[7.4/10] I’m really conflicted about this episode. On the one hand, I’m a sucker for “Bad Future” stories like this one. Seeing what happened to New York in the forty years of Goliath’s absence -- with a dystopian, Xanatos-ruled version of the city and bitter collection of gargoyle rebels -- is undeniably cool. The changes over time, for characters, settings, and relationships, gives this episode some real oomph by the very nature of the story.
But god, this one’s also one giant mess. It should have been a two-parter, since the episode has to practically sprint to cover all the details, characters, and events necessary to get Goliath (and the audience) up to speed. At the same time, it has to set up its own immediate conflict, not just recap what’s happened in the intervening years, which likewise happens at lightning speed. There’s zero time for any of the shocking developments to land or breathe in this one, because there’s just too much material to get through.
At the same time, it’s just twist upon twist. Xanatos is still alive! No wait, he’s just persisting in cyberspace! No wait, it was Robo-Lexington all along who’s been pulling the strings. Despite the reams of exposition in this one, little of it makes sense, intuitively or otherwise, and these events happen way too quickly for any of them to mean much. Plus, we’ve already played the “You can make your own rules in cyberspace” game in prior episodes with no better results (despite Xanatos’s amusing Hamlet reference).
I also hate the “It was all a dream” cop out ending. To be clear, once they killed off Bronx it was pretty plain that this was all going to be undone somehow. I even like the idea that Puck was behind it, as part of an effort to get the phoenix gate. But rather than making the undoing of this future something that takes sacrifice or something else earned in the story, it all just comes down to Goliath recognizing the ploy at the last minute and Puck coming out to say, “Yeah, I did it.” It’s a really unsatisfying way to wipe away all the events the audience just witnessed.
Still, what we see of dystopian Xanatos-infested New York is pretty cool. The “weird pyramid” is a little peculiar, but the show does a good job of coming up with grim but believable extrapolations of where the gargoyles would be four decades down the line. In particular, I like how the surviving mutates put their lot in with Brooklyn’s crew (including Bluestone!), how Brooklyn and Angela became an item, and how Broadway lost his sight. Broadway remains the heart of the show, with his death being the most meaningful moment here.
Overall, I loved the idea of this one and a lot of the choices the show made in telegraphing where our heroes could end up in a grim, Xanatos-controlled future. But the actual storytelling was an unsatisfying dust pile that tries to do too much and too little at the same time.
(As an aside that’s probably only interesting to me, I got a big kick out of the fact that this episode was written by Marty Isenberg and Robert N. Skir, since the pair would go on to showrun the dystopian sequel series to Beast Wars, entitled Beast Machines, a show that trafficks in a lot of the same tropes this episode does.)
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2021-08-11T21:49:01Z
[7.4/10] I’m really conflicted about this episode. On the one hand, I’m a sucker for “Bad Future” stories like this one. Seeing what happened to New York in the forty years of Goliath’s absence -- with a dystopian, Xanatos-ruled version of the city and bitter collection of gargoyle rebels -- is undeniably cool. The changes over time, for characters, settings, and relationships, gives this episode some real oomph by the very nature of the story.
But god, this one’s also one giant mess. It should have been a two-parter, since the episode has to practically sprint to cover all the details, characters, and events necessary to get Goliath (and the audience) up to speed. At the same time, it has to set up its own immediate conflict, not just recap what’s happened in the intervening years, which likewise happens at lightning speed. There’s zero time for any of the shocking developments to land or breathe in this one, because there’s just too much material to get through.
At the same time, it’s just twist upon twist. Xanatos is still alive! No wait, he’s just persisting in cyberspace! No wait, it was Robo-Lexington all along who’s been pulling the strings. Despite the reams of exposition in this one, little of it makes sense, intuitively or otherwise, and these events happen way too quickly for any of them to mean much. Plus, we’ve already played the “You can make your own rules in cyberspace” game in prior episodes with no better results (despite Xanatos’s amusing Hamlet reference).
I also hate the “It was all a dream” cop out ending. To be clear, once they killed off Bronx it was pretty plain that this was all going to be undone somehow. I even like the idea that Puck was behind it, as part of an effort to get the phoenix gate. But rather than making the undoing of this future something that takes sacrifice or something else earned in the story, it all just comes down to Goliath recognizing the ploy at the last minute and Puck coming out to say, “Yeah, I did it.” It’s a really unsatisfying way to wipe away all the events the audience just witnessed.
Still, what we see of dystopian Xanatos-infested New York is pretty cool. The “weird pyramid” is a little peculiar, but the show does a good job of coming up with grim but believable extrapolations of where the gargoyles would be four decades down the line. In particular, I like how the surviving mutates put their lot in with Brooklyn’s crew (including Bluestone!), how Brooklyn and Angela became an item, and how Broadway lost his sight. Broadway remains the heart of the show, with his death being the most meaningful moment here.
Overall, I loved the idea of this one and a lot of the choices the show made in telegraphing where our heroes could end up in a grim, Xanatos-controlled future. But the actual storytelling was an unsatisfying dust pile that tries to do too much and too little at the same time.
(As an aside that’s probably only interesting to me, I got a big kick out of the fact that this episode was written by Marty Isenberg and Robert N. Skir, since the pair would go on to showrun the dystopian sequel series to Beast Wars, entitled Beast Machines, a show that trafficks in a lot of the same tropes this episode does.)