Gargoyles: Sanctuary – Episode Review Continued


Thailog and Demona have teamed up to take Macbeth’s wealth. The plan involves a marriage and a dungeon, and I’m not speaking figuratively. Macbeth hasn’t lived 1000 years just to twiddle his thumbs in a cell in his basement, though. His time to end it all has come! It’s up to the gargoyles and Elisa to stop Thailog and Demona’s plan, and save Macbeth from himself.

Catch up with Sanctuary episode review part 1.


Macbeth tells his love that he has some secrets to reveal. Now, if this was anyone but Demona, I’d be feeling sorry for them. You’d think the man would perhaps have let her know about his special qualities before they got married. Rather unfair to do it now!

Demona says she will go first, though. And indeed, the sun is setting. She begins to transform. Her wings rip from the back of her dress, and pain racks her. Macbeth feels the pain since he is all of two yards away. Now he knows her secret.

Disney Gargoyles - Sanctuary - demona transforms
That’s what you get for not telling secrets earlier.
Disney Gargoyles - Sanctuary - macbeth knocked out
I wouldn’t wanna be immortal unless I had powers that could keep me out of situations where you want to die but can’t.

Thailog arrives. The moon leads him to the basement, where the dungeon is. Yes, Macbeth’s place in Paris has a dungeon. I should also mention that the dungeon is his wine cellar. I hope he’s the only one who goes down there, or some uncomfortable questions might come up. “The cell in the back? Why yes, that is for my…poodle collection when they get rowdy.”

Disney Gargoyles - Sanctuary - macbeth faces thailog
I wonder what Macbeth things of this anti-Goliath?

The plan is to keep him there until the authorities think he is dead, which will happen after Demona reports him missing. Then all his worldly belongings will go to his widow.

Thailog acts impressed at seeing the mighty Macbeth. He goes up to the bars for a closer look. When he does, he hands Macbeth a laser pistol. Well now, I guess Goliath was quite wrong! Thailog is actually out-conning Demona. And I’m pretty sure Demona was going to try and get rid of Thailog on down the line too. You see, they had combined their resources: the 20 million dollars Thailog had stolen from Xanatos, and all the money that Demona has been hoarding for the last 1000 years.

Macbeth is calm about the whole thing. He waits for the right moment, and then shoots at Demona. Somehow she manages to jump out of the way. Then Macbeth shoots a hole in the wall and escapes.

Disney Gargoyles - Sanctuary - macbeth with pistol
Macbeth has probably been in tighter situations. I would love to see a spinoff series that chronicled Demona’s and Macbeth’s separate sagas over the last 1000 years.

Thailog plays dumb and demands to know if Demona searched Macbeth or not. He recovers quickly, I’ll give him that. He’s definitely had training from the best.

Macbeth gears up and promises that it will end tonight.

Disney Gargoyles - Sanctuary - macbeth suits up
The Batsuit!

Thailog goes to the roof and meets Goliath and Angela, who have landed for the battle. Thailog is semi interested in Angela.

Thailog beign Thailog, he can’t resist blabbing his plan to Goliath. It’s not so much that he’s bragging, he’s just saying what’s going on. This is very Xanatosian. He thinks that with the combined wealth of himself, Demona, and Macbeth, he would be on equal footing with Xanatos. Unless Demona and Macbeth have a massive amount of wealth accumulated, I really don’t see how he would be on equal footing with the multi-billionaire. Even if he thought he was on the same level finance-wise, he lacks the sheer power of Xanatos Enterprises and the reach of that company.

Disney Gargoyles - Sanctuary - thailog looking cool
That is one FINE gargoyle! I’m surprised more of the gargs haven’t changed their wardrobes.

There’s a throw-down again. Thailog doesn’t care that Angela is young and new to the game. He shoots part of the chimney down on top of her. Luckily Bronx saves her.

Thailog and Goliath battle it out. Goliath pushes them off the roof.

Inside the mansion, Macbeth and Demona are going at it in their usual humorous manner. Each time one lands a good whack on the other, they both feel it. So it’s rather a pointless effort, other than to see who has the biggest pain tolerance.

