More on Theseus...

Apropos of nothing, I've been thinking some more about Theseus. So you guys are the victims of this off-topic Ramble.

I really like the guy.

Here's a kid with a tough upbringing. He's a bastard, and a royal one to boot. That's always hard. Then he pulls his father's sword from UNDER the stone (sound familiar?) and sets off on a quest. Lots of adventure, dealing with bandits and rogue kings. Gets to Athens. And immediately has to deal with an assassination attempt perpetrated by his step-mother (the always interesting Medea). Then he promptly volunteers for hazardous duty and goes to Crete where he's a big hero (at least from the Athenian point of view -- obviously the Cretans and the Minotaur wouldn't agree.)

On the way home, he does abandon Ariadne, but I still think he had no choice because the lady had caught Dyonisus' eye.

He then screws up and is indirectly responsible for his father's suicide. Mary Renault tries to explain this in THE KING MUST DIE. Everyone can decide for themselves whether her explanation is convincing.

Anyway, I'm coming to what I think is the key to his character. The transition point that changed his life, largely for the worse -- ultimately.

He fell in love. With Antiope, Queen of the Amazons. (Hyppolyta's younger sister.) I think this was a great love. A love of equals, in battle, in governance, in life, in bed, etc. This was the love of his life.

And then she dies. It all might have turned out differently if she had lived. I think they were a good influence on each other. But she died in battle, saving his life. And nothing would ever be the same.

After that, he makes one bad decision after another. (Though he does manage to set up the first semi-constitutional monarchy, which is something of an achievement, even if his motivation was selfish -- he didn't want to be tied down to dealing with day-to-day governance.) But basically, he just can't deal. His marriage to Phaedra is clearly a political alliance. And that's a disaster, resulting in her vengeful suicide and the death of Hyppolytus, his son by Antiope. The fact that Theseus is largely to blame for Hyppolytus' death (as he was for his father Aegeus') I think drives him past caring about much of anything.

Now he's just looking for something to kill the pain. He kidnaps Helen, not cause he wants her but because she's a prize. He becomes buddy to that idiot Perithoos. He abandons Athens and winds up stuck in Hades for seven years. And finally, he's killed by a king who was trying (in a very old west fashion) to build his rep by being the man who killed Theseus. It's not a great Arthurian way to go, of course.

But it feels honest to me.

I'm not trying to excuse all of Theseus' mistakes (some of them were fairly horrendous). But I do think there's an explanation.

And if you look at Antiope as the fulcrum of his life. With the Teeter-Totter heading uphill until he met her, holding steady while they were together, but swinging sharply down after her death, I think it ranks up there as one of the great tragedies. And yet still very human.

"Awakening, Part One"

My kids and I have started watching the 66 chapters of Gargoyles from start to finish, so I thought I'd give a shot at rambling on each episode as we view them.

So starting at the beginning...

Random thoughts:

In the original script, there was a bit that came right after Princess Katharine reprimands the Captain for inviting the Gargoyles into the Great Hall. She says something to the effect of: "To allow beasts in the dining hall..." Right then, we were supposed to cut to a shot of one of those hounds that you can see milling about in the initial establing shot. The hound was supposed to grab a chunk of meat off of one of the nobles' plates. This would further establish Katharine's hypocracy, but also embarrass her further, lending believability to the things she says and does thereafter. I recall that the scenelet got animated, but not well. Frank refused to include it in the final cut. He may have been right, given what we had to work with. But I still miss the moment I envisioned in my head.

Katharine and the Magus are so nasty in this episode. Boy, did they go through some changes.

I'm also struck by just how much the Trio grew from this first appearance. They're kinda medieval ninja turtles here. But they show potential. I still love their exchange with Tom as he tries to get names out of them and they are baffled as to why names would be important.

I do wish we could have seen more Gargoyles flying around. (It really would have been nice to catch a glimpse of the Coldtrio, but frankly, they hadn't been designed yet. We knew they were coming, but we didn't have time to design them before they were necessary.) But it would have been great to see more beasts, more females. More young and old. But I guess we did all right.

The cliffhangers are interesting too. In both, the threat is the Gargoyles themselves. Princess Katharine says something nasty about gargoyles, just as Goliath enters the Hall. He growls, clearly having heard her statement. And we go to commercial... I could never have gotten away with that by even episode 2. But this early on, we didn't know the gargs well enough to know how they'd react. Clearly they had our sympathy. But would Goliath go berserk? Obviously, not. But that was the tension in that beat. Same thing happens between Acts II & III. The threat seems to be from Brooklyn, Lex and Bronx. Of course, they're bluffing. Annoyed with the humans, they are simply trying to put a scare into them. But the audience doesn't know that yet, so I can get away with the second cliffhanger being a Garg threat as well. Of course, by the end of the episode, we know just how noble they are. And that's a great cliffhanger I think. Goliath roaring to the heavens filled with grief over the death of his "Angel of the Night". 'SCool. (But how many of you really thought she was dead?)

