Todd Jensen writes...

Thanks for the "Ill Met By Moonlight" ramble, Greg! (And it's a pity that people keep on misreading it, as well. Maybe they need to read a little more Shakespeare and come across the original line. :))

I'm at a slight disadvantage at reviewing this episode, since I missed "Ill Met By Moonlight" the first time that it aired (or, more accurately, wasn't able to see it properly, since I'd just gotten a new television set that didn't have an antenna yet and so wasn't able to make out the picture very well). By the time that I did get to see it properly, I'd also already seen "The Gathering" and so got to meet Oberon and Titania through it instead. (It also meant that I already knew that Titania and Anastasia Renard were the same person, and since I'd already seen "Walkabout" by this time, knew therefore what Titania was talking about when she made that remark to Goliath at the end.)

You didn't say much about the Weird Sisters in this episode, but there were two small bits about them that stick with me. The first is that, when Oberon's burying the Avalon clan alive, the Sisters exchange little smiles with each other in a way that makes them look almost like a school tattletale who's just gotten someone sent to the principal's office and is gloating about it.

The second (which I think is especially intriguing) comes at the end, when Selene (the Sister representing vengeance) is clearly angry over the way that events have turned out, but Luna (the Sister representing fate) holds up one hand silently. Fate restraining Vengeance - that definitely makes me wonder what was going on there, especially since you said that the Sisters still had other plots brewing. Pity that we'll probably never find out now what they were.

I don't know for certain whether I was expecting Oberon and Titania to show up in the series, but I'm glad that they got in; it would be odd if they were only to be mentioned but never actually appear.

This was definitely one of the more "Shakespeare-heavy" episodes. Oberon, Titania, and the Weird Sisters are on-stage characters, Puck is mentioned, the title is taken from Shakespeare, there's a gargoyle named Ophelia, plus the lines "The game is afoot" (I wonder how many people know that Shakespeare wrote that long before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes) and "All's well that ends well".

Ophelia raised a good point about the issue of Oberon having a prior claim over Avalon. (Indeed, one question that I've seen raised once in the comment room is why the Avalon clan stayed so long on Avalon; the initial reason was to escape Constantine, but since he was overthrown only two years after they fled, that reason was now moot. On the other hand, anti-gargoyle sentiment didn't die with Constantine - not by a long shot - so I can see why it would want a hiding place that humans could never reach.)

The notion of casting the iron into the shape of a bell worked for me, and fitted in nicely with faerie lore, where the faerie-folk couldn't stand bells. (This seems to have been for religious reasons in the original stories - the bells in question were church bells and the faeries were imagined as being old gods dwindled with the waning of paganism - but here the concept used instead is that the bell is made out of iron.) I'll confess that I don't know enough metallurgy to recognize that the forging of the bell wasn't all that accurate. I also liked Titania's clever little word-play with "ring" in giving the clue.

Good explanation for why Oberon was acting in the same way towards mortals that he'd condemned Titania for acting a thousand years earlier. (Though I did wonder when I first saw the episode why Oberon hadn't had any problems with another mortal - King Arthur - sleeping on Avalon. Of course, the fact that Arthur was spending all that time in an enchanted slumber in an out-of-the-way location like the Hollow Hill would have made that different - as well as what you mentioned about Oberon owing Merlin a favor.)

Thanks again for the ramble. I'm looking forward to the "Future Tense" one next.