Disney Gargoyles - Sanctuary - demona and macbeth knocked out
Assign to the globe what symbolism you will…

In addition to unarmed combat, Macbeth is blasting her with the laser rifle. He’s a horrible shot. Absolutely horrible. He’s pretty much annihilated the entire contents of his library, his furniture, the chandelier, and probably anything nice that he owned. Whenever he tangles with the gargoyles, this seems to happen. And it usually happens because he screwed up either with shooting the wrong things or setting the wrong thing on fire.

Disney Gargoyles - Sanctuary - macberth shooting
They make it seem like lasers are slower than bullets and are thus easy to evade.

Elisa arrives and tries to talk sense into them. This of course is hopeless. Macbeth is sick of everything and wants to die, just like he did in City of Stone. Demona wants to just incapacitate him, which will be tricky since if she knocks him out, she too will be knocked out. So she’s basically on the defensive and waiting for the right moment.

Elisa finally decides that they are not going to listen to reason, so taking a page out of Xanatos’s book, she decides to take them both down and sort it out after.

Disney Gargoyles - Sanctuary - elisa taser
Don’t Tase me, Bro!

She grabs one of Macbeth’s taser pistols, and shoots Demona. Despite Demona seeing her coming, Elisa still manages to hit her with one shot. I don’t know how this is possible, when Macbeth has been blasting away at the gargoyle for a few minutes now. And he’s had a thousand years to hone his skills in combat.

The blast knocks out both Demona and Macbeth. Macbeth comes around first, though, because he was not the direct target. He reminds Elisa that only he and Demona can kill each other.

Eliza says that she was counting on this, because she didn’t want them to kill each other. She was actually saving Macbeth’s life. Goliath arrives to point this out to Macbeth as well.

Macbeth is not grateful for having his life saved. He almost achieved his life goal, which at this point is to die. However, he accepts it with dignity. He does remark though that he will continue his sad, endless existence, which he will spend alone. Alone, huh? This was the password that Demona used in City of Stone to lock out Xanatos. This is the commonality between the Immortals. It is indeed the curse of immortality in many series.

In real life, I don’t think it would be this way. We lose people we love all the time, either because we move, they move, they die, or we just grow apart gradually. I think that after this much time, you would find a way to occupy yourself. Demona certainly has, even though she feels alone. You would probably develop the ability to make strong relationships but not take them too seriously. By that I mean you would not be heartbroken when they ended. Heck, with my job, I move to a different part of the country every several months, so I am well acquainted with having to leave your life and your friends behind, and possibly never see them again.

Disney Gargoyles - Sanctuary - goliath talks to macbeth
I enjoy seeing the antagonist and protag have genuine hear to hearts that don’t end in violence.

Goliath says that the events of tonight prove that Macbeth is capable of love. Now, we know very well that Macbeth is capable of love, because he loved his wife and son dearly. Goliath does not know about Macbeth’s history, though. I suppose the question for us viewers, who know all about Macbeth and Demona, was if Macbeth had crushed that ability, or had lost it over the last thousand years of life.

As in the episode Eye of the Beholder where Goliath comments that there is still hope for the world if a man like Xanatos can love, Goliath is compelled to talk about MacBeth love. I don’t know why Goliath is so infatuated with the idea of Love. Probably because he lost his Angel of the Night, his one true love. But even then, he has found another love in Elisa. He looks over at her when he says that Macbeth can still find love.

Thailog comes back to the mansion just as Demona comes back to consciousness. They fly off together. It’s rather amusing the thousand-year-old Demona, who thinks she can play everyone, is getting played royally by a one-year old. It’s even more amazing that she’s being played by someone who learned all his tricks from Xanatos and who has the DNA of Goliath. Man, I love this show!

Back at the skiff, Angela is still feeling mixed emotions about the fact that Demona is her mom. She’s disappointed that Goliath never told her who her mom was. She’s also disappointed that it had to turn out to be the crazy, vicious, manipulative, vengeful Demona.


Final thoughts

This was an episode full of twists. Or at least it was for the characters. It was less so for us viewers. However, we were still wondering why on earth Demona and Macbeth had teamed up.