There are also moments that are fairly mundane to us now. Elisa pulling up in her car. Goliath first breaking out of stone. Demona stepping out of the shadows. I'd be curious how all those moments made you guys feel the very first time you saw them, particularly those of you for whom this was in fact the first episode you ever saw.

I invite you to post your comments here on Awakening, Part One.

Congratulate me!

I got through all the October questions in one day. I'll leave them up for about a week and move on to November soon.

"ALONE": The Demona Contest Results

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who entered: Shauntell, Airwalker, Derek!, Aris Katsaris, Jon and Bud-Clare. I'd like to state for the record that none of you gave a "wrong" answer. But this was, of course, a contest, and I had to choose a winner. My choice is quite subjective, but the winner by a hair is Airwalker with the following entry:

"ALONE: The Demona Contest Answer"

Demona consciously chose the word ALONE for a password because in her perspective she is alone. Only she seems to see that humanity is a threat and that what she is doing has to be done. Her birth clan remains blind to that fact. Only she alone can see it.

Subconsciously Demona chose ALONE as a password because inside Demona lurks Angel, the sane innocent she once was. Angel is alone, trapped inside a villain, unable to stop being alone until Demona can accept a millennia of guilt, forgive herself, and allow Angel to be free once more.

A close runner-up was Derek! who gave another very interesting answer:

ALONE: The Demona Contest

A city of humans had been turned to stone and their only hope was about to be eliminated. And Demona had done it alone. She alone had survived while others didn't and she alone had eluded the Hunters for centuries. But why would the word ALONE suddenly enter her mind?

Subconsciously, the word had been with her since she kissed Goliath on the forehead in 994 AD. She covered up her pain with the mask of a mightly warrior. She made a mistake 1000 years ago and couldn't deal with the consequences, which caused her to forever be alone.

These are both great entries. I particularly liked Derek!'s first paragraph and Airwalker's second. Which is not to say I didn't like the reverse.

Anyway, Airwalker, I'm not at my office right now, so I haven't yet chosen the prize, but I will contact you via e-mail early next week and arrange its delivery to you. As stated, it will be worthless, but it should hopefully be of interest.

Congratulations and thanks for playing.

The nominees are in...

Praise the Dragon,

I finally got through all the September posts.

That means the next entry you see will be a Ramble that declares a winner to "ALONE: THE DEMONA CONTEST ANSWER".

Sometime next week.

Then, I'm taking on October.

caveat

I feel like a came down to hard on Alaxk, and I didn't mean to. Again, I have no trouble with people not liking aspects of the show (or the entire show for that matter). And I think this (ASK GREG) is a legitimate forum to express those opinions. I welcome, even encourage criticism. I'm happy to respond.

The only thing that sorta bugged me about Alaxk's approach was that he didn't state his opinions as his own. He put them in the form of questions meant to imply that by now I must realize what a mistake I had made. Since I don't feel that way, it procluded any clear discussion of ideas. It felt a bit precious to me, and I'll admit, it bugged me a bit.

But that's not to say that Alaxk isn't 100% entitled to his opinions about the World Tour -- or anything. And those opinions are perfectly legitimate. Next time just state them.

Sure we're called "ASK GREG" but this isn't JEOPARDY, and your posts don't HAVE to be in the form of a question.

Sorry...

This hasn't been a great batch of answers so far. I suppose I might be in a mood, but the questions haven't been too helpful. I'll try to do better later in the week.

More Theseus...

Hey Aris,

Stopped by the comment room and saw some of your comments on Theseus.

I have a slightly different take on the guy. I do think he's heavily flawed, but I think (or like to think) that some of the stories about him reflect bias. He's still more of a hero to me than a villain. (By the way, have you read the Mary Renault books THE KING MUST DIE and THE BULL FROM THE SEA. I'd recommend them.)

For example, in the Persephone story, I've always gone with the version that Theseus swore an oath of loyalty to Perithoos. Perithoos then insisted on going to Hades to take Persephone. Theseus is then stuck. He either has to break his oath to his friend or go to hell, so to speak. He tries to talk Perithoos out of this fool's gambit, but the guy won't listen. (And I wonder if Perithoos hadn't pissed off Eros and gotten shafted.) So Theseus goes. And is severly punished. Thus Athens is abandoned by him for years, and they don't forgive him. Thus you get some bias...

As for his history with women...

Ariadne - I always read that Theseus was FORCED to abandon her by Dionysus, who had taken a shine to the lady. (And this fits with Renault's more realistic interpretation too.)

ANTIOPE - I always thought that Theseus only ever really fell in love once. With Antiope the Amazon. (Sister to Hyppolyta, though Renault and others often confuse her with Hyppolyta herself. It may be that Hyppolyta was more of a title than a name. When Herakles' Hypolyta was killed, her sister Antiope ascended to the throne and took the name/title Hypolyta. That might explain the confusion.) When Antiope died, I think it killed something inside him.

