My initial plan was one post per season under the naive assumption that season 2 was a similar length to season 1. That was a very foolish assumption. Season 2 has fifty two episodes, enough for one episode per week for a year and far too much to summarise.
However, there is a distinct shift in the whole premise of the show that begins at episode 20 and is fully established by episode 25. That twenty-fifth episode (set in Canada) is effectively episode 1 of a significantly different show and I’ll save those episodes for another post. Between the two is a three part story that I’ll get to below.
For the first part of Season 1 the show continues on from Season 1 in much the same manner. The Gragoyles has been established as living in the clock tower above Elisa Maza’s police station and have sworn to protect Manhattan as they had once protected Castle Wyvern. The main enemies have been established Xanatos, The Pack, Demona and the as yet mysterious MacBeth.
There is a running theme of transformation in several episodes. Elisa’s brother (introduced in season 1) is turned into a kind of mutant gargoyle like creature by the sinister Doctor Sevarius, Xanatos creates a robot version of himself as a new leader for The Pack, Demona enlists the elvish Puck and a magic mirror to make herself human during day time (as well as messing with the human/gargoyle distinction more generally), Fox (the former leader of The Pack and now fiance to Xanatos) turns into a werewolf, Demona turns everyone in Manhattan into stone, Goliath gets cloned to create an evil Golaith (Thailog), and The Pack get changed into cyborg mutants.
The various transformation allow the show to edge a bit closer to a romance subplot between Goliath and Elisa. There’s just a hint of the similarity between aspects of the show and the 1980’s Beauty and the Beast TV show. Goliath and Ron Perelman’s character are a bit similar and both Elisa Maza and Linda Hamilton’s character are in law enforcement. However, while Gargoyles touches on romance (and there are multiple weddings) it’s clear that the show is sufficiently confident to real dive into it.
Of course, if we are talking about live-action influences we can’t ignore Highlander. MacBeth is revealed to be an immortal Scotsman and in fact the actual historical King MacBeth on whom Shakespeare based his play. A deep connection between MacBeth and Demona was suggested in Season 1 but in Season 2 the back story is picked up.
The basic issues of Gargoyles start becoming clearer. The show has so much backstory that it often works as a kind of time-hopping fantasy epic. However, much of that backstory was a set-up in Season 1 to establish the Gargoyles as a kind of superhero team. In principle the two things could work together but the further into Season 2 the show gets, the more obvious it becomes that the conflicting concepts of the show don’t really gel.
Part of the problem is Xanatos. The character is great in some many ways and a clever contrast to Goliath. Affable and pragmatic, he is unfazed by failure but like any super villain he has to keep being defeated but never in a way that he is conclusively defeated. The difference between Xanatos and a classic super-villain is that he really isn’t bothered. Which is fine and in many ways quite clever. However, after awhile his schemes increasingly look like absurd games on his part that don’t really matter to him.
Demona also is something of a one-note villain but unlike Xanatos remains interesting mainly because of her past-self. This first part of Season 1 allows the show to pick up on her history and follows events in Scotland after the rest of her Gargoyle clan are either murdered or turned to stone for a thousand years. The connection between her and MacBeth also gets explained up to a point.
By episode 20 nearly all the hanging plot points have been resolved from Season 1 and even most of the new ones introduced in Season 2 (excluding the introduction of The Illuminati of all people). The only remaining issues are
- the multiple magical macguffins introduced (a book of spells, a magic transforming stone and time-travel amulet)
- The ‘weird sisters’ — MacBeth’s three witches who have been intervening in the past and the present in various guises
- The Gargoyle eggs
The eggs were the biggest unresolved piece of foreshadowing from the introductory episodes of Season 1. After Goliath’s clan is murdered and the few survivors cursed, he entrusts the remaining Gargoyle eggs to the Princess and the Magus (the initially bigoted but now contrite characters from 994 AD Wyvern Castle). The implication being that a second generation of Gargoyles would hatch from the eggs. This point was put aside until episode 21 when, out of the blue, a Medieval knight appears in New York sporting a helmet that looks like Goliath and an unconvincing Scottish accent.
The knight turns out to be Tom — a character we last saw in the early episodes of Season 1 as a boy in 994 Ad Scotland. Tom’s arrival sets the show on a new course. Goliath, Bronx (the Gargoyle dog) and Elisa are taken to the magical island of Avalon. Here, as explained in a long series of flashbacks, is where the Princess and the Magus ended up along with the eggs.
However, the island has a different pattern of time and so all these characters (and the hatched eggs) are still alive on Avalon. A conflict involving a Archmage (now voiced by David Warner), the Weird Sisters, Demona and MacBeth is now a war and Goliath and Elisa have to defeat them to save the new generation of Gargoyles. The ensuing conflict involves bringing King Arthur back to life and various other antics.
It’s a gloriously absurd mish-mash of Shakesperean references, Arthurian legend, time-travel plots, and space age beam weapons that makes zero sense. All of Demona’s and MacBeth’s backstory gets retconned into this plot but with the added twist that the two of them are under psychic control at the time so remember none of what is revealed at the end.
It’s silly but it works. It works better than the attempts at getting the show be a X-Men style superhero show or even as a very odd show about fighting New York mobsters.
The multi-part ‘Avalon’ episodes end with Gloiath, Bronx, Elisa and Goliath’s new found daughter climbing into a magical boat and setting off from Avalon. The past few episodes had busily blown up the past premise of the show and resolved substantively all the hanging elements of the backstory. Fittingly, the four characters in the boat sail off into a very different show than they had just left…
Camestros Felapton 