clan, and then go off to rescue the Scots and avenge their kin on the Danes. Things initially go well. The gargoyles reach the camp, wipe out the guards (who hadn't been expecting there to be any gargoyles left) and start freeing people. Unfortunately, during the battle, Jarl Megahelm and the traitor warmaster slip away, taking the captive lady (the most valuable hostage, on account of her having higher placed relatives than her wizard husband) with them. Goliath chases them while the other gargoyles finish routing the Vikings.


Betrayal #2

While they're separated, wizard lord dude manages to get free, and thinks his wife is lost forever. He decides to blame the gaargoyles for this; if only they hadn't counterattacked, he and her would have been ransomed together! How dare they come to rescue the commoners from slavery and get revenge on the people who murdered their whole extended family in cold blood when he and his wife were at stake! He'd already been researching a way to magically defeat the gargoyles, on account of his resentment and mistrust of them, and he decides to use it to punish them now.

All of the surviving gargoyles besides Goliath are forced into their hibernating stone forms forever. Or, as the spell dictates, "until the castle rises above the clouds," which is basically a poetic magical way of saying "forever" in intent but still leaves a plot-critical loophole.

Meanwhile, Goliath confronts the Viking and Scottish generals with their noble captive, and learns the truth. The warmaster babbles pathetically about how it wasn't supposed to be like this, the gargoyles were all supposed to be away from the castle when the Vikings came, and the Vikings weren't supposed to smash them even if they weren't. Jarl Schwarzzenager Greathelm the Illiterate tries to pretend he was just doing what the warmaster said, but he obviously knows this won't work and is just phoning it in as a final bit of hopeless desperation. God I love this Viking. The show does the Disney thing and has the two men fall off a cliff to their deaths while Goliath is rushing them, to avoid having their honourable child-friendly hero rip two living people apart onscreen (he even grouses about how their misfortune denied him the opportunity for hands-on revenge, which like...come on, show, do you have to lampshade it like that?), which is annoying but oh well.

Speaking of annoying though, Goliath brings the lady back to the campsite, and we get the first (and by far biggest) wall-banging moment of stupidity in the five-part pilot. Like, seriously, this scene by itself drags the entire thing wayyyyy down.

Seeing his wife free and alive (and because of the gargoyles sticking out their necks for them too), wizardlord immediately regrets what he did to the other gargoyles. Unfortunately, Best Viking ruined the part of his spellbook that would have let him turn them back. Oh well.

And, the show never calls him on his bullshit. Neither, very, very weirdly, does Goliath.

...

We just saw Goliath try to (and subtextually, getting around the cartoon censors, succeed at) kill the last two humans who betrayed and murdered his kin. This guy has been nothing but an ungrateful, condescending douchebag to the gargoyles even BEFORE this incident. And now, Goliath just acts like...annoyed at him. And doesn't even raise the subject of how, oh I dunno, those gargoyles had just saved hundreds of his people from slavery regardless of how things turned out with his wife?

Granted, given the characterization and political hits, I'm not sure if those peasants are actually "his" people at all to be fair. But still. The show not taking this guy to task almost at all for what he did, even though Goliath is exactly the right person in the right place to do so with, is really, really WTF.

Even worse, though, is what Goliath *does* do. Which is: entrust these provably untrustworthy humans who hate his species with HIS AND DEMONA'S EGGS, ie their literal children and the potential future of their clan, and then ask the wizard to petrify him alongside the others to sleep forever or perhaps someday awaken along with them.

He trusts the guy who just kinda-sorta murdered his last few living relatives for no reason with his children.

What's extra enraging about this is that for the rest of the pilot, Goliath has a whole thing about no longer trusting humans after what the warmaster did and them having to prove themselves worthy of it again. Without ever acknowledging the massive, downright stupid, act of trust that he put in the least trustworthy human ever.

Like I said. Intrusively, show-stoppingly bad, in the middle of a work that's otherwise so well written.

...

Anyway. Goliath makes them bring his four petrified clanmates and their petrified dog-thing back to the castle, and then has the wizard petrify his grief-stricken beside them. I'm sure these dickhead nobles were responsible, loving, and providing foster parents when the eggs hatched.

Fastforward a thousand years. An eccentric American billionaire named William Riker David Xanatos explores the ivy-laden ruins of "Castle Wyvern." He finds the gargoyles in their stone torpor, indistinguishable from normal statues aside from their Gothic appearance being anachronistic to this ruin, and is gleeful.

He immediately has his men start the mindbogglingly expensive process of disassembling the castle, stone by stone, and moving it to his New York headquarters. Here, he reassembles it atop the roof of his remarkably load-bearing skyscraper, and waits for the clouds to come low.

Yeah don't ask me how those thin little support struts are supposed to hold up half a castle's worth of weight. Or how the tower is supposed to hold them up in turn. There was another wizard involved in building this office building I guess.


That brings us back to the present, but there's still another twist on what we saw in the teaser about to happen. I'll start with that, and finish up the pilot, in another post.

Like I said. Aside from that really, really stupid moment with Goliath and the eggs, this show is so far better than I remembered. Like, I haven't even mentioned how smooth the animation is, by the standards of the time and place. Or how well the neo-gothic environment of this cyberpunk New York mirrors the Batman TAS aesthetic without feeling like an obvious ripoff (hell, Goliath's silhouette when he has his wings folded around him even looks like TAS Batman's silhouette, but you only notice that if you're consciously looking for it).

And the dialogue, so efficient!