Television 

Five Thoughts on Gargoyles‘ “Legion” and “A Lighthouse in the Sea of Time”

By | July 23rd, 2018
Posted in Television | % Comments

Welcome back to our weekly retrospective of Disney’s Gargoyles: today we’re looking at “Legion,” which aired September 6, 1995, and “A Lighthouse in the Sea of Time,” which premiered the following day on September 7, 1995.

1. “Legion”

First up, this sees the return of tortured, broken Coldstone, who we learn has two other personalities due to their remains getting mixed up with the stone used in his resurrection. What’s even more messed up are those personalities are of his lover, and a jealous suitor: it’s like Othello, Desdemona and Iago all got trapped in the same body. (You know what’s also messed up? Coldstone’s rival saying, “Merge with me [clan] sister.”)

This episode is a real trip.

The main selling point of this episode is a spectacular sequence where Goliath, using a stolen police VR device, enters Coldstone’s fractured mind. I’m nowhere near of an expert on cyberpunk to comment on possible comparisons with works like The Lawnmower Man or Johnny Mnemonic – it just reminds me of that Simpsons episode or The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, which also reflected a fascination with the newborn technology back in the ’90s. As it is, it’s an exciting episode, but there’s not a lot to sink my teeth into.

2. Bathtub Fight

Moving on, “A Lighthouse in the Sea of Time” sees the return of MacBeth, now with a couple of cronies in tow, to steal the newly discovered Scrolls of Merlin while they’re being transported by sea to a museum in New York. I don’t mind much of the series’ animation, but when viewed back-to-back with the Walt Disney Animation Japan-produced the season opener, which also had an action sequence on a ship, the heist sequence in this episode looks utterly laughable by comparison. The assault on the ship by MacBeth’s Harrier jets as a storm rages resembles a sweded film someone staged with their bathtub, it’s nowhere as intense as it should be.

I know they're called jumbo jets but this is ridiculous.

3. Bride of Frankenstein

So in the episode, Hudson falls into the sea trying preventing the theft of half the Scrolls, and washes up on a blind author’s estate. Within the span of five episodes, there’ve been three major homages to James Whale’s Frankenstein films (Coldstone’s resurrection, Dr. Sevarius and now this), and it’s pretty awesome to someone who loves those beautiful, dark and humorous movies, I much prefer to it when cartoons homage a more recent film, not knowing if they’ll age well or not.

Unlike Karloff's Monster, Hudson likes a good fire.

Like Boris Karloff’s Creature, who learned to speak from the Blind Hermit, we learn Hudson is illiterate, and see him come to appreciate the power of reading from the author: it led me to ponder how much we might underestimate illiteracy is a disability in modern society, when it can be as crippling as something like blindness. I think it’s also great the episode showed someone disabled like a happy and successful, if somewhat lonely, life, normalizing it for children.

4. Words Have Power

Broadway, who is also illiterate, gets captured by MacBeth with the half of Merlin’s Scrolls he tried to prevent being stolen. While captive, Broadway is told by MacBeth that he sealed the Scrolls away himself, while giving him a captivating recollection of the story of King Arthur, which leads to Broadway asking aloud just how old is MacBeth? The Scottish supervillain replies he’s not that old, and I hope Broadway (and the audience) got a massive boost of encouragement to learn to read that day. It’s a perfect demonstration of what the Edwin Percy Whipple-inspired title is trying to convey.

It’s ironic then that MacBeth becomes angry, and no longer sees the worth in the Scrolls of Merlin, when he figures out they’re a journal, not a spellbook. In contrast, Hudson works with the author to decipher MacBeth’s address from the phonebook, something the old Gargoyles describes as “magical,” and you realize he’s right: there’s an inherent worth to every book, but they’re so common that we just take them for granted.

5. Where’s Fox and Demona?

Continued below

Watching all the episodes that aired the first week of September 1995, the show’s shift from weekly to daily storytelling raises all kinds of issues for me. I feel like the characters aren’t dwelling enough on what happened the previous day, unlike in the first season when you saw Elisa hopping around crutches following her gunshot injury.

I understand that it was make the show more accessible in case you missed the previous day’s episode, or to air them out-of-order if need be, but I keep thinking to myself, we keep seeing Xanatos, but has Demona abandoned him? Where has Talon disappeared to? And after all the trouble he got up earlier in the week to free Fox from jail, why isn’t she at his side? In any case, we’ll be finding out where Demona is when I revisit “The Mirror” next week.

Bonus thoughts:
– It’s always unexpectedly poignant when you see the old World Trade Center in these episodes.
– Why did MacBeth seal away the Scrolls? If he thought they were a spellbook, why didn’t he retrieve them sooner? Did he forget their location? (Again, I’m overthinking it.)
– Why does Goliath always think he can reason with Burnett? He hasn’t exactly got a personality.


//TAGS | 2018 Summer TV Binge | Gargoyles

Christopher Chiu-Tabet

Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can't speak Cantonese or Arabic.

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