Channel J: The Xanatos Redemption Arc

 

I’ve considered Gargoyles one of the best animated shows of all time ever since I watched it back in the mid 1990s, but if there’s one thing I thought they did poorly, it was the redemption of the villain David Xanatos.  Up until the episode “The Gathering, Part 2,” I’d been steadily shown in various episodes that Xanatos was evil, had plans within plans within plans, and only once did he ever express actual and honest regret over something.  He always acted like nothing ever got him down, even going so far as to declare that he still had “the edge” in an episode appropriately titled “The Edge” after yet again being defeated by the Gargoyles.

When he thanked Goliath for saving his newborn son Alexander and told the Gargoyles he was in their debt, naturally it seemed like another angle Xanatos was playing.  How would the richest man in New York City betray the Gargoyles’ trust this time?

He was sincere.  Suddenly, Xanatos was an ally and even gave the Gargoyles back their home in “Hunter’s Moon, Part 3.”  …what?

Xanatos continued to be on their side in Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles, and even went so far as to foil a trap laid for the Gargoyles by anticipating it ahead of time and building a way out of it before the trap could even be sprung.  Essentially, the series turned Xanatos from Lex Luthor into Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark.

At the time, especially since the network I watched it on broadcast the episodes once a week and season two contained 52 episodes, I’d only had the opportunity to watch season two exactly once.  I never missed an episode, but the season lasted the entire year, so there wasn’t an opportunity to rewatch any of those episodes until it showed up on Disney+.  Well, there were DVDs too, but considering how long Disney took to release the second half of season two – they dragged their heels for seven and a half years – it was impractical to wait around for a release that might never have happened.  Not every series shown during the Disney Afternoon is available on DVD either, and until the debut of Disney+, there was no legal avenue to watch those missing episodes on demand, as far as I could tell.  So up until recently when I could finally rewatch Gargoyles, I’ve been thinking that the Xanatos redemption arc was rushed garbage.

But maybe it wasn’t.  Not everything in the series was obvious at first glance, and there were things that viewers might’ve missed the first time around, especially in Canada where the entire second year consisted of new episodes.  Viewers never got the chance to rewatch any of them and catch clues unless they kept taped copies.  One of my favourite examples of this was when Demona summoned Puck (the very same Puck from the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night’s Dream) with a magic mirror and when he grumbled, she told him, “You serve the human, now you can serve me.”  This was Puck’s first appearance in the series and so it would’ve been easy to let that line go.  Which human was he serving?  Maybe we’ll find out the next time we see him, right?  It wouldn’t be until much later when we’d learn just which human Puck was serving, and that we had actually seen him may times already and not known it.

Not all of its foreshadowing was as subtle as that.  Another of my favourite examples was in “Enter MacBeth” when MacBeth attacked the Gargoyles, but only because he was after Demona.  “You know Demona?” Golaith asked, and MacBeth gave an answer that begged for more questions to be asked, but we wouldn’t find out what he was referring to until season two.

“Know her?  I named her!”

Gargoyles was a series full of foreshadowing and wheels within wheels, so upon rewatching it, especially season two, I’m willing to admit my initial assessment of the redemption of Xanatos might not have been as accurate as I thought.  Maybe it was adequately foreshadowed and I just wasn’t paying enough attention the first time around.

Or maybe it was because the series wasn’t shy of showing just how evil Xanatos was, right up until the episode where he turned good.  Less than a month prior to watching Xanatos nearly lose his son to Oberon and Titania, I watched him set a trap meant to pour acid on a sacred Native American relic, plus our heroes because they got in his way, all so that he could trap Coyote in order to bargain for immortality.  And then halfway between that episode and his redemption, I watched a future version of him actually kill off series regular characters as an AI version of himself before it was revealed that it was all an illusion from Puck.  It was basically drilled into my head that Xanatos was the main villain of the series without giving us a real chance to think otherwise.

There certainly was no “Zuko Alone” equivalent in Gargoyles, no episode focusing on David Xanatos and showing us those unguarded moments where he’d be alone with his thoughts and that maybe he regretted what he did to the Gargoyles.  There were no moments where we saw him about to do something morally questionable and then change his mind because he had standards.  He actually had few things he was unwilling to do.  About the only positive thing I was certain of was that he actually loved Fox, although the cavalier way he proposed to her almost indicated otherwise.  It wasn’t until “Eye of the Beholder” that we could be absolutely certain that he did love her, and thus the very first seed of the Xanatos redemption arc was planted.

I think when it came to villains redeeming themselves, none are more infamous in Western animation than Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender.  Fans were cheering for him to redeem himself even as far back as season one when he rescued Aang, even though he only rescued Aang so that he could be the one to bring him back to the Fire Nation and thus reclaim his lost honour.  Aang managed to escape anyway.