The theme of Love runs through the episode, yet there was no love from Demona and Thailog. Xanatos was right when he considered love a weakness, because it was Macbeth’s love that proved to be his undoing. Indeed, looking from an objective point of view, love is a crack in the armor. It gives your enemies a foothold, something they can use against you. Any time you open yourself up to relationships, you open yourself up to the possibility of emotional, physical, and other harm. But you have to decide if it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. It is only when we are vulnerable and a bit uncomfortable that we grow the most emotionally. Without relationships, we become wrapped up in ourselves, and as Ben Franklin said, a man wrapped up in himself makes a very tiny package. Thailog and Demona are very tiny packages.

It will be interesting to see what Angela does with the information regarding her mother. I’m not sure how much importance she places on mothers, since she pretty much had one in the form of Princess Catherine. I don’t really understand people who were adopted and who are obsessed with finding their real parents even when they have loving adoptive parents. But there is, I guess, a strong genetic imperative to find your progenitors.

And yet again, Elisa passes in episode without calling New York.

By the way, I banged this article out in an hour with voice recognition software on Google Docs with my phone. So if it sounds a bit different from usual, that may be why. Fun facts: it translated Thailog as “they love” and Xanatos as “Zoom toes.”

Next week it’s not where but WHEN we go. We’ll be checking out London at the height of WWII! Is it possible to change the past? What about the future?

Thoughts? Comment!


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Gargoyles: Heritage – Episode Review

Gargoyles: Shadows of the Past – Episode Review Continued

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5 comments

  1. “Unless Demona and Macbeth have a massive amount of wealth accumulated”

    I think it’s safe to say that they do, Thailog is no dummy. He’s probably done the research.

    Hell, by issue #8 of the comic, Nightstone Unlimited owns has gone multinational. France, America, the UK… they own a coffee franchise, and isn’t it safe to say Starbucks is a super power?

    Yeah, Thailog knows what he’s saying. But safe to say that most of Nightstone’s capital came from Demona.

    “Demona wants to just incapacitate him, which will be tricky since if she knocks him out, she too will be knocked out.”

    Not necessarily, she knocked him out at the end of Act Two… she clearly felt the blow, but was prepared for it, so she stayed standing. They share pain, not necessarily the results of that pain, and since a gargoyle is physically tougher than a human…

    1. I still find it hard to believe, especially since they’re just getting NSU off the ground here. Either Xanatos is keeping false records, or Demona is overstating hers. (or both!) One also wonders what other companies she owns? A coffee shop, yes, but what are her R&D subsidiaries? She did have Sevarius working with her, which indicates something in the way of research interests.

      Hence the trickiness. A little too much and they’ll both be out, as they were later.

      1. You mean Thailog’s R&D subsidiaries? He’s running the company, last we saw, not her. She’s still in hiding after Hunter’s Moon. Ever read the comics?

        But yeah, we do see the laboratory in The Reckoning and Hunter’s Moon. As for what else? We don’t know yet. But I like the idea that Thailog is behind Starbucks… profits provide a lot of operating capital. I’m sure we’ll see more if we ever get more canon.

        And Macbeth is very wealthy. I remember Greg was asked about this.

        1. No, I mean before Hunter’s Moon. After HM everything gets thrown into disarray. And in the reviews, I’m sticking to whatever we know at this point in the series, without using knowledge of future events.

          Or maybe it’s Dunkin? I think Thailog would get a kick out of having the slogan, “America runs on Dunkin.”

          I don’t really have access to the SLG comics. I have…like two of them. I can pick up one now and then on amazon, but rarely. I read the older comics online, though. But those aren’t exactly canon, as far as I’m aware.

  2. One thing I’d like to know about this episode, is how Demona convinced Macbeth she was in love with him. I can’t imagine Demona as a great actor. Lieing through her teeth? No problem there. But pretending to be in love with the person she hates most on earth? She’s too emotional for that.
    Proof of that is here going after Macbeth after his escape – she was clearly trying to kill him, not incapacitate him, as you said. Her hatred for him gets the better of her – the same happened in City of Stone. She doesn’t want to die, but hates Macbeth too much to think about the consequences when they go at it.

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