I don't want to whitewash the guy, and maybe my problem is that too many of my early exposures to the character did just that. I do think he's a Bastard. With all that that implies. But I like to think there's more good in him than evil.

I could go on -- and some day I probably will -- but that should do for now.

Shameless self-praise...

One thing (one of many things) I admire about Joss Whedon's tv version of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and his ANGEL is his fearlessness as a creator. His willingness to let things evolve, change.

Characters find out the truth about other characters. They fall in and out of love. Things aren't drawn out forever and ever. He's unafraid to GO for it.

And frankly, I think that's one of the things I'm proudest of about GARGOYLES.

Not everyone loved the World Tour, but how many of you ever thought we'd have the guts to do it. To take our two leads and send them away from their "franchise" location not just for an episode or two but for what amounted to a season's worth of episodes?

And, honestly, how many of you thought -- even at the very end of "Hunter's Moon, Part Two" -- that we'd REALLY blow up the clock tower? Did you anticipate that the Gargs would wind up back at the castle with Xanatos or was that a surprise? For that matter, in season one, how many of you would have thought we'd have moved them out of the castle in the first place? "Enter Macbeth" represented a defeat of sort for our heroes. Did you see that coming?

(NOTE: These are not rhetorical questions. I'd really like to know the answers, so don't hesitate to let me know with a post here.)

Anyway, if these things were shocking, I think it's because they were somewhat brave. A risk. But not a risk for the sake of risk, but a risk in the name of being true to the characters. We made the various franchise shifts because nothing else made sense. I think it paid off for us, at the very least in loyalty from all of you. What do you think?

Miscellaneous...

My DC Comics editor finally sent me a few copies of that Justice League comic with the Captain Atom/Gargoyles story. I had forgotten just how many Gargoyle in-jokes I put in that story. There's much more there for a Gargoyle fan then for a Captain Atom fan. Though I think the scenes of Cap kissing Bette (and the mention of Las Vegas) would make a couple people (Simon Del Monte, Melissa Page, for example) a bit nostalgic. I think the story turned out pretty well. Anyway, I'm happy. My editor made a couple small changes. He removed the two references to the year the story took place (1991). And he changed the title. It was called something like: "An Exercise in Self-Indulgence". Now it's called "The Flashback of Notre Dame". Both are accurate, but his is much more clever.

Lately, I've been giving away a lot of ASK GREG tidbits for some reason. Not sure why. I'm just in the mood, I guess. But it suddenly occured to me to register this caveat.

There's canon and there's canon.

As far as I'm concerned the only true canon is the 66 episodes of the series running from "Awakening, Part One" through "The Journey". As many of you know, I don't like to consider the other twelve episodes of Goliath Chronicles to be canon, let alone whatever other stories got published by Marvel or Disney Adventures Digest or whatever.

But to be honest, even some of my ASK GREG answers cannot truly be considered canon. They're closer. But I won't be held to them in any absolute sense. Part of the wonder of producing the first two seasons of Gargoyles involved things discovered along the way. I won't etch things in stone (pun intended) just for the sake of making these ramblings and off-the-cuff answers sacrosanct. If I got the chance to produce the show (or one of its spin-offs) again, I'd ABSOLUTELY incorporate much of what's here. But I'd be a fool not to hold everything up to a microscope and decide with consideration what would and wouldn't be best for the new series.

Having said that, I've been giving some particular thought to G2158 recently, studying timelines for example. And I've changed a few things in my head. Nothing major. But certain things have changed that would in turn effect things in TimeDancer and present-day Gargoyles. Maybe even New Olympians and Pendragon. (So far nothing that would alter Bad Guys or Dark Ages.)

The good news is that none of these changes effect our three current contests. (Wouldn't that be an ASK GREG disaster?)

And all this thought has gotten me thinking about how I might handle a couple of thorny problems in any revival of the original series, specifically the time gap between 1996 and whenever the new show hit the air, and/or the existence of those 12 non-canon Chronicle episodes.

And frankly, I think the internet is the answer.

Goliath Chronicles exists. I can't change that. But I think I can ignore it. For example, if I wanted to do my version of the trial of Goliath -- the one where the question before the court is his very sentience -- couldn't I just do it?

New fans wouldn't know about the Chronicles trial and thus wouldn't be upset about it. Old fans could check here and find out why it was being ignored.

That only leaves a small percentage of people, who, for example, see the Chronicles episode on Toon Disney and wonder about it, but don't have the resources or whatever to find a site like this and learn the rationale. Would they be very put off? Is that too selfish an approach for me to take?

Likewise, the time gap. What if in the fist season, I did that Halloween story I've mentioned before. I wouldn't mention what year it was. For a new audience, they'd just assume that the story took place in say, October 2002. No harm done. But I could post here and tell people it took place in 1996. Then, by the end of the first season, I could have the series caught up to 2002, but still have gotten to do the stories that would have depended (continuity-wise) on proximity to the events in Hunter's Moon and The Journey.

What about that?

I'm very interested in all of your opinions on these notions. Please post them here.