Wes's Guide to Gargoyles: Legion

Welcome back once again to Gargoyles. As promised, today’s episode sees the return of Cold Stone.

We open with the lifeless body of Cold Stone (Michael Dorn, Take a Shot) at the bottom of the river as he opens one piercing red eye. Inside his head, a repair sequence begins to initiate as we get flashes of Cold Stone, or I guess Othello’s memories, including two Gargoyles we haven’t seen before. One who was clearly his lover and another who played devil on his shoulder as he tried to convince him that his love favored Goliath over him. Keeping with the theme, these two were dubbed Desdemona and Iago in the script. As such, that's how I'll be referring to them from now on. I’d also like to take this opportunity to point out that Desdemona is voiced by the very awesome CCH Pounder, known for playing the equally awesome Amanda Waller on Justice League Unlimited. The repair protocol completes itself and Cold Stone bursts from the water, but his dialogue makes it clear that he’s not acting on his own will. Cold Stone breaks into a what appears to be a secret government weapons testing facility. Since he’s essentially a Gargoyle Terminator, Cold Stone walks through all opposition with relative ease and manages to download some top-secret files. However, this action seems to damage Cold Stone in some way, causing the Othello personality to re-emerge. Confused, the Gargoyle goes on a rampage.

At the ground floor, Elisa and Bluestone are using this opportunity to test out a new specialized police drone for high risk situations while Lexington and Goliath watch from the shadows. The drone also comes equipped with a virtual reality interface so Matt can see what the drone sees as he pilots it through the facility by remote control. Though the drone manages to hit Cold Stone with a taser, it only manages to piss off the cyborg Gargoyle and gets itself blasted. Cold Stone then blasts his way through the wall and flies off, Goliath and Lex recognizing him and giving chase. The two catch up to Cold Stone, who fortunately seems a lot more reasonable this time around. Goliath embraces his brother and invites him to join them at their new home.

At the Clocktower, Cold Stone is happy to see the others, but the happy reunion does not last long as Cold Stone seems to freeze up and the red light in his eye starts to blink rapidly. When he comes to, he starts acting different. He recognizes Goliath but has no memory of The Clocktower and is deeply frightened by the sight of himself in the mirror. Cold Stone flies off in terror as the Gargoyles persue. While flying over Ellis Island, Cold Stone’s eye begins blinking rapidly again and he crashes to the ground. When he wakes up, he has changed once again, now openly hostile towards Goliath and smiling menacingly as he blasts away.

Meanwhile, Elisa gets a call from Lexington and the two bring each other up to speed. Apparently, the files Cold Stone downloaded were top secret weapons specifications that were protected by an extremely powerful computer virus that can wipe out any unfamiliar programming it finds. Lexington has an idea and asks Elisa if he can borrow the virtual reality interface.

Back at Ellis Island, things start getting freaky as Cold Stone starts jumping from personality to personality until finally he collapses, demanding that the voices in his head be silent, a brief glimpse of the two new Gargoyles we saw at the beginning appearing in his eye. Lexington arrives with the virtual interface, deducing that someone needs to “go inside” to save him. Goliath volunteers. I find it odd that before, all that the interface could was let Matt see through the eyes of the drone, but now allows Goliath to actually enter Cold Stone’s mind, but whatever, the laugh I got from the cofused look on Goliath’s face upon entering virtual reality is enough to make me forget. Once inside, Goliath finds a mostly empty void with what appears to be Castle Wyvern in the distance. However, things are soon besieged by a mass of cybernetic tentacle things, the virus. Goliath makes his way to the castle where the three Gargoyles lay dormant in stone and he’s greeted by the last person he expected, or wanted, to see inside his brother’s head, Xanatos (Jonathan Frakes, Take a Shot). As he explains, this isn’t Xanatos per se, but rather a computer program created by the real Xanatos, complete with his personality, designed to enslave Cold Stone to Xanatos’ will, the virus having apparently prevented him from taking over completely. Hmmm, a hostile computer program created by Xanatos and downloaded with his personality and intelligence with a directive to enslave. I won’t say why, but just keep that thought in the back of your head for a future episode. Anywho, as Goliath battles the virus, the three Gargoyles awaken and Desdemona goes straight for Goliath, Iago using this to further drive a wedge between her and Othello. As Desdemona explains, it turns out Coldstone was constructed from pieces of three different Gargoyles, meaning all three personalities now reside within this one mind. Add the virus and the Xanatos program and it’s a regular party in here. Speaking of, The Xanatos program and Iago have apparently joined forces and have together managed to convince Othello that Goliath is his enemy and The Gargoyle lunges at his brother.

