Todd Jensen writes...

Just read your "Metamorphosis" ramble. Thanks for it.

"Metamorphosis" is one of my favorite episodes - largely because of what I thought was a very effective ending (Elisa letting Xanatos have it verbally for what he did to Derek, then weeping back at the clock tower); I certainly agree with you that it made a great tragic close to the story. Elisa's weeping scene remains for me, to this day, one of my favorite "great moments" in "Gargoyles".

And I was certainly fooled by Xanatos the first time that I saw this episode. I actually believed him when he made it look as if he wanted to help Derek. In fact, when he refused to let Sevarius cage Derek, saying, "He's a man, not an animal", I practically gave him a mental standing ovation. And then, of course, when I discovered the truth at the end....

But it's interesting to note that I got fooled by Xanatos even AFTER I was familiar with his being the main villain in the series. I knew perfectly well what he was capable of, and yet still actually wanted to think that his concern for Derek was genuine.

Sevarius's apparent death also took me quite by surprise; even though I knew that "Gargoyles" wasn't a typical Disney cartoon, I was still staring at the scene where he apparently gets electrocuted and Xanatos announces his death, with an attitude of "They actually killed somebody in a Disney television cartoon?" (Of course, I must have forgotten about the Wyvern massacre, the fates of the Captain and Hakon, and even Elisa getting shot in "Deadly Force" - although she doesn't actually die there - at the time). Sevarius turning out to be alive at the end definitely astonished me as well.

I don't recall, on the other hand, what I thought at the time about Brooklyn and Maggie's sub-plot (I hadn't even realized, I might add, until after reading your memo, that that and Derek's part of the story both shared the "self-deception" theme, although it makes perfect sense to me now). I did sympathize a lot with Maggie, though; she gets mutated as almost a conscript for a war that she knew nothing about.

One last little note of interest: although you don't mention it in your ramble, Xanatos and Sevarius tell an additional lie that doesn't even get exposed as a lie until later on in the series, about not yet having any gargoyle genetic material to create a clone from. And then we discover in "Double Jeopardy" that they'd already created a clone (given that they got the blood sample from Goliath needed to create Thailog before the gargs even left the castle in "Enter Macbeth").

As for Sevarius's name: well, I think that it's kind of appropriate that it would sound cliched, given the way that the guy revels in cliches.