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Anonymous writes...
Greg, First of all, thanks so much for your help in creating such a great show! My question has to do with the original 5 show Awakenings arch: Why, when he knew that the eggs in the rookery would be hatching soon, would Goliath request to be placed under the sleep spell? If he was concerned enough to see to their disposition by asking Katherine to care for them, why wouldn't he have simply stayed "awake" and cared for them himself when they hatched? He certainly wouldn't have bee n "alone" then and could have worked with the Magus to find a way to remove the sleep spell. In addition, turning the eggs over to someone else, specially someone like Katherine, who had been so bigoted against the gargoyles so recently, has never seemed to fit with the rest of Goliath's character.
Thanks in advance for your answer!
Greg responds...
The eggs weren't THAT close to hatching. Still...
I hate to say this, because I love Goliath, but he was clearly abdicating responsibility. There's no excuse, though the reason is obvious: he was overwhelmed by grief. Just overwhelmed. He couldn't face the years alone. He couldn't even face the prospect of raising the gargoyle babies alone. He made a rash and horrible decision. I'm not going to try to justify it.
Because if we're going to be brutally honest, Goliath believed he was committing a kind of suicide. The terms of the Magus' spell were that the Gargoyles would sleep until the castle rose above the clouds. To Goliath, that was like saying "'til Kingdom come". He didn't think the spell would ever be broken. He didn't think he'd ever wake up.
When he did wake up, and when Xanatos told him that the eggs had not survived, his guilt must have been enormous. Enormous. When he discovered that Angela and the others had survived, his relief was equally boundless.
And since we're on the subject, I want to give some credit where it's due. When Paul Lacy and I worked out the original flashback story and when Michael Reaves wrote the first draft teleplay, we had the Magus offer Goliath the option of joining his companions in sleep. When my boss Gary Krisel read that, he suggested we make it Goliath's own idea, his own request. Of course, Gary was absolutely right. But believe me, that was a daring thing for any executive to approve, let alone suggest. At the time, "Awakening" was a four parter, (before we realized we had too much material to fit into four parts). The entire 10th century flashback was stuffed into Part One. Gary was inviting us to end our FIRST EPISODE EVER with the implied suicide of our lead hero. I watched it again a few weeks ago. Even though it's now an act break in Part Two instead of an episode-ender, it's still a very powerful moment. And the idea for it came from a DISNEY EXECUTIVE. Those types get a lot of flack.
Witness some of the recent comments in Gore's comment room about TPTB at Disney. It doesn't hurt to occasionally remind everyone that executives are people too. And that sometimes they have great ideas and the courage of their convictions.
Hell, I was still an executive when I created and developed Gargoyles. In fact, I was still an executive while I was producing most of the first season of the show.