Back in the real world, things are starting to look pretty dicey. Apparently, Bluestone discovered that the virtual reality interface was “stolen” and, tracking it through its homing beacon, is on a warpath to get it back. He’s even gone so far as to assemble a SWAT team and is leading an assault on Ellis Island with a fleet off police boats and helicopters. I half expected ride of the Valkyries to be playing over this scene. The Gargoyles have no way to wake up Goliath, so their only option to to buy him as much time as they can. While Brooklyn and Broadway deal with the Helicopters, Hudson deals with the boats, using his blade like a rudder to steer them off course. Very clever.

Back in the virtual world, Goliath is getting his tail handed to him by Othello, who accuses his lover of favoring his brother, but words of love from Desdemona seem to snap him out of it. Seeing this, Iago and the Xanatos program just drop the pretense and merge into a single enormous entity that easily manages to take out Goliath and Othello. The giant Iago then demands that Desdemona merge with him so they can be together “as I always knew we should be.” Desdemona is having none of Iago’s crap and bites him, freeing both herself and her brothers from his grip. The giant Gargoyle tries to fight off his three adversaries but is eventually consumed by the virus, just as the rest of this world soon will be. As the virtual world crumbles around them, Othello demands that Goliath return to his body, stating that he and Desdemona will remain to battle the virus. Whether they succeed or not, they will be together, and that is all that matters. Goliath escapes and wakes up in the real world, leaving with his clan and the now lifeless body of Cold Stone before the SWAT team arrives.

We soon learn that, just like pretty much everything in this show, all of this was a plot by Xanatos. Hell, at this point it wouldn’t surprise me if Xanatos went back in time and arranged for the Vikings to attack Castle Wyvern. Turns out Xanatos was the one who supplied the police with the experimental drone (if you were paying attention you'll have noted that the drone bore the Xanatos Enterprises logo) and then planned to use it to extract the weapons data from Cold Stone, the taser also acting as a type of date transfer. While the virus prevented Xanatos from getting the data, he did manage to get his hands on a copy of the virus itself, which he claims is the deadliest weapon he knows of. Our episode ends properly with Goliath having brought the Cold Stone body back to The Clocktower, so that when and if Othello and Desdemona are able to return, they will do so among friends.

This is another one of those episodes that’s really cool on paper but falls short in execution. Don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoyed this one far more than I was expecting to. I thought the idea of three personalities within Cold Stone fighting to take control was an interesting idea, the virtual world was visually interesting and led to some cool fights and its always cool to see new Gargoyles. However, my problem with this one is that it feels very rushed. It’s implied that Iago tried to pit Othello and Goliath against each other a thousand years ago, but we get very little elaboration on that. In fact, Iago in general just feels like a lame villain. He comes completely out of nowhere and it’s stated that he has a grudge against Goliath and Othello, but we don’t really get any motivation beyond him wanting to get with Othello’s girl, which is pretty weak if I’m being honest. Desdemona is a little better, but we still know virtually nothing about her other than she was Othello’s lover, but also had a strong bond with Goliath. Personally, I think this episode could have benefitted greatly from being lengthened into a two-parter. That way we could have elaborated on the past shared by these three Gargoyles and maybe gotten a broader picture of what was going on between them. As it stands, this is a good episode with effective tension and some pretty cool concepts, but still feels like its missing a large chunk of its own story. Next time, we see the return of MacBeth in A Lighthouse in the Sea of Time