[6.3/10] How many damn gargoyles are there going to be on this show? I suppose that’s a naive question, but it’s still a mildly frustrating one. This episode falls into a lot of tropes I’m not a big fan of.
For starters, it adds a new group of baddies who seem to exist only to sell toys, not because the story needs them. I’m used to the Beast Wars phenomenon of shows with toyetic demands on them introducing new characters that would make for cool action figures. But I’m still pretty tired of it, and these new big cat-based gargoyles seem like chea cash-ins. The more gargoyles the show introduces, the less special they become, and making them crazy mad scientist gargoyles doesn’t help.
I’m also tired of the “everyone a hero knows ends up becoming a fellow hero or a supervillain” phenomenon which afflicts a lot of comic book stories and adaptations. It’s not enough that Elisa’s brother Derek is under Xanatos’s influence as an employee. Now he has to be a bad guy science gargoyle to boot. It just feels unnecessary, and a shortcut when trying to craft compelling villains on the show.
Speaking of which, I like Xanatos’s planning acumen, but his scheme here takes the cake in terms of straining plausibility. The whole ploy to try to turn Elisa’s brother into a gargoyle is just too convoluted, with fake deaths, implausibly lucky happenings, and a byzantine series of coincidences and predictions coming to true in order to work. As sharp as Xanatos is, it’s OK if things don’t work out the way he planned sometimes, or he has to make the best of a bad situation.
Then there’s Maggie, the poor homeless woman who gets turned into a cat-gargoyle. The show gives Brooklyn a special attachment to her based on nothing, and then expects it to matter to the audience. I get what they’re going for, with Brooklyn seeing a female member of his species who isn’t Demona for the first time in forever, but I wish they spent more time developing it than they do here.
The few parts of this one I really liked were 1. Tim Curry’s scenery-chewing performance as the mad scientist. He’s always fun, and this is no exception, and 2. The reveal that the Gargoyles are basically solar powered, meaning they don’t have to eat (even if Broadway seems to enjoy it). There’s some good material with Xanatos feigning outrage over what he’s been funding so that Derek still believes he’s a good guy. But again, Xanatos’s ultimate plan with all of this is just silly, and how easily Derek comes to believe that Goliath and the gargoyles are the bad guys just makes him seem like a dupe.
Overall, you can feel this episode going for high drama and emotion, but it devolves into too many bad tropes to genuinely earn those emotions or plot twists.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2021-06-29T22:52:47Z
[6.3/10] How many damn gargoyles are there going to be on this show? I suppose that’s a naive question, but it’s still a mildly frustrating one. This episode falls into a lot of tropes I’m not a big fan of.
For starters, it adds a new group of baddies who seem to exist only to sell toys, not because the story needs them. I’m used to the Beast Wars phenomenon of shows with toyetic demands on them introducing new characters that would make for cool action figures. But I’m still pretty tired of it, and these new big cat-based gargoyles seem like chea cash-ins. The more gargoyles the show introduces, the less special they become, and making them crazy mad scientist gargoyles doesn’t help.
I’m also tired of the “everyone a hero knows ends up becoming a fellow hero or a supervillain” phenomenon which afflicts a lot of comic book stories and adaptations. It’s not enough that Elisa’s brother Derek is under Xanatos’s influence as an employee. Now he has to be a bad guy science gargoyle to boot. It just feels unnecessary, and a shortcut when trying to craft compelling villains on the show.
Speaking of which, I like Xanatos’s planning acumen, but his scheme here takes the cake in terms of straining plausibility. The whole ploy to try to turn Elisa’s brother into a gargoyle is just too convoluted, with fake deaths, implausibly lucky happenings, and a byzantine series of coincidences and predictions coming to true in order to work. As sharp as Xanatos is, it’s OK if things don’t work out the way he planned sometimes, or he has to make the best of a bad situation.
Then there’s Maggie, the poor homeless woman who gets turned into a cat-gargoyle. The show gives Brooklyn a special attachment to her based on nothing, and then expects it to matter to the audience. I get what they’re going for, with Brooklyn seeing a female member of his species who isn’t Demona for the first time in forever, but I wish they spent more time developing it than they do here.
The few parts of this one I really liked were 1. Tim Curry’s scenery-chewing performance as the mad scientist. He’s always fun, and this is no exception, and 2. The reveal that the Gargoyles are basically solar powered, meaning they don’t have to eat (even if Broadway seems to enjoy it). There’s some good material with Xanatos feigning outrage over what he’s been funding so that Derek still believes he’s a good guy. But again, Xanatos’s ultimate plan with all of this is just silly, and how easily Derek comes to believe that Goliath and the gargoyles are the bad guys just makes him seem like a dupe.
Overall, you can feel this episode going for high drama and emotion, but it devolves into too many bad tropes to genuinely earn those emotions or plot twists.