In the season two episode “Zuko Alone,” we saw him literally alone, with no one there to judge him or to pressure him into acting how they’d wish him to act.  In one of the very first scenes of the episode, he was starving and desperate.  Having recently abandoned his uncle, he was clearly not able to take care of himself very well.  He saw a campfire and a delicious meal being prepared and was about to ride in and steal it when he saw that the campers included a pregnant woman and her loving husband.  Despite his own obvious need, he took his hand off of his weapon and rode on.  The couple never even knew he was there.

The plot of the episode involved Zuko being taken in by a farmer and he defended them and their village from corrupt soldiers.  He tried his best to defend them without using firebending, out of fear of rejection.  He had found something he wanted to protect, and went to great lengths to do so.  When it became impossible to protect them without using fire, he used it long enough to defeat the episode’s villains and then was promptly run out of town anyway.

Although he struggled with remaining loyal to the Fire Nation, he eventually realized that he’d never lost his honour, the Fire Nation did, and “Zuko Alone” went a long way towards showing him this, and so he eventually sought out Aang in order to teach the Avatar firebending.  In helping defeat the Fire Nation, he ended up becoming the new Fire Lord and he worked to restore the honour of his Nation, with Avatar Aang by his side.  The Zuko redemption arc was a long one that took a couple seasons to tell, but then Avatar: The Last Airbender was never a series that liked to play the “mystery box” game.  It was a pretty straightforward adventure story and viewers actually got the sense that characters were growing, and that the plot was steadily moving towards a final confrontation.  Most of the foreshadowing was for the viewer’s benefit and was played usually in a subtle manner, little clues that gave attentive watchers a little added bonus.

Gargoyles was full of mystery boxes.  “Know her?  I named her!”  Although it played like an episodic series, its episodes still tied into a larger narrative.  There just wasn’t a clear end goal that viewers could see coming.  No final showdown promised, it was just a series about Gargoyles trying to survive in our modern world.  I don’t know what a proper third season would’ve involved, but hopefully it would’ve been planned out like the first two seasons were.  That said, the Xanatos redemption arc was so hidden that one had to go hunting for clues, and such clues were drowned out by the man’s deliberate antagonistic behaviour.

After “Eye of the Beholder,” Xanatos teamed up with the Gargoyles to defeat Demona in the four part episode “City of Stone” when a plan to extend his life by about 14 and a quarter years turned out to be a scheme by Demona to destroy humanity.  That doesn’t seem like a lot of time, considering Xanatos wanted to be immortal, but the solution involved making the sky over New York City burn, so it’s logical to assume the spell only affected New York City in the first place, and given the population of the city in 1995, Xanatos would’ve only stolen about seven and a half million minutes of life, total, if that’s what the spell had been designed to do.

The population of the world in 1995 was about 5.7 billion, so maybe that’s what we’re supposed to think Xanatos was after, 5.7 billion minutes, which would’ve given him over ten thousand extra years of life.

However, as I said, moments like Xanatos teaming up with the Gargoyles to stop Demona were drowned out by moments when Xanatos acted the antagonist.  We saw in “The Price”, he had Hudson kidnapped in order to test a cauldron that was supposedly able to make whoever used it live forever.  The cauldron, however, was very literal and anyone who bathed in it would live “as long as the mountain stones” because it’d turn them to stone.  After Hudson defeated Xanatos and escaped, Xanatos’s assistant Owen stuck his arm in the cauldron, turning it to stone and demonstrating the unfortunate magic that Xanatos was going to expose Hudson to.  In response to his assistant losing the use of his left hand except as a bludgeoning weapon, Xanatos showed no sympathy or concern, or showed any regret for almost permanently turning Hudson to stone.

During the world tour arc that ran from the end of “Avalon, Part 3” to the beginning of “The Gathering, Part 1,” Goliath and Elisa foiled several of Xanatos’s plans throughout the world and unfortunately this reinforced our belief that the man was a villain, so of course his sudden turn at the end of “The Gathering, Part 2” and his follow through in “Hunter’s Moon, Part 3” would seem to come out of nowhere, but given that the series had shown that the man was capable of love and that he was willing to do anything to protect those he actually loved, his redemption wasn’t completely out of the blue.

Maybe he would’ve slid back into a more antagonistic relationship with the Gargoyles, but at this point, we’ll never know, given the last official canon set in this universe was published in graphic novel form in 2009.  Xanatos was apparently willing to act as public relations for the Gargoyles, hosting a Halloween party for New York City and having Goliath’s clan in attendance in issue three.  Shortly after, he was given a mission by the Illuminati, but the comic ended before the mission could be revealed, with the fate of the series left in the air.  Disney increased the license fees for the Gargoyles series, thus ensuring that the comic couldn’t afford to continue, and the final issues dealt with the start of the Timedancer story, which would’ve been spun off into its own series.

Gargoyles might not have featured a clear redemption arc like Zuko would get in Avatar: The Last Airbender, but it’s definitely there if you look, even if it wasn’t as well realized as it could’ve been.